On parental examples and soulmates

Photo by Kier in Sight Archives on Unsplash

Lately I’ve been thinking about two things -

The first is when I heard a child praise his parent for giving him ‘a blueprint for life’ and set forth an example on how to live.

Then, a few days later, I saw a social media post that said. - shout out to those who didn’t have that and have to carve that on their own.

Now - I want to clarify -

My mother had wonderful characteristics and there are ones that I will always deeply, deeply admire and fall short from.

But my mother was also a terribly wounded person who had trauma and never received the proper mental health that she so desperately needed and deserved.

And I had some wonderful women relatives and community -

But didn’t want to have any of their lives - not their careers, and certainly not their marriages.

I only saw women in substandard marriages. And as mothers - The primary purpose of their lives was clearly service to their children and marriage, and that as priority over the women themselves.

It took me many years to admit that I had only ever been taught that - through example - and I had absorbed that -

And that I had other ideas for how to live my life. But still, it influenced me and I made decisions I ought not to have -

I got married way too young, before I knew myself and had a chance to live independently, before taking on another person. So, my marriage was heavily co-dependent.

Learning to become a fully self sufficient, autonomous woman has been something I needed to figure out on my own.

The other thing I’ve been thinking about lately is something that I read online the other day that made me just roll my eyes -

It’s called the Invisible String Theory -

The notion being that two people- usually soulmates or potential partners — are connected and may be circulating around one another, but that they will only encounter one another to become a couple when they are both ready, when they are evolved, at the precise kairotic moment, if you will.

I find myself thinking - what horseshit!

Perhaps I am jaded. But I think the very notion of soulmate is rather fucked up - in whatever form you interpret a soulmate.

I think that the people we attract have everything to do with where we are in life and and is in direct proportion to the amount of emotional labor/hard work that we’ve done on ourselves mentally.

We are sent all these messages from our culture - on finding that one person who will complete us or not dying alone - hoping to have someone who loves us - a partner or a child - who will be there for us on our death beds to provide what we may need in our final moments.

Those notions used to make me feel very lonely, especially because I had no partner, no children, and such limited extended family -

But I have a very different perception on it now -

The more I not only can now ‘stand to be alone’ but also - I have a lot less internal noise going on - so, I no longer use people to emotionally calm me down, to help regulate my nervous system through the presence of the other people - —

As well as just being honest with myself —

The less I enjoy the company of others -

Especially others who can’t listen but mostly wait to add/talk about themselves constantly, or who present themselves through rose-colored glasses, and want to talk about others and cut other people down.

Being alone brings me comfort now and I never thought that it ever would/could.

Tomorrow is Easter. I will go to church, but though I have been invited to Easter dinner celebrations from the community I’ve made here, the ‘family’ I’ve cultivated -

I actually decided that I wanted to be alone.

I feel better being alone.

If I’m honest- Holidays will continue to be challenging, given my dead family and the loss of the dream of having my own - children, etc, -

But being around others and seeing their family, honestly, it makes it worse.

I would rather celebrate the reason for the holiday - in my faith - and enjoy my books and my own little sanctuary that I’ve cultivated in my cozy home.

I no longer wait for a partner, nor do I look for one. It’s not worth it to me, the time it takes, the energy suck and emotional labor involved.

Women receive a lot of messages that we are incomplete without a man -

It took me to middle-age, but I am thankful to no longer be looking for that, or even—quite frankly—desiring that anymore.

Solitude suits me.

It has been perhaps one of the greatest lessons in my healing journey, but it is true -

The more I heal, the more and more quietly introverted I become.

And, to come full circle, I realize that it is probably because - I’m carving out my own path here.

Having come from a long line of ancestors who were very wounded, mentally ill, alcoholics, abused, etc, etc -

My ‘work’ is focused inward. I do service-oriented jobs in my profession, but I no longer feel the need to ‘care for’ a man or children.

That has distracted me, for a long, long time from what I now grow to think of as my life’s work -

Healing myself and my line.

It may sound selfish from a western patriarchal lens, especially because I don’t have children. But - I also take the perspective that I am also engaging in ancestral/intergenerational healing and that through my own healing, I am able to heal my ancestors and those who came before me.

I take comfort and solace in that.

I only know the most immediate women - I often times wonder - what about all those generations of women that came before me? How tired they were, how wrapped up in service to their husbands and children. What were their stories? Who could they have been if they didn’t have to become a wife and mother? If they had had mental health help? Education? etc?

