I worry about writing personal things, but I pray that it might be helpful to someone, or more selfishly, that taking off the mask will help me, and in the bigger picture, don't unhealed, covered up things of mine hurt you anyway?
When to smile or not is a big delimma for me. I remember when my ex left and I was in the car with my parents to spend a couple of nights at their house. I had one of my few epiphanies where I know what to do. "Smile at Rachel", who was three at the time. So I did. Even now I make it a habit to smile at my girls every night when I tuck them in. (The boys are too old and cool to be tucked in, but the girls still want me to.) Smiling can be an act of faith. I may not feel right with the world, but I have faith that things will turn out right by the grace of God.
But there is a time to mourn as well. I guess it's one of those balancing acts where one does not tip too far into pessimism, moroseness and despair, nor into a manic denial of reality. I watched Intervention the other night where a woman a bit older than me and her husband were caught up in alcoholism when he lost his job while their youngest was in highschool. It was very sad to see the toll it took on their three children. The mother had been horribly and repeatedly abused as a child as a result of her biological mother giving her to a prostitute to raise. She found stability for the first time in her life when she married her husband who adored her and who had provided well for their three children, until he lost his job. Due to the alcoholism he was unable to keep a job after that and they lost everything. But she would not deal with her past. She buried it in alcohol, or when she tried to be sober, which never lasted more than a few days, she kept very busy because of the thoughts she had when she was still. Even after treatment and being sober for three months, her counselor said that she would still not deal with her past. She claimed that she was a survivor and that it was all over and done with, so no need to talk about it. She felt very free of her alcoholism and she immediately became the encourager and cheerleader for everyone else and her new goal was to be a housemother at that facility. Her face was of determined happiness. And it seemed forced.
I'm not sure what to do about past trauma. When our resistance is down, or our security threatened (often this fear is disproportionate to the actual perceived threat and is based upon an involuntary association with a past devastation) it catches up to us. So does that mean to make sure your life is free of stress so that it doesn't come to the surface? I don't think this is possible. But it could explain why the lady wanted to keep living at the rehab facility as a staff member. There are some traumas that it is too hard to make sense of. They really shouldn't have happened. There are a lot of people who think bad things happen to make us stronger or make us able to help other people, and this can be a result. However this can lead to determinism where we think God is the author of all the bad things in the world. On the other hand, we can think that we live in a chaotic world where evil is in control and we are helpless victims of it. I do not have the answer to this and feel it presumptuous to even say that the truth is somewhere in the middle. But what I am trying to work through since my tears for Isaac are so close to the surface, sometimes stifled and sometimes let loose, is how to realistically see his death. For some reason all the grief in my life is funneled and focused into the last week of my pregnancy, his birth, burial, and the two months before I got pregnant with Rebecca when I got distracted from Isaac, at least consciously. But I was never the same after that. I was less able to handle normal stresses, like when the kids made childish mistakes. I panicked where before I would have been frustrated or even amused. Not that I ever handled stuff perfectly. Isaac's death was when I gave up on the idea that everything could be fixed, and for some reason it's the only thing that I give myself permission to grieve over. Okay I need to deal with one of them, When I realized my ex didn't care about me I was very devastated and desperate which I shared in a link to a different, non-sidebarred blog (which I don't want to link to right now), a few months ago, but I was able to shift focus to my children who loved me and who I thought were incredibly adorable, and part of me believed he was wrong and someone else wouldn't be, and that I was wrong to marry him in the first place so it was all my fault. Anyway, I think my new marriage and after Isaac, my new baby, pushed my grief to an unconscious, but still influential level.
Tuesday's post about St. Gregory of Nyssa's and St. Macrina's discussion at the death of their brother may put a new slant on things. Since becoming Orthodox and having Isaac's icon, shared below, I have been more consciously aware of the departed, and their continuance with us. But I don't think I've understood the place of their bodies. I've learned about holy relics exuding grace, and how this is connected with their holy lives of achieved virtue, but I think part of the answer to my grief is in realizing the person's connectedness with their material bodies in a more personal way, rather than just imparted grace, which I categorize, probably wrongly, as a distant third, impersonal party. A detached gift from God. I know my difficulty in realizing the connectedness in things, beyond impersonally recognized patterns, unless it is a connection with negative connotation, is a very deep thing that recurs often. It has to do with feelings of rejection and abandonment that I've felt since a little child. Not that that's the whole story either, life is complicated. But I tend to think that relationships are based on a very tenuous mixture of whims, feelings, easy offenses, misunderstandings, misdeeds and selfishness which could blow them up at any second, not to mention haphazard violent events that can remove someone even against their will. This has happened often enough in my life and in others' that I can't rationalize it away. Rejection, abuse, neglect, death, and abandonment happen often.
Another point about the mother in the Intervention: when she and her husband started drinking, their high school daughter said she became their parent. They started lying to her and would drink so much she had to sometimes take them to the hospital or otherwise care for their wasted bodies. The way they rolled their eyes at her during the intervention when she would try to cut through to the real issues made that backwards relationship quite apparent. I do not understand how a parent can role-reverse like that. In fact it's not really role-reversal because even kids aren't supposed to lie and self-destruct. The counselor said that becoming an alcoholic, I would say giving up on responsible parenting no matter what the unfaithful distraction is, is the most selfish thing you can do, and that the youngest daughter was the most hurt by it. She nodded and cried. Throughout the whole show, I never saw any acknowledgment from them concerning how their actions affected her, but they did say the parents and children talked on the phone a lot after the rehab, which had just ended.
Father Hopko says we have to deal with our pasts. I know we believe that Christ through the Jesus Prayer and Sacraments will heal us, but I wonder if these blessings from the Church also allow the clarity and strength to look at our lives in perspective and to be able to see what He and the Saints personally can do and have done about it.
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