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.