Transitioning With Grace

Profile in Grace – Jacqueline Kennedy

It is striking how our collective memories are united by moments of unfathomable tragedy.

For generations past, it was the day the stock market crashed that changed life forever and the unimaginable attack against our armed forces on Pearl Harbor – the Day of Infamy.

For my generation, it includes the assassinations of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King that froze people in their places as the news blared from radios and televisions in public places everywhere.  There is no one who cannot tell you what they were doing as these broadcasts spread across the globe.

For today’s generations, it is difficult to cite just a few, but the explosion of the Challenger Space Shuttle and 9/11 loom larger than life.

In times of deep grieve and tragedy, our best rises to the top.  We become the face of courage, kindness and love.  I was touched during the September 11th ceremonies as evidence of this was repeated over and over in the tender acts of comfort shared between the family members speaking the names of their loved ones.  But beneath these national tragedies lie countless sorrows that shape our individual thoughts and define those lingering memories of our private lives.

I was struck by such tragedies in the lives of two people I would never meet that speak to me even now.

In August of 1962, I awoke to headlines about the tragic passing of the waif Norma Jean, better known as Marilyn Monroe.  It was not her passing that overtook me, but the realities of her beginnings being broadcast in all forms of the media that gripped my heart.  I remember following all the fanfare surrounding her funeral and wondering whether such a celebrated, glamorous figure could have found happiness in her fame to offset her sad beginning before she died.  Although that was not for me to know, the question shaped my thinking in ways I cannot yet explain.  Norma Jean Baker’s story opened my consciousness to empathize with the poignant losses in the lives of others.

It was just one short year before that emotional response was reawakened by the death of Patrick Bouvier Kennedy in August 1963.  The face of a grieving mother – her strength, her dignity – would recapture the hearts of all in only a few short months as she mourned the loss of her husband as well.

Image Source: http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/images/jackie2.htm. Retrieved from Wkipedia.org

Like most impressionable young (and some not so young) girls of the day, I was fascinated by the ruggedly handsome, charismatic John Fitzgerald Kennedy.  However, it was Jackie who held my attention.  I have long admired Jackie Kennedy.  She was a role model for me as I watched the young family throughout what is often referred to as the Camelot years.  Her poise, style and grace were a compelling example of strength and courage for me.  I love hats because of Jackie, but more importantly, I have sought to emulate a women who through heartache, grieve, loss and hardship stood tall and remained gracious, rebuilding her live time and time again while protecting the lives of her children.

I offer Jackie Kennedy as my first profile of women of grace.

My Four Pillars

Photo by webdata from istock.com

In an earlier post, I promised that I would introduce you to the women who were central in defining my life.  There were four.  I learned something different from each one.  However, it was only through this journey that I came to understand how those lessons could be knit together to make me a whole who-I-am person.  My first profile of remarkable women is about four of the most important people in my life.  Like all of us, these ladies were not perfect people, and it is not my intention to idealize them; nonetheless, they were women who lead powerfully meaningful lives in their own way and were role models for many.

The First Pillar
The first lady I want to introduce to you is my mom.  She was tough as nails.  I do not believe that there was a life storm that could undo this incredible woman of strength.  She was only 5 feet tall on the outside, but she claimed the 5 feet on the inside and was truly 10 feet tall.  After my father died, I watched my mom evolve into a multi-faceted, giving character.  She was the strength for so many. She was always there with wisdom, clarity and encouragement.  I met my mom anew as a friend in the final years of her life.  We healed many wounds and I saw the dignity and courage that had carried her through hardships and heartaches.  From my mom, I learned perseverance, determination and stoicism.

The Second Pillar
The next lady of my life is my grandmother.  When I was little, I used to hide behind her chair and watch TV with her.  She may or may not have known that I was there, but I prefer to think that I looked on in secret. Later, we became play buddies, playing double solitaire and scrabble while watching mysteries like Perry Mason together.  She was gracious, poised, charming and always in charge.  When I hear the Lionel Richie song “Three Times a Lady”, I think of her.  From my grandmother, I learned the power of presence.

