That’s Not Mine

It’s yours.

Or.

It is mine?

Or is it both?

Turns out yesterday it was both/and.

I hate that.

Both.

And.

I had a client working through some traumatic stuff in session yesterday and I realized later that I had taken some of it with me.

It was hard to shake.

Why was it so hard to shake?

I talked to my therapist today about it.

We isolated it and moved through it and all sorts of stuff came up.

Jesus fucking Christ.

All the stuff.

Fortunately, and I mean this in the sincerest way possible, fortunately, I have been doing self-examination and inventory and work on myself for such a long time that I was able to work through it.

I can’t and won’t divulge what happen in session with my client.

That’s a breach of ethics and I am honor bound to keep those things within the walls of my office.

But.

I can say that what happened had a resounding feel to me of something that had happened to me.

I couldn’t quite pin it.

I know that there was an extraordinary amount of emotion in the room when I worked with my client last night.

I relayed to my therapist things that happened for me in my body, what it felt like, the counter transference that happened and the transference.

And.

That I recognized that some of what I was feeling was my clients and some of what I was feeling was mine.

Thank God for a great therapist.

We isolated it.

Or.

I isolated it.

She did what therapist do, good therapists, she held the field, she let me find my way, she made some connections for me that I didn’t see, she held me with empathy, she validated my experience, she reflected and gave me perspective.

And.

Holy shit.

There it was.

And I broke down and bawled.

Great big ugly tears.

Relieved to get it out.

Although it tried to stick for a second.

It tried really hard.

It did not want to come out.

I was choked with grief.

Stricken.

I got it out though and I named the emotions I was feeling.

Trying to stuff them all into the crumpled ball of tissue in my moist hand.

Guilt.

Shame.

Unendurable guilt.

For getting out, for doing better, for surviving.

For being financially “well off.”

Bwahhahahahaaha.

Have you seen my student loan statement?

I have.

Meh.

Anyway.

Though I may have a fuck ton of student loans, fuck it, I’m worth the investment, I am, I am, I also have a modicum of financial security and I have a nice little home and I have nice little things.

I have a scooter.

I have a bicycle.

I have security.

In so much as I continue working at the pace I am working.

I don’t have much of a security blanket in the savings account.

But hey.

I have a savings account.

When I think about how successful I am in comparison to my mom or my sister and how I have always managed to find a way out, I sometimes, more so than I want to admit, have guilt.

And then.

I belittle my experiences or my own traumas, because, man, they had and have it bad too, and I’ve found a way through.

There is no way through but through.

It’s painful.

But.

Fuck.

It’s so worth it.

And I also see that I am not responsible for my sister, for my mother, for my father, my nieces.

I am, and can only be, responsible for myself.

But the guilt.

It hit me hard.

I was feeling awkward about an upcoming birthday in my family and I was relaying how many times, so many, too many to count, that I have sent gifts trying to foster some sense of connection and love to my family.

And.

Have not received it.

Oh.

I know there’s love.

But I haven’t the emotional connection to my family that I was trying to cultivate, a sort of reciprocation of love and that I need to let go of trying to get it the same way I have been doing so for decades.

We, my therapist and I, talked about how I might be able to establish connection, about what I could do.

I have to say it felt futile.

I was fucking flummoxed.

Then.

As I sat and the grief washed over me and I saw how hard I had tried to do something, taking the same action time and time again, that maybe there was another way.

Maybe.

I don’t know.

But I sussed a few things out and suddenly I had an answer.

It may not be “the” answer.

But.

It felt good to process it all out and find the connections and see how the traumatic experience that I bore witness to when I was with my client last night led me to work through and settle out something that has been nagging me for decades in my relationship to my sister and my nieces.

I don’t have a lot of close family.

Just my sister.

I have almost no relationship whatsoever with either of my nieces.

Although I helped significantly in the first years of my oldest niece’s life.

And I love her so much.

After I moved away from Wisconsin our relationship grew very thin.

My sister had troubles of her own and many challenges that I could not face for her.

Fuck.

I had to deal with my own shit.

The last time I saw my oldest niece was over fifteen years ago.

