From Mr. Preacher:

If God is just a concept then our faith is no more than a philosophy. If he’s just a set of rules then our faith isn’t much more than a prison or, at best, a societal lifestyle. If it just tells us who we should vote for or what party we should belong to, then it’s just a political movement.

But it’s more. He is more. So, then, that begs the question, “How does one experience God?”

The answer is on the tip of my tongue. Or the outer edges of my brain. Or deep somewhere buried in my soul. Guess I just have to keep looking, and it will all make sense eventually. If it never does make sense, at least I’ve enjoyed a journey.

You fit in with: Spiritualism Your ideals are mostly spiritual, but in an individualistic way. While spirituality is very important in your life, organized religion itself may not be for you. It is best for you to seek these things on your own terms. 40% spiritual. 60% reason-oriented.

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com

(via Orac)

Sounds about right to me. I tend to rely on Reason much more than I do faith…but I still definitely have a spiritual side. In some respects, I’d almost expected to show as Buddhist, but guess not.

I woke this morning and found that the angst of last night had almost completely faded. It makes sense, really. I’m such an extravert, writing things down and getting them OUT OF MY HEAD makes all the difference.

Once I put my worries on paper (recording them for my later review), I no longer found them bouncing around in my head like a million superballs. Go figure.

Related to the previous post, here’s an example from Boundaries and Relationships that felt familiar to me:

Joe was a 40-year-old man who grew up with an over-controlling mother who told him and other family members what to feel and what to do, and she still does. Although this was frustrating and hurtful for him even as an adult, he still waits for others to tell him what to do. This causes him to have serious problems in most of his relationships.

Robbed of his inner life, he didn’t know his Real Self. His mother repeatedly invaded his boundaries as she attacked the integrity and well-being of his True Self. But until his recovery, most of these dynamics were unconscious to him — they were outside of his awareness.

Early in his recovery he felt guilty for telling the trust of his experience, which he sometimes interpreted as saying bad things about his parents. (emphasis added) Later, he felt helpless over not being able to change the way his mother treated him. He began to see that the only thing he could change was the way he reacted to her. The only thing he could change was himself. In his therapy group and in individual therapy he learned to grieve the pain of these ungrieved traumas and to begin to set healthier boundaries and limits with his parents and others.

Before I dig any deeper into this topic at all, I need to make something clear: my parents are good people. Seriously. They’re stellar folks, and I’m blessed to have them. So, if coming from a fairly “good” household, I could have so many issues, is it any wonder that so many people out there are in pain?

That quote, as I said, felt familiar to me. In no way is/was my father as extreme as Joe’s mother, and I’m much more skilled at setting boundaries at 34 than “Joe” is at 40. My question is this: at what point did I, as a child or later, subconsciously decide that what I thought didn’t matter? At what point did I completely tune myself out in favor of trying to figure out what/who I was supposed to be? What caused this? Was it my being sensitive as a child? Was it a parent(s) being overbearing? I wish I knew.

But more than anything, I want to understand so that I don’t repeat it.

Of course, I know that I become a role model for my daughter. That’s a good thing. But one of the things that I want to model for her and encourage her to do is to think for herself. For me, I feel like I grew up being fed fish, but never taught to fish. (You know, the old saying…give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day, teach him how to fish he’ll eat forever.) Yes, I’ll do things *for* my daughter as appropriate, but what I really want to do is to help her learn how to do things for herself, so she’ll have the confidence that she CAN.

Included in this is the full expectation that:

1. My daughter will see me make mistakes, and I’ll acknowledge them to her. I want her to know that perfection is unattainable, and honestly, undesireable. Imperfection is reality.
2. She’ll be pretty challenging (and frustrating) when she questions me.
3. But at least she won’t be a sheep.

And that is the issue of the day.

As I just mentioned, I’m starting to get a bit more insight into the issue that remains. Well, I imagine there’s more than one, but this is the one that’s bothering me at the moment. To get me started, here’s a snippet from Boundaries and Relationships:

How the True Self Gets Wounded
Like most psychological wounding, this process is largely unconscious. The following summary of it is taken from several sources, including object relations and self psychology.