My Third Pillar
My third lady is my godmother.  She was my rock.  She was organized, efficient, purposeful and warm.  She had this certain smile that when you saw it you knew to beware because mischief was afoot.  She was my confident after I got out of college.  I could talk to her about anything.  Her answers were honest; her advice always on point.  I relied on her understanding to see me through so much of the just-starting-out-on-your-own heartaches and challenges.  She had an inner knowing that anchored her faith and a quiet strength that could conquer any foe.  When she died I realized what she had been in my life and how important her wisdom and insights were.  I have worked intentionally to cultivate that inner knowing and to ground my faith with her wisdom.  From my godmother, I learned the meaning of inner peace.  I also learned about living through faith and the strength that doing so generates.

My Fourth Pillar
My fourth lady is my mother-in-law.  During the early years of our relationship, I lost both my grandmother and my godmother.  This wonderful lady –no bigger than my mom – wrapped her arms around me, filled the gap those losses created and taught me both tenderness and compassion.  She was the quintessential southern mother – stern when she needed to be, soft as room-temperature butter when it mattered.  Her kitchen was always filled with great things and the pots never seemed to empty.  There was always enough food for whoever walked in the door.  Her open honest loving spirit embraced everyone she met.  With her, I learned to begin to feel safe.  From my mother-in-law, I learned about loving.

All four of these women were women of the depression years.  They had lived during the tumultuous years of World War II.  They had endured segregation.  They fought to be triumphant over hardship, loss, despair and distress.  They stood as tall as beacons to those of us who came after them despite their inner anguish and private tears.  These ladies taught me different things, but above all they each taught me to survive.  They also taught me the importance of those upon whose shoulders we stand, for without them, the shifting sands of life would overtake us.

I thank these four great cornerstones of my life with all my heart.  Their lessons are finally gelling into a cohesive understanding and because of what they shared – by example and through wisdom – I am becoming…

Reflections on an Incredible Journey

Each blog has helped me to break through to a deeper sense of myself.  I have learned so much more than I could have hoped for.

•  Above all, I learned that I really am naturally introverted and reserved, which is expressed through a shyness that situational comfort can reduce but not take away.
•  I also learned that I have much to offer and have come to respect my gifts and talents.
•  I have learned to stop apologizing for my weaknesses and deficits because me strengths outweigh them as evidenced by my contributions and achievements.
•  I learned to trust and believe in myself.
•  I also learned that I can just be me because I am worthy of being known.

Fear had driven me to live on two speeds: full speed ahead and full speed head-on.

Photo by Spiritartist from istock.com

The first was driven by the safety of logic and reason while the second was driven by raw emotion.  When I was acting through full speed ahead, I behaved like a horse running the Kentucky Derby.  I was single-focused, plowing down the road ahead of me.

Photo by hfng from istock.com

On the other hand, when I was responding though full speed head-on, I was more like a train wreck in waiting, charging headlong toward a sure disaster.  Invariably, I crashed every time and grew leery of my own emotions.

Head-on became my preferred response spurred on by my failures in the emotional realm that affirmed some childhood messages that defined my world like:

Put your feelings in your pocket and do what needs to be done;
Don’t wear your heart on your sleeve;
Don’t lead with your heart;
Think before you leap.

Although there is wisdom in each one of these directives, understanding them required experience and insight that I did not have.  Rather, I heard them through the fear of an unhappy, lonely little girl.  Lack of life knowledge left room for the serious misinterpretation of these cautions.   I gravitated to the side of an over interpretation, in part, because the resulting aloofness insulated me from the scars of my train wrecks, and in part, because I hoped that accepting the more disciplined path would win the approval, validation and love I desperately needed.

