Here we go again - the bloody "F" word of easter!
I am sick and tired of being asked if I "forgive" the church, the pedophile priest, the cover ups the crimes against humanity!!!!!
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO !!!!!!!
I do NOT forgive them!
Turning the other cheek is exactly what these narcissists rely on! They thrive on people who sanctimoniously "forgive" them!
They don't give a shit about their victims, their crimes or their lies, just their image!
They tell me that Easter is the time of "forgiveness"
The only thing I will forgive this Easter is myself for the amount of chocolate I will probably consume!
I don't think too much about having been adopted, of course I don't, I am almost seventy for f...s sake, it is a long time ago!
But as with all traumatic events(and it WAS traumatic!) they leave an indelible and irreversible mark on each of us. The more I know and learn about epigenetics and neuro-science, the more I understand about the physical changes that occur. And in the same way as other traumas, there will be "triggers", out of our control, when a sudden smell or sound or witnessing a repetition of an event, sets off that trigger and puts us right back back in the trauma.
I have talked a lot about having been "bought" and being brought up in that strict and superstitious toxic catholic environment, with all of the damage and abuse that was incurred.
But I have never been so "triggered" by the adoption stuff , as I am at present when I am hearing about a little girl who is to be adopted, in what I consider to be an equally inappropriate way. I am finding myself getting really angry.
She is seven years old, has a brother who is only ten months younger than her, and who she has never been separated from. She lives with him in a very nice foster family,where she has been for eighteen months, having been removed from her birth family twice already.
The foster family have looked after her very well, she has a lovely bedroom, the family have a labrador puppy, she is in a school she likes, had a tea party for her birthday, and the family have weaned her off vast amounts of sugar, introduced her to vegetables and shown her how to grow her own little vegetable patch.
She is to be adopted by a sour faced and very bitter single woman of fifty, who lives in a house that looks like it was furnished for an eighty year old. She is a professional woman, and so therefore believes that she is an ideal parent. She is vegetarian, the child is not (So we will see about that!she says) She wants a child who is "being good at school, and is not a fussy eater"She has VERY strong opinions about "boundaries" and is argumentative and arrogant.I am told that these days, adoptive parents are put through stringent "checks" but in this case I cannot see that it was anywhere near robust enough.
I feel so distraught about it! I want to go and rescue her, I hate the idea of her being brought up, like I was, as a toy for some embittered and unhappy woman. I cannot get it off my mind.
Adoption is NOT always the answer! We seem, as a society to feel the need to get unwanted children into other people's "homes" as quickly as possible. Of course there are happy stories, I could not deny that, but there are far more that are not.
I fear this child will feel like me, a cuckoo in a nest, an alien in a world she cannot relate to.I fear that like me every time she does something wrong it will be blamed on her "bad blood" whereas every time she does something well it will be because of this woman's benevolence.
I remember as a very small child having my hair permed because my mother wanted a curly haired child! She changed my name from Christine to Susan, because there was another child somewhere in the family with the same name, and so many other things I could go on and on with.
You know, it is actually ok to be a lone child, perhaps even in an institution, as long as you are in an environment where you are valued and prepared for the future when you can make many changes and dreams come true!
For me there is nothing worse than feeling you have to "perform" for your needs to be met, where love is only ever earned and can be withdrawn as easily.
There has to be another way! Somewhere where she can learn that she is a precious and irreplaceable unique part of the Universe, and is made of Stardust!
Getting near to "Mothers Day" always is lovely, I have such wonderful kids and they all make such a fuss of me, mostly undeserved I am sure.
But as it is looming, it makes me think about my own Mother, the one that adopted me that is, (well, bought me actually!) She was a very complex and difficult woman, a singer with a lovely contralto voice. She should have been on the stage, I am sure she was a frustrated actress, but she compensated for not being there by being a perpetual "performer", you never knew who she really was, and certainly you could never believe 99 per cent of the stories she told. I suppose in my way I loved her, she was all I knew. But she was extremely cruel, a passed master at emotional blackmail and guilt and shame inducement. She frightened me more than anyone I have ever known.
She was totally obsessed with the catholic church, and our lives revolved around it and it's calendar, in fact our home was a shrine in itself, statues and "holy" pictures everywhere,"the Sacred Heart" "The infant of Prague" "our lady of Sorrows" and a really scary portrait of a crucified jesus who had eyes that either opened or closed depending on where you looked at it!
Crucifixes everywhere, and even a "holy water" font at the front door that we had to "bless" ourselves with every time we went in (or out ) of the door!
