Reflections On My Sister

My first memories include my sister. She was 16 months old when I was born. In my memories she is “there” for me in a stabilizing--offering--security kind of way. I am depending on her so I don’t have to feel as though I am alone. I am depending on her to talk for me. I know she gets along with everyone and makes people feel at ease through her conversations and I need her to do that for me. I need her to protect me. I don’t feel like the adults are in control and I need her.

I was an incredibly shy little girl and not a happy child. My mother was erratic and angry a lot of the time. Often, she was angry with me. This scapegoating could take the form of silence or ridicule depending upon the moment and situation. Quite frequently, her rage spilled out against our father—especially at night after we were in bed. It was not unusual for my brother, sister and me to be huddled under a table during these tyrannous outbursts.

I shared a room with my sister. I know this annoyed her. It was “her” room. I don’t know how I knew this or why it wasn’t “our” room. But, it was hers. Every night I peed in the bed and then I cried. I would cry and cry until our father would come in and get me. Then I would go to sleep in my parent’s bed and my sister was left to sleep in the peed-in bed. This was very aggravating to her! I knew this at a very deep level. But, I didn’t stop peeing. Eventually we got twin beds. I don’t think this made my sister any less dismayed but perhaps once the quiet was restored and I was not there she might have felt relief.

It seemed to me, as I grew older and my memory came into sharper focus, we were quite different from one another. I liked to play with my friends, climb trees, play ball with the boys, make mud pies, work in the yard, garden. I enjoyed doing anything active outside. My sister preferred being inside designing and making elaborate doll clothes and watching TV.

The differences between my sister and I seemed to widen as we hit adolescence. By high school the tension between us was obvious and uncomfortable. This didn’t deter my feelings of needing her for security. It is easy now to remember my grief when she went to college and I was left alone and unprotected for the first time in my life. I was outwardly calm and collected but inwardly I was lost and terrified.

It took me many years to work out my dependency issues with my sister. My "mother issues" were complicated enough and challenging to unravel. It hadn't felt as though my actual mother had been present to me and my needs so I sought and received "positive" nurturing from my sister. I had to redefine myself and reorganize my entire way of thinking and identity to relieve the anxiety I felt. Only when I had stabilized and grounded myself inside was it possible to actually begin to let go of the dependency. We both struggled as adults to develop a healthy relationship with each other.

Only in the last 20 years have I really gotten to know my sister for who she truly is. Imagine my shock to discover how alike we are! She is the one person on the planet who really knows me. She knows without my saying a word what I am feeling and what is going on with me. When we are together, we don’t even have to talk to know what is going on with the other or our response to those around us. Our taste is similar and other than her being a “girly-girl” and me maintaining my “tom-boy” persona, we are two peas in a pod.

I haven’t seen my sister in over two years. I am preparing for a visit over the holidays. I am SO excited! Loving someone your entire life and then being able to share quality time as adults can be incredibly sweet. It has taken both of us being willing to "do the work" on our low functioning childhood and the unhealthy parts of our relationship to reach the point we are now. I am grateful to both of us for our tenacity, courage and strength. We have a lot to celebrate!

COMING HOME

While I had a smattering of magical moments growing up, mostly playing at my great aunt Leonie’s and with my best friend, I wouldn’t look back and consider myself a happy child. I grew up in a small town of 800 people in North-East Kansas. I wandered freely there because I knew everyone and the environment of the community offered safety not found today.

I remember hearing several sayings that puzzled me: “Home is where the heart is” and (of course, like Dorothy being from Kansas) “There’s no place like home”. In the isolation I felt and without having the reference of a larger world, these sayings didn’t mean much to me. More importantly, even though I have some fond memories from that time, what I remember most wanting was to leave.

As children do, I took my home for granted. I lived in the same house for 18 years. My mother used to tell us the story of seeing the house being built when she was 3 years old. She thought it was a church. As endearing as her story was, it was not my experience. My home was filled with too much underlying stress and that was particularly challenging for me, as I was an extremely sensitive child. I was also the scapegoat in the family so I felt in some way that I was causing the disharmony.