During the past two years, I have learned that my understanding had been incorrect.  It is impossible to live without emotion.  Although, unchecked, the heart is truly blind, emotions are an integral ingredient to living fully.  Acknowledged, they become an empowering gift enriching life; ignored, they fester into a repressive paralytic force stealing precious life moments.

As I have struggled through this journey, the battles have raged between heart and head.  Every post I wrote, I began writing from one extreme or the other.  My challenge has been to understand that neither is complete without the other.  My feelings of brokenness and isolation have grown from both my need to think my way through life and my retreat from my greatest failures/heartaches, which have come when I threw reason aside or surrendered to the pride and longing of the heart.  I have come to understand that my struggles with connecting with others were rooted in the fear that they would see those failures.

I wrote this blog to wipe out the rule of shame in my life by sharing that secret side of myself. I did not expect that over the past several months, I would also challenge myself to learn to listen to both my head and my heart as I step forward and to allow the entwined understanding to guide my footsteps with wisdom, reason, and passion.  Through this new hearing, a new confident me has come from behind the mask.  It has meant learning how to find that safe place where I could trust myself to be unguarded and accessible.  For now, yielding to this tenuous head-heart collaboration is a conscious process.  I have to stop, take a deep breath and make room for both voices at the table of my life.  One day, they will come as willing partners and I will instinctively know the right balance in order to respond appropriately to whatever situation I am in.  When that happens, I will have one speed – purposeful, fueled by the integrity of an all-together, trusting, composed me.

I have cherished this journey, but it is time for my personal journey to become part of the background of this blog because transitions happen to all of us.  Going forward, I am transitioning this blog from a chronicle of my journey to a forum to examine life transitions that we witness around us.  I will search the profiles of remarkable people, past and present, who have demonstrated grace under fire during times of change and challenge.  Once a month, I will post information on a new person for discussion and examination.

Thank you for taking this journey with me.  Please continue to join me as we explore life lessons from some of our best role models.  Please feel free to add information on your role models or recommend people for me to review.

Why Joy

In my last post, I spoke of learning to balance pain with joy; but, why joy and not happiness.

We rarely spoke of happiness in my house when I was a child. Maybe it is because we were not a happy family. Strained feelings and fractured relationships have that effect on a household. Ours was no exception. But, my mom was a strong stoic woman that had a way of putting things into perspective. Although she was not a warm person, she was trusted by all that knew her, and people were drawn to her reassuring strength. I can remember the times that I turned to her because I was upset or felt that one of the neighborhood kids was angry with me about something. She instructed me to not wear my heart on my sleeve, to put my feelings in my pocket, to ignore them or to let whatever was bothering me roll off my back like water off a duck. She often ended our comfort session by saying “if you are sad, you can get glad again” or “if they are mad, they can get glad again” depending on the situation. She made it seem so simple and matter-of-fact. For my mom, how you felt was a choice – a getting rather than a being. I can only imagine how dangerous feelings must have seemed to her because she appeared to make ‘making life make sense’ about how she chose to see her life; not how her life was. Her life looked to be about control and disciplined responses. For me, the idea of being glad felt strange and unattainable. But, Psalm 30:5 promises that joy comes in the morning and Psalm 51:8 longingly asks, “Let me hear the sounds of joy and gladness.” I interpreted these words as anchoring my mother’s instructions to see past my circumstances for the good waiting on the other side that would erase the feelings I was experiencing; so as I stepped out on my own, I chose to internalize her thought-centered philosophy.

Sadly, as I look back over my life, I realize that there was a detaching message underlying that dispassionate outlook; one that has served me well in my fight to remain invisible; that gave me permission to live allusively and disengaged; however, one that also closed off my heart to the life and living happening around me. For me to grow and to become, it is critical that I give depth to the restrained perspective that my mom’s philosophy casts over my worldview and that I develop an open heart through which I can embrace the work of living. For me, the perspective that resonates in my spirit is joy.

