The Day My Buddha Burned - part seven

Integration

It seems that I didn’t truly die. The old ideas, the old me slowly came back and reformed about the body I was in. I became a ‘me’ again. I  never truly believed the stories, as I did before this grand awakening experience, but I have been blinded at times by the power of my patterns.

After the first initial break I started the long slow work of digging up the foundation stones of what I believed I was. I worked arduously, vigilantly and with continual dedication. I faced loss after loss. I held moments of clarity so bright it felt as though there was no going back, and then  finding myself suddenly  tripping on another layer of stone work a little deeper than the one before. Very well then. The sun does not rise all at once. It takes it’s time.

(And even this, ‘it takes time’ is a belief that needs careful scrutiny and is addressed accordingly in Myss’s Defy Gravity.)

I was 14 when I was left with my grandparents. I saw children as a burden. I saw them as annoying, cloying creatures that ate into your ‘real’ time. I certainly was not bought up to think of myself as a mother and I was not a female who was interested in children in any way shape or form.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered I was pregnant! At 28 I looked at the plastic stick with the blue markings and straight into the eyes of Responsibility and said I do. From that moment forward, I found myself wrapped in duty towards my unborn child, regardless of what those responsibilities meant to myself. I turned to my partner of three years and committed myself to a ‘family’ with all that it meant to me.

You know what is coming. The loss of my ideals. The second great crash of my belief system, after the loss of my father, was the loss of the ‘ideal family’.  I promised myself that no child of mine would grow up like I did. There wouldn’t be lies, secrets, strange rules, drugs, instability or confusion. There would be love, support, two stable parents, honesty, hugs and more ‘I love you’s’ than a child could count.

Before my son’s second birthday I was a single working mother in a foreign country. My son was handed between the kindergarten, a baby sitter and the Japanese family I lived beside. I came home one day to my son speaking Japanese better than I could and calling the woman of the house grandmother and I realized, perhaps erroneously, that I needed to get the hell out of there. I didn’t know the smallest thing about my son. I was too busy feeling depressed, alone, victimised and confused. I was suffering the death blow to my family values. The ideal family was pure fiction inside of my head. What I had was exactly what I didn’t want. And I was still alive and thriving and in retrospect, better off than I had been before. I had support, money and care for my child. But I couldn’t see it at all. I was only feeling the death toll of another belief system.

The father did not exist.

The family did not exist. 

And I was soon to find out, ‘the one’ did not exist.