 |
| My 92 year old mother and me, September 3rd, 2018 |
It
was a beautiful summer day when I returned home from the Women of the 14th
Moon Ceremony on Monday, September 3rd. This is a women's ceremony that I
have been participating in since 1999. Every year women gather from near and
far over Labor Day weekend on beautiful land outside Portland to honor
ourselves and each other in all our life stages —
maiden, matron, and elder. Especially honored are Elder women, a process
which has had an incredible impact on how I experience growing older. This
ceremony has been one part of what has transformed me and the life I am blessed
with living today. (Please go here for more information on the ceremony: http://www.womenofthe14thmoon.com/.
For those not already participating, please also let me know if you are
interested in more information and/or attending next year's ceremony.)
Each
ceremony has changed me, healed and expanded me, and connected me more deeply
with myself, with other women and all beings, with Spirit and the Sacred
Feminine, and with our Mother Earth. There are so many of us whose lives have
changed from the inside out through the spiritual process of healing with and
honoring of other women in ceremony... In this moment my heart experiences this
bittersweet but soulful gratitude for the many blessings of this ceremony which
have supported and blessed me and countless other girls and women, from 11 to
93, in awakening to our greater wholeness and the Divine thread connecting us
all...
This
year was especially tender-strong and heart-opening through our Intercessor's
intention to focus on the preciousness of our being and on circles of
connection, with both being antidotes to isolation and often long needed
healing. During different parts of the ceremony, we were given the opportunity
to speak about our relationship with and experience of our preciousness. One
young maiden spoke unhesitatingly about how we are all born precious, it's just
who we are. Many other maidens and women of all ages struggled to one degree or
another with the question, with some expressing how the thought of being
precious is something foreign and unfamiliar. There was such a palatable sense
of sadness and longing. Others identified that they found connection with preciousness
through activities that they engaged in, leaving space for wondering about the
preciousness of our being that is found outside of anything we may do.
A
common theme expressed in a variety of ways was how the ground of preciousness
for so many of us today does not emerge from a place of deep-rootedness. To one
degree or another, many of us had or are struggling with experiencing ourselves
as precious. And, of course, what I have learned over the years is that if we
are alive and breathing, for most of us there is always more work we can do to
uncover and address the obstacles to our loving ourselves and each other and
Life more deeply.
 |
| Outside the ceremonial arbor of this year's Women of the 14th Moon where over 100 women gather in ceremony |
*****
There
is a memory I hold of the first time that I was told that I was precious. I was
in my early 30's and a woman therapist was holding me during our counseling
session as I cried tears of grief. And then Sharon Sun spoke and told me that I
am precious. What a raw, heart-breaking-open experience... It is one
thing to know in my head that I had a crazy mother who was incapable of loving
me and who certainly never communicated that I am precious, and it is another
thing altogether to feel that loss. It is one thing to know something,
and another to truly know it in our depths. And here I was, in my 30's
and hearing for the first time what I had needed to hear and know from
from the time of my birth... but had not received. So many layers of grief.....
Today
I understand that my mother could not give to me or to my twin brother or to
anyone what she had not first been given herself. My mother's remembrance of
her mother was that she lay on a couch in the sunroom with a washcloth over her
forehead. She was not to be disturbed. My grandmother communicated through what
was likely her own paralyzing depression that my mother's needs were not seen,
were not valued, were not going to be responded to, and did not matter. Once
sober myself, I also realized that my grandmother had been alcoholic and also
chronically critical and shaming toward my mother, her only child. My
well-meaning and sometimes very loving but sometimes scary German grandfather's
motto, which he laughingly joked about to my brother and me when we were
children, was how he used to say to our mother "tell her once or give
her a lickin'." I asked my mother in recent years if she ever got that
"lickin," and my mom replied that she was always good. So,
no...
And
thus were planted within my mother the opposite seeds of preciousness — those of not being seen or valued, of shame
and fear, abandonment and ruptured attachments, rage and self-loathing. Such
great loss and trauma was ameliorated and numbed out by my mother through the
cultivation of a narcissistic false self who is always good, always perfect,
always the best. And, as an adult, everything and everyone around her was
expected to mirror her reality and her expectations of perfection. After all,
to my mother we were more than reflections of her, we were experienced as not
being separate from herself. So when one of us would do something "wrong"
or "bad," for my mother it was like her left arm was out of control.
Anything other than feeding her narcissistic needs and mirroring her demand for
perfection was simply intolerable.
