the moon and back
life, death, heartbreak, beauty, serenity, dare i say ... joy?
Greetings Gentle Reader (cue Bridgerton theme music)
I promise there was once a time (it feels like in another lifetime) that I shared obnoxiously positive holiday letters and updates:
What’s on your mind? How grateful I am for this beautiful life and loves …
In hindsight, we were a “lucky” family. Major tragedy like some of those shared on my podcast (which you can listen to here on Substack) had largely bypassed us. Lifelong “extremely hard” wasn’t a such regular visitor. Journeying with my brother with his brain cancer in 2016 seemed to open the floodgates. He died in January 2017.
Mind you, HARD visited at times, however the above thoughts entered my mind as I begin this letter to you because there is total awe at the fact I used to have to temper my enthusiasm about what was going right …
Now I’m restraining myself from being a total downer by illustrating how frequently the hard circles around.
Since I’ve last written, my son whose substack I recommended in the last post, relapsed. He’s now out of inpatient treatment and it’s a relief that I can say you can read his substack , Road Dogs, to engage with his story as he writes about it.
Fellow loved ones of those who struggle with an addictive process of any sort or other major challenges: I feel you; my pain and confusion sits with your pain and confusion. Until you go through this with someone you deeply love, which I have in a prior relationship and with other relatives as well, you cannot understand the gnawing ache that accompanies it. An anticipatory grief sits on your shoulder. The work to stay differentiated and detach with love is all encompassing.
My said son once told me that my motto needs to be “save yourself.” Damn. It’s true. If I ever got a face tattoo it would be the mirror image of those words to see when I looked at my reflection.
Also since I’ve last written there have been three deaths of precious loved ones. One of my best friends here in NZ, one extended family member, and an old schoolmate.
My last visit with my NZ friend was 48 hours before she died. She gifted us with being able to process her impending death with her. On one of our visits she instructed us to put together a playlist and photos for her funeral; we did much of it with her. Her daughter read the blessing I had written for her journey forward to her while still alert enough to comprehend it. I spoke at her funeral held at the crematorium, went home and finished packing and the next day at 4 am headed to the Cook Islands with my husband. We landed at our first stay we’d reserved hoping the same friend and her husband could stay with us.
I felt so heavy, it was a rejuvenating space of exhaling, being in the moment with nature, unplugging and feeling my true self in a way I haven’t for a very long time. My broken body could flow through the water with ease and, awestruck, view the magical sea life. Bright blue starfish. Swimming with a school of hundreds of tropical white and black striped fish. Viewing so many spectacularly colored species.
Feeling weightless, to connect with the natural world on such a multi-sensory level was pure medicine to my mind, body and soul. In no way did I feel like I was running away or copping out, still feeling all the feelings. It simply validated the idea that we all need to regularly feed ourselves time in nature to commune with what is real and solid and miraculous in this life we are living as sad, stressful and tragic as it may feel.
We’ve been back four days. Blood drawn twice, acupuncture and a new specialist appointment done. Another specialist appointment next week. Not expecting any great answers to improve what renders me so unlike myself. Not getting them. The quickest way to explain is my previous 10/10 is now a 5/10 at best. I’m not whining, promise. My condition feels like such a daunting, moving target, it would be total denial not to be honest and make space for the challenges it has brought to my life.
Can I tell you one thing that lifts me on a daily basis? Daily, I get emails about the people, you, subscribing to my writing on this substack. Yes, it is followed by a twinge of guilt of feeling undeserving since my writing has been few and far between, but as a lifelong writer there is a joy in having my words welcomed. I hope to touch base more frequently; it does make me come alive to connect with you.
That’s enough of an update for now. Below, as promised, I will share Chapter Two of my memoir through the lens of death, and then the stars spoke … and link you to one of our podcast episodes I think you’ll enjoy.
Just a reminder, with this book I have a song after each chapter that was relevant for me in processing what happened there. I’ll link it. If you want to catch up on the intro and first chapter, they are in my two previous substack posts that you can find on this platform.
third chapter of and then the stars spoke …
sins of the father
I was conceived into rage.
The very amniotic fluid I swam in pulsed with the hormones released out of fear and doubt and regret and sadness. The thunder in the background was my father’s booming, venomous shouts. The jolts and jumps expressed the tensing of my mother’s body.
There were ancestors surrounding my wee self, surely shaking their heads in disbelief, but also knowing the why that lay before me. The why that tortured me throughout the soreness of my childhood.
Before I was even born, I’d lost my father.
Born in 1961, I was the youngest of four—three older brothers, seven, nine and 15 years my senior—and the first female grandchild on my mother’s side, after 13 boys.
My father’s rage had already depleted his capacity to love by the time I was born.
A novelty of feminine energy in our extended family, I was not the miracle that everyone must have hoped would allow my father to lean into love and turn his back on rage.
My mother and father, who were 38 and 40 when I was born, raised me with the story that they were ancient. Listening to them, you’d expect to find them in the Guinness Book of World Records listed under “oldest parents to ever have a child.”
Old age was the excuse for why they could not playfully engage with me.
“I’m too old, I can’t get on the floor anymore.”
