Days Like This

We are all condemned to have the occasional “off” day or two. The gods of patience and acceptance I appealed to did not pay off. I am stuck where I am indefinitely instead of being where I really need to be. Normally I can handle setbacks and frustration. We all have to from time to time. But, damn.

I have a habit I’ve developed over several years now when I take an emotional hit. I don’t immediately react. I chill out for a while. I take a few deep breaths. I may make myself some tea. Even if I feel awful or sad or scared or something equally unpleasant, I take a minute. Instead of reacting immediately, I create some mental and emotional space inside myself. I wait until I feel strong and composed and ready enough to deal with whatever it is that needs to be dealt with. Trust me, this was an acquired skill.

There is no need to open up, let alone answer that bound-to-be disturbing email that just popped up on your screen. There is no need to answer your phone when you are not up to talking to the name that comes up. Once I remember, back in the days of dial phones, when my father was visiting, I let a phone ring in my house and fully planned to ignore it until it stopped. My father writhed in discomfort and finally blurted out: “Aren’t you going to answer that?” I didn’t.

I used to be at the beck and call of the world. When it wanted or needed me, I’d step right up. No matter what my needs and feelings were. I expect that is still necessary at certain stages of one’s life. As an employee, you ignore your boss indefinitely at your peril. But you still have the right to take a breath and focus on yourself to get grounded in order to tackle the task or carpet call that is coming.

The problem in the workplace, like every other group dynamic, is that there is a predictable domino effect. Emotions are contagious. So if you catch a whiff of anxiety, especially from someone in charge, it is very easy to catch it. I think being a good manager and even a good parent has a lot to do with modeling emotional self-regulation and self-care.

I wasn’t always as calm as I am these days. No sirree, Bob – whoever Bob is.

I would go off on just about anything if my ego was invested enough. The conflagration of neurotic emotions like anxiety, fear, and distress would take over and I would be off and running. My amygdala would completely take control. The amygdala is known as the lizard brain. It has only one function. Self-protection. It doesn’t think things through. It doesn’t say: “Hold up a minute.” It doesn’t seek to negotiate anything or even invite you out for a beer. Instead, it triggers lots of adrenaline to flow into your system with the classic “fight or flight” response.

A talk show host whose name I refuse to mention did once impart a solid piece of advice I have taken to heart. “You teach people how to treat you.” So if you choose to be a doormat, expect to be treated like one. If you have questionable self-respect, don’t be surprised if people around you question your value, too. If you are meek and mild instead of taking bold actions, expect the world to reward you in kind.

And if you don’t want to be endlessly bothered by other neurotics, let the phone ring. Call them back later. They will survive. Especially when you are having an “off” day.

Patience and Acceptance

Patience is not my strong suit. I am better than I used to be but I’m still not great. I hate the feeling of helplessness that patience requires. I hate things outside myself that don’t move or react as quickly as I do. This made me a less-than-stellar mother when my kids were little. I honestly couldn’t wrap my head around how much my kids didn’t know. And the messes they made! That there is some pretty dysfunctional parenting.

I hate when some illusion I harbor of being in total control is tested. I was never in total control, of course. Far from it. But what a handy deception that was. It usually alienated or amused others who fully got that it ain’t happening until it is supposed to happen. They traded stress for relaxation and enjoyed the unexpected downtime. This used to horrify me.

“WHAT do you mean “siesta”?” “Why can’t these people keep their stores open all day?” “Back at WHAT time?” “Am I supposed to hang around here waiting for you to get back from lunch until I can purchase my – pick one – train/ferry/plane/bus ticket?” This was particularly galling in the then so-called “third world” countries. Customer service standards were variable at the best of times. Those populations had a lot of patience to put up with it. Or they had given up caring.

The qualities of being demanding and impatient generally made me a fairly typical entitled Yuppie and an unpleasant person to be around. Why can’t this task be accomplished in this amount of time I expect it to be to a suitable performance standard without so much whinging and whining about inadequate time and resources and blah, blah, blah? Not only did I not get the results I wanted with this attitude, but I also frittered away MY downtime. That was dumb.

