moon meditation

The other night on my long drive back to jersey from upstate, i was doing my driving meditation...alone, but into the solitude.  Recently I've been taking the space to listen to music LOUD and sing just as loud.  Its my way of releasing and processing my complex life.

So the other night I'm driving and singing with Beth Orton, and I look up at the moon, and am struck by how beautiful and alone it is.  Alone yet shining down on all of us at the same time, affecting us.  I felt the beauty of the moon's alone-ness and brightness so deep inside of me, I started to cry because it seemed so sad.

I belted out the song and felt the sadness and cried, and then came to the acceptance that sometimes something beautiful and sad is okay and doesn't need to be fixed.  Sometimes something can be sad and beautiful and heartwrenching and there's nothing to do about it, that's just what it is.

creative survival

Today I opened the door to a neighbor screaming at me about my dog.  He was completely aggressive and although I tried to remain calm we escalated into a turbulent screaming match.  He threatened to hurt my dog and I told him to leave my property.  I mean, loudly ordered him to GET AWAY.  This is in my stuffy upper crust ivy league neighborhood.  What manners...NOT.

I felt shaken by the guy's unbounded aggression, and I cried thinking that my dog is just too fucking wild for this place.  We're all too wild, we don't belong.  I was lementing this to my husband and he reminded me that our mean lesbian neighbors in NP hated our dog, too, and were consistently vocal about it.  Not great neighbors there, either: the first time I walked over to say hello, the woman told me she moved here 25 years ago to her house because she wanted to be away from people and not have any neighbors.  Awesome introduction.

Anyway, my husband said "Look, she's just a wild beast, its nobody's fault.  Her mother was burned to death by some occult group, she was living in the wild before we got her, then she grew up running free on 40 acres.  How is she supposed to be able to deal with living in a backyard?"

I paused and started laughing.  It hit me so hard that he described me.  I was laughing but no one got it.  That's my life in archetypes.

Its me and the closest people to me in my life.  I have gravitated to motherless daughters for a long time.  My best friends from young adulthood on have been these girls.  Mothers who have died, mothers who were absent in some way, a mother who was a junkie and who just left when my friend was young, birth mothers.  We could all relate on some pain level...we unconsciously knew we all understood that frequency of abandonment.  I even became really close to a girl for a short time who was TOTALLY attached to her mother and after we hadn't seen each other in a few years, her parents died in a tragic accident.  Its almost like I was drawn to her and her imminent pain.  I feel like we made up a tribe of orphans...we were all young women who were forging ahead with their own lives mostly unsupported by any parental figures as a reference point.  We were living lives of creative survival.  We all still do, that is what we do.

I fall into survival mode so instinctually, it is very natural to me.  It comes easily, and remembering that I have the option to do more than just survive is SUCH HARD WORK.  

in and out

I am in my bathroom and I wash my face, smooth cream into my skin, brush my teeth and find myself with my hands down on the floor, and my spine parallel to the ground, I stretch and get into my body. Like physically getting my consciousness into my body.  I turn to the right and stretch my arm skywards and twist out my kidney.  I come back to neutral and go the other way, to the left.  I am continually shifting away from being in my body and then coming back in, out and in.  Out and in.  Out. and. in.  It feels like I'm remembering something I forgot and giving myself a gift when I come back in.  I forget it alot.  I separate myself, not in a way that I don't know what I'm actually doing when I go through my days, but just...detached...in a way that I don't even realize until I shift back into my body and become aware that I just wasn't there.

Is this an adoptee trait?
Is this a trait of someone who has lived through sexual abuse?

I wonder what informs my past.

My long drives upstate and back give me a space that as a mother of four I rarely have, where I'm in a confined space with nothing to do but sit and be in the moment.  In a zen way I can look back at that phrase and contemplate the proposal that that is my life's description.  But not really in that I have so much to do pretty much at ALL times; that's my perception.  I go in an out of overload all day, every day.  Another place I go in and out of. Overload and my body.  I get overloaded and I go out of my body.  I get into my mind or close psychic space to it and just hang out there until I've dissipated enough of the energy that I can handle grounding back into my body and absorbing the next surge.

I wonder if I am a minority in this way? Do other people experience this as a backdrop to their life, a characteristic of the page their life reads off of?

I have practiced yoga for several years, but this winter was the first time in a long time that I began doing aerobic exercise.  I think its totally tied into my familiarity with not being in my body.  It has seemed so insurmountable in the past that it was something I didn't even think about for YEARS.  I began running.  I could feel the weight of the impact of my feet on the ground on the front of my shins.  Like, I could feel the pressure of my body pushing groundward when my foot would hit the ground and I was feeling subtle pressures and feelings in my body that seeemd totally new to me.  Its a weird feeling that makes me wonder where I've been.

I wonder how life would be different if I melded my consciousness with my body more often than not. I assume it would be too painful; I'm not sure I would have the capacity to handle how much I would feel.

is my name me?

Names are powerful.

Names are declarations.

What does a change of name do to a personality? I think it effects subtle changes within a person, and less subtle, gross changes externally.

I have lived with 3 or 4 names this lifetime, and I am only 35. My uncertainty of the total number is from my unclarity of my first name. Was it from pre-birth, or was I actually named something besides ___ after my birth, before my adoption? Eva? I have no idea--adopted people are legally not allowed access to their birth certificates in New York State, as well as I think 41 other states. The birth certificate I have seen has my adoptive parents listed, as well as significant technical birth information, as if I was born to them. Interesting...my thoughts on that will be held for another time.

What was my name as an unborn baby? What was my name as a born baby?

My name as a baby adopted into a new family with a new mother and father was ____. I lived that name for 20 years. I got married to my first husband by a rabbi but didn't sign any legal documents authorized by any state. I did not feel a need to change my name, and didn't. I did not feel any desire to take on my husband's name.