She was nine.

In a few days she will be 25.

I was nineteen when she was born.

I was the first person to hold her.

I saw her crowning.

I saw my sister endure the most excruciating pain.

I rocked that baby to sleep so many nights, I sang her songs, I can feel the heaviness of her carrier in my arms now.

I loved her beyond any previously known capacity to love.

And that is enough.

I gave what I could when I could and when the paths of my family and mine diverged, it was right to go the way I did.

To allow others the dignity of their own experiences.

To allow others to feel the weight of their choices, the consequences, good, bad, indifferent, to their actions, and not interfere.

I can still love my sister, my mother, my father, my nieces.

I can still love my cousins and aunts, uncles, my remaining grandparent.

But.

I don’t have to do so at the expense of myself.

I don’t have to lose myself in care taking.

I mean.

hahahaha.

Who the fuck am I kidding?

I’m a therapist in training, I may very well lose myself in it all over again, the care taking thing, but I also get to have boundaries and frames and I get to help in a way that won’t drain me.

At least that is what I have hope for.

I have a deep capacity for love and my experiences have borne this out.

I have and will always love my family.

I just won’t put their needs before mine any longer.

I deserve better.

And.

Well.

Fuck.

So do they.

Who the hell am I to decide how they should live their lives.

They have their own God.

As do I.

Thank God.

Grace.

Over.

Drama.

For the most part.

I was a hot mess yesterday and today in therapy but it got worked out and it got worked out fast.  So grateful for that.

Beyond words.

And though it may not seem cause for celebration.

It is.

And.

I am.

Yes.

The luckiest girl in the world.

Seriously.

I am.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Yes.

I am aware that tomorrow is June 1st and not November.

It has been one hell of a month.

So much happening.

Amazing things truly.

I love my life, I’m lucky, I’m graced, I’m blessed.

And.

I might just being going to Hawaii for Thanksgiving!

Yup.

It will be my first time, unless something unusual pops up and I find myself in the islands, which I am not opposed to, but to tell you the truth, I hadn’t expected to hear the news today that I might be in the islands for the holiday.

My family I work for brought it up today.

I will have off that weekend from school and work, well, since it is work, will let me have the time.

It’s not a real vacation for me, I’ll be working, but, oh, the location does not suck.

Not at all.

And like I said, I’ve never been to Hawaii.

I really should go, I am part Polynesian after all.

Puerto Rican and Polynesian on my father’s side.

German and Scot on my mom’s side.

I had someone tell me once that I was a Polynesian princess mixed with white trash.

Heh.

I might have a little trashy in me.

I definitely have some princess in me, that’s for sure.

Nevertheless, I am thrilled at the idea.

I love that the family really wants me to be included in their lives and I really love working for them.

Tomorrow marks five months of work and it’s been such a great job for me and the parents really appreciate me and the kids love me.

I love my charges.

LOVE.

Both of the older kids were under the weather today and one of them stayed home from school.

Work was huge amounts of snuggling, singing every song I know from my years of being a nanny, and an almost endless repetition of a lullaby that I usually sing to the baby, and all the babies I have ever worked with and a lot of my toddlers too, to the oldest boy while rubbing his back and petting him and just sitting and crooning to him.

He is the sweetest boy and super smart and vulnerable and the request to keep repeating the lullaby and stroking his soft blonde hair, oh, my heart, I just wanted to curl him up in my arms and kiss away the fever.

He got lots of love and I got to be the Queen of Snuggles.

I also got to do some cooking while he was watching a movie, sick days get movies, and I revelled in the cooking.

It feels good to cook, I miss it sometimes, cooking for a partner or my family.

I used to cook all the big holiday meals for my family and oh, the baking, and the stews, the jams and cheesecakes and pies, the cookies and pork chops.

Midwestern much.

Aside.

I said “bubbler” today and the woman looked at me like I was an alien.

Bubbler is water fountain in Wisconsineese.

I made up that last word, rhymes with cheese, bubbler is a total Wisconsin word, there are a few more, but that one slips once in a while into the conversation, or “pop” instead of “soda.”

