tamarjacobson

Have I always been on the outside looking on?

I remember sitting in the living room with my father and his wife. They were speaking Ladino and I did not understand one word. Well, perhaps a word or two here and there: "cierra la puerta?" She sat in a blue chair in the corner of the living room and puffed on her cigarette, holding it between her fingers in a slim, black holder. I remember she wore gloves when we drove into town to have tea and "a thousand leaves" cakes at Haddon & Sly. I was mostly very quiet. I sat as still as I could so as not to be noticed. I was terrified of doing anything at all in case it was wrong. For I had heard that she had a very large temper. When my father brought me home for the weekend, she would meet me at the door and lead me directly to the bathroom to wash off all the dirt from my mother's house. "Remember to scrub your knees and neck," she would say.

I wrote about some of this back in 2009:

I only visited their home for about five years until I was ten years old or so. After that my father told me something had happened and he was no longer allowed to take me there. He never told me the reason why. Perhaps he thought I was too young to understand, or maybe he did not want to hurt me. Nevertheless, naturally, as a child I assumed and imagined it was because of something I said or did. He and I would have to visit in the park, drive out on outings or go to the movies – it felt like meeting a clandestine lover or something.

It would be years until I could visit him in his own home again.

I came from the outside – another life – and she allowed me to intrude for awhile. 

Quote of the day:

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. T.S. Eliot

Yesterday's "nostalgic reading" whet my appetite this morning for more backward looking. And so I checked out, on this blog, each July since 2005, right up until today. 

Conclusion?

Laugh out loud.

Or as we are all saying and writing these days … LOL.

… And the reason is, gentle readers, I have been navel-gazing in a very similar way from year to year. While I might be sensing stirrings of change in my attitude, outlook, or even behaviors, I pretty much feel the same way year after year.

Hm. Interesting. Unpacking "interesting" a little more, it is a tad frustrating to be sure. I had been hoping for gut busting revelations that blast open old paradigms and create a self-altered moi!

But.

No.

Me is just me – year after year – plodding, struggling, ruminating along. If there is a change in me, it is happening in the tiniest of increments. Minuscule to be sure.

However, one thing is common in all the posts each year: hope abounds.

I think I am trying too hard. 

And … honestly? 

I am not sure what for …

Four years ago at Mining Nuggets: The right track

Looking back seven years ago when I started blogging, I happened upon two July postings (2005). I had returned to Israel for a reunion. It was a very emotional time for me, and I wrote a trilogy describing the ten days there.

What is so telling for me now as I read back in time is I notice that Part I: Personal, has been deleted. I am sorry for myself that I had felt the need to delete it at the time. Sad about my feeling afraid and ashamed enough to do that.

For I imagine today, that the piece probably expressed important feelings. Now, seven years later, I would be more likely to validate those emotions and experiences that happened to me, and share them with pride.

In any event, I share Parts II and III here as I start out July 2012 looking back and thinking forward into future writing of blogs and/or other stuff – personal or professional:

Israel Trilogy: Part II

Israel Trilogy: Part III

Six years ago at Mining Nuggets: There's a post in me somewhere …; & The "Double Bind"

Quote of the day:

"It's okay to let the world be big and painful. It's all happening at once. In the middle of it you, are searching for your salvation – don't you think there's some of that in your urge to write? Grace can't be found outside the truth of suffering … Name your blindness and give it light." (Natalie Goldberg, "Old Friend from Far Away," Page 193)

Included in the songs that I listen to on my morning walk are a few from Olivia Newton John's CD: Grace and Gratitude. Friends of mine gave it to me for Christmas, or just a little after the holiday because they had ordered it but it did not arrive in time. However, the CD arrived just in time for me, somehow. The songs touched me at a soulful level, and have been accompanying me for the past months almost daily. 

One, in particular seems to envelop and support me. A strange sensation to be sure. Mostly it makes me weep, but not of sadness – more like relief. I think that most likely Newton John is singing about God, or perhaps someone she loves, although in one of the lines she asks for help "believing in" something she cannot see.

This morning, as she sang me up a rather steep incline, I sensed that, in a way, the song feels like a message from me to my therapist. For, he relentlessly pushes me, ever so gently, to become aware of, and thus validate my emotions – and the more I am able to accept them, the more I seem am able to forgive myself, and let go of all that rubbish I learned to believe about me for so many years.

And, yes. There is intense healing taking place – probably for the first time in my life.

The song is: Help me to Heal.

Here follows its lyrics. 

If I reach out my hand
Will you hold me
Will you help me to stand if I fall
If I can't say my name
Will you know me
Oh will I still be me
If I lose it at all

[Chorus:]
Help me to heal
Help me to feel
All I know is what I see
So won't you help me to believe
Help me to heal

If I'm not all I was
Will you love me
I'm afraid if I change you might go
As I face the unknown
Are you with me
Cause you know I can't do this alone

[Chorus]

I know I'll find the strength to fight
If I can trust I'm gonna be alright
So walk me through my darkest fears tonight

[Chorus]

Here, I add links to the past six posts I have written on some of the processes of healing I am experiencing through therapy. I notice that I wrote Part IV on two separate entries. The second one is more like "Part V" and so the last one should really read "VI." Well, never mind … perhaps more will come to me as the months continue, in which case I will start with "Part VII."

Healing dimensions

Healing dimensions: Part II

Healing dimensions: Part III

Healing dimensions: Part IV

Healing dimensions: Part IV

Healing dimensions: Part V

Healing dimensions: Part VI

In the final chapter of my book: Don't Get So Upset: Help Young Children Manage Their Feelings by Understanding Your Own, I write about how we can all change our emotional scripts. Lately I realize that understanding my emotional script has been instrumental in helping me change it, even though at times it is very painful and requires constant courage and hard work. After all, I learned those feelings about myself from patterned, repetitive behaviors and interactions from the most significant adults in my early childhood.

