Tag Archives: childhood

Poetry, Writing

About Sacrifice and a Poem : Making Things Holy

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MOSAIC

 Mosaic: a word that means from the muses, from Moses and a work of art created from broken fragments of pottery, stone or glass.
 

Even the first time, surrender was not hard,

though the grownups and mothers

with their drinks and swizzle sticks

undoubtedly thought it so when you volunteered

your only present that 10th Christmas

to a younger child who wouldn’t understand

being giftless at the tail end of a line to Santa,

nor your inherent sin in being born.

Such generosity should have stayed

between your concept-of-God and you,

but grownup admiration (you could not hope

to make your act unpublic) sullied the soap

of any generosity’s power to cleanse you.

Other atonements followed, only one

almost perfect, being perfectly anonymous

spoiled by an accomplice’s later telling.

Perfection? You never made that grade,

your terrible love for God demanding all life

from your life. No one told you, “Live a lot,”

not in words that made it matter, though

they doubtless counseled, “Live a little.”

You were always in school to be perfect,

never knowing that life is a classroom

where one learns to love flaws

by throwing bad pots, to shatter

them with careful hammer,

assembling beauty from broken things.

I do not believe I posted this poem here before. I may have but I doubt it as I was going to publish it in a print journal. Instead, I never sent it out. So instead I choose to “sacrifice” it here. (meaning: If i publish it online here I cannot do so in a print journal…so this is for you, folks!)

I am going to tell you about the child I was when I was very small, as small as I can remember. The first thing I remember about myself as a self, was…well, what do I remember? This is hard. For one thing, while I am down to only 5mg of Abilify, I still take 160mg of Geodon, but more important I still take 200mg of Topamax, an anticonvulsant that has known adverse effects on memory and cognition. Whether it actually interferes with what I can recall from childhood or not, I could not say…Perhaps ECT did that, 16 plus 5 sessions of ECT could have done a number on my brain, especially as I had active neurological Lyme disease at the time. The Lyme-literate neurologist advised strongly against ECT, but the hospital psychiatrist forced me, at least through the last 8, after I refused to go back, by getting a court order and drugging me on so much Thorazine I had no will.

Ah, but “They,” the faceless They of Authority, They say that ECT affects  only short-term memory. Well, then, I guess just being 60 years old and having gone through trauma after trauma in the present decade alone surely could have wiped out memories from a half century ago and before. Whatever is the case, I must now scour my brain to recall what I thought I could recall easily.

Marjorie M, an old friend of my father’s, related a significant story recently — about me at age 6. Given our bedroom when she stayed with our family to recuperate from surgery, while my twin sister and I camped out somewhere else in the house, Marjorie was relaxing in my twin bed, alone, when she was surprised by my little face in the doorway. “Hi, Mrs M,” she tells me I said. “Why, hello, Pammy. How are you?”  I looked at her with concern. “Are you all right, Mrs M? Are you lonely? Do you need anything?” (or something to that effect..) I am astonished that even at age 6 I knew I needed to “do this,” although I think that my mother, who disliked Marjorie intensely, was probably ignoring her and I suspect knew it even then. But Marjorie says she fell in love with me at that moment. She certainly never forgot the incident. Bless her heart…

I forgot it, likely I never knew or understood its impact. Given that I was six, I had already made the decision the year before, when Martha was born and I was five years old, that since I would never have the older sister of my own dreams, I would instead have to be the older sister I dreamed about for Martha. I made myself the promise to Martha, the day she was brought home from the hospital, that I would do everything in my power to be in Martha’s older sister the OS I would have wanted.

In all our childhood photos, until the year I turned 14 and stopped permitting photos to be taken, you see two things: I am almost always featured next to Martha, with my arms around her or somehow touching her, protective of her, and my twin sister is with the dog or otherwise occupied. Always. You might not be able to tell which twin is which from our facial features, but you can tell us apart from that. One of us is with Martha, and you know I am that twin for certain.

