The Little Girl and The Monster - storytelling part 1

In my youngest years I truly believed I was being raised by the wicked witches of the east. If I wasn’t alone wandering in the yard, I was surrounded by women cackling and calling each other names, talking about their misdoings, and gossiping about others in the family or beyond. Their energy was big and exhausting. I would wake up at night to hear them playing cards or reading the tarot. An echo down the hall to my room sounded,  “you bitch!” followed by hoots, cackles, and slaps on the table. They always had exceptionally tall glasses of blood red wine, their hands holding the glass, nails painted a dark ruby color or bright red like a dripping flesh wound.

I remember moments where I wondered if I should be concerned for my safety, or if what I was witnessing was normal. At one point in my early childhood I lived with three of them. They drank liquor like starving raccoons and somehow that alcohol brought out the evil in each of them. Something was so very wrong with their reaction to drinking I still to this day do not understand it. My mother was the sweetest of them all they said, a favorite, a younger sister that was taken care of as much as possible after enduring what sounded like some of the worst of the trauma. To this day I am still unsure how she survived the emotional, verbal, and physical abuse she endured. Although she survived, what grew inside her from it all was something darker than I could ever have imagined. My mother, the woman everybody liked and adored, in fact protected fiercely, had the deepest most powerful monster within.

One day in my thirties I was listening to someone who had done past life regression work with my mother. She was speaking about a past life I had with both her and my mother hundreds of years ago. It was me that died first in that life, it was a bad death, almost cursed like and it left a deep grief wound in my village that was never truly mended. Ceremony was done to protect my soul as I passed through to the light, but my mother in that life turned down a darkened path. She chose to give away her power in that life, and she had such tremendous medicine power as a true medicine man in that life. Yet she let it go, maybe because of grief, rage, anger, anguish…I will never know. But hearing this story which others might think of has incredibly strange suddenly helped me make sense of some things.

I once had a dream as a teenager about my mother that was particularly scary for me at that age. In the dream, I was standing at the base of her bed watching her sleep. It looked like she was having a nightmare. She tossed back and forth, wretched in and out of her body, battling some kind of monster. One side was demonic, the other was her authentic self, and she fought back and forth will all her might. I was so freaked out I woke myself up and sat in bed with a cold shiver down my arms. I felt I had seen what was hidden in the recesses of her spirit. I saw what had become of the power she had given away, what was feeding off of it anyway.

I didn’t actually realize I wasn’t safe until one late night when my mother awoke me from sleep, I must have only been 6 or 7 years old. She dragged me to the car in a fuss, angrily searching for her keys. She wouldn’t stop bitching about something and made a racket. I sat in the passenger seat, eyes widened, with a deep anxiety in my chest rising higher and higher. I didn’t understand what was happening. Suddenly her two sisters emerged from the house with disturbed looks in their eyes and made their way carefully over to me. One opened the passenger door and reached for me. That’s where my memory stops. I will never forget the concerned look on my aunt’s faces. The deep worry in their eyes. Something about their expression made me realize I was not safe. My body always knew this, but in that moment in my mind, something just clicked..

In the years after that disturbing late night, what I didn’t know then and not until my late thirties was that I was inexplicably in a state of survival mode all the time. My nervous system knew my environment and acted accordingly, trained well by the chaos and instability that plagued me for years. As I grew older I became more aware of the fact that my memory of childhood was like a room with all the lights out. I simply had very little to no memory before the age of 8 years old. I was put in therapy as a teen and resisted it like hell. Giving dirty looks was like a super power and withholding information was a form of my own resistance. I hated everyone and almost everything. The only thing that brought me peace of any kind was nature. My body had learned to tighten and resist, whenever I was in the presence of my mother I either avoided her, insulted her, or crossed legs and arms with an immense tightening of every muscle in my body. 

You see, at the time where my memories are black is the time where my mother drank heavily. She was most certainly an alcoholic and has been attempting to recover ever since. But the thing was, when she was wasted that monster came forward in its full authentic form. She would tear you apart with words, she would assault you or come at you in attempt to destroy your wholeness. This is something her monster almost succeeded at with me. I think back to the small moments that kept me alive. The people who came and went that spoke to me to remind me of who I truly was, the parents that gave me a glimmer of what parenting was truly like, and the teachers that saw through my pain and stayed with me through it. Those are the individuals that I owe my goodness to. My grandfather was one, in all his imperfections and many mistakes as a parent himself he somehow managed to show me the light along the way. 

My grief over identifying as a motherless child in many ways has been with me always. Yes, my mother was physically there and she managed to keep me alive in her own state of degrading mental health, which is a miracle in itself. But our relationship was broken early on. She became the unsafe person from a very early age, in fact dangerous. To me, she was an evil wolf disguised as a sweet innocent lady who would in fact eat you alive as soon as you let your guard down. Although I am not here to intentionally shame or bad mouth my mother, this is my story, my experience. It’s very real and valid to me, and after decades of it being denied by my own family over and over again I am here to speak my truth. Maybe this is not anyone else’s truth but my own and that is ok. I am fully aware of only a fraction of what my mother has endured and there is a part of me that understands the monster inside. The suppressed feminine rage, the lost soul, the tormented little girl who was told her body was disgusting and she would never be worthy of anything. It was the worst for her and I see that. For me, there is also a story of my own, and trauma is unfortunately passed forward from generation to generation and the harm continues is various ways.

Because of this experience, I became fiercer about my medicine path in this life at an early age, I learned to own the witch inside of me that maybe the women in my family could not, I dove head first into many therapies and alternative modalities in attempt to dismantle what was carried in my ancestry. I have never been more certain and determined about anything in my life. At some point in my late twenties I realized I was living in unhealthy patterns I had learned. I was in a very narcissistic abusive relationship and I had had my first child. Not long after he was born, It hit me like a tsunami in my chest and felt like an absolute emergency to unbind me from the toxicities in my life. I began with talk therapy, sighed up to receive biofeild tuning sessions, and began my journey with Reiki. Now in my forties I understand that I may be unbinding myself for the rest of my life and even the next. But I am here to do this work and even to walk others on their own path for a time, to empower them, to remind them that the fear is the most important catalyst. Most importantly, that their most horrific experiences are there to teach us just how powerful we really are. That we are master medicine people walking the shamanic journey. This is NOT an easy or beautified path by any means, but it’s the most lucid and miraculous journey there is.