I come from a family of worriers so in part I know it is genetic. Or environmental. My Nanny would frequently fret about just about everything. Maybe that was her coping strategy. She’d fret about the weather and if it would rain or not. And if the bread in the big mixing bowl would rise sufficiently if the air got too humid. We lived in mortal terror of opening and mistakenly slamming the oven door. The cake would definitely fall. I once saw a cake this happened to. It was a slippy-slidey, lopsided-looking creation on the plate. But with a generous dollop of icing on top, it still tasted delicious.

So today my fate is entirely in the hands of some faceless bureaucrat. Months of planning and negotiating a visitation schedule are likely to go up in smoke if the unnamed bureaucrat doesn’t come through. Blame and punishment are equally useless in a situation like this.

Eons ago, life won the arm-twisting contest and I started my transition from demanding Arschloch (That’s German. Look it up.) to a more patient and reasonable person. It was around the same time I learned the world’s shortest prayer that I regularly employ when I conclude there is not a damned thing I can do to make the current circumstances any better: Fuck it.

“Fuck it” has a dazzling breadth and range of applications to an equally dazzling breadth and variety of situations. This particularly patience-trying situation I am now in included. I believe it is wise for me to employ that short prayer right about now. So, fuck it. Que sera, sera. (That’s French.)

A Home of One’s Own

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

T.S. Eliot, Originally published 1943

Think about home. How does that word feel for you? Warm? Cozy? Messy? Bright? Gargantuan? Fun? Dingy? Safe? It’s a trigger word for some. It’s definitely a trigger word for me. I have been looking for “home” my whole life.

I envy those who can look back on their childhood with warm and fuzzy feelings. I wish I could. As soon as I was able, I set out to find my dream home. In my ignorance and haste, I made boneheaded mistakes. It didn’t quite work out as I expected. To start, I needed to believe I was capable of achieving stability. I wasn’t there yet.

The home I so desperately wanted when I was younger had to be created by me and me alone. “Me” wasn’t ready. “Me” moved around a lot. It took ages for this penny to drop. “Wherever I go, there I am.” Years of international travel taught me that packed with your luggage is all of your other baggage. To be sure, I traveled widely for years to study, to learn, to explore, and simply for adventure.

Underneath those goals was the unexpressed hope that by being somewhere else, I might BE someone else. Someone I actually liked and admired. Someone I could love and support. Someone I wanted to spend time with. I still cringe at the memory of adopting a British accent in London one summer. My Queen’s English was passable enough to chattily converse with a traffic bobby without raising suspicion that I was not a fellow citizen. Perhaps he was just a proper English gentleman.

What I hadn’t factored in when I headed off for foreign shores was that I needed to get rid of the mess in my own foundation first. You can try to build a house on quicksand, but it is going to fail. Before a house can be built, the foundation must be prepared and made solid. When one’s childhood is emotionally unstable, it can be difficult to know what is needed to stabilize that internal foundation. In my case, I moved around a lot. Every six months or so. For years.

The reason – though I didn’t know this as clearly when I was younger – was that staying in one place for too long allowed unwelcome feelings to come up that I didn’t know how to deal with. Eventually, legions of counselors over many years helped me excavate the muck in my psychic basement. Then one day the pile of muck is outside. The rot is drying in the sunlight. It finally desiccates down to dust and the wind blows it away.

How did I know I was well on the way to healing? I could talk about difficult events in my childhood without panicking or plummeting. I had searched for years for ways to feel normal. I didn’t want to be constantly nervous, or anxious, or terrified, or overwhelmed. That state of mind finally arrived when I could see and separate feeling like a bad person from a person who had many bad things happen to her. Such is the fate of the unprotected child.

I believe I am a good person because I continued to seek answers for why I didn’t feel like one. What a ride – and a long one at that. All that external and internal traveling has seen me finally disembark at a happy place. That dream home? Sure, it would be nice. But acquiring it is much lower on my list of life priorities these days. I am the home I always craved and needed. Welcome to me.

