Love Heals
I’ve been somewhere I’ve never been, and met someone I’ve never met. I lost and found my older brother, who knew me even before I knew myself. Our blood is thick, because we only have each other, no folks no sibs. My brother’s wife (I’d never met) seems so familiar, and my husband, now family, fits in so easily.
We were huddled in the same hovel, Randy with me. He, being older, did his best to protect me but we both came through trauma, traumatized and shattered. I’m proud of our rebuilding. The long painful process of restoration is never easy, and no one really understands who hasn’t lived through it, inside of it. It’s a harrowing existence, walking gingerly between the mines.
My brother bore the brunt of my father’s alcoholic rage, while I watched, helpless. I knew I was lucky and felt guilty. Feeling helpless still leaves me frozen on the tracks of an impending train, immobilized. My father was a terrorist. One you hear about on the news, but contained in a tiny place, with witnesses frightened into silence. It took me years to admit my anger. I was afraid I’d kill someone if I released it, and so I smiled sweetly, unable to defend myself. Who taught us about boundaries? Who taught us anything?
There’s power in anger. Imagine my surprise when my precious boy began attacking me. What did I do? What *didn’t* I do? What does he need that we can’t give him? (he never went after Doug). Somehow we muddled through the ugliness but I hated that my nightmare was alive and well in waking life. I was sure I’d gotten away!
Since I do most things in reverse, you can keep the energy of youth; I wouldn’t trade the stability of maturity for a week of carefree carousing (well maybe. We just had a fabulous vacation!) What I mean to say is, what I’ve learned was not available to me ’til now. No, it was, but I couldn’t take it in. Couldn’t be comfortable in my own skin.
There’s a gentle art called ‘Acceptance’ that I was too stubborn and damaged to entertain, and I tore through my life, defiant. I was gypped, it was wrong, I was unloved and unprotected and I won’t move forward until the past is rectified. I will get what I deserve! And so I have, but not in the way of my belligerent demands. I had to drop my anger (which at some point became my body guard) and trust Love to protect me. I won’t say it wasn’t hard, but I feel so much lighter. Freer. Whole, and some days, holy.
I couldn’t find God back then, though lots of people helped me look for him. “Love, like a kind father!” Ur, no thank you. Even if God is just an energy without a form, I say yes to it, because the spaciousness, and majesty, the all things bright and beautiful has captured me and sucked me in, straight to the marrow bone. Love was elusive, but I never gave up on finding it (well, once I did, but this ramble is long enough). I’ll sum the whole thing up in two brief words: Love heals.
LBM 8/13/2019
