60 Times Around the Sun - The Beginning

TW: mention of violence, trauma, sexual abuse

60 years and one month ago, 18-year-old Diana Elaine, named after her mother and weighing in before pregnancy at 95 lbs dripping wet, now looks like a 5’2” doll with a bowling ball where her belly used to be. Three and a half weeks past her due date (as though one can plan when a baby arrives), Diana is about to give birth to her second daughter. Three weeks later, on her 19th birthday, she will see her own mother for the last time, lying in a hospital bed, one eye sewn closed, following brain surgery. If she’d known, she's told me dozens of times, she would have brought the baby for her mother to see. I am “the baby”, and this is how my life begins.

My mother does not talk about the past. She says doing so upsets her, and it does. I don't want to upset her, and, I want to know. Not only to flesh out my early years; I want to write my mother’s story. And her mother’s, the first Diana Elaine. These women are my life.

The DNA of our maternal lineage is passed down from egg to egg, living in our mother’s 4-month-old embryo, inside her mother’s pregnant body. This means that the tiny-but-largest-in-the-human-body cell that someday your father would fertilize to became you lived in utero in your grandmother’s belly, inside your mother’s embryonic uterus. At the most primal level, you carry a direct relationship with your maternal grandma. She carried one of your first two cells before your mother was born. If that does not blow your mind, take a moment and be with the knowledge until it does.

I spent the first 27 years of life outside of mama’s belly consciously and unconsciously preparing to be a mother. My youngest memory of childhood play is pushing a dusky dark blue, plastic baby carriage around the cellar floor, imagining I was a mom. I had my first crush in first grade, and as I grew up, while other young women looked for someone to fall in love with, I searched for a guy with good “dad” qualities. When I was 22, I saw the guy I was dating kneel down in front of a friend's toddler and listen to her with full attention. I’d found my man.

At twenty-six, four years after miscarrying our first pregnancy, we consciously conceived Ember. From day one, the Sun rose and set on this child—literally. I’d sit for an hour at a time on our patio, meditating, morning sunlight pouring over her through my swelling belly. Carrying a child brought my first experience of unconditional, selfless love, and I wondered in astonishment how people could experience it without having children.

“How are you doing?” folks would ask. “I imagine every woman feels this way,” I’d reply, adding in earnest, “but I’m pretty sure I’m carrying the Christ child.” 

At birth, my little celestial being glowed; and as an infant, she often awoke with those summer-sky blue eyes following a magical and invisible-to-us someone or something above her. Fairies? Angels? We never found out. She lived in a land of magic and spent hours playing with what those not in the know call “imaginary friends.” Five and a half years later, Eamon arrived and I felt a different magic, recognizing an old friend. Unfathomable midnight blues, the night sky to his sister's day, looked at me from his tiny face, right to my soul, and we seemed to exchange the same greeting, “It’s you…”.

Twenty-seven years of preparing to be a mom led to twenty-seven of fulfilling the dream: stay-at-home mothering, breastfeeding, Waldorf homeschooling, making wool and wooden toys, annual camping trips to Kings Canyon, recording family holiday albums, rehearsing with the Agape choir three days a week, etc., my childhood dream come true. Even when Eamon turned twenty-one, I still held on to my “mother” role with clenched teeth, like a bitch with a bone. What could possibly exist after this all-encompassing life mission? Turns out, being a mom was the beginning, prep work for what lay around the corner.

When I met Jon I was too young to know myself. After we’d moved in together and I'd miscarried our first pregnancy, I worked at a holistic massage school, a place run by some of the most powerful women I've known, and one of the teachers recommended that I pick up a copy of “The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse”. She said I had all the symptoms. It was the late 1980's. The Sisterhood Bookstore still in business and a haven for all things women. I bought the book but couldn’t get through it, the content way too close to home. And, the time had not yet arrived. I still had children to conceive, birth, and raise, and I was not yet solid enough to unearth the childhood sexual abuse, neglect, self-abandonment and dissociation I’d internalized as normal.