One by One by One

At a staggering rate, I get at least one like a day on my blog posts. I am a humble writer so that is all the encouragement I really need. I have a modest number of followers.  (Hello, dear reader.) Were Mom still alive, I might have surmised that single daily “like” came from her. Not that she was a consistent fan of my writing. Quite the opposite. Mom recognized early on that I could string words together but she balked at what I wrote about. Usually some uncomfortable memory from my childhood in which she was a key protagonist/antagonist.

It felt like her public shows of support for me were more designed to keep me (and her) from looking bad in front of friends, neighbors, and colleagues. She was thoughtful that way. I came to believe her over-the-top displays of support had the same undertones as “methinks the lady doth protest too much.” Acknowledging to herself, as she must have, that she wasn’t there for much of my childhood. Her expressions of support in young adulthood were no doubt relief, as much as motherly pride.

In university, I once received an amount of money in the form of the curiously named Anonymous Donor Scholarship. I was convinced my mother was behind it. I could only speculate about her possible motives. Boost that girl’s resume/prospects. Buttress the child’s/mother’s deficiencies. “But,” she would assert. “I never interfere.” 

I was well-coached as a child in the absolute “necessity” of repressing my truth or feelings, especially about “bad things.” Not only was I discouraged from standing up for myself, but I was also coached into playing along with the hypocritical societal sleight-of-hand that we lived in. All “to keep the peace” and “keep up appearances.” “Because it could hurt someone.” And “someone” usually meant the perpetrator.

My mother had odd ideas and choices in who she was driven to protect and a perplexing empathy for the underdogs she championed. It was clear that her own children did not merit the same degree of protection as an arms-length transgressor. How could she have been? They were HER children, after all. Invincible and special. They didn’t need protection. They were independent and self-reliant little girls. From a very early age.

Mom may not have been all that different from her parenting peers. The “keep the peace at all costs” message targeted girls and women – with the crystal clear sub-text – “… even if it kills you.”  In the Fifties, many women did just that. Poet Sylvia Plath’s unhappy ending at the open door of a gas oven is one of the decades’ more prominent victims. But in other ways, Mom was her own special creation.

All of this subterfuge and narrative shaping falls under the general category that we had drummed into us in the “Fabulous Fifties:” “Don’t spill the beans.” I won’t divulge more just yet. I have recently pledged to keep most of my emerging stories close to my chest until they “is” fully-growed. But flawed Fifties child that I am, I am happy to report that my memoir will be full of beans. Lots and lots and lots of beans.

Feelings Check

Occasionally, I like to trot out and test-drive the emotional impact of my writing on real people. I’ve had a range of reactions. Sometimes the reader is amused, aghast, or apoplectic (Well, not really the third one but the alliteration was too tempting to pass up).

Does the writing elicit the response I was going for? Laughter. Tears. Outrage. Or does it elicit another type of response? Confusion. Disinterest. Boredom. I would die of mortification if my writing caused someone to die of boredom. Honest to God, my worst fear. Or one of them anyway. I would never recover.

That said, I have shared snippets of my intended book right here in this blog. The Ladies Lunch piece? Remember that. A cousin was good enough to write to let me know that the scene rang true to its time and place. She also said my words were “vibrant.” I liked that. Another dear author friend told me that another blog post I wrote elicited “two titters” out of a possible three. That is, it made him laugh. If you understood this guy’s sense of humor, you’d know what high praise that is for my post.

And then there is the person with whom I shared some of the darker issues that will be explored in my memoir. She almost reflexively advised me that “she worries” I will be at risk in the family of deepening old wounds or aggravating new ones. I’m not disagreeing with her. But what I know for sure is that keeping the truth and deeply scarring emotional wounds hidden is much more damaging and dangerous than hurting the perpetrators’ feelings.