1. Wounded themselves, including having unhealthy boundaries, the child’s parents feel inadequate, bad, and unfulfilled.
2. They project those charged feelings onto others, especially onto their spouse and vulnerable children. They may also project grandiosity (e.g., “I always know what’s best for you!” — when they don’t). They look outside themselves to feel whole.
3. In a need to stabilize the parents and to survive, the child denies that the parents are inadequate and bad. With the unhealthy boundaries that it has learned from its parents and others, the child internalizes (takes in, introjects, accepts) the parents’ projected inadequacy and badnessl. A common fantasy is that, “If I’m really good and perfect, they will love me and they won’t reject or abandon me.” The child idealizes the parents.

(list continues…)

Right now, I feel like I just need to write, without concern of the “organization” of what I’m writing…so here goes.

Off and on for the past few years, I’ve worked for my father’s consulting business, primarily doing document and presentation work. (yawn) As time has gone by, I’ve found that I’m simply incapable of hitting deadlines for him. In the rest of my life, yes. For him, no. I’ll have the best intentions, but somehow, I always put off his work until it’s beyond being a deadline crisis. It’s simply late. Very, very late. It’s not acceptable, yet I still do it, and as I continue to do it, my feelings about my own value suffer. He’ll say something about it, but honestly, he’s too *nice* about it. If I were my employee, I would have fired me long ago. There are times that I wonder if I’m trying to force his hand. (I almost feel like a six year old desperately pushing buttons and hoping for some boundaries.)

This ties into one of the big issues I’ve noticed over the past several months. I feel often like a rebellious teenager. Or perhaps a petulant two-year-old is a better description. If something is work that I’ve assigned to myself, fine…but if it’s something that someone else is telling me I “have” to do, I feel absolutely belligerant about it. It’s childish, it’s annoying, and as much as I try to talk myself past it (grow up, etc), it’s just still THERE.

A lightbulb went on for me recently, while I read some of the new book on boundaries. I have no idea how much of this has to do with my upbringing, or how much of it is just my being um…crazy… but I related to a lot of the text quoted above. In my case, it was the grandiose option. Seriously, until college and into my 20s, I doubt that I ever questioned whether my parents (father in particular) were ever wrong. Dad didn’t make mistakes. Dad knew everything.

I can’t remember enough of my young childhood now to say for sure (sheesh, sad, isn’t that?), but I really wonder if this has a lot to do with who I was growing up…or more accurately, who I wasn’t? Until my mid-twenties, I genuinely think I only exercised superficial, at best, control over who I wanted to be. Instead of working on me from the inside out, I looked outward for cues of what I was “supposed” to want to be. As a kid, that meant becoming an A student (in 1st grade, I actually chewed holes through my shirt sleeves, because I was so stressed out about school!). As I got to be older, it meant going through the on-again-off-again “backsliding” ritual that is part of being a “Christian” teenager. I got so exhausted by the first few years of good/bad/good/bad/good/bad that for three years of high school — sophomore-senior — I didn’t even listen to secular music or radio. You know, because rock is from the Devil.

In my mid-twenties, the realization that I didn’t know who I was hit me like a ton of bricks. Actually, what hit me was more frightening…it’s not that I didn’t know me. There simply wasn’t a “me” to know. (tiptoe-ing into the bedroom looking for an old journal…)

from an entry dated January 2, 1997 (I was 25):

Why am I so FUCKING sensitive to others’ opinions??? Why do I HAVE to ANALYZE every blessed thing I do & say? Why am I so ANGRY when I don’t have anyone to blame but me for my own PSYCHOSES? Why won’t I turn around and look at the light? Or am I placing clouds before the sun?

