How does a person rediscover her True Voice and inner compass when she has negated it for years, learned that it was a vulnerable and seemingly irrelevant Voice, and simply learned to ignore it?
Well, I don’t know about everyone else, but in my case it was a pretty ugly process.
In my childhood, my mother used my expressed feelings, flippant comments and even my carefully-chosen thoughts as weapons. In schizophrenic rants that often commenced in the middle of the night, she repeated things I said almost as a mantra. You want, you want, you want. All you ever do is want from me. I quickly learned not to say what I wanted. But even worse, I learned that even wanting itself was bad. It didn’t help to have a broken heart and wish for more nurturing; it was better simply to deny it.
When I was 13 and entered foster care, I lived with two very kind, sweet Christian families. I had become an evangelical Christian myself at that point, and I heard from many different sermons and Bible lessons that what I wanted was sinful. It didn’t matter what I wanted. What God wanted for me was the thing that mattered. This made perfect sense to me at the time, and no doubt (and in all fairness to the teachers I listened to at the time), I saw their message through the only lens I had at that time: the human heart is deceptive, needs to be surrendered entirely to God, and therefore, I didn’t have to listen to it. Again. Perfect. I thought of the worst thing I could possibly be when I grew up: a minister’s wife. That was something I couldn’t stomach. So moved on to the next worst thing: a missionary. Yup, I was pretty sure God wanted me to be a missionary. I seriously considered that option for several years of my teens and early 20s.
However, the human heart has a way of beating its truth despite the clogged arteries feeding it. Tha-thump. Tha-thump. Tha-thump. I found moments of beauty and joy in music and art and writing, but those things were mere luxuries, I thought. They weren’t saving the world from hell, and they just made me feel good. What point did that have, I wondered?
I wondered, too, why I ate entire boxes of cookies, trays of brownies, quarts of icecream in one sitting? Why did I stick my finger down my throat in such violent self-hatred? It all seemed quite mysterious to me.
Fast forward many years to becoming a single parent. I’d long-since dropped the evangelical belief system, and I no longer binged and stuck my finger down my throat. But remnants of the self-denial still clung to me. Now my reasons seemed just as valid, if different: I have a child to care for and to support. Listening to my heart’s needs will just take me down the path of financial ruin and self-indulgence. I don’t have time and energy for that stuff. Maybe later.
I had continued, for the entirety of my 20s and most of my 30s, to work in situations that were uncomfortable to me. I dated men I didn’t feel good with. Surely, I was the problem, I thought. I took responsibility in my life for everyone and everything that didn’t work. If I could just contort myself enough, I could fix the problems in other people and in situations that were unworkable. It was the magical thinking of childhood, carried into adulthood. Surely, if I am good enough and say things the right way, my mother will love me and stop hurting me.
Parenting, while excruciatingly difficult, cast a spotlight on the dark, lonely place my heart inhabited.
Seeing my child and loving him awakened me to the child I had once been: I had deserved my mother’s love and care. I didn’t deserve abuse. My heart should have been cared for and heard. My mother’s abuse had not stemmed from my horrible heart: it had come from profound mental illness. I saw that message in my son’s sweet face, as if a written message from the finger of God.
Having so little left at the end of the day of parenting and working forced me to finally value my precious little self. I had nothing else to throw at emotionally unavailable men and work situations that sucked the life out of me. I actually grieved this for a while: I so badly wanted to run around and seek out empty wells for a sip of water. I just couldn’t do it. I was too tired at the end of any given day to do it any more.
Slowly, from a sad and lonely place, I started to see that the things that fed me, things like music, art, good friends, writing, and satisfying work were not luxuries. They were the very things that would put fuel in the tank of my personal and familial RV and keep it trucking.
Eventually, after fingers down my throat, a bad marriage and subsequent divorce, jobs I couldn’t stand but did anyway, and lots of co-dependent contortions, I found my compass somewhere in the baggage of my self. I had a heart, and its needs stopped being inconveniences and dreams I acknowledged only when I slept. I have a heart, and I hear Her today. She has wonderful things to say.
Wilderness of Motherhood 