Bittersweet paradoxes and mysteries

When I spend time with my Mum I see her inner child so close to the surface in these later years of her life.  I recognise what I carry of hers and perhaps sensed as a sensitive child growing up…all the things unsaid by her.

After going to the nursery and pottering around to find plants we decided to go to our little café in the place close to where Mum grew up and wandered the streets as a youngster.  We were talking about the tragic stabbing of a garage attendant, fifteen minutes before the end of his shift he was set upon by two angry teenagers armed with a knife.  “I just don’t understand it”, my Mum said.  “He was an Indian boy working hard to survive, I wonder where his parents are?”   We talked of how hard Mum and Dad worked, how little time they had to share with friends just goofing off.   Sadly the hard work never ended and Dad died before he got to enjoy the fruits of it.  There will always be a sadness there for what we never got to share, dying when he did in my life before I could truly know him as an adult.

It was a long and slow work (walk!) to the café.  Mum will never travel again.  She is in constant pain from a fractured pelvis which occurred when she fell down stairs trying to take a suitcase down them to take to my sister on one of her last hospitalisations for depression a few years ago.  I cried walking to the café as I realised we are coming to the end of a tine where we can ever go away again.  I didn’t see it coming.

Later I helped her in the lift with the two cyclamens, one for her friend, one for herself.  I left her to go home to my house and my own life, a separation of sorts.  What will happen when she gets even older I don’t know but I really want to be there for her.  I felt scared though on the way to the café.  My body was hurting and my left breast where I had the cancer has been sore.  Its probably nothing but I have thoughts of dying, don’t get me wrong in some ways I have never felt more peace and happiness and contentment (I am not feeling suicidal, I have never wanted to live more), it is just that our family has known so much trauma and stress and I feel such a desire to live and give and love lately.  As I read this back it occurs to me that as a resonate being when I am with her at times I think my own body picks up her pain and some of our maternal inherited ancestral pain, all that pain is gone from my body now.

I spoke to my sister too today.  Turns out she isn’t as freaked out about going to Melbourne as Mum had said.  I had to call my therapist to try and work out that one and an avalanche of tears fell after our phone call as I realised how pulled around I feel when others speak about a difficult time someone else is going through.  In a way I would rather not know about it but on another level I was relieved.  Anyway the tears were some kind of deep release and compassion for the little child and young girl who struggled so much in stormy seas that swelled in her later adolescence and for the young woman who in sobriety has worked as hard as she could to find self knowledge.

Lately I am seeing ways that I can be self centred when my inner child of the past has her abandonment issues triggered.  She gets upset when no one calls or reaches out and forgets they are going through stuff, and the distance isn’t personal.   I need to be with her at these times and give her love and help her to realise it isn’t personal.  It can be hard to keep giving love when you feel you wish it would come back but just sometimes after a day in which I HAVE been able to give my heart swells with such a powerful ocean of love it nearly blows my body apart.  I am made aware at these times of how love is the bedrock that really underlies everything and it makes its presence felt at times when we least expect the tide to come in.   Life is full of bittersweet paradoxes and mysteries sometimes and they are difficult to express at times, but feeling them makes all the pain we have gone through on the journey of suffering and working towards understanding worthwhile, even if only for moments.