Afraid of what the light will show. Afraid to take a good look at myself. If I ignore it, it will leave me alone. My demons sitting on my shoulder will shut the FUCK up. And then I’ll be better at playing HUMAN because that’s what I’ll CONVINCE myself I am. And I will BE. But when I stop spinning and look, I’ll still be there. Unless I can keep the pace, my head will lose the dizzy sensation and I’ll see with sane eyes. And I’m scare the PICTURE won’t be pretty. Not critically ACCLAIMED. Not the BEST I can be. Not what my friends, my boss, my parents expect. I’ll just be ORDINARY and God forbid I ever became a normal human being. Who can talk about emotions and cry without shame who can find her own identity and not feel like jumbled pieces of everyone else mismatched like a flea-ridden mutt’s genetic code. Is it true that we’re all just pieces of each other? Not true for some, for those who excel and have personal direction but all I seem to do is suck the life from others and claim it to be my own. But I know the truth is, if you peel away all of the layers, there’s nothing left.

Fuck. I’m an onion.

pardon the syntax from here on…it just was stream of consciousness after this point

A vegetable. something green a child sweeps off the table but like iceberg, with no content save water and a bad taste who is holding this pen anyway I’m pretty DAMNED certain I don’t know. I used to know me I think but maybe I was fooling myself then too maybe there’s no reason to bother to be happy it’s all a fucking facade one that I know all too WELL.

Automaton. Automatron? Automaiden.

Nothing touches nothing affects nothing comes close so that no one can see past the metal apron and cast iron business suit if no one is close no one can touch me or hurt me and I don’t have to be fallible I can at least let others have the illusion of perfection and they won’t have to see or deal with the messy black insides of my soul but blackness causes rust and decay and I’d have to have my armour replated regularly or the SHIT inside me will start to show but I know I’m not capable of that kind of life because sad fact is that I care and I will always feel like a complete liar and know deep down that others can see through my metal because it’s not really metal it’s the shell of a crab CANCER at moulting I lose my hard shell and if I’m not careful I get caught in their nets and it’s safest to stay down buried beneath the coral where I can hide and no one has to see the painful and embarassing process I go through as my thick shell changes to translucent and the lights from above the water above the land show what’s inside and I realize that I’m not a crab at all but a human and I bleed sometimes from cuts but more pain when it comes from the soul where no light reaches and there’s dust in the corners and cobwebs on the ceiling and why can’t I find a rag to wipe out all the dirt there’s no windex or pledge for the soul, but it sure would fucking SELL.

And now I’m tired and I’m going to play the piano. One of the pieces that I still know as me.

Dear god, I’m exhausted just typing that. Exhausted and sad. I forgot how much, when I actually looked at myself, I hated myself. We’re talking about a girl who had plenty of friends, a good job, several promotions, a great apartment…pretty put together from outside appearances. Yet, I felt like a fake.

Things that strike me:

Splitting
I had a huge tendency toward all/nothing patterns of thought. If I couldn’t be perfect, why bother? If I wasn’t the best, I was shit. There was no in between.

Image
I was so concerned about putting on the right appearances for others that I didn’t really know what *I* wanted. This particular behavior caused me to self-destruct later that year (major depression, though at the time, I just thougth I was going to die, and soon)) as in the long run, it’s well…impossible…to please everyone. Ironically, Sublime’s song “Everything to Everyone” got heavy airplay during that timeframe. God, that song used to piss me off. It hit too close to home.

Fear
So much fear. Through all of that pain was the fear that if anyone saw me, really saw ME, they were certain to reject me. Of course, I was so busy hiding me, I never spent time figuring out who I was anyway.

Okay, back to the present now…it’s a lot more comfortable to look backward. When I do that, I can see how entirely fucked up I was emotionally and realize how far I’ve come. God dropped a counselor in my life, and boy, did I ever need one…

What’s going on for me right now is this immediate reaction of rebellion when someone tells me what to do or think. How does that tie into that long-assed journal entry? Well, I think that I’m still rebounding, after all of those years. I spent much of my early life letting others tell me what to think, feel, and do. Now, if something even so much as gives a whiff of scent in that direction, I react…furiously.

