Archive for category: Blog

The title speaks for itself, really.  But the experience is one to write on.  I was invited to an Ugly Sweater Party, of course assuming it was an Ugly Sweater Party.  In preparation for said party I realized I did not have in my wardrobe an Ugly Sweater.  Being that it is the Christmas season, my assumption was that the theme was based on the Holidays.  A reasonable deduction I thought as i found myself in a consignment store looking for just the right thing to wear.  As I walked into the store I immediately located the “ugly sweater” racks.  Hard to miss as they were located strategically at the front of the store.  I scrolled through the racks until I found just the right horrible one.  A tunic.  A busy one at that.  If you looked at it long enough, I am fairly certain it would have given you a headache.   Small little Santa’s dancing around  peppermint candies and candy canes on a green velvet background.  It was horrible and also three times my size.  As I walked to the register to pay the $10 it cost,  the clerk looked at me with eyes of wonderment, and I said I was going to an “Ugly sweater” party.  With that, her eyes relaxed acknowledging this hideous purchase.

The day of the party came.  As I  entered the house with my food preparations I  Immediately made contact with the hostess busying herself with last minute preparations.   Upon seeing her I immediately realized that this was not, in actuality, an  “ugly sweater” party, but a beautiful people “ugly sweater” party.   The differences you may wonder, are plentiful.   Her sweet little tunic was just that, sweet.   A simple sweater that looked like a Santa suit.  Sweet and  simple.  Although I knew SHE would not wear that in pubic, someone would.  Stylish and beautiful I thought of her as I stood there with my oversized tunic that was beyond an eye sore, when her husband walks in  with his reindeer sweater and says to me “that is scary ugly, like one of those girls on the tricycles in the movie The Shining.”   OH MY GOD I thought to myself, solidifying this was not an Ugly Sweater Party after all,  but a Beautiful People Ugly Sweater Party with sweaters bought from Nordstrom Rack!    I stood in the kitchen as others arrived  in their socially appropriate “ugly sweaters,”  while others decided not dress the part at all.    Cute and sweet outfits while I was there with an outfit that reminded people of a scene out of a Stephen King horror flick.  I could not help but feel like Bridget, in the first Bridget Jones Dairy movie where Bridget, played by Renee Zellwegar,  shows up to a party with a playboy bunny suit on because she has been told it was a costume party themed “Priests and Prostitutes,” until they changed the theme, but did not tell her.

“As usual,”  I socialized and maintained an evening of conversation with various people without them knowing that a feeling of foolishness persisted deep inside of me.  Later, at home, in another “as usual” moment I pondered why any of it would have mattered.  Why did it matter that I actually wore an “ugly sweater” to an “ugly sweater party?

On the surface it did not.  The party that is.  But the experience inside the party did matter.  The feeling of foolishness mattered.  Why?  It mattered because it made me feel vulnerable at a time of year when I feel vulnerable already.  A time of year where I feel exposed.  Much like a stray dog is exposed.  The Holiday Season.  The happiest time of the year thus says the Christmas carols.  Well, I am not sure who some of those Christmas songs are written for, but they are not written for my experience, and I am guessing many other people’s experience.

It is this time of year that exposes a lack of family for me.  Not that there are not physical people still alive, there are,  but the dynamics are so toxic for me that it makes it impossible for me to have relationships with some of them.  The hard lines I have had to draw for my own mental health have been hard ones to draw.   To some I am the mean one.  The one who won’t just “let it go.”  (a topic I have written on previously).   Choosing to be the person who refuses to place band-aids over the very evident, and  gaping problems in my family of origin has in some ways left me “alone.”  At least in the context of “them.”   But somewhere along the way I realized I had to choose “me.”   I had to consider my own mental and emotional health first, finally.  I had to detoxify from the toxicity.  Although I have no regrets in my decision for my own mental health, to choose otherwise would have been my demise, for whatever reason that night the party exposed some deeper set feelings.  I, the single one, the one with no kids, the one that wore “the ugly sweater” to the Ugly Sweater Party.   The “outsider” because of those choices that I had made both consciously and unconsciously throughout my life.  As I stood there socializing, the old, unsettled wound echoed throughout the cavities of my soul.  The voice that tells me I am not good enough, that I am not pretty enough, that I am “outside.”      I can not tell you why the voices paid a visit that night.  My hypothesis is that I generally feel vulnerable at this time of year and so I am susceptible to these most familiar old voices.  The season represents them in many ways.

There is much more to say on this subject and my feelings and why they surfaced that night and the hardship of this season in general for me and many others.  But for now I say that as hard as growth is, I would not go backwards.  And in moving forward I hope I can take my pain and make art out of it instead of it swallowing me up.  And in the words of Bridget Jones learn to like myself, just as I am.

