A Story About Preciousness

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."

— Thích 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