Keep Talking Keep Talking Keep Talking Ask Questions Keep Speaking Words Matter Keep Talking Ask Questions of the people you love before you assume you know what you are to do for the them as you imagine they are and the you, you imagine they want you to be. Keep Talking because the questions un-asked burn a hole right down to the middle of this life as you wish it this life as you hoped it this life you can assume away in one wisp of a second away so that we‘re both old and our hearts can’t find beds big enough to hold us in all the non-beautiful not crafted yet never will be tidy pain and also this stirring musty love.
KEEP TALKING NEVER STOP ASKING QUESTIONS we humans don’t have the largess of spirit to know when a tiny moment small left turn something that could be almost casual and maybe not remembered due to either scale or relative unimportance or maybe just maybe the pesky PTSD Dissociation that seems to slip out of realm out of consciousness out of sight but never out of range enough to minimize impact. Keep talking keep talking because this hourglass of love that’s as big as the universe is moving one tiny black sand beach grain at a time down through the hole. Keep talking so the heartbreak stays an idea and not a wrenching gasping hide-in-my-bed never-want-to come-back-in-light reality. Keep talking. I wake up with it. Not yet five in the morning. And all I hear booming really. LOUD really loud. Keep Talking. As if someone would drown of it if I stop. And how potentially delusional is that really?
This hope, this need this craving if you will this desire but NO. It’s not at all or not only these. It’s simple really. So simple. I want to take the palate of stories I’ve been given and lived and loved through and stormed through and wept through, and craft them into something beautiful something useful. The broken twigs on the forest floor are that when the first sparks from the first fire shoot straight up towards where the stars hang out.
Keep Talking don’t ever stop it’s the little small words sometimes that slip into a crevasse that change a life and sometimes we don’t even know.
THIS IS WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE THEN… Just an ‘oh’ it’s those words that directed those words I don’t even remember those words you took as dictates. Guiding somehow but the next words and the next didn’t happen never happened. And years have gone by. Years. YEARS that held so much pain. So much mis – misunderstanding. Missed opportunities. Missing hugs. The misses of a lifetime of hearts not meeting. Because words were missing. Because questions weren’t asked. Because when it comes right down to it. IT IS DENIAL. A denial so deep so pervasive so ever-present that to pretend it away is as easy as a decision inside not to see. Not to speak. Not to ask.
The promise to bring the insides out is another miss. A world of misses and missing and tiny mis – alighnments mis-and disses. Disorders and diss-appointments and disses like insults and failings but not the regular kind. Except maybe, maybe they’re all like this. Simple words not spoken. Simple questions miss or diss or un – understanding and connection and love doesn’t happen with our species when we choose no words.
I promised a window inside the belly of trauma. I promised to craft something beautiful out of the palate that’s left. Everyone has a series of stories. A series of materials. A conglomerate of matter that might be whisked away on a whim but can be caught and shared and related to. Keep Talking because it’s what we have to do.
My eyes are sticky. My fingers are stiff. My hearing is caught in the echo of words not spoken. Inside the fight / flight trauma response are real things, real interactions, real transpires. That could have should have. Passing things and energy and feelings and thoughts and all the mutations of all that’s possible between us. This has to happen.
There are requirements to this living business. Requirements to this being a person. Being a mother. Being a daughter. Sharing space as a human on this precious ground we all inhabit. We all share it. AND ALL THE PRETENDING all the denying all the ‘I don’t want to'–s that humans can come up with don’t change the facts that come with the territory of the gift. We get these bodies this life this time and what we do with it is a CHOICE.
Inside the belly of all the acting out are some basic simple living things that have to do with love. And when we do not speak it, ask what needs to be asked, tell what needs to be told, we break the hearts of the very people we hold dear.
When I’m hit very hard right here at the core I go on pause. Because it’s a choice. And decimating that which I hold dear is not a burden I want to carry. So the wailing weeping clench-fingered gripping happens in a kind of quiet river of wet. The steady stream of tears and grit move quietly. My eyes are sticky. My fingers are stiff. My wrist moves my arm move forward for my fingers whose touch is more like gentle clubbing of the keys than typing.