My
brother failed at birth — according to
what one of my paternal aunts witnessed in our mother — when he "wasn't born perfect." My aunt told me 30
years ago that John had been born with some form of a treatable condition (I
don't know what) that was not treated because our mother refused to admit that
there was anything wrong. But everyone reportedly knew otherwise. John also
rebelled and acted out from the earliest age and I remember that my brother
went from kindergarten into the first grade "on probation." He'd
pinched our kindergarten teacher and done other "naughty" things and
spent a lot of time in the "thinking chair." I went the opposite way
and did my best for years to be the perfect object for my mother to show off.
Of course, that was unsustainable. Plus I grew into my mid-teens and became
both rebellious (I'd been sitting on a mountain of grief and rage which had to
begin to finally erupt), and also competition for the attention my mother
required to sustain herself. And all of the attention was to go to her. My
mother had been compelled to feed off of the life forces of all of us around
her.
So
none of us felt very precious. We were a family living in the wealthy Detroit
suburb of Grosse Pointe. And we were starving to death.
 |
| With my parents, Nancy and Jack, and brother, John. Christmas 1968 |
*****
Author
of Circle of Stones (https://www.amazon.com/Circle-Stones-Womans-Journey-Herself/dp/1880913631)
and psychotherapist Judith Duerk was among the earliest of those I adopted to
help support me in the process of healing the loss of my mother and myself and
more. In the early winter of 1990 I'd read Circle of Stones and had been
deeply blessed a few months later with participating in May in my first retreat
with Judith. Then on Christmas Eve of 1990 my phone rang and it was Judith
calling me from her home in Maryland. I was just stunned to hear from her. She
told me that she had called information, had gotten my phone number, and that
she was moved to call me because she knew that I was a young mother of three
little sons who would be experiencing Christmas without hearing anything from
my own mother. She knew that my mother, because of her severe mental illness,
was refusing to have any contact with me or with her only grandchildren.
So
Judith just called. She didn't use the word precious, but her simple and
generous act of kindness, compassion, and caring wove its way into my heart.
And I had yet another glimpse of the truth that I had not known — that I am precious, I matter, I am worthy of
unconditional love and caring.
So many of us grew up without the secure attachment and
consistent love and tenderness we needed to flourish and grow into our
authentic wholeness. To one degree or another, this initial abandonment
precipitates the abandoning of ourselves. Rather than learning to identify and
meet the true need, we develop addictions — substance and non-substance alike —
and false and fragmented selves, and we engage in image management rather than
risk vulnerability, trust, and intimacy. We also continue to follow the rules
we learned in our painful families and/or culture of Don't Talk, Don't Trust,
Don't Feel. And we become strangers to parts of ourselves and what we carry in
our deepest heart. Healing and transforming our wounds asks of us to open to
the gradual process of befriending what we have rejected and hidden away. This
is the doorway into the preciousness of our being.
And there is more.
Over many years — and through her books and the many retreats
and phone conversations and more that we shared — it is Judith Duerk who I
carried in my heart as a slightly older woman who nourished me and reminded me
of what I had forgotten and lost. Judith also eloquently writes of the loss of
the Great Mother, which illuminates an even larger picture:
"Long before the patriarchal period, in
many places on earth, the goddess was worshiped. Woman in the train of history
has been orphaned by the death of this Great Mother, has suffered loss of
connection to her own beingness, lack of sense of legitimacy and belonging in
the universe or in her own individual life. Woman can draw comfort from an
image of the Great Mother reaching out to her to fulfill and to bring to manifest
form in her own individual life that of hte archetypal Eternal Feminine. Woman,
with the help of the Great Mother, can leave the collective way to find her own
individual way, for somewhere deep inside she knows that she must leave to
become herself...
"For clearly the values of the feminine
need to come forth... of the earth, the instincts, the individual... all that
nurtures and sustains life. Those values need to come forth, to re-emerge with
their ancient feminine strength and passion. Those values need to come forth
and to voice... this time, not be be silenced by the oppressing, negating
ancient patriarchy, but to speak clearly and firmly from the even more ancient
flow of the archetypal feminine.
"How might your life have been different if there had been a place for
you? A place for you to go... a place of women, to help you learn the ways of
woman... a place where you were nurtured from an ancient flow sustaining you
and steadying you as you sought to become yourself. A place of women to help
you find and trust the ancient flow already there within yourself... waiting to
be released... A place of women...