Once and a while my roots show.

I am, however, not so connected to my Hawaiian and Puerto Rican roots.

My father wasn’t much around growing up and though I always kept in touch with my grandmother, I didn’t have much idea about Hawaii.

I had things from Hawaii that my grandmother would send and I remember boxes of chocolate covered macadamia nuts and once a grass skirt, coming in the mail from my grandmother.

I think we had placemats too and a few books about the islands and where the family was from.

It wasn’t until I moved back to California as an adult that I met my father’s side of the family in a more concrete way.

I remember meeting some cousins for the first time and being blown away by how much I looked like them, how they looked like my sister, and how I was actually lighter skinned than the majority of the family.

“They look like me!”

It was a relief and in a way an almost instantaneous connection that I had not always felt with my mothers Germanic roots and Scottish ancestry.

I was neither pale skin nor blue-eyed, or green-eyed as my mother.

I did not have blond hair.

Nope.

I got tan.

I didn’t really burn.

Well, once in a while, after long ass days detassling corn in the fields around Waunakee during the summers when I was working the crews, I might get a shoulder burn or a heavy crop dusting of freckles.

My mom though, my God, she could burn so easily, such creamy white fair skin.

Yeah.

So coming to California and starting to get those connections to my father’s family was a revelation.

I’m still not as close as I suppose I can be, social media does most of the work for me and there’s still stuff with my father that I have reservations broaching my family about.

I ceded his care when I was in Alaska in the hospital to the head of the administrative at the hospital.

I love my father.

I have exquisite and amazing child hood memories of him.

I also have some pretty awful ones too.

But.

He wasn’t around and when he had the accident that lead to the coma that led me to Anchorage, I went almost more to settle my own heart, then for anything else.

I sat by that hospital bed in the ICU for four night and five days.

He was in a coma the entire time I was there.

I held his hand and talked to him.

I forgave him.

And.

I asked for him to forgive me.

I made friends in Anchorage and the fellowship there carried me when I wanted to collapse into the snowbanks and the cold air and just cry my heart out.

I managed to not get stuck in any snowbanks but I won’t ever forget the dark night sky outside the window of the room the hospital hospitality house put me up in, for families of critical care patients at the facility, and the roughness of the sheets on the bed and how alone I was.

No.

That’s not true.

I wasn’t alone, I had God, I was carried, but I was by myself.

I was grateful, beyond grateful, to be there for my family and to relay messages out to the world and to let my grandmother be in contact with me and my uncle and my cousins and the love seed that was planted there.

I have never talked to any of them about letting go of my father’s care, but I did visit my grandmother that next summer and it meant everything to me to say “I love you,” and in that moment, as I was leaving to get on a plane from San Diego, in my grandmothers arms, I could feel how much she loved me too.

I will always have that moment.

And I look forward to getting to go to Hawaii.

Even if it’s not with my employers, which is sounds like it might actually be, I will go.

I have some more healing to do in that corner of my heart history.

I will swim in the ocean and walk on the beaches and turn my face to the sun.

I will go home again.

Although it has never left me.

Impressed as it is on the cheekbones in my face, the wide plush smile on my face, the curls in my hair, the freckles on the crest of my nose, the wilderness of my hips, the sway in my walk.

I have not forgotten.

I always have had the islands in me.

Always.

Date Night

Date Night* Written 4/20/17 WordPress site down

 

And Debussy.

I am listening to Clare de Lune and my heart feels full.

It is a good thing.

I just got back from a date and it was really quite lovely.

Lovely is not quite the right word, I am sure I will find the correct words, they elude in this moment.

But.

There is poetry here.

Sitting by the fire.

In a space full of recognition.

The doorway after the threshold.

The moment.

The moment when.

The moment, a monument of time, a granite faced creature to scale.

In that moment when.

I looked into the eyes of those across the table and did not feel shy about my history or my lineage or my drama, trauma and crazy, when I realized I had so many words, so much to say.

I could embarrass myself with a wealth of things to say, so many words.

All the words.

Piled on the table like small crudities, rare and delicate and delicious.

A smorgasboard of words.

