The look on this unknown young girl's face says it all.
Living a life as I had designed it up to this point required I react to what was expected of me. I had a role and once I had allied myself with a partner, I left all the decisions up to him. I didn't even get a driver's license. I preferred being a passenger. This says the most about my investment in my own life and the weak grasp I had regarding relationships and partnerships. I had no plans. I was along for the ride. Not desiring anything would guarantee me a kind of safety, I thought. But not making a choice is making a kind of choice. I had declined deciding and taking charge of my own life and I found myself in a serious personal crisis. The shock of pregnancy and childbirth and the demands of motherhood would rattle me to my core. It would shake me up enough to get me to notice that I had made some choices by default; choices that I needed to step up to...or run away from.
Different Ways, Chapter 11 , Hello Baby Momma , pp. 80-84.
Music: I remember worrying that this song was a personal reminder for me when it first came out in the 90's. There was truth in it around how I was once inclined to judge myself and most of my judgements centered around my experience of being married and having a family that I had abandoned. I was never one, however, to cultivate a belief I was a completely worthless human being though I'd certainly seen some serious mean rise up and pour out of me that I had to answer to. I was an unconscious, stupid, pretentious and vain girl given to aggrandizement, however, and I paid a full admission to that shit show by the time this song became popular when I was 40. I had learned to love and appreciate my children; they taught me this, actually. One would even return to live with me as a teen. I would individuate, transform and be myself as a conscious and empowered idiot. The acceptance of being a resplendently stupid human is actually part of the acceptance dance in the lessons I've been involved in. Finding the strength to reach into that sludge heap of guilt and shame to retrieve the self is powerful medicine that seeds forgiveness, empathy, compassion and the ability to care for others. That said, what I lived through in the 70's was an extremely rough period of lessons. At that time, voices in my head be like...
Thank you for joining me here. The memoir Different Ways: Revealing the Feminine can be purchased through my website using a link to Village Books at AlltheDifferentWays.com. There will soon be an eBook version available with an independent retailer. The e-book on Amazon is a bit of a mess but free if you are a Kindle member. Don't buy it. Parts are missing.
The BlogCast that outlines my intentions for this series of readings from my book, Different Ways, Revealing the Feminine can be found here in the post, Between the Lines.
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