I love the feel of good old fashioned celebration…I enjoyed being amongst the crowd watching the fireworks and hearing the ooh’s aah’s and cheering. It feels like community and makes me long for the America portrayed in Norman Rockwell paintings.
Tag Archive: home
Little girl, pigtails and blue-jeans
all muddy and smiling so big!
I love to watch you fling out your arms
and twirl in the sunshine. You see
the world through uniqe eyes that
accept with blind faith the beauty
and wildness of the world was created for you.
You know instinctively that joy is
your reason for being. You take delight
everywhere you find it and accept
without question that happiness is yours.
Perhaps I will come twirl with you today –
and you can show me the world through your eyes.
There’s something out there that is calling to me.
I hear the voice clearly – haunting – chilling-alluring.
I long to follow… but I am so afraid.
It whispers, teases, shouts – and still I stand-
frozen and impotent.
When I break free of this I will run blindly
into that tantalizing music of freedom
and find my laughter waiting for me there.
Strange how when you hold me tight it doesn’t feel invasive and confining anymore.
Strange how quiet and peaceful I feel with you here with me.
Strange how I look toward the future with hope and not doubt or fear.
Strange how your love has changed me.
Talking to my mom today sent me into a tail-spin. I hate that I am so afraid of being “found out” like I am doing something wrong and have something to hide… I hate that just speaking to my family on the phone has the power to make me doubt my past and begin to see it through their eyes. I came from a family of “brush it under the rug”. They are great at pretending that everything is ok and we’re not really broken in the extreme. Most of my life my dad yelled and screamed and belittled all of us and my mom just took it and let us take it.
I remember one night when I was a little girl, my parents had put me to bed. I got up to get a teddy bear off my shelf to sleep with and had curled up in bed and was just drifting off to sleep when my dad burst into my room, angry. He asked me if I had gotten out of bed and I told him I had gotten up to get a bear to sleep with. He asked me if I had left the room and I hadn’t. He then accused me of sneaking out of my room to watch through the cracked door as my brother changed clothes. He was crazy angry and accused me of lieing when I denied this. He beat me with a belt so badly I had whelps from the backs of my knees to the small of my back. He was in a blind rage. My mother came in afterword to ask me if I had done this and I told her the same thing I told my father. She told me it would make things better if I apologized to my father and just said that I had done this thing he accused me of. So I did and my dad pulled me into his lap and hugged me and told me he loved me. I don’t even know why, to this day, he would think I would be watching my brother dress or undress or why it would have been a big deal as we were both very young… I was about 6 and my brother was about 9-10.
When I was a teenager I confronted my parents about this and they both denied the whole thing and told me I must have imagined it. My whole life they have managed to make me feel crazy… Now I just want to live in truth and not brush anything else under the rug. I am through pretending. I long to walk in the sunshine and feel the warmth on my skin. I long to live in truth. I may not be perky and happy all the time, but I am real and alive, and that is so much better to me.
So when you’re young you celebrate all of your holidays with the family you’re born into, and sometimes that tradition carries into your adult-hood. In my case, I find my self celebrating my holidays more and more with my chosen family. I wasn’t given a choice about who I was born to, how I was raised or how I was treated by my extended blood family. Now, as an adult, I make the choices about being with people who genuinely enjoy me, who love me and who care about my well-being – even if that means they hold me when I cry. I belive my parents love me very much, but negative emotion wasn’t welcome at my child-hood home, so I learned early to just choke back and suppress any unwanted emotion and only display what is positive even if it was a total lie. I don’t live that way any-more. I have the right to feel how I feel with no apologies and no guilt. I embrace all of my emotions and don’t worry about what’s politically correct or socially acceptable. I embrace the truth of the moment and I don’t continually censor myself any-more. Now I approach the holidays with the thought of… “What’s healthy for me?” not “What will make everyone around me like me or approve of me?”
This year I have spent Christmas day with my best friend and my husband, two of the only people who truly feel like family to me, two people who really know me and love all of me, not just the acceptable opinions and attitudes… I will also be ringing in the New Year with them and I can’t think of a more peaceful way to begin my year than to be surrounded by love and acceptance. I am truly grateful to have been given a new definition of love and of family this year.
captivatingbitter 