They tumbled from my mouth and I could tell stories.

Oh.

The stories.

There are so very many.

I don’t often have the luxury of expressing myself the way that I expressed myself tonight, and all the words lined up in my mouth, a minuet of dancing syllables and vowels that bowed and courtesy and waltzed out across the table, into the air, fragmenting into poetics and poesies.

Chains of daisies, a small girl, yellow sun dress, the kind with the little elastic ribbing and the shoulder ties in string bows, sitting cross-legged in a field.

Clover.

There.

That smell.

The one field on the drive into work.

The rich, verdant, lush, overbearing sweetness of it.

Almost, but not quite a velvet purple crocus of sweetness, but deeper, with an edge, just a tiny peppery edge, that alleviates the sweetness to make the smell palatable.

All those things.

In the cross hatch of the tablecloth.

The tea bag, white Moroccan mint.

I don’t even like mint tea.

But there I am ordering it, as my mind is not concerned with the tea.

No.

Just the company.

The stories.

The tall tales.

The tall man across the way.

A waiter takes our order.

He has blood trickling from his right nostril.

I point it out to him, he walks to the bar, wipes his nose on a napkin, returns, takes our order and brings me mint tea.

The shimmering line between strings, either ecstatic in the exuberance of the violin-cello.

Or.

Discordant, the chop of a credit card breaking piles of cut cocaine in the employee bathroom.

The whisper in the hallway of the deeds done and remembered, recalled, and integrated now, the fire in the hearth.

The echo down the history.

The pub.

Harold Pinter plays.

Shakespearean sonnets with turns in the quatrain and the final couplet sings to me of the music of the spheres and the lifting of eyes toward heavens as yet only alluded to.

“Do you ever get up early in the morning and go down to the beach and drink coffee and watch the sunrise?”

No.

I never have.

The sunrise on the beach.

The mermaids they sing each to each.

The shells in a paper sack, mussels, indigo violet, malevolent blues studded with dried seaweed, the remnants of drift wood fire.

The sunrise.

The drive up the coast.

The view of the ocean from the red checked table-cloth booth, a vinyl booth my little girl legs stick to as I wait for pancakes and syrup to be set in front of me.

The sun.

The sun in my mother’s hair, reddish fired tinge, a halo of gold in the brown, mirroring the flecks of gold in her green eyes.

Undone by the beauty of my mother I dragged my fork through the buttery stickiness and surreptitiously lick the tines to catch-all the maple sugar in my mouth.

I think kissing you would be.

So sweet.

Yes.

Down to the ocean.

To the beach.

Let us go then you and I.

I shall wear my trousers rolled.

Or at least my bib overalls, and watch the foam-flecked waves throw themselves at my feet as the sun comes up again over the promises of urchins, spiny, but broke open, buttery cream orange uni, the soul, just there.

Just there.

You will kiss me in the dunes.

And all the words will come undone.

Tossed into the sand.

Where they will stay.

Like.

Scattered dropped magnetic poetry.

On the old fridge down the hall in the artist loft.

Rearranged once in a while by the hand of a passerby.

Blue scar pretty jealous skin.

 

 

Sexy Got Her Homework On

And her yoga on.

But not her sex on.

Well.

Not true.

I took care of business after my second yoga class today.

Yes.

I said that, two yoga classes today.

I have never done that before.

It’s not that big a deal and at the same time, it sort of was.

I went to my normal 9 a.m. Sunday morning class and got a very good sweat on and proceeded to watch my entire day change in the span of a few text messages.

When I got back from my yoga class I got a cancellation then after I got out of my shower and was getting my breakfast ready, my coffee date cancelled.

So.

I sent a lover a message.

And.

Nope.

NO response.

That kind of day.

So.

I got to do extraordinary amounts of self-care.

Which was needed and much cleaning and house hold attending.

And.

Cooking and grocery shopping.

This next few weeks is going to be busy.

I will be working two weeks straight for the family, the dad will be leaving Thursday for a business trip out-of-town so I will be working next Saturday and Sunday.

It’s actually going to be three weeks of work and school before I have another weekend off.

