Facing My Creations

Caring for children, raising children is great creative  expression.  My daughter gave me an idea about creativity being a spiritual expression, that by creating we are emulating our creator.

Raising children can be contributing to the positive growth of a loving human being.

Looking at how this works as a natural but missing mother, I have to go past my own misunderstanding to loving myself.  I have to nurture awareness in myself. Awareness of me and my daughter and everyone else in our families. Before I can do that I have to love myself enough to bear the awareness.  If I had known at the time of relinquishment what I know now…

Many times I have not been able to bear awareness.  I have not had the courage, the heart to face the trauma.  So we have been over and over and over the frightening bits .

I wanted Joy to know I loved her.  I wanted her to feel it and know it, for it to be her reality that she was/is loved.  There have been so many times and ways that it obviously wasn’t getting through.

She did not know that I loved her for a long time.  Nothing in her formative years indicated that I loved her or that I was capable of loving her.  Then we met and were caught in our lies of self sufficiency.  Those lies led to a lot more misunderstanding.

As many times as it takes, as many times as I have to face rejection, as many times as I have to face hurt feelings, as many times as I have to forgive myself and the world I know; for what I have created, is how many times I have to do it.  I have to do it.  There isn’t any other alternative but to go forward.  When she feels rejected I do too.

I go down and touch the sadness that sits next to the old conditioning telling  me I was not good enough for her–that I was undeserving to be her mother.  Then the defensiveness is triggered and I’m fighting to justify myself, to prove that I have a right to hold my head up and breathe the air everyone else that has ever been born has the right to breathe. I have to breathe no matter what, no matter how unconscious I may be.  Breathing my way back to the present, through the pain, until I’m watching myself from an inner distance.  Then I know that I don’t know.  I don’t know how to work this except to keep looking for the good.

And asking.  I am learning to ask for help and for clarification, and that I have the strength to face whatever is in front of me and be whoever I am.

As many touches, as many words, as many hugs, it will be worth it. I am involved in one of the most creative acts possible on Earth.  I am growing myself up to be the most loving momma I can be.   Falling short is part of what I do.  I come to places I can’t bear.  Sometimes I turn away to find a safe place to breathe and rest and come to know the terror and pain can’t last.  They don’t endure.  I do.

And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love.         Whoever lives in love lives in God, and god in him. [1 John 4:16]