Ours was a fairly highly functioning low functioning family. We looked great to the public but behind the closed doors of our home it was dysfunctional with all the rules that go along with it. I could tell from going to my friends’ houses which were calm and supportive that something wasn’t right at home but, of course, the first rule I learned was to keep silent.

I had fantasies about how my life was going to be when I left home. I made up stories about it and acted them out with my friend. It was comforting to imagine having a healthy scenario for home. The more I tried to create a more harmonious place in my mind, the more difficult it became to settle for what was then my reality. By the time I was a teenager I found myself feeling agitated, irritable and angry most of the time.

I left home with lofty hopes of finally being able to live the life I wanted. It was not so easy as I had imagined. College gave me structure and an artificial form to live in but I still spent most of the time in the same turmoil I had felt growing up. I just couldn’t seem to get my feet under me.

Two patterns emerged that repeated themselves over and over throughout my life. One was to develop a relationship that would help ground me and make my life “feel” more stable. The other was to look for places to live and spend excessive amounts of energy fixing them up so that they would feel like my image of “home”.

One day in my early twenties I had a startling revelation: I realized that I had to take responsibility for myself. This might seem like an obvious thing, but it had not been in my consciousness. I wasn’t sure what it meant? All I knew was that it scared me to think about it.

In the beginning my therapist gently took me back through the dark feelings from my childhood. With guidance I began to develop and understand the skills of having feelings. It began to emerge that a major difference between being an adult and being a child when it comes to feelings is perspective. It is much easier to see what is going on with the objectivity of an adult.

As I worked on myself, the satisfaction of reclaiming my life gave me such confidence I knew I could never turn back. From that moment, I have been on my inner journey. I know that what goes on in my outer world is reflected in my inner feelings. So, if I want to change what is happening on the outside, I must work from the inside out.

It took me years working within this framework before I came to the conclusion that my inner self was trying very hard to discover what “home” meant. Childhood had given me images that were superimposing over my present and I was experiencing the distortions from the past. After working with the symbol of “home” through many different creative modalities, it began to become clear that the home I was yearning for was inside. The more work I did on myself the brighter and calmer my life became. I recognized that the people and places I had tried to find as an adult for my stability were simply impulses from my healthy inner self, yearning for safety, empowerment and support.

Now I finally understand the meaning of those sayings I heard as a child. Home is where the heart is. Tethered securely to my Self, I feel strong, secure and confident in my inner home. It is a relief to know that “home” is inside. Not looking outside for home means that I can avoid a lot of pain, disappointment and heartache. It really is true: there is no place like home!

HEAVEN AND EARTH

From the time I was a small child I was fascinated with the night sky. Living out in the country in the Midwest offered me a magnificent view of the mysterious worlds beyond.

It was not unusual to hear the adults in my tiny farming community communing about the heavens. They knew that the heavens controlled the weather. Weather was their survival and it was mentioned in every conversation I ever heard as a child. Later I realized that their comments about the weather were actually outward descriptions of internal feelings. For instance, if someone felt good, they would talk about a day that was sunny. If someone was sad, rain would work its way into the conversation. They religiously planted and harvested by the moon, and consulted the predictions in the Farmers’ Almanac more frequently and reverently than any other source.

My curiosity about the night sky was further piqued by the stories my grandfather told me about the constellations of the stars. I loved discovering which ones were visible depending on the time of year it was when we were out watching. I found it interesting to imagine children in other parts of the world seeing constellations that were not in our view.

The Big Dipper felt at times like my best friend because it seemed to always be waiting for me and I always found it. I became completely attached to the North Star as a guide that would let me know where I was and show me the way home.

Without a doubt, my early bonding with the stars was an extremely important reference point for me. The stars were SO FAR AWAY! It was their influence on my feelings, my sense of self, my assurance of protection and safety and consolation whenever I needed it, that established within myself a foundation for being on the earth.

During the daytime you would find me sitting high up on a branch in a tree watching the clouds and trying to imagine where the stars were. The big fluffy cumulus clouds, prevalent in that part of the world, would slowly float by against a brilliant blue sky. Their shapes took on the forms of horses, towers, dragons, dogs and cats, and a myriad of other things. It was peaceful up there and I felt like I was part of the tree, the sky, the breeze and myself.