When I think of being happy, I think of a transient experience: something happening to or around me that yields a pleasant, albeit temporary, feeling. The circumstances that seem to relate to creating happiness involve my relationships, my job or the current status of my life. Looking at where I have been in these areas over the years, it would be nice to be able to say that I have been happy; but, honesty requires that I admit that either ‘most of the time’ or ‘not always’ are more correct. The feelings that define the other times in my life are disappointment, sadness and anger – a dangerous roll-a-coaster of vulnerability that became too big to just roll off my back once acknowledged. Remaining detached turned off the roll-a-coaster until it stopped working. Going forward, happiness can no longer be my goal.

However, when I think of joy, I think of satisfaction, contentment and fulfillment. Joy leaves room for those times when things are not all they should be without giving rise to feelings of being cheated, hurt or discouraged. Joy is indeed a getting. It represents the conscious choice to be at peace regardless of your circumstances.

I spent a great deal of time with my mom before losing her several years ago and I watched her come to a place of joy – of getting glad. Each step of my journey now is teaching me about achieving gladness and joy; about being in control of my live without controlling everything in it. I have come to understand that finding joy is not the journey of a lifetime but a lifetime journey. I now embrace that journey with less inner turmoil and fear, greater awareness of myself and an ear attuned to listen for those inner sounds of joy.

Balancing Pain and Joy

Since perception becomes reality and reality becomes memory, it follows that memory makes us witness to our own lives.  However, as we recall our experiences do we also fall prey to being an unreliable eye witness to half perceived truth?

I have been to several seminars lately where they have shown a video clip to test eye witness recall.  As the video begins, the speaker directs the audience to watch for something unusual happening.  The video plays through and appears to be an uneventful street scene or a ball game at half time.  The clip ends, and the speaker asks how many people saw the unusual event – you know the one where the gorilla runs through the middle of the scene.  Virtually no one in the audience noticed anything except, of course, that handful of hyper-observant people.  The speaker discloses what we should be looking for and replays the tape.  The audience breaks out in laughter because right there, on the screen, bigger than life, there is a gorilla in the middle of every scene pulling outrageous antics that no one can believe they missed seeing the first time through the video.

I remember my life to have been a very lonely, unhappy existence; one that was darkened by fear, shame and humiliation and muted by secrets.  But was that reality?  Was there more to my life than I have remembered?

I found a picture in my mother’s things after she died.  I wish I could have found it while she was living.  She may have been able to speak truth to my confusion.  The picture was a picture of me as a little girl all dressed up and surrounded by adults.  The adults are all fancy too.  My mom was right behind me, and there was a group of ladies I cannot remember squeezed into a small space behind her.  I could not have been more than three or four years old at the time.  The picture appears to have been taken in a parlor of some kind, but I have no memory of that room.  My dad is kneeling beside me, leaning towards me with his mouth open. I am standing with my mouth wide open as well.

When I looked at the picture, I saw a scared little girl crying while being scolded by her dad.  The picture made me very sad.  It felt like a cruel mirror of my life.  At the same time, it let me remember that I did belong to someone.  My dad died when I was in college and my mom died five years ago.  When she died, I felt like an orphan.  Despite the chaos that was my life, I loved my parents and losing them both was hard.  The incongruity of my feelings made the picture all the more uncomfortable to look at.

I shared the picture with my aunt and cousin one day because we were talking about my dad.  My cousin responded almost immediately, “I had forgotten how much you and your dad liked to sing together.”  I requested an instant replay. She pointed to the picture and said, “See you and your dad are singing. Your mouths are open and he is next to the piano” – the gorilla in my picture.  I had not seen the piano.  I just saw me being in trouble again.  But when I took a closer look, there it was, just like the gorilla, right next to my dad.  Through her eyes, I could see that this was a picture of what was most likely a very happy event.  I have adopted her understanding of the picture.

How many more gorillas have I missed in my memory of my life?  How much of my life have I colored with the blinding memory of unhappiness?