In a way it is a little like living in a self-made prison, believing that the way I was treated was because I deserved it – a common way of thinking that many young children develop in circumstances similar to mine. The more I understand that most of what happened had nothing to do with who I was, and so much more to do with what was going on in those adults lives at the time, I am then able to break out of the made up myths and misconceptions, and thus change the script. 

By writing my books, I guided myself towards the exit of the self-made, emotional prison, that in some ways helped me survive some excruciating double binds and scapegoating. But now, I can start to break free. I am an adult myself, feeling safer, and can shed the shame that binds, as I head into my next writing project. 

For one reason or another lately, I have been pondering about what contribution I might have made to the profession, and have even been asking colleagues and friends how they see my contribution to the early childhood field. I must say that people have been most generous in their responses, for which I am always grateful and humbled.

More and more I am coming to the conclusion that one of the ways is through both my books for teachers, where by modeling my internal ethnography, they are able to learn how to do the same type of self-reflection for themselves. Consequently they are able to make theirs and young children’s lives better. At one level, sharing my feelings and life experiences has not been easy, but on the other hand, it has quite often helped others share theirs too. I believe that we commit a kind of violence to children we care for and educate, if we are not willing to become aware of how and why we tick. Because then we act unconsciously, and often unintentionally take out on small children many of our own emotional biases and personal issues. As professionals we owe it to young children in our care to know who we are!

Thus, the healing continues in spite of myself. For once I set out on this path towards freedom and light, there is no turning back.

Has it been a busy month, or is it avoidance? I must say that writing has become more of a challenge of late.

But, this morning I think I understand why.

For me, writer's block sometimes comes after I feel shamed by critical, external forces. And, this past week I rediscovered some unresolved emotions from events going back about three and a half years ago. They sneaked up on me! A real surprise. Springing out of one, flippant comment from a family member. But that is how these things happen … bringing up old pains, and pressing creaky, old buttons that tap into emotional memories in my brain.

Tap, tap, tap.

For a few days there, I raged and broiled within, wrote in my journal, and wept often. And then … presto! I realized that there were still unresolved feelings lying low and were simmering quietly beneath my consciousness. 

• It was painful. 
• Unpleasant. 
• Uncomfortable. 
• Pushed me right up against a wall.
• It made me re-uncover my vulnerabilities - 
• my old childish need for acknowledgment and validation. 

Ah – regression.

Or, is it that I really do not like that part about myself: being angry?

For it makes me feel ugly and weak.

And yet, cognitively, rationally, I know that anger is just one of the many emotions all human beings feel. After all, if someone stands on my toes, it is necessary to tell them: "I don't like it when you do that! Ow! It hurts!" I teach and present this stuff constantly for early childhood professionals everywhere. I lecture and write about how we must accept children's anger – validate them to feel their feeling safely with us caring adults, and guide children to express it in ways that are not self-destructive, or that would hurt others. For anger is a necessary emotion which is also productive.

For, surely, without anger as the original force, we would never be able to change the world and claim our civil rights. 

I understand all that so clearly for everyone else … just not for me. 

Pushing past that wall means letting go of my need for validation and acknowledgment from people who are unable to give it to me, and realizing who I am and how I came to be me for my self. 

None of that is possible, until I learn to feel deserving enough for me to allow myself - to validate, acknowledge, and accept my anger, not as something ugly or weak, but just part of who I am as a human being. And then I might be able to choose how or if to express it in ways that are productive and useful to me …

… perhaps, through writing, writing, writing … 

A year ago at Mining Nuggets: Once a blogger

My Vita can be found here:

"The first senior moment in history." (Received from a colleague this morning)

Sitting in my sister’s Buddha garden very early this morning, I realized that I was staring at the very same bamboo plant I had seen vividly during a meditation a few months ago.

And then I understood exactly why I had felt the need to come to visit at this time. Indeed, the purpose of my visit for my inner journey became clear … and I wept …

Evening primrose in the morning … this morning.

This rapidly growing flowering plant came with me in my suitcase all the way from Anacortes last summer. It was a tiny sprig, a simple slip of a thing. In the heat of the Philadelphia summer, I was not sure it would survive, even as I watered it often, whispering gently to encourage its growth. This spring it sprung. The leaves reached up and out as far as they could and it thickened into quite a sizable little bush. As I was dragging out the garbage bins this morning, I turned around suddenly, as if summoned silently through the cool breeze, and there the flower was. Open and bright. Beaming at me! 

I had hoped it would open in time for Friday because its original owners are arriving on Thursday evening to celebrate life partner's sixtieth birthday. They are flying in all the way from Anacortes. And there it was … a little foreign Seattle flower blooming in Philadelphia … to welcome the day.

Excitement is very definitely in the air as I prepare for our visitors, and somehow this delicate flower knew to open up in time for the occasion. Sixty is a formidable birthday! I remember celebrating mine three years ago. Indeed it took me almost all year to digest the fact that I was entering into the senior hood, and culminated in a weekend in Paris that I will never forget. Of course, Life Partner has his own plans for realizing one on his bucket list: a very special fly fishing trip …solo … in Montana in June. But before that, family and friends will help him usher in this momentous occasion. 

A year ago at Mining Nuggets: Wisdom of the age

Seven years ago at Tamarika: I don't want to die without knowing how I am