Omega – Thank you so much for keeping on asking and communicating. It is in this way we may make progress.
My mother – So imagine a wild cow whose calf doesn’t show much signs of life. It is imperative if the calf is to survive that it get on its feet quickly, that it moves around and looks lively. So when I try to understand the things my mother did, it makes sense that she saw me like this and gave me a good kick now and again to get me on my feet and looking lively. She had no subtlety remember, and didn’t think about things. She simply responded. If I didn’t stand up then I would die, so a good kick might stimulate me into being a bit more alive. I think this was heightened with my mother because she had several heftily built sisters who produced babies weighing in at the magnitude of 9 pounds. My tiny frame of 4 pounds appeared tragically fragile beside them.
The kicks my mother gave me all related to threats of leaving me or giving me away. These would perhaps have been felt as mild parental emotional beatings except that my mother didn’t connect with me easily at birth because of my fragility. In fact, my grandmother took over my rearing until she died when I was eighteen months old. This meant that I had not connected fully with my mother or she with me. My grandmother had been my mother. When she died I lost the one who had mothered me, and I felt abandoned, as I had felt at birth.
So at three when I was taken away to a convalescent home because of my sickly constitution, my world fell to pieces. The wound of abandonment cut into me at birth, then at the loss of my grandmother, was ripped open again, and it took over fifty years to put some of the pieces back together again. I wasn’t long in the home, but that I was there at all stabbed a blade of pain and fear into me that left a wound that didn’t heal. The convalescent home shattered whatever frail sense of being wanted I had been able to build in the intervening years. Going into hospital again at six to have my tonsils removed, opened the injury again and deepened it.
My mother’s anxiety lasted throughout my youth and expressed in ways that left psychological scars that deeply changed the directions I took in life. As an example, one Spring when I was about six, I had walked home from school for lunch. I hated school meals and so walked back to our next-door neighbour’s, Mrs Spilstead, who fed me while my mother was at work. There was only one other boy who also walked home at lunchtime. I remember his name was Brian Spencer. On that day we met up on the way back to school while walking along Whielden Street where we both lived. There was no problem in crossing Amersham High Street in those days, as there were so few cars about.
At the beginning of School Lane there used to be a wonderful open meadow rising up a steep hill to The Rectory. Now it has buildings at its foot, but then there were only giant horse chestnut trees and a huge expanse of grass. As we were passing, the thousands of Michaelmas daisies in the meadow were too much, too many, too glorious to ignore. We climbed up the bank and into the waist high grass to pick the daisies. It was our plan to give them to our teacher. On arriving at school however, we must have lingered too long in Rectory Meadow, as all the children were in class. The massive oak door of our class, facing directly on to the playground, was closed and formidable with its large iron studs pointing out to us. We stood looking at it for a while, daisies drooping in our hands. It seemed to me too difficult to open that massive door and face all those enquiring eyes. So I thought the best plan was to play in the Recreation Ground across the road from the school until playtime. Then we could mingle with the children and enter class without crisis.
I don’t know what happened to the daisies. I do clearly remember that we got deeply involved in catching sticklebacks in the small river – the Misbourne – at the end of the Rec as we called it. When playtime came our classmates flowed over the Rec and watched us for a while with our arms deep in the scented Misbourne. I don’t know why, but no thought of school ever came into my mind. Somehow the river, the fish, erased all concepts of school and of time. I have no recollection of purposely setting myself against going back to school. It simply never occurred to me that I needed to. The river and the willows along its bank were all. Even when the children reappeared again the spell wasn’t broken. The information never even got anywhere near to telling me that time had passed and I would be expected to return home. For those hours I had returned to a younger age where there were no goals, no appointments, no expectations, only the moment.
There are several indelible images of what then happened. One of them is of myself, still with arms into the river, bent and intent, suddenly aware that a shadow had fallen over me. It was my mother. I was so pleased to see her. I tried to share the wonderful river, but I was pulled away.
I can remember the exact place where the next image was engraved into me. My hand was being held firmly by my mother as we walked along Church Street, on the left hand side before getting to what used to be Goya’s scent factory. There is a blank as to what had been said before that. I know I had been questioned as to why I hadn’t returned home on time, and why I had missed school. I had explained as well as a six-year-old child can. Suddenly my mother said, “You hurt me. Now I am going to hurt you.”
She never explained how I had hurt her, but I suppose she meant she had been worried sick when I didn’t return home at the usual time. Then followed the third ingrained image. My mother took me home, undressed me, bathed me – we had a large zinc bath then which had to be filled from saucepans and placed in the middle of the kitchen floor. She then dressed me in my Sunday best clothes and told me I was going to be put in a children’s home.
I had not known my mother to make threats she didn’t carry out. So I took this as a statement of her plans. Remember that I already knew the pain of the convalescent home, and behind that the sense of being motherless at the death of my grandmother. There was already a pit of terror in me called ‘Abandonment’. The threat of being thrown to that monster again tore me open. I clung to my mother begging her to keep me, and the scene fades in my memory as I cling to her begging and sobbing.
The result was that from then onwards I cut my mother out of my heart and cast her aside. I would no longer sit next to her or treat her with respect. I would no longer trust a woman with my love. I started calling her ‘an old cow’ – another way of helping myself kill out my feelings for her and my emotional dependence on her. Being that independent turned into a wonderful strength, but a terrible weakness. I was much more individual than most boys. As a young man called into the armed force for national service, I was far less prone to homesickness than most, and not given to depending on a girl friend to help me feel wanted. Even at forty, I had been married for years without ever knowing what it was to have an emotional bond with my wife. It took my second marriage to show me the pleasure, and reintroduce me to the pain, of actually learning to love someone again. Quoted from Autobiography of a Premature Child.
Omega, I feel there is something perhaps I have left out emphasising – it is that we can so some of the work but Life in us has to take it up to complete it. I know this sounds ridiculous to our rational mind, because to that point of view we are the one who has to get up and get on with life – as if we created ourselves. But the processes of life created you, not your mother – your mother was a host to the miraculous egg. Of course the life with your parents created another aspect of you and was a part of your present personality. See
http://dreamhawk.com/interesting-people/animal-children/#Program and
http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/the-conjuring-trick/I had tried everything I could to ‘deal with myself’ – yoga – years of meditation – positive thinking – dieting – fasting and sulking because nothing did what I felt sure could be found. So one day I decided that all my huge efforts were not working, so I decided there must be a hidden factor which I would wait for. And because I recognized that I had no clue what it was and couldn’t find it in the huge library of books I had read or in the things I had almost frantically used I must wait without any aims or thoughts - T. S. Eliot gave us these lines:
I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing;
there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
So I set aside half an hour each day and simply sat – not even trying to still my mind, because that was self-acting again. I can’t remember how long that went on, but an event took place that was an answer to my waiting. One night I got out of bed to go to the toilet and as I was getting back into bed I heard a voice clearly say to me, “You have asked how God touches the human soul – now watch closely.”
A few days later the events described in
http://dreamhawk.com/approaches-to-being/lifes-little-secrets/ erupted into my life.
To me that is the best advice I can give – trust Life/God to do the healing. Well we have to work hard but the real part is taken over when we learn to trust the force that constantly takes care of us.
Tony