owl
Tomorrow is the new moon, the first new moon of the new year. Thank goodness. I need another fresh start. My grandmother’s death two weeks ago and funeral last week unleashed a cascade of triggers I had not expected and was unprepared to handle while also grieving. Night after sleepless night I spent in a quivering heap, assaulted by waves of crippling anxiety, rage, grief, and limp despair. The grief I owned; the other emotions belonged to a much younger me, and there was nothing to do but be present with her and witness to her pain and mine. I spent a lot of time needing to be held. This week, at last, I have been able to stand again, to look forward, to plan and act and be an adult. It’s good to be back.
I have been thinking a lot about inheritance lately, and about owls.
It’s been a year now since I read Dr. Galit Atlas’s Emotional Inheritance. In the book, she said:
The people we love and those who raised us live inside us; we experience their emotional pain, we dream their memories, we know what was not explicitly conveyed to us, and these things shape our lives in ways that we don’t always understand1.
I will never know how much of what I was feeling in the aftermath of Grandma’s death originated with me, and how much belonged to my mother, my grandma and great-grandmother. My grandma was from the unhappiest of families you can imagine: an abusive and perverted father and a mother who spent most of her life drugged into oblivion. My mother and aunt were mostly raised by the same people, because Grandma had not processed her trauma enough to realize that her parents were not a safe home for children. I don’t know what it was like for them there, but it was surely not an easy way to grow up. I wonder how much of the trapped and hopeless feelings I experienced throughout my teens and young adult life were theirs, both my grandmother and my mother stuck in a home they must have longed to escape. “We can’t heal our wounded parents,” Dr. Atlas said in an interview with Hippocampus Magazine. “The problem comes when we keep trying2.” If I am to heal, I must heal for me, alone. I might feel their pain, but I can only heal for me.
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