Much later, with the marriage dissolved and the children out of the house, I had a Sage to raise, to discover, to learn to love. And it was hell. For the next six years, following Persephone’s lead, I descended into the underworld, battling and losing identity after identity, relationship after relationship, replaced with receiving and coming to terms with the diagnoses of Major Depressive Disorder, Complex PTSD, and trauma-induced ADHD. I'd lived with these, let's call them "adaptations", for over half a century; now they had names, and thus, treatments.

The diagnoses came two years into what would become a 4-year legal battle with Jon's Marina del Rey bulldog attorney. I crawled, cried, and by the grace of God, stood and walked through fire: self-represented litigation with the kids’ dad (yet another story, ladies); the sudden ending of important-to-me relationships; a deceptive marital engagement with the fifth, and so-help-me-God last, man on my MeToo arc; my dear force-of-nature daughter "taking space" because, "you don't sue family!"; and oh, so many deaths, including the hospice and passing of fourteen-year-old, constant companion and dear canine friend, Shiloh. All in the isolation of Covid lockdown.

For the first time in my life, the winter holidays arrived with no other mammal in the house. Each morning I took a walk and hugged neighborhood trees, not only because I am a lifelong tree hugger; I needed to hug and saw no one else to turn to. I did not yet know how divine a blessing unwelcome aloneness can be.

That January, after discovering that my new, Covid medical plan included mental health care, I called a crisis hotline, and when the clinician asked if I was in danger of hurting myself, I answered in all honesty, “I don’t know.” I was lost, floating in space with a wornout, fast-fraying tether.

It was a brutal time. 

As the Chinese yin/yang symbol shows, go far enough into the light and you will reach the dark, far enough into the dark, and there is light. For someone with over half a century of stubbornness, self-reliance, an overdeveloped and/or misdirecterd sense of responsibility, and trauma-based coping skills that began before I had full use of language, the darkness had to become pitch for me to let go, to let God, Spirit, Source, Life in. I had no conscious clue how to trust enough to do so. The let go emerged out of necessity, desperation. Then, true healing began. (That healing is also a story of its own.)

Fast forward to now, my mother is in Florida with my sister (also another story!) and I am 60, happy, and grateful to be alive. It is time to live. 

This year is a miraculous new beginning. Life abounds with genuine, reliable friendships and family-ships. I changed my Zoom name to "💖Sage is Turning 60!" Joy I’d lost hope of ever feeling again awakens in me each morning. My writing muse, angel—or whatever inspires downloads and the willingness to type ‘em out, has landed again, and there is So Much I want to share with you, including how I celebrated this new life—with an adventure...

For now, here are a few things I’ve learned in the last six decades: 

Sometimes selfishness is a healthy option; ease is a universal need and one that I now allow myself to care for; who I am is more important and more attractive than how I look (this one took a regrettably long time to learn!); the family that life gave me and that gave me life is the family I love to love and am grateful for; I can be happy with who I am even when you are not; God gave me enough to share, and others enough to share with me; I can trust my body to lead me to my needs; emotions are welcome messengers; blood does make family and not all family shares the same blood; the Earth is my first mother; my birth mother needs my love and care as much as I need hers; the Creator is my father; my birth father cannot give me what he does not have; my children are and will always be my greatest gift, and I will never apologize for the way I love them or anyone else; I can follow, lead, speak with power, and be still; I always have a choice—no one can take that away; I have all I need one day at a time, and having more than I need can feel burdensome; no one and nothing is “right”; no one and nothing is “wrong”; people are self-cleaning ovens, not projects; Beauty is not always pretty; Joy is not always happy; I am here to praise, to love, to feel, to lead, to serve and to play; and most of all, if/when I forget that every moment is a miracle, it’s time to go outside, remember my mother, her mother, my children, and a family tree that began hugging us all before we were born.

To be cont’d…

With love,

Sage