Denying our denial is the slippery slope of the sophisticated. We know the words maybe have even heard some of the stories. But the reality of it is when you deny the fact of me, I’m really gone to you. So you can speak of me to others and forget about the me of which you speak. And these two actions – they both count. One visible. One rendered not. And because it all dwells in the abyss of your own dissociation, your own deep well of denial and your heartbreaking-ly beautiful efforts to learn the words - speak the words - teach the words is so truly true also, it’s a quick sigh of a sinking. Just a tiny ‘ooof’ and the disappeared stay gone. When you speak of me and never tell me. It’s denial. When you think you’ve done all there is to be done and you never complete the circle so I never know, never receive any of the comfort you’ve thought you’ve precipitated, there’s a denial so deep it runs our world. When you notice it’s impossible to keep a person you love inside a cycle of family, it’s a blatant clue. If denial weren’t assiduous, I wouldn’t be spending my life trying to upend it. If denial didn’t run a multi-generational rift down mountains of people who purport to love, people who probably do in this heart-breaking heart-ripping way and YET. Things have to stay known or people do not engage in the actions necessary to save the elements that need saving.
If denial wasn’t seething underneath wasn’t running the ship of our family, then the fact that going to the beach might be hard for me - after being raped on a beach in St. Croix by two armed masked man less that five feet from my husband who was tied up and held by guns – would be so obvious so self evident as to be insulting if it were to be pointed out. It is loving to acknowledge my possible discomfort on a family beach outing. It is denial to have it never enter the realm of family consciousness at all.
You asked me if I needed you. I said ‘Yes.’ It was loving for you to ask. Truly. You took my answer and made enormously painful life decisions out of it. You never asked me again. The weeping heartbreak of it all is that I have no recollection of any of it. And you would know this if you would choose to climb out of the denial abyss that grips our family. Because as much as any of us may hate it, I have been violently raped three times. I am dissociative. I am much more wounded than I look. The denial about this fact and its ramifications and my adaptations re-triggers the trauma and makes it worse moment by moment.
You’ve not known how much I love you. No matter what you say. Because every time we interact, I climb a mountain of psychological self rape to do it. And you don’t know it because to hold on to this knowledge, you’d have to hold accountability for the denial you’ve tried so hard to both negate and make better and also to deny.
And for me, the pain of your trying, when I’m able to see it through the haze of the me that’s largely missing in our interactions, and the pain of how much we love each other and how much we miss, is just so crushingly sad. I’m so sad I want to utterly disappear. I’ve set my life task to use this material so others don’t have to suffer like this. My trying in this way feels magnificent. I wanted always to do it with you. The doing it alone has been breaking my heart for a long time. I see your heartbreak. Your missing. It hurts me more than my own. If you spoke of your wounding around my wounds, if you told your stories so I could share your wounding around your wounds, we could do joy together. The denial of these truths we share makes everything else sit on a foundation of lies and omissions. It doesn’t have to be this way.
2 thoughts:
I see her now, inside my mind, inside my heart, my mother. I see her blue blue eyes. I see those eyes young and clear, I see them old and cloudy. I see her now inside my mind. Her wrinkled skin, her thinning hair, my mother. I see her now inside my mind, I see her worried face, I see her pain filled eyes, I see them full of joy and silliness. My mother. I know the smell of her skin, her house, her cooking. My mother. I see her arms her legs, her childhood scars, the way she rubbed her face when she was troubled. The way she lit up around her children, my mother. I see the little girl, the wounded girl, the abandoned motherless little girl. The brave little girl, the scared little girl. The abused little girl. The searching teenage girl. I see the wife, the loving wife, the abused wife. My mother. I see the caring friend, the hurt friend, the loving friend, the jealous friend, my mother. I see her loving hands, her work worn hands, her raising hands, my mother. Something about me turning 60 makes me see her every day inside my head, inside my heart. We never talked about my life wounds. My abuse, my scars and shame. My confusion and fear and rage. I did that work somewhere else. That wrenching painful, soul stripping work somewhere else. I did not want her to bear that pain too. She knew I did the work. She did not ask. I did not tell. I could not bear to watch her bear my pain too. We all have our own. She had her own. I had mine. I did my growing up and growing through somewhere else. After, after, I stood beside my mother, a woman. A separate woman. I love the woman I became. I love the woman she became. The woman she was. The woman she could be. My mother. I miss her every day. I miss her. I miss her. My mother.
Thank you so much for writing. What an exquisite portrait of both you and your mother. The moments I've shared with mine - when she was fully present - were so beautiful, so full, that the large gaps left when she wasn't, have filled me with a longing bigger than the words I am able to find. You caught both with your post.
Thank you.
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