It is the greatest loss to me, the worst thing, the — I can only say this: I am not a quitter, but I was unable to complete that most important of assignments because of what happened to me in high school, whatever you want to call it. I either became ill, or troubled or had too many problems…whatever it was, I simply could not function well enough to do all that I promised myself (and Martha) I would do for her. I could not BE the person I needed to be, the functioning adequate teenager, in a good enough way to be a good enough older sister to her.

For instance, just take the older sister/younger sister Q and A that ought to have taken place but never did after I was 14. My own menstual periods took me by brutal surprise. In addition, I never did learn “the facts of life”  (ie sex) as we called it in those days, not for real, not so I understood them, until after college. I vaguely knew the “birds and the bees” but not really, not so I understood the fundamental mechanics of sex at a time when most teens were experimenting with relationships for real. (Not me… I went to an all-girls high school and even though it was not necessarily true for the other students, for me, sex was never on my mind, I never understood the urge or the drive, not then and frankly not ever…) Given those facts, you can see that the OS/YS tête-a-têtes about sex and dating etc just were not going to happen. I didn’t know enough, one, and two, even if I had, I was unprepared to talk about anything so intimate with anyone.

As it turned out, though, Martha had plenty of friends and soon clearly found people to talk to when I could not. Thank heavens, because if the roles had been reversed, she could have taught me plenty! Only they could not be reversed, because I was the OS and she was the YS and things had to stay that way… I think to this day, though she doesn’t say it in so many words, she misses, if not resents, losing the OS, the me she once had…She misses surely the OS promise she knew I made to her from the outset.

Oh, Martha knows it wasn’t my fault. Life is life and shit happens. But she misses me, the Pam that never quite panned out because of everything that “happened” after I turned 14, 15, 16 and then it went on and on and on…She reminded me recently that even before I was taking any medication I told her that life was a minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day struggle just to survive…and I was only 24 or 26 or…This horrified her. To this day she can scarcely bare to recall my telling her.  Or of seeing me catatonic in the State Hospital. She left crying and I think could not bear to visit again for years…

We create our reality, people tell me. Our thoughts are very powerful…If so, I created from a very young age, a very harsh reality, one where in cahoots with a punitive God, I had learned over the years I had to be selfless to the point of self-obliteration, as well as nearly mute. But not so mute as to be noticeable…because if you were noticed then you were not completely self-less. (I told you it was a harsh world…) I had to speak just enough so as to NOT be noticed, but never about me or my concerns. ONLY about others…and then listen to their problems ONLY. I had to be a pair of ears pinioned to the wall. Wear drab no-color colors, unnoticeable. Fade into the woodwork, but only in a way that was unremarkable…As soon as someone noticed that I was fading, it was evil! and I had to add just enough color to fade into the crowd anonymously yet again, self-lessly.

No wonder my handwriting almost disappeared into invisibility. (I would have willed my fingerprints away if I had been able to!) Can you imagine my mortification, and the self-mortification I had to practice when bank tellers noticed the minuscularity of my signature and made me sign checks a second time? They NOTICED my attempts to disappear, and in doing so, made me appear loud and big…which was bad. So the voices took it out on me, making demands that had to be answered and hidden in turn.

Why am I writing about these things? Because despite the pain it has caused me, I still believe in self-denial. I believe in self-lessly doing things for others, and in NOT being the center of our own universes ALL the time. I think a good bit of doing for and thinking about others in THEIR universes is good for the soul, so long as they do not abuse you. And I do not believe that others need to know everything good that we do. I do not think we need to broadcast every good deed on Facebook or to our friends so they know what good people we are! So what if it remains anonymous, or between God and you? Maybe even God doesn’t need to know it if you do something for someone else…and that someone else doesn’t need to know who did it either.

Live with  the anonymity. You can do it. You can be self-less once in a while and not die. Your self is strong enough tolerate not telling the world everything you do for others…Trust me. You do not need kudos, confirmations or smiles for everything you do. You just need to know that someone else is better off because you did something or gave away something you could have used, but decided to give it to someone else instead. You sacrificed something. Not that you gave it away because you could not use it but because someone else needed it more than you did.

Try it, a little sacrificing especially in the United States is a good thing to learn. But make it real, don’t do it falsely. Giving up time or giving away something you don’t use or have any need for is no sacrifice. Sacrifice: from the Latin, sacer, “holy” plus facio, facere, “to make.” Something is only a sacrifice, something is only made holy, if it is a real loss and a real gift at the same time.

