Shame Colors Everything: As Does Love & Kindness
Part 3
Shame colors everything. I was brought home from the hospital into a house built on a generational swamp of shame.
How could my mother give me what I needed in order to thrive when she had been born and raised in the swampland? When she was raised by a mother who had only hinted that she loved her until the night before she died? When my great-grandmother was committed to the “insane asylum” four times during her lifetime, leaving my grandmother without a mother to care for her?
(See Shame: Companions in the Swamp)
My mother grew up unsure of her mother’s love. Unlike her, I know my mother loved me and she always told me so. I know it was never her intention to brand me with the badge of shame. And yet when the torch was passed to me, I picked it up.
All my life I have felt like I’ve lived in a perpetual game of tug-of-war. I’ve tried my best to get out of the swamp, but as soon as I have a foot on dry land I get sucked back into the muck. This has happened over and over again. I risk coming out of the swamp only to be pushed back into it. As a child I felt so homely and dirty. On a day when I dared to show up feeling feisty and free spirited, my parents would tell me I was getting too big for my britches. This constant battle is exhausting and it can feel easier to just stop struggling and stay in the swamp.
Everyone is dodging life’s slings and arrows. If you are born into a family whose house is built on solid ground, a person is often able to shrug them off more easily. However, for a child born into a swamp the arrows can strike deeply, sucking us back down into the muck.
When jumping roping at recess time in fourth grade a mean girl changed the words of the jump roping song from I’m a Little Dutch girl Dressed in Blue, to I’m a Little Dutch Dressed in Rags. It was devastating for me. It confirmed that the outside world was able to see the truth about me. That I was a girl from the swamp. A girl raised on solid ground might have better equipped to shrug it off and forget about it after a day or two. It doesn’t stick to her, haunting her for decades like it did me.
Somewhere along the line I began to see perfectionism as my ticket out of the swamp. I found myself striving to be perfect, and failing miserably. I was never perfect enough to be a perfectionist. Receiving a grade of 3.0 in a college class would send me into a tailspin. And yet I discounted all of the 4.0 grades that I received.
I can hide it from the world, but I can’t hide it from my heart. My heart knows. I can appear bright and shiny on the outside. However, the ooze of the swamp can make its presence known when I least expect it. I can smell it. I can feel it in that closed off spot deep in my body. It’s always telling me that I’m not enough.
Outwardly I have a built a pretty good life. I’m in a long-standing marriage with a great guy; we raised four children. I have plenty of grandkids to play with. I’ve had interesting jobs and traveled to places that, as a child, I never dreamed I would see. And yet, when I stop all of my day’s doings, in the quiet of the night I can feel lonely and isolated. This is especially true after an evening of socializing when I find myself rehashing everything I said, or did. I never quite feel at peace.
Why is this? I’ve come to realize that it is because I’m not being kind to myself. I’m focusing on swamp sludge instead of giving my attention to the sweet-smelling lotus flowers that grow out of the sludge in the swamp. I’m not paying attention to the unconditional love that is always there. The unconditional love that is in the swamp, on the solid ground, and as I came to learn…even in prisons.
I learned to see that love and beauty exists in every person when I was asked to facilitate a workshop on women’s leadership training at a state prison. I didn’t know what to expect. What I found was a cadre of amazing, lovely women.
Lunchtime on the first day at the prison is forever etched in my memory. We sat, a group of us, at a table in the dining hall eating egg salad sandwiches on homemade bread. (Thank you inmate who made the bread, whoever you are.) Aside from eating with sporks and not being free to leave the building, I could have been sitting at a table in my local café getting to know a new group of women.
Some of the women shared with me what they had done that led to their incarceration, others didn’t. After an initial curiosity, I found that it didn’t matter. Working with these women, I grew to love and care about them and it didn’t matter why they were there. Most were battered in spirit from childhood. I never met a woman there who hadn’t been physically, sexually, and/ or emotionally abused growing up. I could have so easily ended up in prison with these women.
These women taught me a life lesson when I worked with them on a digital storytelling project called Shared Straight. As the project was wrapping up we were headed into the holiday season. I was feeling pressure from the prison administration to finish up the project. I was feeling self-imposed pressure at home to prepare for the holidays; wishing away the season before it even began.
As the season drew closer the women’s holiday cheer increased. They were busy creating decorations out of the limited materials at their disposal. Hanging the decorations in seemingly every available space, sometimes in places where the guards would require that they remove them. Decorations on your cell door window is a definite no-no. If these women could find holiday cheer in an often-cheerless place surely, I could too.
I learned that I have choices. I can fill that hole with the story that I’m not good enough, or I can fill that space with love and kindness.
If I can feel unconditional love and kindness toward the women in prison, surely, I can feel it for myself and send unconditional love and kindness to those who came before me, including the woman to whom I owe my very existence. To the women in the swamp. My mother, my grandmother, my great-grandmother and all of the women who came before.
For me feeling love and kindness was the first step out of the swamp.
To be continued…
With Love & Healing Energy by the Pond,
Laurel
