Being dropped

I’m not sure where we were living, probably the projects in San Pedro…

or if I was two or three…

but I see a dark hallway with steps.

This memory came to me the way so many of my family history comes to me, by way of my siblings’ stories.

After the birth trauma my mother experienced, layered on top of her unresolved grief from the death of her two children and husband, exacerbated by her trauma, being an immigrant and single mother, she began to slowly descend into psychosis.  My early life were a series of bizarre and erratic love and fear scenarios.

My sister tells me that late one night, when everyone else was asleep,

she saw my mother carry my sleeping body to the top of the steps

and drop me.

This was before foster care, before being ‘dropped’ repeatedly throughout that experience.

I can feel my young self rolling down the steps, mostly asleep, confused, and disoriented. This could be just that experience or it could be knowing this as the metaphor for my life.

It recalls for me the way I experienced so much neglect, abuse and terror, but I always accepted it, saw it as normal, in somewhat of a confused fugue, a dissociated going along.

(There is also a way I viewed it as a dream state. Even as I tell my story I see it as a dream, like a wave I am surfing on the outskirts of life, a ride I took to stay aware that ‘reality’ is not what it seems and we don’t need to get too tied up with it. I’ve always felt this as an aspect of my ‘higher/true self’)

 

My mother did all kinds of bizarre and abusive things, but many nights she would come back and make sure I was breathing.

She shared later in life, that the voices would tell her to kill us. Then she would come back to her mama senses, being a warrior mama in her healthy state, and check on us, hoping that the voices had not won.

 

This reminds me of how we do this abuse/neglect and love dance with our own souls on the daily.

In this society where we have been systematically disconnected from each other, from village, from Mama Tierra and all of Life, we have become accustomed to, accepting of, and normalized to abuse and disconnect.

It is all around us.

We are all being dropped down the steps of an unfriendly world.

And we struggle to know how to pick ourselves up because the healthy adult has not been modeled.

Our parents, caregivers and institutions are all influenced by colonial/violence and domination oriented paradigms, so we learn to drop ourselves, our survival self modeled after them.

Then sometimes we have moments, maybe after doing some grounding practice, where we go back for ourselves.

But in between we adapt to the fugue, to the madness of society as is, and invariably accept the abuse, accept the programming/conditioning.

We’re doing our best, it’s true. But when I think about that little girl dropped down the steps through no fault of her own, I know she deserves more.

It is helpful for me to tell this story to see the many ways that I still accept dropping myself at times. And also show me why I have such deep compassion for this with those I support.

It is not enough to come back and check, hoping that we didn’t harm ourselves too badly.

That is psychosis.

For our inner child to know that we are safe,

that we are loved,

that she can come out of dissociation,

that she can be free to live,

she needs to know we have her

and will not drop her.

And of course, I know this is a journey, a process, a lifetime of unlearning domination narratives, unpacking and remembering what it looks like to hold ourselves, tend to ourselves.

As I remember this story, I open to my guidance and again ask what it looks like to sweep that little bruised and battered girl up from the bottom of the stairs.

To let her know this abuse does not belong to her.

What it means to show up every day for her,

to commit to her,

to reclaim her.

We have to ask over and over again to bring it to consciousness, to develop new neural pathways.

I feel and allow my little girl’s grief at the many ways I have overlooked her pain, dismissed her, allowed her to be dismissed or harmed.

She never deserved this.

We never deserved this.

I see myself tightening the weave of the figurative multicolored rebozo that holds her close to me, wrapping her up again, with deep compassion and my devotion.

I bring forth my own warrior mama self that held my babies close, one in the front, one in the back. And see what life looks like holding myself this way, never tolerating being dropped again.

Remembering each action we take on our own behalf is much needed and deserved regeneration for ourselves and the world.

xoxoxo

Sylvia

Thank you for listening.

Please comment, when moved, so that we move toward connection in this separated world. And please share with anyone you feel would benefit (when you can), to honor the intention behind my sharing, mutuality and interdependence.