On March 18 I marked my 48th year of embodied existence, at least on this go round. I believe I have lived many times before, in other bodies, under other names. Overall, who knows how many birthdays I have celebrated?
The re-birth I am celebrating this year relates to my nine-year-old self in this lifetime. When I was nine, my parents decided I needed to be quashed, that my spirit was too big. My noisy, enthusiastic, ecstatic embracing of life scared the crap out of them.
My mother struggled all her life with clinical depression. She repeatedly told me things like: “Never trust anyone, not even me” and “Life is nothing but misery dotted with a few fleeting moments of happiness.” My father had fits of barely controlled rage. He once punched a man so hard that he broke the man’s jaw. Once, when I was twenty one, he chased me down a flight of stairs and then stood inches from me, shaking his fist in my face.
My parents were never what you could call well-adjusted individuals. And who did they get as their first-born child? Me. I swear, I must have powered out of my mother’s womb on jet skis! I LOVED life, loved being alive. I still do, and I always will. I remember a photo of myself as a baby, grasping my father’s sweater in both chubby fists as I leaned back and stared at him intently. In another photo, I am lying in my crib on my stomach, raised up on my arms, just staring in the direction of the camera. My mother told me I used to do this for hours at a time.
I was eager to take part in the world, ready to learn as much about where I had landed as I could. Several years ago I wrote a song about this feeling, called “I am Seeking.” It contains the following lyrics:
When I was born, the poet inside me
opened up her steel-blue eyes.
She looked out upon this great, blue ball
and what a surprise.
She would never be the same again
after what she saw:
life with every gorgeous blemish
and fascinating flaw.
I believe I was born so close to the Spring Equinox for a reason: because I burst into this life the way life bursts into the world when winter gives way to spring.
At the age of nine, I’m sure I had begun to blossom, to strut my stuff as only a nine-year-old can. To my parents, the world was a frightening and dangerous place; a place where their dreams had been crushed. I’m sure they thought they were protecting me, keeping me from the same crushing disappointment they had suffered. So they decided to show me the error of my ways.
One day my father grabbed me and started tickling me, one of my very favorite things. I screamed and shouted and mostly laughed, all at the top of my lungs — I did nothing by half measures at the age of nine. As he tickled, he picked me up and carried me into another room. He lay me down on the rug and continued to tickle me for a while.
When at last he stopped, I heard a loud “click” from behind me, and then a whirring sound. I became aware that my mother was in the room, sitting on the couch. My father sat down next to her. When I sat up, I saw that between my parents was a tape recorder, one of those flat, black ones from forty years ago with the big red Record buttons. The whirring sound was a tape being rewound. When it stopped, my mother pressed Play.
There, on that day, in that never-to-be-forgotten living room, my parents played back to me my screams and shouts and laughter. And, as the tape shush-shushed around the spools, they told me I should be ashamed of myself. “That’s no way for a young lady to behave!” my mother said. “Can you imagine what people will think if you behave like that in public?” my father said.
What I remember most clearly is the profound sense of betrayal. They deliberately induced my behavior and then used it to condemn me. They did not love me the way I was.
This year, a few days before March 18, I realized that I have been hoping to get the same thing as a birthday gift every year for the last 39 years: my mother’s and father’s unconditional acceptance and love.
As you may imagine, I have had many very disappointing birthdays. Nothing, no matter how special and wonderful, has ever measured up. Until this year. 2007 is my year for true rebirth. I have let go of my nine-year-old’s stale hope that her parents could have been different, could have loved her more.
At 48, my life is replete with abundance, with flow, with magic. Close friends surround me, people who see the shadow and the light in me and love me complete. The more of myself I reveal, the more friends I make. The more of myself I reveal, the more power I reclaim. The more of myself I reveal, the greater my outpouring of creativity.
I have come home to the belief that I am enough. What better gift could there be?
~Love and Blessings,
Selene~
