I’ve started reading Reconciliation: healing the inner child, by Thich Nhat Hanh. The five pages of the introduction have already had me openly weeping several times, and my favourite purple ink underlines nearly half the words. Beautiful and painful and horrible and wonderful. And through it all, I fight with myself that I am worth the time and effort to do this. The old me (I need to find a name for her) pushes back, telling me that my time would be better spent getting chores done, doing nice things for my family, ordering gifts for my friends so they will continue to like me.
Old Me is filled with so much doubt and so little worth, it’s sickening. She survived. She got me this far. I owe her so much.
I hate her.
I fear my connection with that part of me is going to take far longer to heal than any of my inner child connections.
She is the bitch matriarch character in all the post-apocalyptic stories, the one who everyone hates but still follows because she “does what has to be done,” even if it’s shooting the injured child in the head to save food or travel faster. She did what had to be done to get me through, but caused so much pain and left so many scars in her wake.
I’m here because of her. But I hate her.
When I’m not strong enough or brave enough to be the me I want to be, she takes over. She cooks supper when I want to scream that it’s not fair that I am responsible for all meals. She helps the kids with their homework when I want to slam the door and take a nap. She silences me when I ache to say no. She smashes down my frustrations, my exhaustion, my fears, she tramples on my dreams, my desires, she ignores my cries for help, because she does what she has to do to survive.
She still gets me through. I honestly don’t know what I would do without her.
But I hate her.
I resent her.
I’m jealous of her.
But she’s horrible. And she keeps me from being honest with myself. Or anyone else, for that matter.
When I have reached my reasonable limits, when I’m exhausted, when I’m stressed, when I’m sick, when I need to communicate that I have needs, that I am desperate for help, for support, she wrests control from me and somehow gets it done, alone. So not only am I more of all those things when she’s done with me, I also have continued to prove to people that I can do anything and don’t need help.
She has gotten me through, but she also keeps me here. She holds me back from doing the actual things that need to be done, the steps to getting my needs met, to healing myself, to being happier, freeier, healthier. She shuts down communication and continues the silence.
Oh God. She’s my mother.
I am my mother.
Shut down the self and just do what needs to be done.
That’s her. Or the person she became through her trauma, anyway.
I saw glimpses of another person. The thoughtful, compassionate one. The one who took ten rolls of film over an eight hour period from the same spot at the end of a mountain lake to “see how the mountain breathes.” The woman who wanted to learn to fly airplanes. The one who wanted to learn to speak Chinese. The Mensa candidate. The one who could paint beautiful pictures in a single afternoon. The woman who felt more at home with horses than humans.
But I didn’t see her very often. Mostly, I saw the woman who was miserable, who was in pain, who resented her life, who picked herself back up again and again to do what needed to be done. The woman who bore everything in silence.
Until she couldn’t. Until she broke. Until it boiled over, and she yanked out the entire silverware drawer and let it drop to the floor with a nerve-shattering crash. The woman who stormed out and slammed doors. The woman who took the stack of cereal bowls she had just unloaded from the dishwasher and threw them to the floor as hard as she could.
They exploded, tiny shards of ceramic shrapnel, Snowflake Blue Corelle, except for the bottom of each bowl. Those sat in a perfect stack in the midst of the shattered sides. I pulled pieces of those bowls from my bare feet for months afterwards; no matter how many times I swept the floor, there were always more.
She cultivated silence. She grew it, intentionally. And it got bigger and heavier and uglier as my life went on. But she survived. So that’s what I learned. That was my place. That was my role. That was my own survival.
She was so broken.
I am so broken.
And my heart is crushed that I can never tell her how deeply sorry I am that she had to become that person. And I can never see who she should have been. She deserved so much better.
And now I carry the broken bits of her forever in me, like those shards of cereal bowl. I didn’t absorb all the beautiful, strong, creative, intelligent, amazing parts. I inherited all the broken bits.
I inherited the silence.
The silence has a life of its own; ominous, amorphous, hellish, but alive, pulsing and growing. You feed it, day after day, with the things you ache to say, but can’t. Or won’t. You feed it until it can’t hold any more, until it explodes. A door slam. A shattered dish. A broken shelf. The sudden explosion of noise a relief valve for the silence. The unspoken words weave themselves into the violent soundwaves and escape out into the void. The heavy feeling of waiting lingers for a while, like an approaching storm that never arrives.
And the silence begins to grow again.