“He couldn’t not know what he knew; he couldn’t not see once he saw.” Patti Digh
It hit me today in yoga, that what I am witnessing in my great niece is Me.
Me as a newborn baby girl arriving and going with the flow of the family I was born into.
She appears on a stage of an already in motion drama, a play in progress, roles clearly defined, the scenes are set, the dialogue is memorized, and from there her role is carved.
She begins with a supporting role, and will learn that in order to maintain favor, her lines will reflect those of the Main Characters, her parents and grandparents.
It is the expectation of her elders to follow their roles, and someday take over top billing.
I may be her future self and she is my beginning – we are linked with the thread of legacy.
My mother’s sister who was estranged from her family has come into my thoughts yet again. How nice it would have been to have her view of my mother’s family.
What made her leave the stage she was born upon?
I feel that I am my Aunt, but a generation behind her.
I have access to the Internet and have ways to communicate that she wasn’t able to.
My mother is close to her brothers and has always been, while my Aunt chose to stay away, two totally different perspectives of one family.
The last words my mother said to me was, “we have two different perspectives!” Remarkably wise, she knew we didn’t match.
My mother never spoke of the sister that ran away, never. She had another one who also was estranged from the family but lived near the family; she, I was told was cold and bitter. My mother had very limited exchanges with this sister.
She also had a brother who committed suicide.
My Uncle (my mother’s brother) molested my brother and sister, and another Uncle molested my mother when she was a young girl, yet she remains close to her family and holds them in high regard, visiting them regularly.
There are two distinctly different reactions on the stage of abuse; we either keep the normal dialogue going or we get off the stage!
If you stay on the stage, you continue with the same play and drama and accept new characters as they are born upon this stage.
When you get off, you get off alone and you are segregated and an outcast, but the abuse stops.
It stops only along your family branch, but the rest of the tree continues to flourish as long as the other branches go along with the original dialogue of abuse.
Roles continue unchecked, words flow the same, abuse lays in the wings waiting, forever near, cycles spiral again and again, repeating itself like a broken record.
On my new stage I have to learn or maybe unlearn the first 40 years.
I am no longer a newborn without a voice or a choice.
I now am able to discern what I feel and what I know, what is healthy and what isn’t healthy and I have the right to act freely and use dialogue that goes against the original family play.
It is with the greatest compassion that I look back upon my old stage and see my family still stuck in the roles they were born into.
If I can be a voice that hollers from off the stage, a disgruntled watcher of their play, if my jeers can put a seed of doubt, a drop of fear, a whisper of truth, if I can lure but one player away, I feel my life’s journey will not be for naught.
I will not be the silent Aunt who disappeared….
