"This acquiescience to marrying the monster is decided when girls are very young, usually before five years of age. They are taught not to see, and instead to "make pretty" all manner of grotesqueries, whether they are lovely or not."
-Clarissa Pinkola Estes
This is something from Women Who Run With Wolves that leapt off the page at me. By age five? We are already lost by age five? We are already walking into the roles that will maintain family dysfunction. In reading that, I felt hopeless, and wondered again...what happened to me? to us? In reading, I began thinking about the dream, once again.
I am still a bit confused by it - the dark dream where I wake up hyperventilating. Nothing ever really happens. I am exploring my house, and I am in the wing where it is dark, there is something in the dark and panic sets in. I want to escape, but I can't. I don't know what or where it is. What I do understand is that whatever it is that is triggering the dream, or the memory I am trying to process happened before I was five. And I am very confident that something happened at the hands of a protector...probably a parent.
As I described before, as I have coped with this nightmare, the darkness went from inhabiting the whole wing, to a room, to being in a box. In the box is a living, breathing young girl almost mummified with blood or tar. She is not evil, but is paralyzed by violence. I am not afraid of her, so, was I afraid of the part of myself that is her? Logically, I am afraid of waht happened to her/me, or of whoever did this to her/me. Where is that person? Is the one who hurt this little girl so badly even in my house any more? Am I just afraid of potential for violence in this world? Am I afraid because women/children are not safe?
The box was not evil, the box that contained the little girl. The box was the tool that isolated the girl from the rest of the dark. So where did the other go? I just had a thought - maybe the dark can not exist in the Light. Sounds stupid to say that, but maybe what was there was the shadow of memory - memories held in the body, memories the mind can not bear to recall. But they can't go, the memories are part of me. I wonder where they are stored...
By age five, I was trained to accept, and to have no hope, no mechanism at protecting myself. I was at the mercy of those around me. At that point I was already prepared to be the victim of sexual assault. I didn't know how to tell if I was safe or not. The question never entered my mind. I just floated along in life at the whim of whatever was around me. By age five, I was already trained to marry, not a monster but an alcoholic. The compassionate part of me knows that I married someone who was in severe pain, and who numbed daily. But in reality I chose an archetypical monster. I think we all play these roles for each other. Although there was never physical violence, there was psychological violence. And I accepted it, tried to cope with it, tried to adjust my thinking to make it work, all the while thinking I was lucky. And I was ready for this by age five.
I am experiencing my first wildfire. The fires are in the mountains, not close, but the sky is overcast and we can smell the faint scent of campfire smoke. It is beautiful here. I really like it, and am enjoying my time with my son and daughter-in-law so much. But overall, I think I prefer the snowstorms and thunderstorms of the east to the wildfires, mudslides and earthquakes of the west!
I am looking forward to hearing about Paris...dreaming of someday.....
Love from Clare
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