Babies that had not been baptised floated around "Limbo" for all eternity. Hearing a ringing in your ears meant that the "Holy Souls" in purgatory were in need of prayers (purgatory being the place that you went to after death if you were not quite ready (good enough) to go to heaven, but not quite bad enough to go to hell)
If you prayed for the holy souls at their ear ringing request quickly enough, then you could chop a bit of time off your own purgatory!
We should revere the clergy, they were next to God and could do no wrong, they had "sacred hands" and it was a "blessing" every time one of them crossed your doorstep! (some blessing)
I could go on and on!
I can actually never remember her actually DOING anything for anyone, helping someone out, or giving to charity (Unless it was a catholic missionary!) Never remember a good turn, a sympathetic gesture, just endless judgment and bigotry.
I can't help wondering if she and her equally deluded sisters had ever got up from their knees and put as much effort into actually DOING something good for someone else, as they did drooling over the priests and the church, they could have been a real force for good, as it
happened they chose instead to waste all those opportunities for good and use their limited time on Earth feeding that voracious and insatiable monster which is the catholic church. And I might actually have better memories on Mothers day! (I might even have been a better Mother myself.)
I am however, in absolute awe of my two daughters who have both made a wonderful job at being Mums and will now pass that on to their children, and because of them that wretched circle is well and truly broken!
So when the day actually gets here I will really have something to celebrate!
I have always found the whole "inner child" stuff a little strange and a bit silly. But as with most things that I take a dislike to, I often find the difficulty is with me rather than "it"!
I have no contact with people I knew as a child really, apart from a couple of very close cousins, certainly no-one from school or teenage years!
Hardly surprising when I think how disturbed I was back then, quite crackers actually! a raging alcoholic self harmer with lots of very dark secrets that I HAD to keep hidden! In those bleak days I sabotaged most of the relationships I had.
I also moved away from my home town at sixteen, and then later made only "duty visits" to my adopted Mother until she died.
But this week I came across the FB page of someone I started school with aged at 5 in 1952! She was a girl I had a lot of very happy early memories about, dancing around her living room to Doris Day songs, signing her plaster when she broke her leg, and generally playing like proper little girls!
It was a real "blast from the past", and not the dreadfully unpleasant memories that I normally get! And it was lovely! she still looks as pretty as she did then, she was always the prettiest girl in our year, but was also always too nice to be jealous of!
We ultimately went to different secondary schools, and our paths crossed only occasionally at college, but my main memories are when we were little girls.
I don't know if she ever knew of the mess I was, thankfully I don't think she was ever exposed to it, but she may well have heard stories!
We didn't know each other as adults, although I did bump into her once on one of my "visits" about 48 years ago!
I have no doubt she has had her demons to overcome as indeed have I, but I still think of her as the pretty little girl who was my friend, when we were still "sugar and spice and all things nice"!
I was so pleased to see her name, I dropped her a message which she replied to straight away.
I don't have too many experiences like this, and in fact one of the things that hurts is the inability to enjoy good memories of the past without them being tinged with the bad stuff.
I am sure she can't know how much that simple connection has meant to me, and I don't know if we will meet again, but she gave me back a glimpse of a long lost happy time, before all of the crap, and for a while I was a little girl again! Wow!
My somewhat hedonistic and rather shallow sister in law, thinks I should retire and have some "quality time", She thinks I should take a leaf out of her book and have five holidays a year, "twice to Ibiza (pronounced incorrectly of course) 2 cruises, and a trip to Lanzarote"! She seems actually to feel sorry for me and suggests that I am missing out!
She couldn't be more wrong! Not to "crow", and although I am not at all special, I have been privileged to do so many things that money simply cannot buy! In my capacity as head of a teaching organisation,I have personally taught 14,000 amazing healthcare workers, teaching all over the UK, and the USA, I have spoken in the Italian parliament, the Polish parliament, the U.N. three times, addressed a crowd of twenty thousand people, received a "Lifetime's achievement" award for my work in addiction, an "Inspirational Woman of the year" award for Human rights, I have been to tea at the House of Lords three times, taught for the staff of 128 UK prisons, and military mental health . I have been privileged to speak at many inspirational gatherings like the launch of "Aid and Abet " in Scotland, International women's day, Secular Europe day, Freedom of speech rally, and more. Rallied and danced with my wonderful deaf and speech impaired friends from The Provolo institute in Verona several times, and in Rome four times. As well as being co-founder of Survivors Voice Europe , I am on the board of trustees for the charity "Godless Grace Foundation" I am a patron of the "Pink triangle" and I have real solid friends in Italy, Holland, Poland, America, Australia , Nepal Canada, Hawaii . I have been involved in important research, co -written a book and am three quarters through the next one. I have six kids, three grandchildren, an incredibly talented and supportive husband and a beautiful black Labrador! Poor me!