In order for me to move forward and overcome my social awkwardness, my fear of people and my persistent self-doubt, there is one other very important thing that I must do.  I must find the strength and courage to reframe the witness I have been for my life.  I have to begin to see the glow of happiness behind the shroud of misery that overwhelms my images of those years.  It is not about denying the hurt and emotional injury of my past, but I must balance the pain that grips my memories with the joy that I have allowed myself to forget.

Learning to Give Myself Permission Instead of Holding Myself Accountable

Although holding onto the memory of that breath-taking moment flying over the Rockies has not been hard, I have not been able to hold onto the emotional freedom that had allowed me to be present in that marvelous moment ever so briefly.  I do not understand how I was able to reach that point of engagement; but duty called quickly, and there has been no time to figure it out.  No time until one beautiful summer day when I went for a walk and was gifted with a second glimpse of an emotionally freeing experience.

While oblivious is too strong a word, I am rarely mindful of the world around me when I walk.  Normally, my mind is occupied with the things I will have to do when I got back home; what needs to be done to move to the next step of some project I am working on or what work may have been overlooked in the project that I have just completed.  Though I often thought about bringing my music to listen to so that I could drowned-out the racing thoughts for a while, that idea only comes to me after I have already left home.  The one other thought that captures my attention while walking is the need to be on guard for potential danger.

But, on this particular summer day I had gotten a call that family was on their way over.  I knew they would have to pass me on their way to my house, and I knew about how long it would take them to arrive.  I decided that, although I had time to finish my walk, I needed to stay plugged into what was happening around me instead of surrendering to the thoughts in my head so that I didn’t miss seeing them drive by.  About three quarters of the way through my walk I realized something different was happening on to me.

I was hearing the tranquility of a slow-paced Sunday with the birds singing in the woods and a woodpecker knocking on one of the trees beside me.  Murmuring in the background, the steady movement of traffic formed a percussive hum in tempo with the sounds of nature.  I felt incredibly connected and realized how much of life I must have been missing by rushing around in my head keeping up with my stuff in order to just remain accountable.

As I have pondered the alive-ness that I felt from these two incredible events, I have allowed myself to slowly accept that this world has been surrounding me all along, and that maybe if I could give myself permission to become a little more connected to the pace of the world….

Give myself permission: allow; decide; choose.

Action verbs that have kept coming back at me head on.

Allow myself to enjoy life;

Decide to reach out and be part of the world around me;

Choose to be the me I feel inside not the me people expect me to be.

For whatever reason, I have accepted my narrow life without question.  However, being thrust on my own by change and circumstance set up an environment in which I have felt the emptiness that my over-focused life has left behind and the hunger to feel less isolated, less alone, less lonely has been pressing in on me.

Facing the ‘why’ of how I had let my live become about tasks and work rather than love and people has been a critical part of my journey.  However, to move forward, I realize that understanding the past is not going to be enough to create the change I now thirst for.  I have given myself permission twice to just be present without guilt or panic and it felt nice. If I could give myself permission to be that open with others, who would I be?

Who could I become?

What more could I have in my life?

If I could learn to give myself permission…

An Awakening Begins

As I have said before, I have spent my life being accountable first to others and then to my own unrelenting overdeveloped sense of responsibility, duty and obligation.  Only on rare occasions have I ever approached being relaxed enough to enjoy the moment, and when I have the guilt has always been so overwhelming that I would quickly returned to duty as if duty were a place.  It was safe there.  It was validating.  However, working through the issues of where I have been and who I have been in my life during this past year has opened corners of my heart that have been locked away for a very long time.  I have begun to feel the moments of my life more deeply, to feel present and aware with less guilt or panic.

The seeds of my soul’s awakening began in the most unexpected places.