It’s going to be intense.

So I’m grateful I had today all to myself.

I was good company.

I took some extra time this morning for my writing and I made myself the most delicious coconut/almond milk latte and decided to just let the day unfold and not worry about anything.

I knew I also had to get a paper written for my Trauma class, my step-father made it into a paper this go around, and do cooking and food prep.

But I didn’t force myself or stress.

I just took each moment as its own little exquisite experience.

I washed all my bedding and did two loads of laundry, even washed the rugs in the bathroom, and swept, vacuumed, washed, polished, and cleaned my whole house.

It looks so nice.

I also went grocery shopping for two weeks of food.

I will probably have to re-up on fresh fruit, but I have enough coffee, eggs, oatmeal, brown rice, almond milk, organic carrots, frozen blueberries, and prepared food to get me through the weeks to come.

I roasted a chicken today and I made jambalaya.

I froze the majority of it and canned the rest of the chicken soup I had leftover from last week.

I have meals for days and I feel happy to have dealt with it.

I didn’t leave the neighborhood.

Although I did take my scooter to the Safeway on Balboa to get my groceries.

I wasn’t going to take it further, I knew there was going to be one more episode of rain and sure enough, there was, but not before I had run all the errands I needed to do and the next week and a half looks like sunshine.

That is going to be super helpful, I have my first therapy session with my new therapist Tuesday before work and I have an appointment to see my advisor at school Thursday before work.

The before work, work begins.

In actuality, I realize, it began already last week, I have been doing things before work for the last couple of weeks since the last school weekend.

Which reminds me, I need to swing by the post office before work in the morning and pick up a package.

I think work is going to be pretty busy, not just with working next weekend, but also, its Spring Break for the kiddos, which means I won’t have reading time for school work.

I feel like I’m ok though, I have done a lot of the Couple’s Therapy reading already, finished all my Trauma reading and I wrote my Trauma paper today.

I had some push back on it.

I realize I have been having some feelings of, “over it,” move along, I’m tired of this stuff.

It can get exhausting looking at the trauma minefields in my life history and how I got through some seemingly unscathed, but the patterns of the things I did to survive stay with me, little bombs of shrapnel on my psyche that explode without warning and leave me tired on the side of the road picking the stuff out of the pockets of my emotions.

“I feel brutalized,” I was telling my person yesterday at Tart to Tart, that place has seen a lot of my tears, about an incident that happen last week and how I felt and why I was angry.

We did a lot of work around it and I got some very good suggestions and I took them, I’m still taking them, I will keep taking them as the days move forward.

I hadn’t realized how much I was carrying until I said out loud that I felt brutalized and that it reminded me, I later saw, of my step-father and my mom and some stuff that happened to me growing up.

All the things that happened growing up.

Glad I start therapy on Tuesday, Jesus fuck.

Of course, under the lens of my graduate school work, of course, a lot of stuff is going to come up, the pot just keeps getting stirred and things pop to the surface, so when I sat down to write my paper I realized just how much I didn’t want to write it and I let myself start out that way.

And.

Five pages and 1,562 words later.

I was finished.

In fact.

I finished it so fast that I realized I could go to the restorative yoga class tonight at my studio.

Yes, I had already practiced today, but the restorative is really meditative and relaxing and it’s not about getting a work out, it’s about being in your body and supporting different parts of it that don’t typically get support or rest.

It was just so what I needed.

I came home, lit some candles, checked my messages, saw nothing from anyone, and said, well, I’ll just take care of me and took care of me.

I am actually a little surprised that I had so much sexual energy today, I just finished my period yesterday, but as I am getting older I can tell that sometimes it comes out in different ways energetically.

I also had some fodder for fantasy running around my head that I just let myself have.

I could say it was counter transference from the work I did today, which is another entire blog and far to clinical for me to delve into here.

Or.

I could just say.

After getting flowers, a home cooked dinner, and a restorative yoga class I was just in a yummy, dreamy space.

And I let myself go there too.

Yes.

Thank you self-care Sunday.

You rocked.

Ready for the next weeks work.

Bring it on.