That particular response, unsurprisingly, came from someone in the very society I struggled so hard to escape. It spoke volumes about the collective worldview we were raised in. “Be nice.” “Don’t tell.””Never say shit even if you have a mouthful.” I’ll say more about that worldview later. Much more.

Raging Debate

To tell or not to tell? How widely should I spread the word that I am writing a book? It is often cliche and code for “not doing much of anything.” Well, given this blog is about writing a book, that ship has already sailed. But telling the world I am writing a memoir to be accountable is not to be confused with disclosing everything that will go into that memoir.

I once read that the brain doesn’t distinguish between the stories you write on paper and the stories you share out loud. Once you’ve shared, the logic goes, the brain thinks you’ve done it. What I read about this phenomenon doesn’t fully explain how this happens. But it has slivers of sense in it.

Research suggests that discussing the story you are planning to write can actually make you less likely to succeed and finish it. It’s almost like your brain gets tricked into thinking that you’ve already put in the effort and achieved the goal. So, instead of inspiring you to move forward, the act of discussing your work widely before it is completed can actually dampen your motivation.

There is this fairly reasonable fear in artists of fragmenting their vision or misspending their creative energy and momentum. If they allow their drafty drawings or words and stories to be disseminated too far and wide before they are finished, creativity could come to a halt. Writer’s block, for example. That has a host of causes but letting cats out of the bag can be part of it. Releasing sections of our writing into the world prematurely makes it harder to stay focused and committed to the book project’s path. It is like dispersing energy to the wind. Usually unrecoverable. Like time.

There is another good reason for keeping your artistic cards close to your chest. For many authors, even those who have carefully outlined and story-boarded their manuscript, it can happen that their writing doesn’t quite behave and stay on track with the writer’s vision. Plots have been known to deviate onto their own inherent logical path. It would be a pity not to pursue an interesting plot line if it was just sitting there beckoning to you with a broad smile and open arms.

I also hear characters take on a life of their own. You have to follow where your characters lead, not vice versa. Many authors have told me this. Keeping that which is precious and emerging from your creative depths both safe and protected is a generally accepted artistic “best practice.” You wouldn’t think of leaving your infant outside at the mercy of the elements or pushing him or her to tackle something before they are ready.

So to err on the side of caution, I won’t share any chunks of the emerging memoir. Not anymore anyway. From now on, my mantra is “Write don’t tell.” Or is that “Show don’t tell?” I get so mixed up about what I am supposed to do in my writing. I have been listening to way too many online book coaches.

Margot’s Argot

In an earlier post, I talked about my pleasant interaction with a book coach following the Perfect Your Process Writing Summit. Presently, I’m neck-deep in researching my subject matter, dates, places, events, and so on, and learning what I need to do to eventually get myself over the book publishing finish line. That seems like plenty to tackle for now.

But I’m not gonna lie. Having a knowledgeable someone to hold my hand and kick my ass in the doldrums could be helpful. Even better, it feels great to think that there would be someone else I could blame for my procrastination. Or failure.

The first challenge in finding such a person is imagining who that special someone might be. In that regard, bringing a book coach into your life feels a lot like falling in love and setting up house. Without all the sexual tension and dirty dishes. So how does an aspiring author go about acquiring and hiring such a person? Make no mistake. Acquisition is precisely the word. There is a marketplace out there with no end of well-meaning book coaches hawking their wares. And just like any corner of the capitalistic marketplace, the offerings are widely diverse.

Some book coaches have developed their own “processes.” They lure you in with their assertions to the secret world of publishing. Soon you are learning the special language of the publisher and the publishee. Just follow them, step-by-step, they exhort, and you shall be a published author in no time flat. When I came across one particularly comprehensive sales pitch, I checked out their website. I have never been so confused in my life.

That link led to this welcome page and then you sign up for the community here and, while you are at it, submit some of your writing so that others can critique it and that page will lead you back to a page where you can critique the work of others and if you get your draft submitted within this timeframe, you may get some of your money back and … whew. I am exhausted and I haven’t even talked to anyone personally yet. Maybe I’m not supposed to.

