In november  when I started this blog experiment,  I was able to point through words to the pain that was playing out in my daughter’s heart.  I didn’t have solutions;  I didn’t know what was going to happen.  While we were trying to find experts and work with their solutions to such things, I also leaned heavily on whomever and whatever I could find that could point me to the deeper thread of this difficulty.

A word like difficulty doesn’t match what I am trying to say.   This raging time was messy, embarrassing, painful, relentless, hopeless in appearance.  Scenes of terror and rage played out in cars, parking lots, closets, mirrors, public places:  scenes of thrashing, smashing, ugly pain at top of the lung out of control hystaria.

My daughter had stepped beyond my reach.  I had never been one for Freudian theories, but truly, as the miraculous visit to a sane Psychiatrist revealed, a classic case of Transference.  Freud did know a few things.   🙂

Eden was unable to rage at her father because he could not listen nor understand her.  He also was not a safe person with whom to work things out.  He has a delusion of who he is, and in this insanity, he is unable to parent, especially in her crisis.  So she took the full weight of her rage and placed it solely on herself and me – the two  most critical  people who could help save her.  She took her rage to the brink of destruction over and over.  It felt like standing on the edge of the grand canyon, while she tied a rope around my waist and proceeded to jump and take me with her into the abyss.

We would resolve and come together but the relief would be short-lived when a word, a look, a call from her father would set it off all over again.

I  am putting words to this chapter, not to relive the past, but to recognize where we are today in contrast to the place we were  in November.  Now I can look it full in the face because we have moved into a new space.  I also visit from my now place on the path with assurance to the frightened me and to any  frightened souls of anywhere where the road gets tough.

Eden has rounded more corners than I can count without the aid of the pills they wanted to prescribe.  She has beat the diagnosis they wanted to pin on her, marched into her rage and out again.  She now relies on her own strength and the strength I am so willing to lend as needed.  This was not the only path through – it is the one that Eden chose.

I am grateful that I walk this earth to be here to see that hope can blossom out of hopelessness  in our little  story.

On our walk yesterday, she stopped to watch a worm making its way across the cement sidewalk in the noonday sun.  I asked if she was going to pick it up to help it not fry as so many worm corpses had done all around where we stooped.

She said no, i want to watch it, to see if it makes it.

And so we watched it make its way.  I was doubtful it would survive. I was wondering if we were just going to watch it die. But wiggle it did and eventually it slithered into the clean line of  grass on the other side, free from the relentless sun, free from the army of hungry ants,  finally burrowing into the cool dirt.

I expressed  dismay while she shared her knowing that it would make it all along.

Here now –  I express my dismay and knowing that exist side by side in me.  What we walk through!  How we help each other!

thank you. thank you. thank you.

Frying on the sidewalk or sinking into the earth, wiggling our worm bodies in joy – we make our way.

Tags: gratitude, Impermanence, Love, parenting, suffering