Then my mother died. She left me an inheritance. I went to the local bank to find out about the procedure to get the money. My mother had made the account out to my then-husband's last name (which was not mine). Looking back, this was a perfect testament to the less than subtle rift between my mother and I; did she actually not even know my name? Anyway, my social security number (the only one I've ever had) was on the account, and the bank people REFUSED to release the money to me. They insisted the only way for me to get it was to come back with ID showing myself to be someone I was not.

So I legally changed my name to get the money. I figured out how to do it myself; I did not use an attorney, and it was a whole involved process. I lived with that name, disconnected from it, for 10 years. The name outlived my marriage.

My ambivalence to that name somehow parallels my ambivalence to the place I live right now. There's something similar about it. I was driving down the road today between towns. I was noticing my surroundings while simultaneously noting how disconnected I feel. I said to myself, "I live in this place right now, but it is not my place." The geography feels temporary; I guess that is okay on some level. But underneath there is something very unsettling about it for me.

I ditched that name for my new name when I got remarried. I decided to take on the new name. Its interesting; I don't feel necessarily connected to the name and its history, per se, but I do feel a difference in that my choice to take it was specifically to reflect our connection.

I was in a bookstore the other day. I bought a few books and handed the man my credit card. He looked at it, looked at me, and in an offhand way said, "B..., B..., hmmm...are you jewish?" I felt like a deer in the headlights inside, and must have looked stunned outwardly as well, because he paused and said, "I'm only asking because I used to know a Breitman back in college..." I don't know how I feel about the fact that I have a name that definitely implies jewishness at the same time as looking so totally not jewish. My name's reference to my marriage feels safe, but its also feels dangerous in that it is like an invitation to my identity confusion.

i want something more

And I do want to change. I can say that I want a new paradigm; it just seems hard to grasp this new way out of thin air and make it my own. How to do that?

I want to live a life that is whole, but I fear that I have no way of even knowing what that is.

The basic premise I get from therapy is that understanding develops self awareness, which can be instrumental in changing behavior. But don't I need a role model? Who are my role models? When I think of my family, every single person has big secrets. I don't know half of who any of them really are. Every single one seems split, with sections splintered off, and I am aware that I only know certain parts of them.

I'm trying to figure out the differences in the influences between the outcome of being adopted ( in general) vs. being adopted into the specific, totally dysfunctional family that I landed in. Its very confusing.

my life script

I feel loved and wanted when people break the rules to be with me.

how i feel lost

When I am physically alone I most often feel disconnected. Lost.

Like, floating. Not really grounded or tethered to anything or anyone.

I feel like the people I love and who love me are like fingers on hands, and I am the substrate that filters through. They are there and they try to catch me, but I slip through the cracks. Sometimes they catch me and hold me for a little while, but as soon as I'm physically alone I slip through and there is no one and nothing to catch me anymore. Unbounded.

Its disorienting. I suppose it could be considered scary, but my familiarity with the feeling numbs out the terror.

I want to be connected so deeply. So much. Its the most important thing to me. I want to really know the connections persist even without the physical presence.

I hope I get it in this lifetime.

sources of disconnection

I feel like my life has been a series of events that have imposed disconnection on me.

I was adopted soon after birth. (How long from birth? I don't know, I haven't gotten all the facts straight yet). Ripped away from my mother. I remember my adoptive mother telling me a story about the first night they had me, she came into the room with my crib and woke me up from my sleep because she was so excited. Apparently I cried and cried and would not stop crying for so long that she never did that again. I think back on that story and can't help but think that her fulfillment was at the expense of me being lost.

At the end of third grade, when I was 10, my house burned down. I was the one who found the fire in the garage and alerted my mother and sister to get out of the house. I remember going inside to tell my mother and we stayed inside for a few minutes while she called the fire department. Then we left and went to our neighbor's house. My mother's new Corvette was in the garage and blew up before the fire fighters got there. Most of the house was gone before they could even attempt to save it. I basically watched my house explode, then was taken by police car to my best friend's house where I slept over that night. I distinctly remember falling asleep in her bed and crying into her pillow, feeling totally completely terrified and disconnected from the life I lived in that house. It seemed like that life burned away and there was nothing left. I still feel like that. We were able to save some pictures and old movie film, and one of my favorite pictures from my childhood is one that is an enlarged picture of my mother, my sister and I set on a 70's wooden plaque. The wood is burned and the border of the picture is, too, but the image shows through the center. A few years ago my sister, my dad and I did a project together in which we bought an old film projector off of ebay and watched all the old semi-destroyed movies. I felt like it was a priceless gift to have footage from the inside of the house. Oh my god! I was able to relive what I was forced to only imagine in my mind's eye for so many years. That's what my room looked like--wow, remember the wierd elf cookie jar on the kitchen counter? Look at the wallpaper! I felt like I was going home. I still feel so attached to that house--its like another piece of my life that was taken away from me in which I had no control.

Then, when I was 20, my (adoptive) mother died. She had been sick for basically my whole life. Not like a little sick. SICK. Hospitalized over and over again, year after year. For the last several years of her life, while I was in middle and high school, she almost died several times, and there I was again, powerless over a horrible situation I could not control. Even though it was humanly impossible for her to stay alive at the end, I was stunned when she actually died. I spoke with her the night before; I called her from a payphone from my crazy life on the road with my crazy (first) husband and baby. I told her that my birth mother and I had made arrangements for her to come to the US for us to meet. Then the phone cut out and I actually didn't have any money to call her back. That was the last thing I said to her. She died in the middle of that night.

After my mother's funeral, my grandmother said to me, "Did you even love your mother?" As if losing my mother for the second time wasn't torturous enough.

Needless to say, my identity within (and without) my family is more than confusing.