Sometimes you have to unlearn to learn.  And change to change.

Melissa Hunt

I jotted this thought down awhile ago to remind myself that to be open to change requires of me a willingness to unlearn.  It requires of me a liquidness of my mind, body, and soul to be open to a process that may not be comfortable.  It may ask of me to dispose of patterns and styles of relating that may no longer be serving me. We get comfortable, I think, in patterns.  In systems.  In structures.  They give us a sense of security and safety, albeit a false sense, but a sense none the less that we are safe.  That we are secure.  Although systems and structures in and of themselves are not bad things.  If we use them to create for ourselves an inner security and an inner safety, we are placing a whole lot weight on something that could be taken out from under us in any given minute.  Leaving us susceptible.

Change is hard.  Particularly the internal kind.  The kind that requires of us an internal look at ourselves.  A journey most won’t, or refuse to take.  A journey that often requires of us a process of unlearning.  A stripping down of the old to make room for the new.  A journey that grounds us in the only way ground can be found, internally.  A journey that strips us down to the raw essence of understanding who we are.  When a person can do that kind of work, the true and hard work of essence, then, and only then, will a person have wings to fly.  Our wings are no longer clipped, or dependent upon things or people to define us, or create a false illusion of safety.  Like the hawk that soars above, we too shall soar.

Be grateful on Mother’s Day when it rolls around and you can celebrate without complications or confusions.  Be grateful on Mother’s Day if you can celebrate without a single trace of needing to do so out of duty or guilt, or because society and Hallmark have decided this is the day to celebrate mothers.   For those of you, stop reading.  This blog is not for you.  However, if one, or more than one of those emotions plus many more that I have not said apply to your story with your mother,  join me as I write a brief blog on Mother’s Day.

There are many wonderful mother’s in the world.  Mine, was not and is not one of them.  Long ago I stopped the celebration of Mother’s Day.  The reason:  Hallmark, ironically.  I remember the long ago day when I was somewhere in my mid-twenties and I went to the store to get my mother a card, not because I wanted too, but because I felt i had too. I scoured those shelves of Mother’s Day cards for what must have been well over an hour when it dawned on me that there was not a card on that shelf, or any shelf for that matter that remotely talked about what my mother and I’s sorted relationship was.  That was the moment that I stopped celebrating Mother’s Day.  That was one of my first, conscious and subconscious steps toward my emancipation from the clutches of my mother.

My journey with my mother is a sorted one.  So sorted I am writing an entire book about her, and my entire family conflict.  As usual I will not be celebrating my mother in any fashion.  In that moment a few decades back when I walked out of the store without a card I realized that to celebrate an institution that did not exist for me was incongruent to who I was a human being even though my mother’s emotional state still dictated me at the time.  I wish I could say that their hasn’t been guilt laced throughout my decision with the celebration of Mother’s Day and many other decisions she has forced me to make, because there has been.  Sometimes that feeling can still linger around, like an itch that won’t go away,  but that does not have anything to do with Mother’s Day per say, it has more to do with an overall feeling my mother wreaks of, and that is for someone to take care of her, not leave her or abandon her.   Feelings that I unknowingly took responsibility for at ages too young to remember.   The whole dynamic leaving me without any understanding of how it was I felt, only understanding what she felt.  In my journey to excavate my soul from my mother, which has been a lengthy one I must add,  I’ve come to understand a few things.  She forces those states of being on others taking zero responsibility for any of them, leaving me with no choice.  It is her, or it is me.    My emotional well-being can not and will no longer be dependent upon what she wants and what works for her.   It can’t be or there is no excavation of my soul.  There is no healing for me from having parented and not been parented.  I could write so much more here but I will not today.   As I stated earlier, I have an entire book on the subject of excavation of my soul with small sections being put out here on my blog.   What you need to know for  today and for tomorrow is that  I don’t celebrate an institution that did not exist for me.  I freed myself up from the celebration of a Hallmark Holiday decades ago and it has lead to bigger and deeper freedoms in my life because of that one small act of leaving a store without a card.

I am sorry for those of you in similar positions as I have been.  Positions where you have had to make hard choices and draw not only lines in the sand, but dig drenches so deep in relations with parents that that they can not get to you anymore.  That your health and well being are finally more important to you than theirs.  Our stories may differ,  but the end result might not be.  A severing of a relationship that no longer serves YOU!  One person’s truth might be another person’s mean.  Be mean if that is your truth.  To deny your truth denies your health and well-being.  I was a parent without being parented.  That was my truth.  Maybe it was yours.  If it was your truth celebrate you for having been a parent without being parented.  If you are a now a parent, celebrate you for being a parent to your children when you yourself did not have that experience! Honor what serves you this day and tomorrow as one more Mother’s Day rolls on by……

LISTEN and SILENT

are spelled with the same letters……..