How might your life be different?"
My mother, my grandmother, myself, and on back through time
had all been orphaned by the death of the Great Mother. This story of losing
any sense of our inherent preciousness, of losing ourselves and developing
false selves and painful false stories is about much more than my mom and me
and our family. It is the tragic experience of most of us, to one degree or
another and women and men alike. For so long the world has been out of balance
and we can see evidence of this suffering and great loss and disconnect from
the Sacred Feminine and our Earth Mother everywhere. It is also true that more
and more of us are awakening to the truth of our sacred being and how it is
that we are connected with all of life.
"We are
here to awaken from our illusion of separateness."
—
ThÃch Nhất Hạnh
 |
| With Judith Duerk, 2001 |
*****
As I sat in ceremony this year I thought a lot
about my mom and my grandmother. And as I sat in the south side of the
ceremonial arbor, I looked again and again upon the photograph of my
grandmother on the other side. Each year we are asked to bring a photograph of
an ancestor who has crossed over to hang upon the North Gate, where our
ancestors are honored and seen and invited to be with us in ceremony. I had
brought a cropped photograph of the one below, with only my grandmother and
myself in the picture.
And my heart grieved as I felt — not just thought, but felt — how my grandmother and
mother and I had never known the preciousness of who we are, not even as tiny
children. We simply and tragically were not given this message. And nor were my
grandfather and father and brother and on through the generations. We had all
been orphaned by the Great Mother and, in an essential way, by the mothers who
gave birth to us. We were each painfully strangers to this great spiritual
truth that we are precious, we are born precious, it is just who we are.
The contrast with the great
honoring of ourselves as women that was breathed in and breathed out within our
women's ceremony was painful and raw. Grief and gratitude are so often
intertwined. Here I sat on this beautiful day in early September surrounded by
over 100 beautiful, beautiful women who were all being held with love, respect,
compassion, and caring. And I looked upon the photograph of my grandmother
across the arbor...
And my heart filled with
sadness as a memory arose of the envelope that arrived for me in the mail from
my mother over three decades ago. I was surprised to hear anything from my
mother as we had been a long stretch where she refused to have contact with me
in any form. But here it was, this envelope addressed to me from my mother. I
opened it and found a single small piece of white paper folded twice. I
unfolded it. There was no writing. Just a tiny square paper taped in the
middle. It was my grandmother's obituary. Very little was said about Amalia
Yentsch Moesta beyond that she was born in 1901 and had died that spring of
1985. This was my mother's way of telling me that my grandmother had died.
Later I went to a women's AA meeting, spoke of what happened, and threw the
paper with the tiny square obituary in the middle into the garbage can...
Now it was 2018 and I watched
the slight breeze and sunlight shine upon the beautifully adorned North Gate
and all the ancestral photographs present with us in the ceremonial arbor. And
I experienced and witnessed as one by one by one the elders, matrons, and
maidens were honored and received and seen and blessed. Woman after woman, from
13 to 83, embraced and celebrated. And I grieved for my mom and my grandmother
and all who had never had a moment in their lives where they were welcomed,
where they belonged, where they were truly seen, honored, and blessed.
And yet there she was, my
grandmother in this photograph smiling and reaching out her arm to touch me. I
wept. And I spoke to my grandmother... This is what you have always
deserved, to be embraced and seen and loved. This is what we all have deserved,
to know our preciousness in our deepest being. You are here with me
now...
 |
| My twin and I with our maternal grandparents, 1961 |
*****
I
had been gone for four nights out on the land and in ceremony, and it had been
five days since I'd seen my mother. When I am not away, I see my mom every 1-3
days, usually every other day. And I wanted to come home and see her as soon as
I could. So I joined my mama for dinner. And given that I was just coming out
of ceremony, I was mindful of so many emotions, thoughts, memories, and how it
is that I hold my mother today with such deep compassion and love. She never
had a Women of the 14th Moon Ceremony or anything that met and nourished the
true need. There were so many substitutes, including alcohol and an endless
array of other escapes from herself and her life and the unbearable pain that
lay long abandoned in her deepest heart.
And it's something that I may be integrating for the rest of my
life — that I have had two mothers.