Forgiveness, Happiness, Mental Health, Poetry

Happiness is….

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You know what they say, that happiness is not to be found in how much money you have or in the things you own or can buy, nor even in how many friends surround you or how many people love you. The poem about Richard Cory, upon which Simon and Garfunkel (remember them?) based a once well-known song, just about says it all:

RICHARD CORY

By Edwin Arlington Robinson

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean-favoured and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good Morning!” and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich, yes, richer than a king,
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine — we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked and waited for the light,
And went without the meat and cursed the bread,
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet in his head.

We all know it’s true, both the cautionary tale of Richard Cory, and that money doesn’t buy happiness. At least we know it with the left sides of our brains. Alas, this is still the side that does the intellectual calculations of how many friends or about the nice car we’ll need to have before we will finally be happy. And if we didn’t know it before, all we have to do is listen to the news because nearly every week it seems there is yet another story about a celebrity who seemed to have it all – money, beauty, acclaim, adoring fans – who ended up destroying himself on drugs and alcohol or who committed suicide (“no one had any idea she was so depressed…”) at the height of her career.

But if money and things and friends who love you don’t offer a path to happiness, what does? Is there a map, a guide, an instruction manual, a recipe? One look at the number of books on the market purporting to teach you how to be happy tells me there are lots of people making lots of money trying to tell you they have the secret. And given the number of books they sell, an awful lot of people out there are desperate enough to spring for them. If you have bought any of these books and found their secrets to be The Secret, or even to be one effective secret that worked for you, I would love to hear about it. Truly, I am not being sarcastic. I am a writer, and I believe that writers are for the most part sincere. Not all of them, mind you, but most of them. And so when a writer writes a book promising happiness, I believe that he or she probably believes it. I just don’t happen to think most of  it ends up being effective.

But maybe it’s me, I dunno.

Let me explain. I have had many, many struggles with self-acceptance and self-regard over my lifetime (I am 58 years old at this writing, so you can see that I am far from young) and I assure you that I am far from winning the battle. My self-esteem is very low. So low in fact that I hesitate to say more… But at any rate, when I say my self, I mean my inner self, my soul, my – well, whatever it is that one might want to distinguish from the “self-that-produces,” the working self. What I mean is, I know that I write well, and I am learning to become a better artist as the days go on. But those skills have not fundamentally affected my self-esteem, only my level of confidence. And there’s a big difference between the two. I have a lot more confidence in my abilities than I did years ago, partly due to greater skill and long experience – though only in my writing — and partly due to caring less what others think, because there is less at stake at my age. My self-esteem on the other hand remains utterly unconnected to this, and largely unaffected by it. Whether or not I love or utterly despise myself has little or no bearing at all on whether or not I am able to write or paint or draw well. All it might do is affect what I write well or paint or draw about.

And I can be proud of my poem or essay or my drawing, proud of what I produced, without that having the least effect on how much I fundamentally love or hate myself.

But, and here is the thing: I do not believe that hating or loving yourself matters in the search for happiness. Or at any rate, it is not the sine qua non, the primary requirement before you can be happy. In fact, I think in the happiness department, self-regard is over-rated. It is not that I want other people to feel badly about themselves so much as that oddly enough     I think it has little to do with whether or not one can find happiness.

Maybe I should amend the word happiness to contentment. I do not like the first word all that much, as it smacks of little yellow smilie faces and balloons and other inanities. Happiness is decidedly not inane, but our emphasis on the importance of it has made it seem so. Contentment as a word and concept has been all but forgotten in the rush towards the seemingly bigger motherlode of happiness.

So let’s switch gears and say that we are on the search for contentment, which also is not found in money or friends or in being loved by others. So where do I think you can find contentment? (Clearly I write this with my own agenda in mind…why else write it at all?)

I think contentment – indeed, even happiness – does come from within, and it starts with forgiveness.