I have always had mixed feelings about argot. That special language professionals use to deem you an “insider” or an “outsider.” Think lawyers, doctors, and engineers. Professional training is in large part, language training. Argot – according to Merriam-Webster: “The language used by a particular type or group of people: an often more or less secret vocabulary and idiom peculiar to a particular group.” Well, that definition seems straightforward enough. I read further in the American Heritage Dictionary. “A secret language or conventional slang peculiar to thieves, tramps, and vagabonds devised for purposes of disguise and concealment.” Now that resonates a little too close to home. I am a recovering lawyer after all.

This is not to suggest that book coaches do anything improper or untoward in offering their offerings. But it does have that uncomfortable feeling of “one size fits all.” The promise that anyone can write a book but only if you follow their inherently, foolproof methodology seems a bold statement to me. You can’t argue with success, of course.

If I can be persuaded that countless numbers of illiterate aspiring authors were trained up to become New York Times #1 bestselling authors by following a certain prescription, I would eagerly jump on board. But neither words nor authors adhere that closely to prescriptions in my experience. There is the X factor that makes Stephen King who he is or more accurately the writer he became. He developed his voice over years and years as most successful authors do.

And no one who devours a steady diet of Stephen King’s books necessarily wants to read F. Scott Fitzgerald. Not even The Great Gatsby in Grade 11 English class. After graduation, even less. There is a fairly marked stylistic divide between those two particular genres. As is to be expected in the alchemy of developing a voice.

A book coach may be a good idea up the road but seems premature for me. A conventional first draft book manuscript runs around 50,000 – 70,000 words. I will be more comfortable hiring a book coach when I am at least halfway to that word count, which I presently am not. What happened to the days when intrepid authors sat in their grottoes and submitted query letter after query letter in vain to numerous disinterested publishers and toiled in oblivion for years before their great talent was recognized and, finally, fame, stardom, and wealth inevitably followed? Ya. I don’t really think that ever was a thing except for the favored few. Particularly for those with a trust fund or a wealthy spouse.

For me, for now, I will continue to toil in obscurity in my grotto. Seriously. Given the stage I am presently at in writing this book, getting my word count close to something that eventually impresses me that I am a real author is more urgent. Getting there would at least convince me I am becoming one. PS This is my thirtieth consecutive blog post. That accomplishment is helping me feel like a real writer. In any case, it’s a start.

Ladies Lunch

The memoir progresses. This vignette shines a light on the hypocrisy-ridden social class into which Mom had married. In a small, mid-century Maritimes town, she could be a shocking, therefore, slightly suspicious character. Yet fitting into Fredericton society was my mother’s highest ambition. But she was determined to do it her way. The path that country-born little girl chose to achieve that ambition, which she eventually did, was fraught and not without considerable collateral damage. Mom’s strategy in navigating those social strictures could be clever if alienating – both for her and for her family. In a bigger city, she might have been featured in a woman’s magazine as a rising feminist. But this was the Fifties and the widescale feminist movement was many years away. Mom had to make do.

“Once she had married a lawyer, Mom became a de facto member of the local “lawyers’ wives” club. These women’s only social connection was what their husbands did for a living. In the Fifties, that was considered enough.

The lady wives all arrived shortly before lunchtime toting their contribution to the potluck in Pyrex casserole dishes. The crisp cotton knee-length dresses they wore were usually set off by a dainty string of pearls. Their huge diamond wedding rings were on full display. Lunch would be set up on a buffet side table and then each lady served themselves before sitting down.

I imagined a Jello aspic with ham and marshmallows as part of the menu. After lunch, several of the wives, who lived to play cards, would stay to smoke and wile away the rest of the afternoon playing bridge. Aside from the aspic, gossip was the real main course.

One day, the discussion moved front and center to the outrageous and indiscreet affairs of Edith A. who was one of their own. She was married to powerful local lawyer Francis A. who was generally regarded as a not-nice guy. There was considerable sympathy for her deplorable marriage as he was not only not nice but not terribly attractive. It seems Edith sought comfort outside her marriage to balance Francis’ emotional – and it was said – sexual inadequacy. The ladies cooed and clucked at length about “that Edith” and her indiscretions. “A disgrace,” they all said, nodding in agreement “Her poor children. Putting them through all that. And so publicly.”

