A Journey

 

Chapter 4

 

Happiness in life is not a given.

I find myself many times searching inside for that elusive feeling of contentment .I suppose in order to be happy one has to learn to accept ourselves and others also with all our flaws. Looking back to the past in longing prevents us from living in the moment. It’s easy to magnify things remembered and so we tend to see the past as being better or worse than what it really was.

It’s ok to remember good times and also cathartic to recall the bad times if only to use it as a stepping stone to our well being in the now but wanting and wishing for the past or even the future prevents us from living and appreciating the moment.

Happiness isn’t a feeling nor is there a magical formula that can make you happy except maybe this one; being happy is accepting with joy the moment of just being. There is no judgment, no analyzing the why of the moment. It is being fully awake and enjoying wholeheartedly the process of living.

It is like a vibration that starts in the soul and comes out in a smile that is felt not only by you but in all those that surround you in that particular time.

Being happy is a state of being in the now with acceptance of all that is happening in your life. Staying in the moment requires a lot of effort but not impossible to achieve.

.I haven’t mastered this yet but am learning to enjoy practicing staying in the now because when I put myself back in the moment during some crisis , whatever is bothering me somehow doesn’t seem all so important in the space that is my whole life and then I lighten up.

Happiness certainly cannot be found in "things" and no one can give it to you no matter how much he or she would love to because it is a process that all of us have to go through by ourselves but when you are happy it radiates to others and they somehow feel better around you.

We shouldn’t try to jealously hold onto happiness. As soon as we start to think that something negative will spoil it all and take it away, we’ve already fallen into the ego trap that reminds us of the reality of this world and of all the pitfalls that are surely waiting to pounce on us and then our state of happiness is gone. If this happens we should get back in the moment and see things more objectively with eyes that not only see what is in front of our nose but also the many nuances every experience that we live brings to us .

I can’t say I was a happy child nor can I say I was terribly unhappy. Children live in the moment most times .I wasn’t analyzing my feelings when I was little. I just knew how I felt at any given moment. The person I am now reflects on what it felt like then and is now able to explain some of the feelings that come up when putting myself back in time in these recollections.

Growing up a Catholic in the fifties we were always going to church and would never think of missing Sunday mass, and if we forgot and ate meat on Friday it was enough to make us feel so guilty to have been so careless, not to mention that it was a mortal sin or a venial sin for not staying in line with the laws of the church...I remember so many moments surrounding the events concerning this religion and all its rules of conduct.

There was one day I had forgotten to wear a hat and had to put a paper napkin on my head secured with a bobby pin so they’d let me in church but I loved wearing hats .They were so pretty and it was fun to see so many different styles of hats worn in church by the women and young girls especially by the little old ladies that had all manner of fruits and veils and birds and feathers on their heads. They wore them proudly for they knew I'm sure that even if time was to wear them out eventually their favorite hat would age.

It wasn’t hard to find something funny to laugh about in church. You just had to glance at the person with a bunch of grapes on her head in front of you or the one sitting all prim and proper by your side slowly falling asleep during the sermon, his head tilting back ever so slowly... mouth wide open threatening to swallow the fly that was determined to check out his tonsils. It was sheer torture spending the hour trying to camouflage a giggle by turning it into a cough or a sneeze because if the priest glanced your way, you were in deep trouble. It was fun and and you never knew when a fit of giggles would appear and once you started it was most times impossible to stop and you ended up crying real tears in a tissue and had to get up and walk past the praying congregation to the back for a drink of water and maybe out the door for some fresh air to calm down.. and maybe make your way home a little earlier than you should have.

I used to pass out a lot in church and in school .Everything would just go white and I’d regain consciousness many times stretched out on the floor somewhere surrounded by people I didn't know .. The fainting spells continued till I turned twelve. I never found out why this happened so often but being such a skinny little thing I was probably anemic.

Before television, before computers and the internet we spent many hours enjoying the days and evenings in activities that only the generation that grew up in the pre internet times can really appreciate.

Everyone seemed to own a guitar and on summer nights our little house was crammed with family and friends and they would spill into the backyard. Music and laughter could be heard all the way down the block.

There was always plenty of food around at all times and so the only reason I can give for being so anemic and skinny was my lack of appetite. We were poor but never did without the things we really needed and food was always at the top of the list.

.

I am thinking that the over stimulation in many areas might have been hard on a sensitive child that took herself too seriously and so being fragile and shy, every experience seemed to hit me with a bigger blow than it should have.

The fires of childhood were there. There are probably more of us that were abused sexually than we think and an awful lot whole lot more of us made to feel less than a piece of doggy doo on the heel of a shoe.. There are many kinds of abuses and violation of your body and mind touches your soul to the core of your being.

Going to confession was not one of my favorite pastimes but it was one of the rules of the church that had to be obeyed. If one wanted to be forgiven by God for sins ,we had to confess to a priest and do penance . I had been molested so many times in my pre adolescence that I was left extremely confused with great feelings of guilt and so confession for me was something that I was never able to fully appreciate. I would make up things and would say the required amount of Hail Mary’s or acts of Contrition then wait for the next time I’d have to go. I did try once to speak of masturbation and was shot down so quickly and told how dirty this was by the vicar that happened to be not a regular priest but a Monsigneur (which is one step up) He told me that I should be ashamed and so I should never do this again. I walked out of the confession humiliated , feeling dirty and even guiltier than when I walked in and promised myself I’d never tell anyone again about this and so I heaped this guilt on top of the guilt I felt for all the times I was molested by someone.

