It’s been an odd week. I just spent the first Saturday at home in over 2 months, between weddings and festival, my summer gets busy fast. I’ve also been working on an exercise for days now and I just can’t seem to complete it. Who knew my parents would be so much trouble?
I got the exercise from one of Tara Howisey’s video lessons over on YouTube. Lesson #13 contains an exercise that has you write down 5 good qualities for each of your parents.
I couldn’t come up with 5, folks.
I got 2 for my mother and 3 for my dad and that’s after days of meditation. My perceptions of my parents are flat, textureless, emotionless, barren photographs in what I can only assume was either a very boring childhood or a very traumatic one, either way, I’ve chosen to forget most of it. Since my mother left when I was 6, I have almost no memories of her being my mother. No games, no books, no conversations, no outings. Nothing. I remember scraps of things from the 4 years she was our “every other weekend mom”. A sewing project where we cut up her wedding dress for doll clothes. Watching Lawrence Welk with her elderly roommate. No laughter, no hugs. Maybe a little singing. Not much to hang my hat on though.
Then this book showed up.
I did a recent Google search for the term “remothering” and found very little but I did hit on this small pink book written by a doctor who believes that we all carry a primary wound in our umbilicus and he works on healing those wounds. Powerful stuff.
So today’s meditation went a bit differently. It involved far more pain and tears and a feeling of connectedness to all my unknown women ancestors who carried and birthed (or didn’t) and raised (or didn’t) and loved (or didn’t) and lost (or haven’t…yet) either a child or a mother. It’s all there, in my navel.
That’s where contemplating navels gets you, eternity.
I am not speaking to my mother, though we are Facebook friends again. She didn’t come to Faerin’s memorial festival because I yelled at her about not respecting her grandson’s personal space and she decided not to attend. This wound runs deep. I know she has deep mother wounding too, as did her mother.
Anyway, this doctor who wrote this book swears that I can heal that wound and be healthy. I think some of his ideas are a bit sketchy but he’s worth listening to.
I could use a little healing when it comes to my parents. and my children. and me.