Mom and Edith were once close friends. That is until Edith slept with my father some years later and the friendship became difficult to sustain. But at this lunch, Mom was still on friendly terms with her.   Mom felt a rush of protectiveness and outrage over the ladies’ savaging her dear friend, Edith. After listening quietly for a time, Mom piped up and directed a question to one of the other lawyer’s wives. “Ann,” she asked innocently. “How many times a week do you and Pat have sex?”

There was a collective intake of breath at the table. The lawyers’ wives were clearly aghast and embarrassed. Picking up on their shock and disapproval, Mom looked innocently around the table with a perplexed look on her face: “I’m so sorry. Did I say something wrong? Everyone was talking so freely about Edith’s sex life, I thought there wouldn’t be anything wrong with discussing our own.”

Mom neither smoked nor played bridge. However, I guessed that wasn’t the only reason she didn’t stay after lunch to smoke and play cards with the other lawyers’ wives. Or perhaps it was because her ham and marshmallow aspic wasn’t quite up to snuff. Hard to say.

Graphs and Goals

In writing memoir, it is useful to have a tool to help you plot out the course of your life. It doesn’t mean everything that happened in your life will go into your book. Heaven forfend. But it is like taking a sentimental refresher to remind you where you were, what happened, and how it affected you.

Memoir is not an autobiography. Frankly, most of us don’t rate a fully-researched, detailed book that combs through every age and stage of our lives. That is reserved for global movers and shakers like presidents and Nobel prize winners. Most of us wouldn’t want that type of scrutiny anyway. I sure know I wouldn’t. What I do know is that there were key incidents in my life that shaped me. That mantra I had in the 80s about women “having it all” ruled my life for years. Turns out it wasn’t fully true.

Only in retrospect can I see what a bill of goods we women were sold. As we are just living our lives and trying to make ends meet, it is hard to see the significance of the events happening around you at the time. The power of hindsight is 20/20, so we can look back and see more clearly how a particular thing happening led to what happened next. And so on and so on until you die.

So at the suggestion of author Joanne Fedler, I am setting out to create a graph of my life from birth to the present day. Fedler advises us to create a spreadsheet starting with the year of your birth, your age in each year, significant events that occurred in your life, and also what occurred in the world at large. I remember how significant Woodstock was to me in 1969, mostly as a war story reported by those who had actually attended. I was dazzled by their coolness. Looking back now, I see it was a significant cultural event for a whole generation and marked an era of widespread social change. The music of Woodstock was just the tip of the iceberg.

I find it fascinating to reminisce with old friends about how we were and what we lived through. We had all the perfunctory life milestones to go through at the same time as big things happened in the wider world: marriage, babies, career-building, loss of parents, then friends. The predictable trajectory was often marked by outliers such as random tragic deaths close to us, a random financial windfall or reversal, or stupefying betrayals that shook our belief systems to the core. No matter how charmed, few of us get through life completely unscathed.

So I suppress my intense hatred of MS Excel to capture the signposts I need to guide me on my memoir journey. Signposts and goalposts. That is what comes next. By when will this book actually be written, revised, and published? Those goalposts keep changing.

I started this blog with the goal to have my own book in my hands within a year. I might not need that much time. The truth is I have been writing this book all my life. I filled countless journals as I struggled to make sense of the family craziness going on around me. I sent so many emails to friends that I’m convinced that by printing them all out and doing a deep edit, the book’s salient plot points would emerge. I have signed up for a couple of online challenges with the expectation that I’ll have a working first draft in a few weeks, not months. We’ll see about that.

