Within and before
Jan. 5th, 2023 08:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormIt was awhile ago I came to terms with my dad living inside me: first my stepdad, charming, insecure, demanding, controlling, smart but maybe not clever, failing his whole life, pretentiously stringing together obscure references in patterns no one else saw, never letting anything go.
Sometime after that I came to terms with my dad living inside me, at least how I picture him from the small fragments I have; he ran off when I was very young so as not to hurt me, mom said. He lived in the bush for awhile in Florida, I was told. He was happy at the end, I was told, and left to ponder the implications of that. Hard relate, to be honest.
It's now, in this spacious winter when I'm alone up in my home, splitting wood and hauling water, that I am finally coming to terms with my mom living inside me. For so much of my life she has been the only parent I know. So much of my resistance in life has been to her voice, has been to learning not to have her voice be mine. It takes a lot of silence for me to finally hear the whispers of her as an accepted part of me. It doesn't escape me, though, that I am so much of her embodied, and with the exception of her marriages my life echoes hers in broad strokes in many ways.
It feels like something profound will happen when I love all the people who are parts of me, as parts of me, fully and without reservation. I'm not there now but it seems within mindshot, a couple glades over, a little ways down the path.
Sometime after that I came to terms with my dad living inside me, at least how I picture him from the small fragments I have; he ran off when I was very young so as not to hurt me, mom said. He lived in the bush for awhile in Florida, I was told. He was happy at the end, I was told, and left to ponder the implications of that. Hard relate, to be honest.
It's now, in this spacious winter when I'm alone up in my home, splitting wood and hauling water, that I am finally coming to terms with my mom living inside me. For so much of my life she has been the only parent I know. So much of my resistance in life has been to her voice, has been to learning not to have her voice be mine. It takes a lot of silence for me to finally hear the whispers of her as an accepted part of me. It doesn't escape me, though, that I am so much of her embodied, and with the exception of her marriages my life echoes hers in broad strokes in many ways.
It feels like something profound will happen when I love all the people who are parts of me, as parts of me, fully and without reservation. I'm not there now but it seems within mindshot, a couple glades over, a little ways down the path.
