Chapter Twentytwo A Gift At Christmas: The Family We Have Always Wanted

A GIFT AT CHRISTMAS
THE FAMILY WE HAVE ALWAYS WANTED


I know, you’re asking what a nice Jewish girl like me is doing giving Christmas gifts from the Universe. I can’t help it. I love Christmas. I have always loved Christmas (and I did light my Chanukah candles this year, at least until I ran out of candles). So, please forgive my partisanship and please feel free to substitute any holiday or denomination you would like. I believe my point is that Christmas is associated in my mind with holidays at my Grandmother’s. Her name was Pearl and she really was a role model for me of the quietly capable woman who just gets things done. No suffering for that lady and no victimhood either. She died about fourteen years ago, before I thought about things the way I do now, so I never asked her if she saw herself as the creator of her life. However, she is one of my main guides, so I will ask her now that I have thought of it.

She and I had this bond that was beyond words. Her son, my Dad, was her favorite and I was the first grandchild and the first and only girl until my cousin, Amy, was born as the last grandchild.

Those holidays were always filled with excitement, hope and promise, and a sense of safety and of continuity. There in that house in Kendallville, Indiana, no matter what had occurred elsewhere in my life that year, I felt and knew I was loved and appreciated.

Sitting here today, some forty or fifty years later, I see the themes of my life, and maybe of many people’s lives. I have striven to feel loved and safe, appreciated and optimistic and I would like to believe that, like Pearl, I am a quietly capable woman (ok, maybe not so quiet but I’m pretty sure I get points for capable). And I am very grateful that there was at least one place in my world where as a child I felt entirely loved, appreciated and safe to just be me. And I do see, clearly, how my life up to this point has been a quest to feel those uniquely human feelings within myself for my self. Again, I am moved to tears because, Watson, I believe I have arrived. Yea, no jokes, I have arrived.

I don’t think that it is coincidental that the people with whom I am working currently are feeling the loss and the lack of the sense of security and complete love and acceptance in their early lives and how that lack and loss has contributed to them currently experiencing themselves as damaged or less than.

I wish, as I am sitting here, that I would take my huge heart and all the love in it and all the love that I feel right now for all the wounded souls inhabiting Earth and just shift them and their realities so that they could see and feel themselves as whole and worthy and more than enough. But before I can do that I believe we each need to make a choice to see ourselves in this new light, to give up our stories about not being good enough, to turn away from our victimization and to just be willing to believe that we have the capacity to love ourselves unconditionally, to provide a place of safety and acceptance of ourselves, within ourselves, and, possibly most importantly, to fee that giving it to ourselves, as opposed to getting it from someone else, is enough.

Thank you Grandma. Thank you Dad. Thank you Leslie.

So, without further ado, wherever you are, I wish you love, both of self and other, light and as much joy as it is possible to experience in a human body.

From the innocence and anticipation of the child within me to the innocence and anticipation of the child within you…
To be continued…