I Want to Know Her

Somewhere in my ancient homeland~

Buried deep in dark, dank, moist earth ~ covered over by boulders and rocks ~ still breathing, but only just ~ kept alive by the mother fire and awaiting excavation ~ lie memories ~ relatively distant defining moments ~ that shaped this life and catalysed a descent ~ gradual by nature into the heavy embrace of self-consciousness and shame.

Shame - it washes over me as if in an instance ~ aided by that wise midlife force that beckons visibility, heats the core and flushes to the surface the ancient remains of lives lived before. 

I remember ~ I was around eight years old running naked and free around my brothers after we all shared a bath. “You need to cover up ‘down there’ now!” said my mum.

I felt confused, "What’s ‘down there’ mean? Why?"

I was handed the mantle of shame, right there in that small innocent moment. Not just shame, but a whole host of complexes ~ intricately woven and passed on from generations before. A legacy of disgust.

 I can feel the shape change of my body ~ slightly compressed and deflated.  

A diminishing of childlike innocence ~ stolen by a direction and fueled by a question “what’s wrong with me”?  “Is there something wrong with me”?

I tried everything in my teens to hide my newly budding breasts but a family friend (unwelcomingly) felt it was her place to comment on my changing pubescent form ~ God, I hated her.

But the boys in the tech school, right across the road from where I lived, they were scary. I hated them too, but I feared them more. I walked an extra twenty-minutes the long way home to avoid having to walk past them. Their violent and vulgar abuse in large part was responsible for how I avoided being seen for many years to come.

It wasn’t only the boys though, girls my age took it upon themselves to act out violently toward me too, with no apparent reason ~ perhaps it was my prettiness, or the fact I was good at school and a teacher’s pet, or maybe it was the remains of innocence they glimpsed in me and their own shame lashing out in protest. I don’t know. Years later though, one of the ‘mean girls’ did apologise to me ~ she said she felt ‘really’ jealous.

I felt a core dissonance, a contempt at being objectified, but at the time, I didn’t understand or have the words to make sense of what was happening to me. Implicit messages all around me were compounded by a legacy of female survival ~ where worthiness and love-ability got tangled up with body shape, image and desirability. Deadlock.

I grew to despise the world I lived in, but my disputes turned inward.

Desperate, alone and confused, I turned to food, alcohol and any other mind-altering drug that could offer a temporary respite from my internal fury.

My search for freedom from the grip of shame is my story ~ one story ~ it’s really one of spiritual redemption. Shame took me places I needed to go. Like to the fires of hell to reclaim the lost, small, withered cast out ones – to breath the life of love back into them and welcome them home.

To the young girl I was then, I say to her – ‘God, I love you!’ I sit with her and listen to her anger; I feel her contempt and I hear her cries. I listen, and when she is done telling, I validate her feelings and say: ‘no wonder you felt this way’.

I want to know her, who she is in the simplicity of this moment ~ in the way she sits or holds her head ~ in the rhythm of how she speaks, walks, sings, and moves.

I want to marvel at the miracle that she is.