How to Wake Up

Something unexpected happened
it was like a bucket of cold water on a hot day

but more shocking
to discover the depth of my blindness
and its true nature, more than enough to make me crumble
fragment into bits of decaying motions and empty platitudes
become what they say
a shell of a woman
but my God has spared me
choosing to wake me up at a time when
I am too busy to fall apart
and too surrounded by real and tangible love

feelings aside, or self-loathing and undeserving,
I am in stunment I did what I did and kept it hidden from myself
in a pocket of my mind
walls of positives carefully erected around it
so I could never see the full truth.




Sunday 18th August
At Mass today...
The priest poke about fire, letting ourselves be fired up,
how appropriate

http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message2324382/pg6



The day I was going to publish this blog, dawned spring-beautiful
so here is the sunrise

Now it is Tuesday, three days later and I'm still trying to get it finished, it's taking all I have, to keep to Mr Hill's directives, I think I'll take his Lesson 16 as a mantra for a while:

"Lesson 16: Budgeting Time & Money
Time and money are precious resources, and few people striving for success ever believe they possess either one in excess."


I did get carrots and leeks planted:

And devised an in-situ mini-worm-farm:

It was good to find a use for the terracotta pots that were my failed venture :)


My worms are thriving:

As another Friday dawns, and last Friday's beer on the beach (with the first sunbake for the season!) seems a distant memory, buried under mountains of the living I've done in a week.

The latest collection of shells:

My Barred Creek find:

Barred Creek :)

And more Broome holiday pics:

{oops, how did that get there?}

home and away:

How to Wake Up:

My eyes have been opened to the true nature of my sins, and the harm I have inflicted on those I hold most near and dear, I can hardly take it in, the blindness I’ve been under for all these years.

My daughter and her partner came back from their holiday, and we’d had a family meal to welcome them back, we were sitting outside on the verandah, she’d described an incident she’d seen, where a husband was treating his wife badly, and how the wife was able to hold herself in check, not lash back, which would have made the situation worse.

It triggered my own experience with Genius, who had been like a step-Dad to my kids, whom I had loved truly madly deeply, and so I started talking about him, the self-control it took me, not to escalate potentially violent situations.

My daughter starting speaking about those years, the tears they’d cried when he was mean to me, the trauma she’d suffered, when he was mean to her, and somehow, her speaking rent open the block I’d put up, in my mind, about those years and the madness of his cruelty, and I saw it from the point-of-view of my precious children, and it made me sick.

How I could have thought any of it was ok, is beyond me to understand, it is as if I’m trying to probe the mind of a stranger, yet there it is, the no-longer undeniable truth, and it is casting light on much that has been dark to me.

The sense of discomfort when I’m with my son…I’ve been praying for this to get healed, it has been a festering wound inside me for a very long time, it makes sense now, he would have suffered so much, to see what was going on, and how I put my own need for Genius before the well-being of my kids…

My daughter said he found it very hard, to control himself – I am so glad he didn't interfere, though I know he would check up on me, Genius might have lashed out at him in his alcohol induced craziness, and this was one thing I tried so hard to avoid.

It is as if a pocket of my consciousness has suddenly burst open, I find it hard to believe I didn’t see this before, for all my soul searching over the years.

My sin is great, yet somehow, my Lord, my God, my beloved Saviour, has brought my children through into well-adjusted, likable and successful adults, His mercy and kindness I can never repay, though I will give thanks for it all the days of my life.

I will be talking more about this, to all my children, I want to tell them how sorry I am, and it breaks my heart now, so late! to think about the tears they shed.
I’m still trying to understand it, the delusion I was under, at the time I didn’t realize how bad it was for them, maybe because my Dad had been so much worse, and because I loved Genius so much and truly believed we were meant to be together.

I feel ashamed now, how my blindness has kept me insisting on the ‘good points’ of Genius for so long, how I’ve defended him, all of which must have been like slaps to the face to my son, in particular.

It cuts me deeply, that I have repeated the damage that was done to me, something I swore I would never do, and that I have lived so long under a mistaken belief, that I had not done this, that because

my children’s situation was not as bad as mine had been, that it was ok, and that I ignored what was in front of my eyes.

My Lord, my God, had given me a husband who was not abusive, who cared for his children, and me, but I left him, to pursue a selfish search for a ‘soul-mate’ , someone who I felt I could bond with, in a way I could not with my husband.

If I continue to look upon myself as I was then, as a stranger, I can see what led me to make those choices I did, the profound stress I was under, the ongoing depression and anxiety, the attempts to fix it that I made, with counselling and religion, that only seemed to prove to me there was no escape.

I so desperately needed to escape, to make it better, and all I could see was a very long stretch of time in front of me, of the same struggle and it made me feel I would die if I didn’t get out.

In Genius, I thought I had found the man I had really been destined for, we shared a bond formed on many commonalities that I’d not had with anyone else, he wasn’t mean to my kids at first, and when the difficult incidents started happening, I looked on them as isolated incidents that could be rectified, I think maybe living with my disabled daughter’s tantrums  had over-stretched my tolerance, so what happened with Genius seemed little in comparison, and although I’d seen some signs of his state of emotional fragility, and mental instability, I only realized gradually that he had very big problems, and probably had a syndrome, like my daughter, possibly Asperger’s, that made him unable to love us in a whole way.
When my children didn't live with us anymore, I thought they were sheltered from what was happening to me, and I believed for far too long, that  Genius would come out of it, and be the gentle kind-hearted man I had fallen for.

Someone like me, with a daughter needing so much extra care, should never have taken on a man like that, someone like me, is the only one who can take on a man like that…

His goodness had found a home in my heart, and it took me a very long time to finally oust him from there, and out of my life.

So now, I am left with knowledge indeed, it is colouring my days in sick green and my pride lies in piles of more goo at my feet.

Even in this thick of it, when I haven’t had a chance to talk about it with my children yet, and tell them how sorry I am, there is a certainty within me, that this is a big gift from God, the unveiling of a dense illusion, and I’m trying to live through it in humble gratitude and faith in His mercy.

I'm writing this as honestly as I know how, in a spirit of family sharing, all being brothers and sisters, as we are :)



I tell it to you now, dear Reader, as a testimony to awakening, that has nothing to do with fancy esoteric blissbombs, but with a grittier and more painful reality, thanks be to God..

For it is this that will bring me closer to being worthy of inheriting His kingdom, and to deserve eternal life, 
this punishment that I now endure, that will earn me a chance at heaven one day,
it is a taste of the torment of hell,
this seeing and knowing and feeling
of all I have lost - - - 
such a gift
my life begins.

XXKK