Even now, I still feel that my parents take too much of a role in my life. It’s really hard for me to be objective about what is appropriate and what is overstepping boundaries. Until recently, I’ve toyed with the idea of moving away from here, in part, simply to put distance between me and my folks…so that I would know, without a doubt, that the decisions I make in my life are mine. How reactionary is that?

Now…I’m planning to move into a home about five minutes’ drive from their house. They’re buying a place as an investment. I am going to rent from them. I was planning to sell my place and rent a house anyway…so why not keep the money in the family? On the one hand, the rent will be a good deal — I will live in a much nicer home than I would have gotten for the same elsewhere. Maya will have her own space, I’ll have room for a home office, and I’ll even have space for stock/inventory as I work on (finally) getting my baby/toddler carrier business up and running.

On the other hand, there is a huge part of me that feels like a complete and utter failure for moving into a house that my parents are buying. I’m 34 years old. Shouldn’t I be past that? They tell me that it’s an investment, and that they were purchasing a rental anyway. Um, I can do the math, folks…this is a money-losing proposition. So, add to all of this the guilt of feeling that I’m taking advantage of them…except, of course, that I’ve mentioned my hesitations to them about whether they’ll actually see a gain on this “investment.” Several times. The assure me that this is a decision they’re making — and that they don’t want to go through with it unless *I* actually want it. I agreed to it, visions of a 3-year-old home in the burbs dancing in my head. Now, while I’m excited about moving, I also fear I’ve sold my soul.

Fear is definitely a part of what I’m feeling now. I fear that they will try to intrude into my raising Maya. After all, if I’m that close, shouldn’t we attend church with them? Shouldn’t my daughter get a good Sunday School upbringing? This isn’t the sort of issue over which you tell someone to fuck off. I’ll decline, but I also know that at some point, I’ll probably be asked (nicely, of course) to justify my choices. When I think about that…anger comes to the forefront.

Great, I’m angry at my parents for things that I *imagine* that they’ll do in the future.

Believe it or not, I’ve become so healthy in most of my life…and happy, actually. So why do I still react to my parents (my father, especially) as if I were six and he was telling me to clean my room and make my bed? sigh.

No! I’ll DO IT MYSELF.

So, have I really made a big mistake with this whole house thing? I honestly don’t know. I’m so torn…but the decision is made. I want us to have a nice place to live. But I want to do it myself.

’scuse me while I cry for a bit. Shit.

From Operating Instructions:

Larry called me one night at the end of my pregnancy when I was just desvastated by the thought of the hole in Sam’s life bacuase he wouldn’t have a dad, how much that was probably going to hurt and how I wasn’t going to be able to do much about it. He said that I was just an opening for Sam to come into the world, that I wasn’t supposed to be a drug for him. I was just supposed to be his mother. Sam was meant to be born into the world exactly the way it is, into these exact circumstances, even if that meant not having a dad or an ozone layer, even if it included pets who would die and acne and seventh-grade dances and AIDS. He simply wasn’t meant to be born in the paradise behind the mountains.

I’ve given the basics of the story of Maya’s biological father, but haven’t yet explored much (here, anyway) my thoughts on the reality that she’s growing up without a dad in her life. In many ways, after I’ve gotten past all the guilt of not providing Maya with a daddy, I realize that she has the opportunity for a more healthy emotional life than many kids *with* fathers have…and that it’s okay.

When I purchased Operating Instructions, I also picked up a copy of Boundaries and Relationships. It’s still not the for-the-masses type book that I’d like to see out there, but so far, it’s doing a decent job of explaining healthy personal boundaries sans religion. (Religion is NOT a prerequisite for emotional health and moral behavior!) I’m starting to slowly get a feel for what some of my remaining issues may be, and as I do, I feel sad that I’ve wasted so much time on them.

But then I look at Maya, and I realize that in her, there’s the chance to get it right…or mostly right, at least. That I can help her to find herself, not “the person mommy wants her to be.” That she might grow up with fewer “issues” than the average bear, and become a stronger woman at 14 than I am at 34. When I see that possibility, I realize that all of my baggage (unpacking it anyway) has been completely worthwhile.

