Tag Archives: awakening

Victory at Home

I was standing on Fulton street waiting for the Number 15 to take me to the corner near my home. The wind was brisk with an occasional chill, but the lifting of the hood of my sweatshirt over my head blocked most of it. This particular stop homes three buses headed out and about town. It feels quite familiar as all three round the corner coming out of the transfer station down by Van Andel Arena. I switch feet. I look across to Veteran’s Park where I danced with wild abandon at a Thursday night drum circle held after the Jazz concert at Ah-Nab-Awen park. The Main Library is behind that. I spent hours of research in those rooms. Everything I was looking at seemed familiar, but with a dream-like quality.

I came to the conclusion that I was but a drop in the puddle in their eyes, but in mine, I was so much bigger.

When I moved away from West Michigan in 1989, I had no idea who I was; broken, discouraged, full of lamentations. I had no direction or purpose. I molded myself into the ideals that I believed I was supposed to be. I became a fair wife, a devout church goer, a preacher of God’s love, a model citizen in every way. I provided Christmas for impoverished children, took them on camping trips, advocated for their protection always seeking approval from outside sources. I was miserable.

After the loss of Jordan, I began rethinking my life and the choices that had brought me to a point where I could no longer stay. My marriage was a disaster, my friends were there but they were all much younger than I so their freedoms were different. I still had no idea who I was or what I wanted to be or do. At 25 years old, I decided to find out who that woman looking back at me in the mirror was. I left everything behind. I cut ties with family, friends, acquaintances, and moved back to a small studio apartment in Kentwood. I married again but it crumbled basically from day one. I moved around the country for about a year, using Greyhound as my means of travel.

By the time I ended up in Arizona I was a disaster. I married for a third time. I found a group of friends that, for the first time, not only saw me for who I am, but encouraged me to be everything I was meant to be. I felt like a toddler whose parents delight in the antics of the little one, but at the same time, I was an adult. I radiated humor and enthusiasm. I decided I was strong enough to move, so I did. I moved across the country again to Tennessee where I lived with my father for a brief time. He was a miserable human being that rejected me just as fast as he embraced me. It was constant mixed messages from him which led to uncertainty and instability.

I found God living in a little church tucked away behind a natural shade of trees. I was told to go there and I’m glad I obeyed. It was like coming home. It was the first group of collective people that not only appreciated my wildness, but saught me out for companionship, help, and entertainment. I imagine it’s what being a rockstar feels like. What’s even cooler is that I adored every one of them right back. I couldn’t help it. I’d waited my whole life to know what it was to be me. I learned it at their knee. It was the most difficult day when I had to say goodbye to them and return to my hometown of Grand Rapids.

Only, it wasn’t my Grand Rapids.

It wasn’t the place where the broken little girl made up ridiculous fantasies of being the President of the United States or curing cancer with a brightly colored cardboard box and a stick found on the playground. This wasn’t the city where I dealt with childhood tragedies with self destructive behaviors. Nothing was the same, including the absence of the monsters that didn’t live under my bed but were under the same roofs as me. The dark secrets were held up to the light until their power whimpered into submission.

This city doesnt know me, power in my words, body thick with laughter, hair demonstrably wild, my secrets laid open to the beauty of rainbows once forbidden from my fingertips. This city is unaware that within its limits, there is a woman with courage as deep as a wristcutters truth, but as furious as a hurricane battering abusers with education. Grand Rapids has yet to understand that I, that had all along existed but had been nearly crushed by history, rose up to find my feet.

I’m standing in the middle of Division and Fulton in my mind, screaming with laughter at the pure wickedness of possibilities to be reached. This may not be my Grand Rapids, but it is my home.

Are you in there?

The price is higher than its worth

The price is higher than its worth

I am the dirty little secret; the gate-keeper of his justice

Cloaked in the farthest back corner of his closet of emotional ruckus

Sometimes doctors visited. Some would prod around the rubbish

But they could never find me because they didn’t have the compass

They’d take turns trying to discover where my true self thrived

by poking me with invisible sticks, wondering if I were still alive.

Oh! I am still alive. I am very, very much alive.

When I became the forgery demonstrating his famine-lies

I became the masquerade a dancing puppet super-sized

Nobody could hear my darkness under shrouds of harm

Nobody could tell me anything without red flag waving alarm

I got along with nobody, because we were the same

Nobody was the better of us, better at shirking shame.

I made nobody up so I wouldn’t feel so alone

because Everybody kept feasting on my well-gnawed bones.

I escaped from my slumber when the trash was taken out

I opened my three eyes, discovered peace of mind devout

I shed the garbage like a snake sheds its skin

I discovered my diamond, my value, his sin

I grew formidable cloaked in starlight; causing a dither

while he suffocated himself, decayed and withered.

I am the dirty little secret, but my truth is being bold

I’ll be the beacon for those lost in darkest treachery told:

You have no worth. You have no a beloved’s face.

I offer a flashlight towards the egress of freedom’s fair grace.

Reawakening My Mother

Mother and daughter reunited

Mother and daughter reunited

Persephone yawns and stretches from her slumber. The trees respond with kisses of green bud promises. The flower bulbs planted in the autumn reach out to impress her with their dazzling array of colors. Coaxing her to return, beckoning her to shed the grays and browns of her winter clothing and cloak herself in their kaleidoscope prism.