Self-discovery is a privilege we have today, with birth control and economic solvency so I don’t have to marry. I certainly would pay less money in taxes and be afforded a more cushy living, but it is the gift of my education and my position that I don’t have to yoke myself to a man - caring for him as though I am his mother.

I think about this as I also reflect on my maternal grandmother who has walked on.

She abandoned her children —all four of them —two were still infant/toddler-age, at a time when many women weren’t supposed to do that.

I always found this incredibly cold and counter-intuitive for a mother.

I admire my mother because of her selfless love having never been shown that or taught that from her own mother.

If my babies had lived I would have wanted to emulate my mother’s love, while not losing myself in the process, like she did.

But I also think —if I’m going to be entirely honest with myself and my own ‘character defects’ -

I have shadow sides of selfishness. I am perhaps a lot more like my grandmother than I would like to admit.

The older I grow, the more I am so thankful I don’t have children. I like my time, my money, my footloose and fancy free lifestyle. And I’ve already had it for 20 years now. What if I had never had it? She gave birth at 17? She was a baby having a baby.

I can’t imagine if I never had the opportunity to breathe and grow and self-develop. After all, I felt that I didn’t adequately have that and I was only married young, in college and to a very supportive partner. With no children.

I can’t imagine if I had never had any chance to just be -

I would have yearned for freedom and liberation and autonomy.

I did it in the few short months that my ex-partner’s daughter stayed with us.

At times it felt like completion of a family life and something I wanted, and wanted more of.

And at other times - it horrified me - I felt bored and restless and shackled.

It made me wonder if I was cut out for full-time mommy-life.

I will never know. I would like to think I would have adjusted and been more like my mother than my grandmother.

But I also know that if that had been my path than I would never have been able to grow into myself, as my own person, because I would have taken on partner and mommy-role identity at my core, as my person.

I have been given another opportunity, to evolve and to see the world differently.

That and combined with my dysfunctional family background - I’m well aware that it’s hard to see beyond the lack of fairy-tale endings in my life story - makes me just…

…scoff at the idea of soulmates and picture-perfect adult and parental examples.

I admit I can’t even quite fathom that.

I am not above being jealous of those young adults whose parents are their heroes and everything that they want to be.

That’s a foreign concept to me.

I don’t mean for this to sound like some sort of woe-is-me pity party.

I am grateful. I have a good life. I have been blessed in many ways.

It just sort of baffles me to think about kiddos who grow into young adults who have stories like this.

Hell, even full grown adults —the ones who tell me - ‘everything happens for a reason’. And I try to control my facial expression/response to that, because -

Really?

I believe in God and He can take dumpster fires of situations and use them for good and intervene.

But that’s a leap and a bound away from saying this all happened for a reason -

I guess I just think - you can’t really say that when your father and brother have both blown their brains out.

It’s a luxury you can’t afford. It’s completely incomprehensible then that ‘it happened for a reason’; it’s like you’re speaking a foreign language to me.

Hell, at those moments, I think we come from different planets and I can’t even begin to put into words how naive and rose-colored glasses jolly and trite that sounds to me.

That sounds mean.

It’s partly jealous, I admit.

I wish I could believe it - but to do so - ? Think it through - the implications for me are that then there’s a reason my dad and brother died.

And, maybe there is - I can have enough critical imagination to think it could be true, beyond this earthly realm, but I guess my viewpoint sometimes can’t be that expansive.

It also just…feels icky. Really, really icky.

Like in admitting that, I’m not admitting to the injustice of it all - the untimely death, like I’m giving up on them and acquiescing to their inevitable mental illness.

Perhaps, if I’m completely honest, then I would have to wonder —

What does that indicate? What does it say about me?

So, I guess I’ll resist the whole ‘happily ever’ thing, the point of life to be soulmate hunting, and notions of invisible string theories and ‘everything meant to be’.

I’ll always look a little too hard at my lives that were not lived, staring at the blackened, dried figs fallen, rotten and dead, like Sylvia Plath writes of …

I will always wonder what it would meant to have parents that had healed, had gotten mental health help, to be able to sit in meetings and tell tall tales of how everything in my life was ‘meant to be’ -

Because I look around, especially at the state of the country and the world we live in, and more and more I think —

It didn’t have to be this way. It could have been so much better.