Day# 355: Yay Winter Solstice

 # 355

All of my life I fought with my mother over the idea that one should or should not tell the truth about how one feels or is doing.  She said, it's nobodies' business, they don't want to hear about it anyway and one should just keep moving whether you feel well or not.  Now this is the woman who went into labor playing a concert at Woolsey Hall with me.  She finished the concert and drove herself an hour to her hospital.  This is the woman who on the same week that her husband died suddenly at the dining room table played the first flute part in the St. John's Passion for the Greenwich Philharmonic.  She felt one could always put on the face, and one should.  When I was 9 months pregnant and it was my first presidential election, she put me in the car with her and we marched into the voting place and she acted as though there was nothing wrong with her teen age daughter.  She was a remarkable woman.

But I felt that not telling the truth, that not being open about how one was feeling at the time made things worse, that it was secret keeping.  Secret keeping was bad and unhealthy both physically and emotionally.    I have thought that for the past 60 years or so, I name things, I don't put the mask on, I actively have learned to not put on the smile so I thought.

Today at my hearing I was told that I was intellectualizing everything and not expressing what really was, that I was not telling people I was in pain, I was not expressing what I needed in order to stay out of pain.  I was shocked, well of course I wasn't.  People don't lay that stuff on others and especially not in a professional environment, right, Ma?  I had to actively fight my mother's teachings today with all the strength I had in order to describe in plain English how I really am.  That I wake up 2 times a night in pain and have to move around to get relief.  That I cannot stand for too long, that a movie is usually too long for me to sit through, that I did not go to my family on Thanksgiving because of my pain level.  I don't tell people, I try to keep busy and, although I couldn't play the St John's Passion today, I couldn't even stand or sit through my own concert yesterday and had to get up and down, hopefully hidden well enough that I didn't disturb the audience too much.

Those ways of being, those benchmarks we use to compare ourselves to, those family cultural dos and donts are remarkably strong and strident.    I had an extremely difficult time expressing my pain today.  It was a hard hard day.

12/21/2010

The sunset was not this spectacular this year.  But it is the Solstice, and light will begin to return.  Hallelujah 

 This message is from Access Connecticut to Original Birth Certificates.  I have highlighted Lorraine's blog a few times, I do it again.

A BIG THANKS to Lorraine Dusky, founder of First Mother Forum and author of Hole in My Heart, a memoir, who endorsed Access Connecticut's legislative proposal. Ms. Dusky states she enthusiastically supports restoring the right of adult adoptees to obtain without qualifications a copy of their original birth certificates.

Please let Ms. Dusky know how much you support her leadership and contributions to the adult adoptee movement.

[Birth Mother] First Mother Forum
www.firstmotherforum.com
Email support group for birth mothers who relinquished a child during the closed adoption era (1945-1980). Poems, membership, letters, and testimonials are given.

 

Photo by Pop Stefanija

with Mary Cay Brass and Greenfield Harmony 12.20.15