Saturday, March 24, 2007

luminescence and loss

I was driving to the kids school Friday in a really good mood and i rounded this corner and i saw the sun shimmering down on the grass and i just thought "wow the world just glows, it is luminescent" and then i realized the sun was reflecting off of these silkworm threads that literally covered the grass, and a bagworm had completely surrounded this ginormous oak. I hope it doesn't kill the tree. lately, i've been running and the silkworms are dangling from the trees and they get all over me. i'll stop before crossing the major road and had to remove like 10 off of me!

i was in barnes & noble with my kids today and i picked up this book "Motherless Daughters" by Hope Edelman and i flipped it open and found some passages that blew my mind. although it is written about women whose moms died, in many ways i feel i was raised without a mother because my mom was emotionally unavailable in my early years and then later my dad won custody (when i was 8) and so i had that sort of gaping loss there. i have read a lot of the psychological literature about the effects of various things happening at various stages of life, and i have the patterns affiliated with a major loss during the very early years.

so this is what i related to:

"Self-reliance is perhaps the strongest of the barriers that individuals erect to keep themselves at a distance from others…"

as a very independent person i certainly do this - it's the whole 'i don't need anybody, i don't want anybody, i bought my own house, i pay my own bills, i don't need child support, i am financially independent...' attitude and persona, and yet at the same time there is this deep desire for love, yet i push it away and sabotage things by certain behaviors. i am convinced it is a subconscious way to avoid intimacy.

And here is another thing i related to:

"When a daughter fears loss so much that she believes it inevitable, she avoids forming relationships that might lead to the deep intimacy she craves. This daughter either dodges romance, chooses aloof partners, or extracts herself each time a relationship shows the first sign of long-term commitment. She refuses to make promises or respond to demands, afraid such actions will lead to intimacy that’ll be snatched from her again. She may become proficient at abruptly ending relationships before she has to make an emotional investment, an act that allows her to exercise the control she didn’t have when her mother died."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This happens even when you have a good mother. Don't be afraid. Keep trying.