Thursday Nov 29th @10am
Studio City, CA
Please allow me to preface my upcoming stream of consciousness…
My family is amazing! Generous, loving, supportive… I adore them. I am so blessed and forever grateful for them and the foundation they helped me build.
The thing is as life happens, I have torn down and rebuilt that same foundation many times over the course of the last 30 something years. Therapists and healers and astrologers… oh my!
It has been 4 days since my husband, 3 daughters and I have returned home from our Thanksgiving back east with my family. I am having a moment of reflection as my 8 year olds words play over and over again in my head, “you sound like Nana when she yelled in the car…”
I was driving the car she referred to when my Mother yelled directions at me. I felt my chest tighten and my inner child quiver upon its delivery. In the rearview mirror, I watched my children’s faces reflect my feelings.
Not at all what I want to sound like.
I don’t believe my Mother was aware of her tone, just as I was not aware of mine when my daughter pointed out the similarities.
I used to ask myself why adults spent so much time on the couch getting back to where they were as a child.
Now that I am a Mother and an adult on the couch, I can actually answer that question.
Because I continue to put my thoughts, my beliefs, my feelings on others… on my kids… and so on and so on and so on… I just can’t help it. I consider myself an aware being that knows the repercussions of such actions and I still do it. Hence, I am back on the couch.
My husband asked me if I saw that I do as my parents do… want to get the last word in… bicker… raise voices… behaviors I learned while growing up beneath their tutelage.
YES…I SAW IT… It makes me crazy when they do it… how can I possibly still be doing it! I want my money back… Chakra cleaners and Therapists!
It happens when I don’t pause.
Then Pause.
I get it… I am a mom now and as I have stated many times before, it is the hardest job I have ever held. My parents did the best they could. They did as they were taught. I was fortunate to know all my grandparents, so have seen and spent time with their role models.
I am compassionate and learned long ago, that my parent’s baggage is not my burden.
I thought I had been diligently doing the work breaking generational patterns. Yet still they haunt me.
It all goes to “hell in a hand basket” when one becomes a parent.
I see it all so clearly. I know I will be pausing often in the next few weeks because I will be acutely aware and on my very best behavior, trying desperately to not do as they do.
I know, I know, Right or Happy.
It is knowing this, combined with the feelings I am overwhelmed with that all come flooding in when surrounded by my sister, brother and parents, that will awaken me yet again.
It still amazes me that the minute I step back inside my childhood home, I feel as if I am 5, 10, 15 again… whatever the age of the memory the situation stirs. No wonder the end of a fuse is so easily ignited.
I am a work in progress and will take all this rawness and research and continue to see and change and grow. I make myself feel better by reminding myself that in doing so I shall be a living example for my kids.
Talk about a youthful glow! Who needs Botox; there is a fortune to be made in reversing the aging process just by going home for the holidays.