 

The birds sing in accordance with Demeter’s joy of her daughter returning. The birds, the animals, the people engage in the renewed mating rituals of the season. The winds whisper, “She is coming. Persephone returns.” And the mother responds to the words with rains of happy tears and dabs the scent of rejuvenated earth to entice her daughter closer.

 

My nature heeds the calling I hear as the Wheel turns from icy winter winds that left me breathless to the return of the daughter to her mother.

 

I was estranged from my mother for over 18 years. By my own hand, I severed the cord between us, rejected her wisdom out of spite. If the words came from her, they were lies and falsehoods in my mind. I despised the idea of her loving me because, at that time, she couldn’t love me the way I needed her to and I couldn’t give love to her.

 

The parting of ways was vicious, brutal, and in written form. I wrote a letter describing why I no longer wished her to be a part of my life. I called her out on her behavior toward me as if by doing so she’d fall at my feet and beg forgiveness. Maybe, I expected her to do that. What I hoped to accomplish by writing that letter was to instill guilt and shame with my anger and rejection. I slapped her face and walked into the underworld with my eyes closed to her love.

 

I attempted, half-heartedly, to re-engage a relationship with her twice in that time. Neither of those times was I ready to see her as anything but a cold woman who withheld affection if I wasn’t perfect. I expected her to be Demeter, the ever loving mother. I held her to such an impossibly high expectation that anything less was not acceptable to me. And so I slept for years without dreaming in the darkest years of my life.

 

My anger towards her was so venomous to my heart that I plotted her demise in short stories I’d write, a play, a painting, a drawing, and with each creative endeavor, I found nothing. Blank canvases and gray washed depictions of my denied roots, my lost heritage falling behind me in hateful words and actions.

 

I embraced my lover Hades with such completeness that I lost myself in the darkness. I surrendered my heart to injury, accosting my own heart without thought to the consequences because those, too, were unbearable. I moved through the thickness without finding the light of hope within myself. Where I was had no winds to herald my rebirth for, in a way, I died.

 

I became a daughter when I realized through the boy I had placed in my custody, just how powerful the love of that child was in my heart. For every bad choice he made, my heart ached and I cried tears of longing for the connection to my own roots. I, before then, had not understood the sacrifices a parent makes to love a child.

 

I suddenly found the world becoming brighter. A light was dawning, calling me. I could hear the birds telling me to return home. I could see the flowers lined up for inspection against the concrete wall enticing me to return. The smell of my mother’s kitchen haunted my heart. I could feel her reaching out to me. I could feel my shame and guilt that I’d so carefully placed at her feet reminding me that I’d burned that bridge. I could still smell the smoke of that fire I’d set 18 years before.

 

But I ignored the lies I told myself throughout my time in darkness. I set down my pride in a heaped up pile of scrap at the curb of decision. I reminded myself of her smile, her laughter, her conviction when she saw injustice. I changed how I saw her. The winds shifted and I could hear her calling my spirit with her own. I picked up the phone and physically called her.

 

That first call was naked. I stood before her shedding my anger, refusing to give in to my fears of rejection, dropping them to the floor like the rags they were. We bonded by being mothers together. I confessed my darkness to her. I explained the reason I’d buried myself in the world. I discarded my shell and reached out my fragile tendrils seeking a grafting to my family tree. She watered my efforts with careful tentative tears of rejuvenated faith in me.

 

Without anger there was no longer pride or anxiety to hold us apart. For the first time I saw her, not as my mother, but as a woman. I saw her with scars and wounds, some healed, others healing and she was beautiful. I’d forgotten just how lovely she is. I transitioned from plotting her murder to embracing the human woman. I released the winter of my life and embraced the floral scented breezes of spring.

 

She told me, that although painful, the bridge that I’d set ablaze had been extinguished not long after I started it. She waited hopeful, like Demeter, for my return. When I rediscovered the bridge to return to my ancestral lands, I took out my ropes and my trees and I began working on reparations. I started at my side, she started at hers. When we’d reached a point of understanding and completed the walkway towards one another I sobbed with relief and ran the distance between us with cautious steps, careful words, and noticed the bridge had been reinforced with her love.

 

After our reconciliation, I returned to Michigan, my home state where my mother lives with my dad. On her 65th birthday, I sat at her dining table in her welcoming kitchen and I drank Kawphy*, ate homemade blueberry buckle (my great grandmother’s recipe), and loved my mom with such a deep sincerity that I tear up writing about it.

 

After breakfast, she and I went downstairs and onto her patio. She produced the letter I’d written in ancient tongues of a wounded woman/child. I read it and felt ashamed but she wouldn’t allow me to linger on the past. We hugged tightly, cried, and then, together, we lit that letter on fire and let it burn. It was one of the most profound moments of my life.

 

Not a day goes by that we don’t speak, email, or post something on each others Facebook walls. Our relationship has become a key part of my identity. I know that someday I won’t be able to call her, but to me, that makes what I have with her now so valuable and precious that I can’t imagine taking it for granted or discarding it again. My roots and heritage are found in the wisdom and love of my mother. My only regret is that I took so long to remember I love her.

 

Spring returns. Persephone has found Demeter once again. I, the daughter, found my way home and together with my mother, we rejoice in rebirth and reclamation of a woman’s wisdom.

*(Kawphy, in my family is a sacred ritual. It is a time of sharing, conversation, and the exchange of ideas that flow like the warm beverage between familial spirits)