Tag Archives: family

grateful that you are in this world

Image: colorful birds sitting on a wire, over the words Gratitude is a funny, complicated, and sometimes difficult thing. 

Thanksgiving can be a challenge for many reasons (not least of which the fact that the story many of us are told about the holiday — that it’s to honor the native peoples of the Americas, who kept the pilgrims/first colonizers from starving to death after settling here — wildly sanitizes and white-washes the true history of European peoples on this continent).

We are told this is a day to be with family– the message is everywhere around us, on television, on social media. But what happens when time with family is toxic for us, or harmful, or just leaves us feeling depressed and sad?

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remembering how to trust the ride

graffiti, a child sitting with her knees pulled up to her chest, hands on knees, chin on hands, next to the words Pat Schneider says that, when you go on retreat, you have to expect to sleep for the first three days — it’s your body coming down from its usual routines. It’s 9:30 pm now, late, and my body is tired, the good kind of tired, the tired that says I have spent the day in sun and movement, spent the day in or near water. Soon enough the rhythm of the waves will be inside me. Last year I spent so much time floating in and riding the sea that I felt that metronome of earthly energy in my body back on the beach, lying down to read, sitting at the table for dinner, climbing into bed. This is what I want to be able to give you.

Today I have thought a lot about my nephew. I thought: This is the closest I will get to parenting, this relationship with him — and then I wonder if that is true. I imagine walking with him along these beaches, pointing out small shells, pointing out crabs and urchins and tiny starfish, answering what questions I can and learning from him, too.

I’ve finished one (Andrew Vachss’ ShockWave) of the 11 books in my vacation pile this year, and have discarded another from that pile after only reading about half (Augusten Burroughs’ Magical Thinking) — it takes a lot for me to decide to quit reading a book; usually I’m the sort of reader who will just keep plowing through, searching for the good part, assuming that there must be some good part in there somewhere – I mean, it got published after all.

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all the girls were Princess Leia

Good morning good morning. I woke up this morning to a dark orange shard pushing up over the Oakland hills, announcing the arrival of the sun. Out front of the house, in the lucky garden, one of the nasturtium plants has opened a single, sunrise-colored flower. Welcome to May – what beauty have you seen already today?

Those Santa Ana winds knocked me out yesterday (do we call them Santa Anas up here in Northern California, or is that just a SoCal thing?) — I spent most of the day laid out on the couch, watching movies and resting. It’s as if those strong, hot winds just reached inside my bones, took all my energy away, and replaced it with feverishness and ache. Today I’m feeling better (though still taking things slow), grateful for slightly cooler weather, and am thinking about remembering.

Yesterday I watched a number of movies — Crooklyn, Ordinary People, Peggy Sue Got Married, and Red Hook Summer — while I was crashed out on the couch. Three were period movies — set in the 60s, 70s, and 80s — and the last is meant to be present day Red Hook, in Brooklyn. Miraculously, only one of these films showed any sexual violence, and it was the last one I might have expected. (I’m going to have to write more about Red Hook Summer in another post.)

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extra:ordinary – creating safe haven

(So many thanks to Crystal Loya for our next extra:ordinary project story (stories from our community of our recovery, resistance and resilience). Find out more about Crystal’s work at https://www.facebook.com/theladieswiththe.scars)

I myself being a survivor of childhood sexual abuse by a family member experienced first hand what life would be with no support in recovery after a traumatic situation. As a child at the age of eight as I lay in my bed sleeping before the following day of school I was awoken to a hand touching my body. Not being close to my mother and experiencing emotional abuse from her I had no were to turn. As the abuse progressed I was so scared as a child to speak out about the sexual abuse I kept to myself in fear of what else would be done to me. One day after coming out to my mother about the sexual abuse that was tacking place by an older sibling, the whole situation tore the family completely apart. There were no more family events, no talks about how to deal and the abuse had no fix, then come to find out other family members had been sexually abused by the same person. There was no help in our family home, and due to the lack of communication there was no healing as a family. At the age of fourteen I left home began employment and began to cross obstacles and the healing process alone, I never looked for comfort in my family nor did I ever see my violator again.. Being so young I had no clue how to even get help once I got older. At the age of seventeen I vowed to open a non profit one day to help survivors and children of sexual abuse. The safe haven would make individuals more aware of the American Statistical Association by the U.S department of justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics. I will follow out the plan for the five year goal that includes a safe haven for women and in the future an opening for male survivors. Childhood victims increase every year I will use my degree to pursue the safe haven and child sexual abuse.

(Want to share your story of resilience and resistance? See the call for contributions here!)

this family I’ve been dancing around the edges of

Good morning this Wednesday morning. Where I am, the sun is still behind the thick early fog; even the Oakland hills aren’t quite visible yet. The puppy is at my feet, chewing away at her toy tire, and my morning candle is a needed thing in this just-undusk.

What does family mean to you? Could it ever mean anything uncomplicated again?

This morning, I would like to bake bread: turn on the radio and dial the tuner to an NPR station, get out the hand mixer, and toss the oats and honey and yogurt and blackened bananas and nutmeg and salt and baking soda into a bowl — I’d like to be preparing something to feed your family. I’d like to prepare something to feed this little family that I am dancing around on the edges of. I’d like a slow morning, with laughter and investigation and silliness — everybody reading their own piece of the paper, sharing sections aloud, asking what the others think, while the puppy takes up her place on the living room carpet and disassembles her toy.