The first was flying over the snow-capped Rockies, a place that magnifies the glories of God’s creation.  The majesty of that massive collection of peaks and valleys was overwhelming.  Panic cannot exist in the face of such presence.  I was flying to southern California from Chicago.  As we flew over the Rockies, I felt like we were frozen in time.  The terrain below traded between endless brown masses and gentle white blankets.  The contrasts drew even more attention to the incredible size of the mountainous range.  Occasional willowy puffs of white gave license to the imagination that conjured up images of old smoke signals or smoldering volcanoes.  Science would probably explain the phenomenon as clashing temperature zones causing the moisture in the air to be more steam-like. But, that explanation was for the scientist.  At that moment, for me, I gave myself permission to see the images of roaming buffaloes and nestled tribes holding smoky conversations about the next hunt.

“The buffalo are close,” one tribe has signaled.

“Soon, very soon,” responds the first.

All this as the stately mountain goat climbs steadfastly among the step slops searching for thawing streams and the promise of spring.

Suddenly, I notice that there was a pass below between the mountains.  What left those long, strange tracks?

Like the peaks of my mother’s whipped egg whites, the mountain peaks stood defiantly against the cloudless sky before giving way to a patchwork quilt spread smoothly over the terrain.

As we flew out of the mountain range, I made a mental note to myself to remember to again embrace the permission that had just allowed me look down and see, no experience, wonder.

The Genesis of Fear

Fear often comes from so many subtle, seemingly inconsequential, unexamined nuances in our lives. It was not until I had lunch with my cousin the other day that the source of my deepest fear all but reached up and slapped me in the face.

We were sharing stories, memories really, of our lives when we were children. My cousin talked about how my grandmother’s back door was never locked.  Her house was full of people, and my cousin said that she never knew who was going to be there at any point in time.  There was a constant coming and going with the milling around of multitudes it seemed.  I marked how different my home was because it was always locked up tight.  As I mentioned in my last post, having friends over was virtually unheard of; so, we knew exactly who was going to be in my house – us.  My cousin commented that that was why she liked my house.  She liked the security of knowing exactly who was going to be in the house no matter when she was there.

My mother-in-law was also my day care provider until my son was 10; so, he spent a great deal of time at her house. My mother-in-laws’ home was much like my grandmother’s home.  They were both very accepting, inviting, gracious women.  My son is more like them in his view of how a home should be, while I am far more locked away: not as badly as my mom was perhaps but reclusive and closed nonetheless.  Although my son and I often debated the conflict between hospitality and privacy, I left him the freedom to bring his brand of hospitality home despite how unsettled and nervous I was much of the time.  To my surprise, when he moved to his own place I began realizing I missed the coming and going.  The quiet of being locked up had finally become deafening rather than safe and comforting.  I just could not figure out why.

As I have been peeling away the layers of mask, the conversation with my cousin made me realize that the question of locked doors or unlocked doors meant far more than how many people wandered through my door.  Having the door locked to the world all those years with me locked inside was the genesis of a deeply rooted fear – the fear of being unsafe. The bigger my world became after leaving home for college the more unsafe and vulnerable I felt. The fears born in childhood behind locked doors had formed the shadows of danger that made being outside of the security of those doors terrifying.  This terror has darkened my view of my world ever since, and I constructed virtual doors to carry with me.

Am I really naturally shy as my voice teacher thought or just locked away with fear?  I know that I am an introvert. I problem solve, learn and reason better by getting quiet and thinking things through.  I am renewed and restored by solitary activities.  But I have made a discovery recently.

• Shyness and introvertedness are not the same;
• Nor are they an inseparable pair.

My son’s hospitality let me play on the outskirts of being sociable without having to actually engage or participate.  It offered a connectively I would never give myself permission to enjoy.  On the other hand, it kept me unsettled because it surrounded me with activity beyond my control.  It scratched at the underlying fear that not being locked away equals vulnerability, and vulnerability equals unsafe.  It meant learning to trust.  It meant becoming accessible.  It meant coming out of the shadows, and I was so not ready.

I cannot say that I am ready now, but I can say I am ready to become – to become ready; to become free of the virtual doors that keep me locked inside; to become part of life and living.  I cannot say that I am ready because recognizing fear is not the same as conquering fear, but I am ready for the battle – a battle I refuse to lose. I do not think I had a choice the first time.  I do now.