I started observing my house and family from up in the tree. The drama I was a part of when I was with them induced feelings of frustration, anger and being embroiled in an enormous muddle. There were so many expectations that I felt like a dog yanked up by a short leash. There were many ideas about who I was, what I was to do (and not do), and how it was to be perfectly done. There were the things I was allowed to share with those outside the family and many things I was to keep secret. (This paragraph would not have been allowed!) When I was with my family, I felt deep pain, alone, unsupported, unsafe, and not seen or heard. I had no choices, no chance to be or even know myself, and a lot of confusion from what I intuitively picked up of what the others were doing and not talking about. Living in that drama made me an extremely unhappy little girl.

More and more often I turned to the trees, the clouds and the stars for more honest feedback and comfort. One day, musing up in a tree, I realized that I was compartmentalizing my chaotic outer life and my more comfortable inner life. This was what was creating a feeling of being split in two.

That very day I began to observe myself when I was with my family from a different perspective. What I witnessed when I was around them was that I took on their anger, fear, and dysfunction as a way of protecting myself from having it targeted at me. When I took it on and expressed it, at least I had something I could do with the displaced undertow. This gave me the illusion that I had some control. I realized the feelings I was taking on were theirs. In contrast, my feelings, especially when I was in my favorite tree, were peaceful, happy and most importantly, mine. I felt better when I was away from their quagmire.

My predicament was disheartening. I had more awareness and understanding of the split between my two worlds but only questions and no answers as to how to harmoniously bring them together. I had an inside life and an outside one. I had unknowingly begun the search that put me on the path of my life journey to resolve what I later identified as core life lessons. It took many years to appreciate that it was my discomfort that gave me the motivation to have the courage to keep going even when the path got rocky. I had become a seeker.

I began to become acquainted with my inner self. When I was quiet and away from all the hubbub I could hear my own thoughts, feel my own feelings, and dream my own dreams. These emerged from my inner self and came to me whenever I listened. The first thing I had to do was to separate the entanglement of the two worlds so that I could experience and discover my own true self. From that early age on my life has been about trying to establish a strong connection with my inner self and integrate my day-to-day outer life with the soothing, creative inner source that I experience as connected to everything.

Through the years the Universe did its part helping me create just the right complicated situations and people to learn these life lessons and explore and discover my personal core beliefs. Life was no longer just a big soap opera happening to me from the outside. I began to see how I created the same story over and over again. As the lessons spiraled back again time after time, I realized that even though the people and situations were the same while looking different, my response was same. Oh, no! The common denominator was me! There was nowhere to turn but inside to find out how I was creating these reoccurring patterns.

I began to grow my inner life. I sought out wise friends and drew inspiring therapists to guide me. Books jumped out at me in bookstores and shed light on my queries. I explored the beliefs of different religious traditions, spiritual practices, poetry, psychology, mythology, and nature. The more I learned the less I felt like I knew. My curiosity drove me onward and I began to feel more confident and comfortable with my life.

Every day seemed like an amazing unfolding of myself. Synchronistic happenings in my outer world began to mirror my newly emerging inner life. People and opportunities, aligned with my more expansive sense of self, were drawn to me like a magnet. The meaning of the awareness I had realized while up in the trees as a child was becoming more clear. I liked it. My life was emerging according to my own creation, not haphazardly happening to me. I was astonished to experience my outer life working together so harmoniously with my inner life and authentic self. I was finding joy in both worlds as they imperceptibly began merging into one. The length and breadth of Heaven and Earth was integrating into a seamless whole.

Today, my connection to the stars, clouds, sky and my inner self are present in every moment I am creating, and plays an integral part of my life. My relationship with Spirit and the fond memories from childhood are now mine, both in the quiet times and the busy ones.

The next time there is a starry starry night or a big full moon, you can bet I’ll be there looking up with a smile on my face. Maybe you’ll be looking, too? We can experience the magic together.