Solar Question of the Day from Celtic Devotional by Caitlin Matthews
24th of November:
Which of your family do you most appreciate?
I don’t like this question. If I answer it one way, I will look like I’m being PC,no one do I have in my ‘family’ do I appreciate more than another. My reasons at moment of writing for this, are not some PC enlightened view. It is truly that the wonderful humans that God gave to me as children for my family are overwhelmingly full of disorder and hate and so on and so forth, such that I must always be drill sgt. and dictator in order for them to have any appearance outside of this house as having a ‘normal’. I used to do this with joy and I would always frown in puzzlement at those who would say oh this is soooo hard, or how do you do what you do and always seem to be peaceful and smiling. Well, I haven’t been smiling for a long time. No one hugs me, the favored phrase is to call me a fucking retard and other abusive and downputting things. There is only so long a person can be subjected to these actions before it no longer matters a label or a diagnosis, it all becomes abuse and a thing to be escaped. I want hugs. I want snuggling on couch having a real conversation with them involving feelings. I want them to know me as a person, what I like, what I enjoy. I don’t want to live in a house that has the interactions of sociopaths. It hurts me. It also hurts me that I cannot get through to them, in a lasting way, that they can generalize across categories of life. Hell, I’d settle for silence from them to simply sit up against me, for the ones who cannot stand to be touched. There are currently so many times someone is mid-meltdown that there is no time for noticing or digging up any small thing to appreciate or to praise–they have never liked that and damn me that I need to praise and to express affection to feel myself and whole. They are so blind that they have a nerve to say how much they hate me and hate it here, and yet, they won’t stop and simply leave, so that I might have a life, if that is what I am left with having to decide.
I don’t have anyone but them. I could wallow in that, especially with this sort of question, which evokes the am I good enough to have a ‘real’ family. I’m not an overly social person face to face. I love to talk and to be expressive but oftentimes going out, I become overloaded and one health thing or the other has gotten in my way so that it isn’t a favorite to seek it out. I’d really like to have a cabin in the woods, my nest the way I like it, that I could choose to invite or a person could express a wish to come to myself to see me, not an occassion or a function or a purpose.
I was finally able to tell the woman who adopted me to stop calling me, that I would press charges for harassment if she bothered me again. I remember people frowning at my pleasure at not being fettered by an idea of family. My joy at not hiding in closets ect. I cannot talk to people about that, it is too much for them–and again I feel like a bad person who cannot be enough because what I am, must be kept quiet because dammit positive is the word of the day, along with the denial of honesty and the entire package of things and exepriences that make each person the fablulous quilt of what is ‘them’ the self.
When I was first sober, I had the joy of understanding about Family of Choice. But, there is always just a walking alongside. I often wonder if really this is what there is. That everyone really just walks alongside. I suppose the intent of the question would be to gush over and to have gratitude (I typed bratitude lol) I had some of that last night when the college students went into the young children’s section of the library and looked for the Christmas books that I used to read to them, and choose Christmas movie DVDS, and visited the Tortoise and the Rabbit and the librarian’s greyhound. They sat all squished and bent like trying to mush themselves into the same curled up small selves gaining comfort over simple acts of joy at storytime each night, around my chair. They did begin across the room. I loved being able to see real smiles coming out and little tidbits of gratitude and good memories expressed to me, moments that I’ve never known they could notice or appreciate. These things were not because I had to do them, they were are are who I am. They have not been watered for a very long time. I appreciate then the small things that fly out of them of noticing, that what I did, did get through and that such memory might create longer and longer periods of same engagement and interaction for them with others. I think I might go ahead and make a plan, and a request list of sorts, the way I like and wish things to be. That is all I will write on this for now.
Noticing Nature 