“ I’m too old, I can’t play ball with you.”
Exhausted by their own drama, they simply chose not to spend meaningful leisure time with me. The aging excuse was the handy blindfold to slip over my young eyes.
My father was a complicated, angry man, and my mother was his hostage.
My father was born in 1920 to a troubled mother who abandoned him and his two brothers to their paternal grandmother, whose response was, “If you leave these boys with me, you don’t ever look back.” His father was a meandering alcoholic who was married five times and randomly flitted in and out of his life—mostly out.
With the poverty monsoon of the Great Depression rapidly approaching, those were economically hard times for all, and my father’s grandmother, who single-handedly ran a boarding house and cafe, would place the boys in an orphanage for long periods, in part for economic respite.
My father showed me a photograph of the three boys, the youngest in an antiquated stroller, grinning. It's obvious who my father is, head bowed, glancing up, a look of shyness with a hint of a grin. “That’s me,” he said, pointing. “It was taken at the orphanage.”
Even as a child, trying to make sense of his raging “fits” (my mother’s word for the phenomenon) in a how could anyone possibly be so mean way, I understood that whatever had occurred in the gaps of his memory about being moved about like cattle in his childhood had caused lasting damage. As I studied attachment theory in young adulthood, when we were beginning to realize the impact adverse childhood experiences have on lives and mental health, I developed a deeper understanding.
My father rarely shared scenes of his childhood, claiming he had vast memory gaps. The one story he shared with me about his transient father ended with my father physically striking him after he had missed his high school graduation, arriving late and drunk.
The overriding theme of his young life was abandonment. There was no one who thought he was the sweetest little person or who relished hearing about his day. If he could only have explained to me that he didn’t know how to parent, that no one had ever showed him how, maybe I would have taken his hand in a let me teach you what your child needs way.
My childhood was spent with two fathers: one, a handsome and charismatic, helpful, humorous, church-going public face; and the other, a ridiculing, shaming, explosive, and sometimes physically violent rage-aholic within our home.
Although I can remember a few tender times when I was very small—sitting by him on the couch, fascinated by watching the television war show Combat—I do not recall ever having an interaction like the one described in my visitation dream.
A memory remains of falling asleep on his chest as we sat on the couch in the living room, television blaring in the background, feeling the rise and fall of his chest. Awakening and then clenching my eyes tight. Even my wee survival instincts were active; surely he could not spring into attack mode with a three-year-old sleeping on his chest.
Time with our father within the household was one of tiptoeing around land mines–never knowing what would trigger his backhand across your face and an ear-piercing rant. The outbursts were always unpredictable and irrational:
Get that look off your face!
What are your books doing on the table?!
Stop chewing so loudly!
Transgressions registering low on the typical parents’ Richter scale could set off a violent tirade that would continue to escalate and could last for hours. His face would turn a crimson purplish hue as the veins in his forehead bulged, spit flying. Furniture would be shoved about. Items thrown. The vibrations of the scuffling, the belt taken off with one pull, and the wisp of it meeting the air—almost popping. The signal for my youngest self to attempt to shrink from view, slinking off to hide until the acute storm passed.
My mother, rendered helpless once again, would shove herself between him and my two older brothers—the oldest brother, fifteen years my senior, having already escaped.
Would the kitchen telephone hanging on the wall, the one with the wood plaque with the golden letters of the Serenity Prayer hanging above it, be used to call the police again this time?
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.
When my father was next out of the house, our mother would huddle us together and we would process what had happened.
Unlike the Serenity Prayer’s proclamation, there was no courage to change anything and no serenity to be found, only the wisdom to know that this man was dangerous, and we were trapped.
As much as she feared and despised his behavior, my Great Depression–era mother appreciated her husband’s ability to keep a roof over our heads and food on our plates. There were no women’s shelters. My mother was paralyzed with fear at the thought of having to venture out on her own, go to work and raise her children. The worst possibility was that we might go hungry, as she had in her childhood in the dustbowl of Oklahoma, picking cotton until her fingers bled, at the age of three.
Ultimately, she was afraid he would hunt us down and kill us. A fact she confided in me from a young age. And when every argument for her leaving my father was posed to her, the final call was the promise she made to God. The God she turned to repeatedly with pleading prayers to change her husband, to protect her children.
Thing is, I never saw her prayers answered. Not once.
Our plight was so complicated, my child-mind reckoned that her God, up yonder, as she would say, would never be able to find the solution to our predicament. And true enough, there was no peace until my father died.
Song: “Sad Eyes” by Big Fox
The podcast episode, Talk Dying to Me with Lauren Daley, MD shared here is very relevant to my husband and I as we journey with others through end of life. Repeatedly, doctors seem unable to address the impending death of their patient and have the conversations about the reality which would actually make their final months, weeks, days, hold more ease, steadying the wobbly raft they find themselves on, holding as it passes through their end days on the planet.
I hope listening to this can empower you with what to address if you find you or your loved ones in need. Quick link here
Wishing you light and love and all things for your greater good.
Becky
Beautiful writing Becky...sending white light x
My eyes had Child Shades
And I didn't understand
But my heart knows now
❤️