Thank you cousin. You are a beautiful, awesome, fantastic women.

A Note to My Aunt

I received the most wonderful email this morning from my aunt in response to my post Coming out of the Shadows Part 2. We talked at great length after I read this email and she gave me her permission to share that conversation here. Below is her post:

“Hi,
Good Morning

I just read your latest blog. I felt really sad.  Just reading this and not knowing who you were and what your family life was like really raises lots of questions about your Mother.  However, I know you and I know what growing up in your house was like, somewhat.  I wonder have you looked at these circumstances in the context of all the tension, stress and other stuff that perhaps caused such stringent parameters?  Feeling suppressed is by no means a pleasant or empowering atmosphere for a child of any age to grow up in.

But now, from the perspective of a very learned and mature adult how do you evaluate the circumstances beyond the “transitioning”.  How do you consider the strength and positive influences of a determined mother to raise her children with a desire to become educated and productive citizens.  We all have our quirky and perhaps, minimizing experiences within our families, but, we make a choice to go beyond the borders and  create a life, a life that we choose good, bad or indifferent.  You have done just that.  Successful at marriage, mothering, building a home, and both educationally and professionally.  That 12 year old is not relevant,
think about it.  The only relevancy is that you learned survival tactics and that brought you through to become who you are today.  A really nice person.  I love you very much.”

Response to My Aunt

I am so blessed to have you in my life. I am happy that my post made you sad because that tells me that I am getting at truth as I remember my past. I am being authentic, warts and all.

First, my mom was an incredible women and a treasured role model.  Her strength, courage and determination laid the inner ground work for me to stand strong and persevere through so many challenging times.  Our lives were not easy when I was a child and she did the very best that she could. I have no doubt of that.  I spent a great deal of time working through things with her before she died.  I love my mom and I am not angry with her about anything. I did not mean to portray her in a light that suggested I was angry with her or that she was anything less than a wonderful person. I resolved my issues with my mom intellectually and we were at peace with each other when she died. What I did not do was to let that work with her help me to understand myself.

Until I found myself to paralyzed to move forward with the things that I needed to do to build my business, I did not realize how much I had lived and was still living outside of myself.  All that I had done with and for my mom was to help her: to help her find peace and to be sure that we did not part with unsaid words.  Though I have long understood how difficult those years were, I have finally come to realize that simple understanding would not help me grasp how those years had shaped me: my personality, my sense of self or place and my sense of worth. They were all colored by those experiences. My transitional journey is to look those feelings, fears and memories in the face and finally let them go and put them to rest.

After my dad died, my mom became a warmer more open accessible person. She became the mother to the world that I wish I had known as a child. She became herself – the self her siblings grew up with. I miss my mom terribly and I know that she understands the journey I must now take. It is not unlike the journey she and I took on her behalf those last few years of her life. My prayer is that by the end of the journey, my soul my spirit and not just my intellect can embrace the perspective of a very learned and mature adult.

You are right. That 12 year old is no longer relevant in my life, but I must met her face to face, love her, grow her up and set her free, not from the me that has lived outside of myself but from the me that finally lives as a whole being.  I will get there. This blog is the chronicling of that journey, one step, one layer of the mask, one tear, one heartache, one frozen moment at a time.

Thank you my dear Aunt and friend. By the end of this experience, I will have heartfelt answers to your questions not just the head-thought answers I have relied on to protect me.

Yes, Job 11:12 says “An empty man can gain understanding.” I have been empty too long and did not know why.  As Job 11: 13-19 promises since I am “setting my heart right” and “spreading out my hands toward him,” I know that this journey will grow me to be “firm and free from fear.”
I will be “confident, because there is hope.”

I will “look around” and “ lie down secure.”

I will “rest and no one will make me afraid”.

I love you and I am glad you are part of my journey and that your wisdom is there to draw upon.