Old Ghosts

Relationships are complicated.

Life is complicated.

We strive for perfection and beat down on all things that seem to be holding us back from happiness.

I spent many many years resenting my mom for not being stronger and NOT doing the things I felt she should do to make our lives (her children's lives ) better. As I grow older and face breaking my own learned carried weight of this lifetime riddled with the trauma of generations before me . I am faced now with acceptance of how difficult it is for people to act , to change and to stand up. I allow this understanding to erase away my anger, resentment and any need to beat on myself for all the years I could not bring myself to call my Mom on Mother's Day and wish her a happy one now that she has passed. I don't get the chance anymore to live in this new found acceptance with her available to receive my forgiveness for her, for myself. Did I dig my heals into stubbornness and anger for too long ?

I can not go back, healing is working where it counts in this moment and I must accept who I was at all those given points as circumstance of time and my own human experience. I can appreciate in this moment my growth in understanding why all the things were not done for a better life as I embrace and strengthen my ability to do it for myself. Even in my own hands I must succumb to accepting my own the inability to Act, change and stand up for myself in the tussle of healing and self actualization. Something she probably never question. I have to accept that in her world and perimeters of strength she did what she valued. She endured a life she felt she was meant to live, to sacrifice for and I as her child will reflect back all I've seen and experienced in her.

I often thought of the 'fall in line' mentality of my mom, her female cousins she grew up along side of and her own sisters, all collectively presented to me as a child as my aunts/tezas, who had to endure with cultural religious constraints compounded by political constraints of a balkan heritage of oppression as the lesser race made it impossible for these woman to act for themselves. They were programmed as citizens of counties to fall in line to be lesser and then as women in families where men had diminished power over their lives because of this same condition to even more so obey. No one was on anyone's side so it was important to stay as silent as possible to survive. United in being less.

That's what it all comes back to doesnt it, to surviving? It's the default of human life. Do whatever we can to survive, right ? What happens when survival is no longer the goal and your left with the remnants of broken ancestors in the new world machine of self help and healing? What's left when you don't care to just survive as you fight to unburden your soul with the remnants of your ancestors in a 21st century world moving at wharp speeds you can not seem to latch onto because of the still oozing scars of ancestry and the weight of your lived experience creating a compounded history, lineage of more for the generations to come. Expelling all that you you were raised to believe but not connecting fully with the opportunities of your current condition.

There can be nothing so extreme than my mothers life in comparison to mine. I was born in a free country that supported every aspect, even if only in theory for some at any give point in American history, of the self. I was given rights against oppression and forced marriage and systemic rape. I was give rights to challenge communities and cultures that said it was ok to punish the victims over their monsters to keep "face". I was told to stand up and call out the perpetrators at all cost and to stop more pain. And yet often I could not act being locked in and surrounded by those who still followed their oppressors even in this free country no longer under their watch but the beholden of to the conditioning of ignorance.

I watched as a child and listened to stories over and over of my aunts being abused by their husbands and no one doing anything; locked in closets , five year old girls being raped and just moving to the next town to hide from the shame and fear of uncertainty of safety, children being abused in every way and adults not confronting it for inability of support of justice and more harm done to those victimized and those standing for victims. Anger upon anger growing and ensuing. Woman made powerless in their mothering instincts left broken and soulless just pushing the narrative.

There were some examples of chance and hope I witnessed as a child in my mom's band of sisters. Maybe not standing up as I would have liked but one aunt went to therapy at a time therapy was most taboo for the regular Americans much less immigrants and often repeats a phrase the therapist said to her "you're not the sick one , bring him in here" as it was apparent she would need a stranger from the new world to tell her she had value. Then yet another aunt who empowered herself to get educated and work for something better setting an example for her kids yet still living in the shadows of the judgement of a culture that did not shoulder her accomplishments, left to raise four kids by an immature spouse who ran off and left her for a long while. A husband who would also grow and learn of his lack of shouldering and guidance in a new world.

So when Mother's Day comes and go , yes I think of my mom and now that she is gone even more so think of this one time she said to me "I spoil my grandkids and I will do everything for them because I couldn't do what I wanted for my own kids." A mother unable to mother.

I will never have the mom who fought and actually helped change my world for the better. Perhaps I will have to accept I did all that for myself or maybe just perhaps I saw in her strength to "believe in what you believe and be unaffected by those around me who think they know better or may challenge me". In her cultural stubbornness I learned personal strength to be unwavered in what was right and wrong for myself. Irony. Maybe I don't need it to change for everyone just for myself and reroute my trajectory. Maybe leaving well enough alone is all some souls can manage in this lifetime.

The choice is ours we are told in this free country of America. Believing we have the power to change our lives is ours. Working to break the shackles of generations upon generations of oppression that veil this truth a work in progress for many of us extremely empathic first generation Americans still fighting old ghosts.