My newborn self. While I was finally drawn into this guided journey, there was once again resistance to sitting with my newborn self, the image and reality of me as a newborn. The pain I’ve always known then is softer now, less shrill in my awareness, but I was still hesitant to return. Or to even imagine I could know how to return to these earliest years.
I was born to a mother suffering quietly in a foreign country (to her). She had married my father nearly seven years before, early 1960’s, and he became a doctor for the Peace Corps, to settle his draft status. With a newborn in tow–my sister–they landed in Tegucigalpa Honduras for two years of service. I arrived about three months before we all returned to the States.
However one might understand these things, I arrived as the old-soul, deep-feeling being I am, immersed in her suffering. I took on her pain, as any sponge would. Sitting in the flow of words for this guided journey, I became aware of this pattern in me, receiving what I know not how to NOT receive. A sense of injustice and grief. Some anger.
Defenselessness is a poignant word for a friend of mine this year–aiming to live open-hearted, is her language for this. I’m terrified of this word, because I arrived defenseless in the fear and pain that was a part of my mother’s experience, being a city girl in a strange country (for her). She’s never really talked about it at all, but as my mothering-self feels into the energies? A lot of sadness, pain, fear. A choiceless choice in me to receive it all…
Departing for the States was therefore a long anticipated desire. A young mother with two infant-toddler daughters traveling internationally in the late 1960’s? She knew nursing would be too challenging, so she weaned me at three months, onto formula.
The visceral realities of my newborn self, therefore, became immersion in pain and fear, followed by a deeply felt abandonment.
No wonder I have refused holding infants for most of my life. No wonder I resisted returning to newborn selfhood, even for a metaphorical journey opening here in my mid-fifties.
I smile today at the work I have already done here… For nearly a year, about eight years ago, I had an infant-toy strapped to my steering wheel of my car. Those brightly-primary-colored toys that offer rattles and rings? A little elephant…which invited me to know some delight, amusement, as my newborn self. The best was when I would rest at a stoplight, look over and see another driver befuddled at this infant toy on my steering wheel. I was learning to hold my newborn self how I wish she had been held.
Yet the pattern learned regularly requires repatterning. I regularly need to practice boundaries I don’t know how to keep. I always need to discern whether I can or want to take on the emotional experience of another, so to feel safe, connected…or discern that my emotional gift is NOT receiving that emotional energy. Trusting the other to do his/her/their own work better without my receiving any of it.
And tend to my sense of outrage and injustice that every mother naturally bequeaths all her untransformed emotional-spiritual work into her children. It’s the lineage-wound-and-healing realities of being human, in a long line of human beings. This inheritance has made me the healer and leader I am, so I cannot imagine life any differently. But some part of me still feels the anger.
A work in progress am I, newborn into little one.
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