Forgiveness? Why that of all things, you ask? It seems like so many other emotions and “emotional acts” should be more important – like loving yourself and others and being compassionate etc. But I assure you that without forgiveness, you can have and be and do none of those.

Kindness and generosity were always supreme values to me, even when I was a child. It hurt me inside to see anyone going without something that I had it in my power to give them. But it was many years before I understood that forgiveness was also a crucial value, that it not only partakes of both compassion and generosity but presupposes both. Not only is forgiveness an act of kindness but it is freely given and therefore an act of extreme generosity. You cannot force forgiveness any more than you can force a “sincere apology” despite what our parents might have thought when they made us “say you are sorry and you better sound like you mean it.”

Okay, so forgiveness is critical for contentment, maybe, but forgive what or whom? And why? First of all, everyone is scarred by their pasts, everyone has baggage from childhood. In fact, while some people had more than less happy childhoods, everyone has bad memories that they cannot shake, that have stayed with them and in effect traumatized them.  Second, scars are simply an unavoidable fact of life. You can’t get through life without them, and childhood I’m afraid is a rough and tumble place where you pick up the bulk of them. Three, who “caused” our childhoods, for most of us? Answer: our parents, or whoever took the place of our parents. That is why our first job is to forgive them. I’m serious, and while we are at it, we have to forgive childhood itself, all of it. It doesn’t matter what happened, or how terrible, it really doesn’t. If you do not forgive it, if you do not forgive everything that happened to you, you cannot let your childhood go and get on with the present, which is where happiness, where contentment lies. Contentment is not in the past, that much we know, and no one knows a single thing about the future. But if you cannot forgive the past, and especially the childhood where you got all those scars you carry around now, you will never move beyond it to experience an undefiled present.

Look, I believe that forgiveness comes from inside the brain, but heals a place in the brain we like to call the heart. And I believe that forgiveness is more healing for the person who forgives than the forgiven. So I wish you could forgive all those people who harmed you too. All the people, relatives, friends, lovers, rapists, molesters, thiefs, betrayers and more…because I truly believe it would be good for you and for your heart. But I think it is essential at a minimum if you want to be happy to forgive your childhood, the entire experience of it, not the individuals or the single events, just the fact that you were a child and had to go through it. Once you can forgive it, you see, you can let it go just as it has and be gone.

After you have forgiven your parents or parent-stand-ins, and your childhood, you are well on your way. Many people would say that this is a step towards self-acceptance here, and that is how you reach happiness, but whether it is or not, is not important to me. In some ways, self-acceptance is not what I am after so much as acceptance of the world, both of the past and of the present. And when I say “acceptance” I mean such utter acceptance of it that you can forgive it. Because only when you can forgive, so I believe, can you really accept the world. And when you can accept and forgive the world both past and present, then you can be happy.

( I realize that I have put my poem below on this blog before, but clearly it belongs here, though it is for a second time. And dang, I do not understand why this program will not allow me to get it single spaced!)

TO FORGIVE IS…

to begin

and there is so much to forgive:

for one, your parents, one and two,

out of whose dim haphazard coupling

you sprang forth roaring, indignantly alive.

For this, whatever else followed,

innocent and guilty, forgive them.

If it is day, forgive the sun

its white radiance blinding the eye;

forgive also the moon for dragging the tides,

for her secrets, her half heart of darkness;

whatever the season, forgive it its various

assaults — floods, gales, storms

of ice — and forgive its changing;

for its vanishing act, stealing what you love

and what you hate, indifferent,

forgive time; and likewise forgive

its fickle consort, memory, which fades

the photographs of all you can’t remember;

forgive forgetting, which is chaste

and kinder than you know;

forgive your age and the age you were

when happiness was afire in your blood

and joy sang hymns in the trees;

forgive, too, those trees, which have died;

and forgive death for taking them,

inexorable as God; then forgive God

His terrible grandeur, His unspeakable

Name; forgive, too, the poor devil

for a celestial fall no worse than your own.

When you have forgiven whatever is of earth,

of sky, of water, whatever is named,

whatever remains nameless,

forgive, finally, your own sorry self,

clothed in temporary flesh,

the breath and blood of you

already dying.

Dying, forgiven, now you begin.