Tending to my little one ...

Maureen & Magnolia
Originally uploaded by disneymike
I am always, always amazed at the layers of peeling, chipping away, unearthing and discovery that occur as part of the healing and recovery process.

One such revelation arose today during a session with my healer.

It began with an observation I had on my Friday night trek home, as I became aware of 2 very individual parts of me co-existing simultaneously. My little one, gripped with some historical fears as part of her old wounds, and my adult self, aware of the little one's presence and being of sound mind to tend to her. As I had written about this experience in a former post, what I had not captured was the vivid image and 3-dimensional characteristics that my adult self could perceive about the little one who was there.

As I shared this with my healer today, I became aware of a very specific detail of this experience. The image and characteristics of my little one who surfaced on that drive home was me at 9 years old. I knew this because it is when I first got my hair cut short and had a particular "look" ... this was the little girl in the car that evening.
In identifying this piece, another layer unfolded. This was the age that I was first told that I was adopted and that my mother was pregnant with my little brother.

And then the next piece came to light: this was the time period that I am first aware that my system of denial got constructed in order to help me bear what I could not. I told all of my 3rd grade classmates about being adopted and how special this was and how I was "chosen". I had to make this be important and good and pretty so that I could take in what I had been told. My healer explained to me that at this developmental stage of my life, I experienced a shattering yet was not given a place to experience one. My adoptive mother and father did not know how to attend to potential reactions of upset or distress or shock, nor were they tolerated in my home. This was both a spoken and unspoken rule of my father's. At first signs of pouting or a quivering lip, you were chastised and told "Don't you dare begin ..." and so I learned early on what didn't have a place and could not exist. My 9 year old had to grow up quickly in order to take in the fact that what she came to know as "truth" (i.e. believing that the person I called mother had me in her womb and gave birth to me) was, in fact, a falsehood. My whole world turned upside down and I learned how to quickly make it right side up.

It was from this point on that I would "make up" a self to call "me". About a year after my brother was born, I began to tell tall tales in school, exaggerate things about my life, tell bold-faced lies. This escalated into the deceptive period of my junior high school and high school years of creating illnesses and other things about myself to test if people cared about me. My healer explained that I had to be larger-than-life -- either the oneg version (i.e. excelling at sports, academics) or the nega version (i.e. drunken-life-of-the-party, over-dramatic incidents). I couldn't and didn't know how to be "normal" or "life size".

This is where I am arriving today. In both my AA and Kabbalistic work I am learning how to be right-sized, a responsible adult, a being who understands that to be whole she needs to be able to hold and allow both the nega and oneg aspects of life to have a place in her. Doing this, allows me to tend to my little one who is still here and needs a place to experience what she was not allowed before. This little girl has a right to exist in my life-size adult self.

And I want her to know that no matter what, she and I will always be ok.