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her garden is my best hope

Good morning, you gorgeousness out there. It’s all sun and cool breeze and spring open outside the window, almost warm enough to take the notebook out write directly into morning. My mother writes a couple of days ago to tell me that it snowed back home in Nebraska — in May. It’s just not right. I look out at my garden while we’re texting back and forth, I think of the lettuces, the spinach and broccoli and herbs that we’re already harvesting; I think of the tiny green tomato taking shape on the vine. I remember how devastating it used to be, when I was living in Maine, when the crocus were well blooming and the redbuds had taken firm hold on the maples and I’d begun to trust that finally, finally, spring had arrived — my bones could relax. And then, boom, more snow.

I don’t tell my mom that I spent her snow day out in the sun. She has only just begun to set out her garden — has the potatoes in, is turning over the wintered soil to prepare the space for her many tomato plants, the okra and eggplant, all the annual flowers. Her garden is my best hope. It’s from my mother’s gardening that I learned about the longevity of faith, about persistence of effort, about doing it anyway. She kept a garden all the way through until the very end of the time with her abusive second partner; through all his control and rabid mania, through his sobbing manipulations, through the spending that forced her to work more and more hours trying to reconcile the books and accounts that he refused to be responsible for, through the hostility and hatefulness that he forced her to refer to as love, through all the behind-closed-doors horror that she has never described to me,  she found time to hold on to her connection to the earth, to find solace in a thumb so green she could lift life from a toxic wasteland (which, it turned out, she would have to learn to do).

I don’t know how late into that marriage she kept her garden. I don’t know if her tomatoes were putting out fruit when he was arrested for incest and child sexual abuse, and she was arrested alongside him as an accessory after the fact. I don’t remember, just now, what time of year it was, and I’d been away from home for a few years: he may have driven her away from her garden, the way he’d driven her from cooking and baking and writing, the deep loam of her creative life.

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sister stories that continue

Good morning — it’s dark out there, and I can hear the helicopters. Or maybe that’s just my old refrigerator readying for takeoff.  I’m not awake enough to say for sure.

Not enough sleep last night and here I am awake this morning into the blog instead of the notebook, wanting to talk about sistering and change. This weekend I heard a story about a long waiting, about barrenness and believing for a long time that there will only be barrenness, that nothing (after trauma) can bear fruit — and finding, after a long waiting, that there is a flower where before there were only bare branches; finding an orchard of beauty to feed you where for years before you had found only wishes and loss.

This will be short this morning, as there’s a lot to do today, beginning with some rest and replenishment time. This weekend my sister came to see me and we were safe together. We held space with and for one another. After years of being afraid that we would never be healed enough to be close again, I felt comfort and ease in her presence (and in my body when we were together). This is so deep and new that I can’t quite find words for it yet — what’s new is the part inside me understanding that we are ok. Not that we will be ok — that we are. Continue reading

can we heal what family means?

Katie Ward Knutson, Metro II

Good morning on this quiet and sunny Tuesday morning. How is your heart speaking to you in this moment? Are there words or stories that your fingers are ready to unfurl onto the page? Did your dreams bring offerings that you’d like to be able to remember? I’m slowly, reluctantly, moving through my stretches, and feeling the resistance build in my shoulders. I don’t want to have to stretch before I write, and yet that’s the body I inhabit right now. What happens when we let ourselves be exactly as we are? What energy gets released when we stop trying to pretend like we’re already someone or somewhere else?

Today I am full of questions and mourning and loss. Today I am wondering about family, how we learn to exclude ourselves from it, and how we unlearn the lessons about family that came to us when we were children: that family is not safe, is a site of abandonment and/or control, and is better shunned at all costs. Today I don’t know how to participate in family, and am feeling that place of separation and longing. Continue reading

the calculus of resilience

graffiti of green balloons, a person grabbed on to one, next to the words "schnapp dir auch einen!"

(grab one, too!)

In my dream I had signed up for a tennis tournament, even though I 1) didn’t have any clothes to wear for such a thing, and 2) didn’t actually know how to play. I put off and put off letting them know that I couldn’t participate, and wasn’t at all sure that I wouldn’t take my turn, let my ass get kicked, and then just be done with it. In my dreams, as in my real life, I often like to wait and see what’s going to happen.

I am moving through a small depression here, one that has allowed me to rally for workshops and love, but still sinks down into my bones when I’m alone, that brings with it the messages of persistent failure and sadness. I had such big plans for the months of November and December, such bright visions for the first part of 2013, and now everything has changed. I’m overwhelmed by the work emails and phone calls that are waiting for me — it’s almost time just to wipe the decks clean and start over — and I’m missing the friends and community I’ve been mostly out of touch with since the back spasm at the beginning of November. Physically, I am worlds better than I was even a week ago, and I can see light at the end of this tunnel — but that means it’s time to get back in the saddle, and that still hurts.

This morning, however, my little orange apartment actually feels like Christmas. There are bunches of wrapped packages of cookies, homemade xmas cards, wrapping materials (both new and saved/scavenged), a small rosemary bush snipped into the shape of a fir tree (draped with small Tibetan prayer flags), and a few cards from friends and family. Continue reading

honoring what’s died

graffiti of skeletons holding handsThis morning it’s hard to get out of the nest. The candles don’t pull me, and I lie there cuddled in with the words from a maybe dream. In my dream, my writing persona had two parts, each with its own name. In my dream I knew each of their names. Something like Lillian and Ruth, but I don’t think that’s right. One side was more linear, or performative, the side that sat down to generate words for public viewing, the side that rafted the writing like an editor. The other part was the organic side, the part that let words flow, the part that tapped into the long seam of imagery and possibility living somewhere inside our psyche and let the writing flow from there — the side for whom writing is a swirl, a vein, an immersion, a mess.

This morning I am thinking about the personae, the selves, and the dead — and I want to know how we can honor all of it. Continue reading