Gather ye rosebuds, while ye may...

I think on this, consciously, often when Monkey wants me to play with him, or She-Ra has hurled yet another book at my feet and is looking up at me expectantly with her arms up. I'm almost always knee-deep in laundry, picking up the house, doing dishes or cooking, or I *ought* to be doing those things, which makes my pressure even more acute. OR, I've actually managed to make some breathing space for myself, and I'm all set up to play The Sims Medieval on my computer-- lose myself in my Sims little concerns and their life quests. And... here are the rosebuds, blooming. Full, in this moment, so crystallinely pure. Harvested, they retain their joy and blessing forever, and bloom even more fervently. Ungathered, they wilt, wither, and go to seed, giving less and less blooms to collect sunlight and give vitality to little plants. These children's innocence and playfulness sometimes hurts me; it's so trusting. What was it like, to be so trusting? My life didn't play out that way because of things that done to me, starting when I was my own little daughter's age. Eighteen months: I look at her lying in my arms at night, fast asleep, and I can't imagine the twistedness of a person who would sully such a vulnerable being. A person will do all kinds of things to him or herself in order to protect; sometimes the methods seem completely counter-productive and risk-provoking, rather than protective. It's interesting to get down the nitty-gritty, and be completely honest about what you fear. I've found this work to be the culmination of a lifetime (not to mention 12 Steps' 4th Step: Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves). Once I crossed off spiders, blindness and surviving a car accident as a paraplegic, the inklings of some really deep answers came to me. Surprise, surprise, that the markers were all there in my behavior, rooted in trauma. In doing some reading on surviving child sexual abuse, one factor emerged which really brought things into focus for me. It's fully normal for survivors to be blamed for what happened to them, particularly as post-abuse behavior can often express as promiscuity or even recreations of the abuse scenarios. Uninformed families-- and survivors-- therefore are validated in believing that the survivor 'brought it on themselves' or even 'started it'. This is particularly true in incest survivorship, where families -- and survivors-- have a real investment in the status quo. You really can't take the steps you need to take until you are ready-- and you really can judge yourself so critically and unfairly, in ways you would never judge others. It's been so liberating to unshoulder the burden of believing myself responsible for what happened to me, and what kept happening to me all throughout young adulthood. I understand now such a violation of trust at such a young age (without treatment) led me to believe I would never be safe and the only power I could have was to give 'it' away before 'it' could be taken from me. A matter of choice. Choice in timing, if not in fact. Being woken to sexuality on an adult's timetable instead of my own didn't allow me to have a "normal" expression of sexuality, inner or outer. All of my sexual expression was based on how others reacted to me; being so powerless, any power I could garner was like gold. I learned how to insinuate sexuality, but not too much, and then I got the most approval from those who valued sex, and those who valued brains. I was almost always focused on adults or those who were older than me. Writing it now, the clarity is blinding. Without my feelings of shame, responsibility, darkness and perversion muddling it all up, the facts are like bricks thudding into place in an earthen wall. And that's really the key, for me, for those working the program, for everyone maybe... to remove the ties of emotion and fact, to allow one to see clearly. How, though... well, I guess the how is up to each one of us. I sit here now, finishing this blog post, having interrupted it many times to gather, gather, gather those rosebuds from Monkey and She-Ra, trying to balance theirs with my own rosebuds lain ignored for so long. I'm just doing the best that I can, all the time, with the resources I have available to me. Sure am loving how much more I can appreciate these roses these days-- not to mention the warm sun on my heart.