There's the brutal one: the one who tried to suffocate me to death when I
was
one (something she told my therapist John Derrickson in 1985), the one
who
slugged my head into a wall when I was 18, the one who refused to see me
after my father died because I would not cut my hair, the one who
screamed at me that
she's going to forget that she ever had children in the presence of my
own young children, and the one who refused to see me for 14
years. This is the mother who a therapist told me when I was 26 — and just before my twin's suicide and two
years after my father's sudden death —
that I was going to need to grieve my mother like a death. Scott Fisher,
another therapist I'd had in the 1980's, recommended that I read Scott Peck's People
of the Lie and tenderly told me that on a scale of 1-10 of "people
of the lie," my mother was a 10. Caroline, my therapist in early sobriety,
went on to also tell me that when severely narcissistic people run out of mirrors
that they tend to go quickly — they get sick and
die, they are institutionalized, or they commit suicide.
So it was not a shock when my mother attempted suicide at age
86 when her fourth marriage was headed for divorce. That was followed by her
first hospitalization on a psychiatric ward. And my husband and I were on a plane to Michigan the next
day after I learned what had happened. Then, after 14 years, there she was...
my frail off the charts mentally ill mom on a psychiatric ward that she could
not escape...
Time passed. It took nearly a year to pry my mother loose from the former
step-son from her third marriage who'd been pursuing her for years. His retirement plan was my
inheritance and that of my children. So it had always been in Larry's (not his
real name) best interests to fuel our estrangement and fiercely fight me in
court to keep my mother in Michigan. No matter that something was beginning to
awaken in my mother, something that told her that she needed "to be with
my flesh and blood."
Finally
we prevailed in court and were able to bring my mother home to her family. It
was very rocky at first. Another not as serious suicide attempt happened along
with another hospitalization. And the diagnoses began to come in — the full
cluster B personality disorders (borderline, narcissistic, histrionic, and
antisocial), major depression and anxiety, schizoaffective disorder, dementia
and Alzheimer's. There were more, and along with her daily dependence on alcohol, these were the biggies. Yet, shockingly,
my mom began to stabilize. Finally, she was prescribed the antipsychotic drug
Risperdal along with other medication. Finally, she was with her family and
immersed in love, understanding, and compassion. And, there was just enough
memory loss to make possible the forgetting of that which my mother could not
have bared to remember.
And
my other mother was born.
Against all odds, the impossible was happening. My
mom who was compelled to push away love her whole life was beginning to allow
love in. Her old self was dying away and, at age 87, her true Self was in a
gradual process of waking up. This is the miracle of all miracles. This is the
proof that even those who may be so profoundly gone have, under it all and
despite all appearances, deep within themselves is the jewel of their true nature.
So
I get to do things today like come home from ceremony and bring the ceremony to my mother. Which is what I did on September 3rd. First, as always, I told my mom
how much I love her while I held her hand. She brought my hand to her mouth and
kissed it. I then kissed her hand three times. Mama looked at me smiling and said,
"You snuck in a a couple extras." Cracked me up. Something so small
is so precious. Then I began to share about the ceremony. I shared how the
elder women are honored. I shared about her mother's photograph that I had brought into the ceremony. My mother was present and listening...
And
I told my mom about Alice. I shared that every year the oldest elder is honored
towards the end of the ceremony. This year, the oldest woman was 83, but she
had already been honored in a previous ceremony. Alice was 82 and just stunned
when she was the one called to come up and stand in the center of the arbor with the
Intercessor and others to be honored as the eldest elder. She was gifted. And
then her arm was lovingly held as she was walked around the full circumference
of the circle as one by one by one over one hundred women stood up from their chairs and received her and
bowed to her and smiled through our hearts at her, all while an honor song was
played on the women's large ceremonial drum...
I asked Alice afterwards how this had been for her. After all, this was her
first ceremony, which she was also attending with her daughter. And I don't know if
she is originally from Russia or the Ukraine, but with her lovely accent Alice
told me that she had been a doctor and that her experiences at this ceremony
were as profound as when she delivered her first baby...
And
I shared this story about Alice with my mama. Can you imagine, Mom?, I
asked. I could tell that a little bit of Alice's story and how the elders were
honored and how there was this focus on preciousness and how I brought Nana to
the ceremony and now brought the ceremony to my mom — that all of this
permeated my mother and found its way into her heart.
And
I looked at my mom while we held hands and told her, "You're my precious
mama." And my mother looked back into my eyes and said, "And you're
my precious daughter."
*****
May we all know the truth of our
preciousness.
Our world will change as we do.
With love and blessings,
Molly
 |
| Photo by Molly |