Years ago I had a next door neighbour who taught me a great deal. Her name was "Miss Amphyllis Carter" and was a genuine "Edwardian lady" who died just a couple of weeks short of her hundredth birthday.
We lived next door to her for the last fifteen years of her life and we had become very close.
She had an MA in literature from the days when women rarely got a degree let alone a Masters, and she was clever, wise, thoughtful, humourous and incredibly kind. She was a delightful friend.
She was unmarried, and lived alone and she was also blind, had been so since her early eighies, a fact that never got her down, she coped incredibly and even had a few "elderly friends" over for a church service every Thursday morning because, she said, they weren't well enough to go to church! She got all the chairs ready for them, and made all of their coffees and never asked for any help. She never worried that our beliefs differed, and showed genuine interest in other people's perspectives . She was really quite remarkable.
Every day, she would set her table for lunch, complete with tablecloth and napkins even if it was just "meals on wheels" or perhaps something my husband had cooked, and she sat at the table as if she was in a restaurant, and cleared everything away herself.
On the eve of the Millenium she asked Gez if he would loosen the top of a bottle of "babycham" for her because she intended to wake up at midnight, listen to the radio and "see" in the New year!
We spent a bit of every day together, and she would talk about the things she had heard on the news, and her thoughts on them.
She would ask me to describe things to her, like "What does that little lime tree at the end of the garden look like at the moment?" or "Are those snowdrops near the gate out yet"? I would describe them to her and she would say "OH yes! I remember when that tree looked just like that!"
She listened avidly to radio 4 and knew all about the World's condition. She once asked me to describe Sadam Hussain's face, and when I did, she said "Yes that's just how I envisaged him, an archetypal bully!"
The point is that because I was being asked to describe things all around me, it meant I had to LOOK and really think about what I was seeing, far more than I would normally have done. Amphyllis taught me to properly look, and actually see. It was a great lesson!
I thought about this because I was wondering how I would have described things to her now? what would she have made of the world? I could have told her about a large orange faced man who seems to hate everyone, of marches and banners, of sad faces and fear. I could have described children dying trying to get to a safe country, our miserable faces when we realised that Brexit was really going to happen! and her face no doubt would have matched our own!
She had been through two world wars, lost a brother in each, seen depressions and booms, been careful not to waste water or food had and given to every single charity that ever asked her to contribute. She loved this world and I think my world was a lot poorer for her passing, but I hope to be as mindful as she was of properly seeing everything that really matters.
Thanks Amphyllis I miss you!
Today would have been my son Nick's 49th birthday. He died when he was 19, and just 10 days before his 20th birthday..
The funny thing about birthdays, they seem to remind you more of the person who died, rather than the day that is generally called their "anniversary"
So today I am back in heartbroken mode.
I always wonder why people say "Happy Birthday" to the person who has died, it is not a happy event, to not be able to tease them about their age, their bald spots, their growing paunch! it is not happy to think of all the birthdays he has missed, not just his own, but his brothers and sisters, nephews and niece, and of course mine.It is not happy to know he won't be eating cake or getting drunk.
I remember thinking just before Nick died that it would soon be his birthday, and I was busy as usual worrying about how to "rob Peter to pay Paul" as I had often had to do when birthdays came around, I had very little money back then, in fact I had none most of the time. My ex husband had left me and six kids with no money to fend for ourselves, and although we did survive, there was never enough to go round, let alone have luxuries, but somehow we managed birthdays.
I remember on my fortieth birthday the kids had a "surprise party" for me, and Nick had bought me a big bag of all sorts of exotic fruits, pineapple kiwis, and things like that! He said he couldn't think of anything else "special" that he could afford! That is a very special memory, one of many.
I remember the night he was born, 1 - 0 clock in the morning, and it was cold and rainy. I remember lying in my bed in the ward after he was born and thinking "I have a little boy", It felt really strange, I knew nothing of little boys, and not much about little girls for that matter!
He didn't have much materially in his life, but was so rich in many ways. He actually left me so much, more than he ever knew, and I am grateful for the time I had with him.
I would swap every birthday present I ever had, every Christmas present, everything I have ever owned, every moment we argued just to have him for a minute here with me today, on his birthday.
So today is not a happy day, for me or for him ,or his brothers and sisters. We all miss him still.
My other children keep him very much alive, in a smile that is so like his, a mannerism, and one of his funny sayings. His friends and the girl he loved still keep him with us by staying in touch and laughing about their teenage antics. I guess they are all middle aged family people now, but still teenagers in my mind!
So I won't say "Happy Birthday Nick" , but I will say how much "I love you, I am proud of you and I miss you more every birthday that comes around"