(I’ve got to amuse someone, right?)

Said as I was about to start wash…”Okay, M…your diapers are done, now it’s time to do my laundry. That would be the MOTHER LOAD of laundry.”

Chortle.

click for larger image

So, I just got this email from my father:

I was searching for something and found this web site. It is something that you might find encouraging.

Love,
Dad

There was no link attached, so I wrote back. This is the link he forwarded to me. Um, what the FUCK? Why, exactly is this supposed to be encouraging?

I’m debating whether to tell him gently that I really don’t give a shit about any of what’s on this site…or just to nod, smile, and say mmm-hmmm, then do my own thing. The latter would cause less trouble, but to me, it seems rather dishonest — and might also encourage him to send more tripe my way that would only annoy me. The fear-driven crap on that site is a large part of the problem with Christianity, IMO.

When I read/review pages like this one, I seriously wonder if I actually AM a Christian, if this is what it means. Hell, if this is what being a Christian looks like, no thank you. I’ll pass.

***SIGH***

Literally on the “dream” part, that is. Sometime this morning, I dreamed of a man who just blew me away. Maybe that isn’t the right term…but whatever the wording, he completely charmed me, without actually trying.

Where: at a church. At a freaky, icky megachurch. Why, oh why? I was completely rolling my eyes at being there, and he got that, but he also somehow was able to look past the joke of it all (even though he “got” why I rolled my eyes) to see the real Jesus behind it. It seems like he had some sort of formal role. Youth pastor? College? Something…he was working with youngish, single people.

sheesh…trying to get this down while I remember anything…

Oh — he was leading some sort of group therapy-type session, and I was giving him grief about it as a participant. Challenging him, making jokes, but somehow, he saw through me that I was serious about it, just trying to stay sane. Guess it was after that ended that we actually talked.

He liked my daughter. I loved watching him talk to her.

Hmmm…looks. Nice-looking, but not stop-the-car-gorgeous. Normal, but attractively normal. When he became beautiful was when he talked. His personality brought him up to drop-dead stunning — to me, anyway. He was smart, funny, loving, sensitive, oh, and did I mention smart?

And, at some point, he hugged me. I can still feel his warm hands on my back and arms, and I felt so…safe. Is that something an independant gal like me is allowed to admit? I wanted to just hold and touch, not even in any sexual way, just…exploring his face and learning the features by braille.

I lost a shoe. I was limping around the church standing on my tip-toes with my right foot to compensate for my lacking shoe, some sort of strappy heel. At some point, one of the guys (friends of “the” guy) came to me with a box of shoes that people had lost and told me that most of them were obviously someone else’s shoes, but this one (pulling one out) looked like it could belong to me. It wasn’t the right shoe, but it was tailored, elegant, and lovely in a box of platform flipflops and teenagerish clunky heels. I wasn’t touched, so much as I was relieved…and gratified…that he’d realized those other shoes couldn’t possibly be mine. I have grown-up taste, after all. (huh? on this part…)

I went with “the” guy back to his home, and there was a homemade pie, ready-to-bake, sitting on his steps. He explained that (female friend) had left it, that she often left him pies. For some reason, I wasn’t jealous. He had pets. A bunch of pets…mostly dogs. One dog in particular who “likes no one” walked up to me and climbed in my lap. I was in.

Sometime around this point, I woke up to my daughter’s climbling all over me in bed as if I were an obstacle course. The room was slightly cool, but I still felt warm all over, from a random person who many not exist in a random dream that could have been caused by last night’s pizza. Just the same, I’m enjoying the slight glow.

Within the past month or so, I decided that dating was a waste of time and that I just couldn’t be bothered to care (I’ve mentally written a post on that two or three times, but couldn’t even be bothered to write *that*). But this man…oh, if I met this guy…I think I could care. So maybe it wasn’t just me. Maybe it *was* them. Both, actually…they just weren’t right for me