I already know the theme of the book. Surviving the unsurvivable. Gratitude for life in spite of it all. Looking at brokenness with compassion and empathy – for myself and for others. There is so much out there about the value of forgiveness and to me, it’s pretty easy-peasy. You forgive your enemies not for their sake but for your own. I don’t want the damaging people in my life to take up any valuable real estate in my head any longer. I won’t likely have coffee with them, but I have forgiven them.

Effectively it has been a series of choices to get better instead of bitter. The only bitters I enjoy are Angostura in a glass of tonic water and ice with a generous slice of lemon. That is a beverage I fully plan to enjoy at each milestone that this book-writing process occasions. Chin-chin.

Thank You, Jeff Brown

I hadn’t initially planned to feature other authors on this blog, but here we are. When someone says exactly what you have been thinking about and wrestling with for years, why not? What’s not to like about a website that opens with this front page: “If you want to live a more spiritual life, live a more human life. Be more truly, fiercely, heartfully human.” From, Jeff Brown, Author, Teacher, Enrealment Activist & Grounded Spiritualist. https://jeffbrown.co/

When one of his posts popped up in my Facebook feed, I emailed Jeff Brown and asked for permission to copy it to my blog. He quickly replied: “For sure.” Those of us raised by troubled and immature parents know how easy it was to take all of their deficiencies on ourselves. Children would prefer to believe it was their fault that no one was consistently there to care for and protect them. It is nearly impossible for children to put the blame for neglect and abuse on their caregivers. Their sense of self is not strong enough or big enough. Also, by taking the blame on themselves, it gives children some measure of control. And so the seeds of people-pleasing are sown. It is easier for children to believe that they are the problem than to admit their caregivers are doing a bad job.

There is one question children should not have to ask: “Who is going to take care of me?” I remember wondering that often. When Dad crumpled in a heap to the floor, weeping uncontrollably after losing his businesses, money, and marriage, I put my arms around his neck: “Don’t cry, Daddy. We’ll be all right. Everything will be all right.” At the time, I remember casting about wildly in my mind for what I might be able to do. My mother was in a mental institution at that time so could not be reached, let alone expected to help. I was 11.

Here’s what Jeff Brown writes about what children raised in that situation often do: “In order to deal with the feelings related to the absent parent, children often make the assumption that they are to blame. This is the only way they can make sense of it – if the adult isn’t loving, it must be because we are ‘unworthy.’After all, “Rachel’s father spends a lot of time with her”, and “Michael’s mother always hugs and kisses him in public.” So if yours doesn’t, it must be because there is something wrong with you, something not enough, something not worthy of love. Thus begins the internalized shame and self-blame cycle, often reflected in the disdain we feel for our bodies, our creations, and our very existence. Of course, our unworthiness is entirely untrue, but it is experienced as deeply true for the child self. And if the bitter parent actually told you that you are unworthy, or bad, or a mistake, or anything that undermines your sense of self, then you have literal evidence of your own valuelessness. Who do we believe if not the parent? Who defines us before we are ready to define ourselves? It then becomes very difficult to recognize and call out abuse and neglect, because you move through the world certain of only one thing – your inherent unworthiness. If you are constantly seeking validation and approval, if you are not yet at an egoic stage where you can recognize your own value, on what basis do you stand up to those who abuse you? I think one of the reasons I didn’t call out my mother in my early adulthood was because I had taken her negative message to heart. If I was a bad person, how could I demand she treat me with respect? If I was ‘persona non grata’ on Mother Earth, on what basis would I fight for my right to the light?”

Mr. Brown, you speak my mind. You also mirror my experience. Parents coping with addictions are absent de facto. It took an astonishing number of crises large and small in adulthood based on low self-worth for me to learn to live crisis-free. I wandered too far and too often down wrong alleys in pursuit of love and stability.

Finally, the penny dropped in that I realized to attract love and support, it was up to me to create it inside myself. You cannot drink from an empty well. I finally came to a place where I could see myself as worthy of happiness. Only then, was I able to open up to the possibility that I was capable of giving and accepting love. How I got here is the main message of the book I am writing. Jeff Brown’s take assures me there are others out there who get that type of journey, as well.