I just received an alert reminding me that my annual payment was coming due for my website. It’s been a year. And what a year it has been!!
I love acknowledging year anniversaries. I do it constantly. I’m obsessed with all things full circle and enjoy the opportunity to reflect on where I am as opposed to where I was, and what has been learned or changed as I cycled through all four seasons between now and whatever event I’m circling around back to.
Does that sound peculiar? Maybe. Well I can be a bit peculiar, so that’s ok.
On with the anniversary reflecting….To begin with, I don’t hate mermaids anymore! Today they inspire nothing more than the nostalgic feeling of childlike magic. Any thoughts of the “darker” variety have simply drifted away like seaweed on the shore carried back to the deeper part of the ocean by the tide….Sure it’s still out there somewhere, but it ain’t swirling around my feet anymore getting all tangled up and ruining my beach day.
So now here we are almost a year after that silly mermaid hating post, twenty or so subsequent posts later, 47 organically grown followers, a lot of love shown to me on Facebook/Insta when I post blog links, and a door cracked open just a wee little bit that I honestly hadn’t even thought of knocking on, all has me feeling pretty good about expressing myself on this forum through the written word.
Granted I’ve posted inconsistently and my topics have been all over the map, but damn it’s been therapeutic! Processing heavy shit, be it of the personal variety (death, depression, relationships, etc) or strife in the world ~write about it. Fun times on or at the sea ~ write about it. Holiday happenings that conjure up mixed feelings ~ write about it. Childhood memories ~write about them. Pretty much nothing is off limits, which I suppose could make those around me a little nervous…I mean it can’t be as bad as dating Taylor Swift (ouch that joke was so 2017), but I do like to publicly process some feelings through telling a story….
And tell a story is what I suppose I will continue to do. And maybe looking back on this year I see my story is bigger than I realized and it’s strung together through all these smaller tales. Perhaps there is a common thread that ties them all together and just maybe that thread is not a “thing”, but a “who”.
That who has quite possibly impacted who I am in nearly every relationship I have had, one way or another…My mother.
Fifty year old smiling, confident, super fun, trusted friend, loving partner, best mom I can be, me is comprised of an abandoned newborn, a stolen toddler, an abused mentally breaking down four year old standing in a West Virginia trailer park, a painfully shy and picked on elementary school kid, a suicidal middle schooler, a promiscuous teen, a high school drop out, a drug addict, and eventually a scared too young of a mom desperate not to repeat history….And they all continuously reach out for her ….My mother.
Well that paragraph was the condensed version of my most painful highlights and probably sounds a tad whiney and like I’m blaming my mother….Poor moms, always getting the blame 😉
I swear that’s not where I mean to go with this. In between those house of horror moments were love, light, and beautiful experiences that also played a significant role in shaping who I am and how I view the world. I know I’ve been blessed a million times over.
And how can I say I’m not blaming my mother when I make the bold statements that I do, you ask? Because I’m simply not, I’m merely acknowledging a fact.
The fact that mothers are creators, they are life giving powerful feminine forces and from the moment we are born of them as tiny vulnerable humans in an overwhelmingly huge world, they are the closest connection we know. Forever tethered by the phantom cord that once nurtured us into existence.
I do have enough life experience and especially after having made an abundance of my own mistakes, to know that nothing this woman did (or does), regardless of how much it seemed like it, was she doing “to” me. She’s just been surviving in this world the best way she knows how and because of this I don’t hate her. Plus there’s the fact that she did quite literally give me life….So there’s that. Thanks mom.
Still though, I feel compelled to continue to tell our mother/daughter story because it’s my story. It’s not to shame her or garner sympathy, but just because it’s my most intimate, complex, love story.
She was my first relationship and my first rejection. I carry part of her with me into everything I do and I can never fully escape her. When I look in the mirror I see her face. And when I look again at all my seemingly random blog posts, she’s almost always somehow intertwined in them. She is everywhere.
And so perhaps this writing adventure of the past 12 months, that started as an outward “mermaid” attack and quickly turned introspective, brings me to the biggest full circle moment of them all. I’ve gone straight back to the absolute utmost beginning!
So cheers to a year of self reflection, the beginning of finding my voice, a little healing and as always a lot of love. And that’s all I got for now. I suppose more shall be revealed….
Thanks to anyone who may have found themselves following along. Xo
.
Seahorses and Sunflowers 🌻 