 

I think the worst of abuses I received were the ones where I was made to feel I could never measure up to the standards put on me by my parents especially my mother.. The days that saw me sitting at the kitchen table for what seemed like an eternity, tightening up in silence while screaming inside at her to please shut up and stop talking and complaining all the time. Drama queens monopolize all the conversations and are so hard on those they have control over.. We as children had to sit there and make eye contact and listen no matter what and no matter how long it took for her to have her say and it took forever because she always had so much to say and if it wasn't about something that happened in the present , she'd dig up the past and we had to relive it with her moment by moment. As the only girl it fell more on me. Sort of an "us" against "them" kind of thing .This was a horrible way to live and I don’t wish this on any child, so the sexual abuse I went through is nothing compared to the way this emotional abuse was to me.

I have forgiven her but I can’t forget .She was a good mother in very many ways and has mellowed quite a bit over the years and is now in her eighties and being taken care of in a nursing home. She is actually experiencing a kind of peace and for this I am happy to see because I know that although her dreams didn’t come true in life she has accepted herself and now seems to remember the good times more than the bad.

There were not too many things that a young couple with a growing family in the fifties and early sixties in a small town could do to have a little fun other than have friends and family over for parties and barbecues and such. When you are poor you make your own fun and you can’t afford movies or restaurants or trips and once in a while you might be able to hire a babysitter and get a reprieve from the mountains of laundry and dirty diapers and the constant demands of a growing family in a four room house, so a bingo is a night out to really look forward to and this was their time to unmind and leave the house for a while.

I must have snapped under stress sometime during my twelfth or thirteenth year .It could have happened as a result of my having had a conversation with someone or an actual event but in that year some kind of turning point in my life came about because I think this is about the time when I locked the rage and hurt up completely for what was going to be decades till I learned to forgive myself for having good clean fun, for hating my mother, for feeling guilty for things done to me by others that I had no control over and to also forgive those who did me injustices not maliciously but because of their ignorance.

 

 

It’s hard not to hear and be bombarded by things when you are growing up in a big family.

We had our chores and did them without too much balking and things ran like clockwork most times .The kitchen was the heart of the family and seeing as it blended into the living room with no partition we were always one on top of the other unless we stepped into the bathroom for some solitude or were put in one of the two bedrooms for quiet time as punishment while throwing our tantrums or sent outside to play.

We helped mom and dad make pies with fresh blueberries we had picked locally that summer or rolled the dough for pie crusts and stirred the pot for French Canadian meat pies called tourtieres made with ground beef and pork, cloves and onions. The smell of cloves on meat pie making days made Christmas extra special and it was a beautiful sight to see thirty or forty pies lined up everywhere in our small kitchen, living room cooling off during the day .One year we ran out of room and had to put some to cool outside and caught the next door neighbor's dog trying to sneak into the yard.

On his days off my dad who worked as lineman in the Canadian Pacific Railway.would be elbow deep into making bread while singing and drinking however many beers he could down that would see him through the day.It seems to me my dad was always happy and feeling good and I loved him very much..

Mom would be stirring a big soup pot on the stove while keeping count of how many bottles were left in the case of 24s while speaking over the noisy household trying to referee an argument between two or three of us and chastising the others for not doing whatever it was she had asked them to do a million times. That’s multi tasking!

The smell of things cooking in our house was so wonderful, especially when a big pot of homemade beans were put in just before bedtime and left to cook slowly all night long. Of course the next morning we would all have some for breakfast along with mounds of toast stacked so high they would topple over every time .We never went without food. There was always plenty of it .These were the days when soup bones were free, chicken wings were free, liver was free and cheese was cheap .Molasses was good for you so it went in everything from beans to pancakes to being spread on toast every day. Molasses was also mixed in with sulphur and we were lined up once a week and given a huge massive spoonful of it to keep us healthy.

My parents were great cooks and made sure we were well fed and so, on the days my dad went to work , mom would keep things going, send us off to school and try to keep her little house in some sort of order while catching up with the never ending laundry and keeping her eyes on the little ones that were too young to go to school.

One morning mom got up and opened the fridge to take something out and the door fell off its hinges. Come to think of it, it was not only the refrigerator that gave up but also the day the stove and the dryer conked out .I remember her talking about it with one of her sisters on the phone .She was laughing and crying at the same time. It was a busy household and so I am not surprised how she could have so easily overlooked any one of her children changes in moods in such an uproar.

Everybody it seemed was always shouting over the sounds of the radio always playing some good old country song and then like clockwork the train whistle would add its repertoire to the mix every thirty minutes (no lie) and one could feel the vibrations of it go through your body as if you were an instrument being played by an unseen hand. These times I know fine tuned my discipline.To this day I can keep my mouth shut in a crisis that would probably drive someone over the deep end .If something is none of my business , I will keep silent or I might say something with controlled emotions even though I might want to scream at the top of my lungs.. If I was to let myself go totally sometimes I would probably tear my vocal chords to shred. I don't like to argue , never fight with someone and would rather walk away from a confrontation .I do speak my mind when I feel I should but I hate hurting anyone so I suppose I'm my own worse enemy sometimes.

The screen doors at both end of that little house were always open and slamming shut with someone wanting a drink of water, a snack ,or wailing at the top of their voices in a symphony of sounds that grated on the nerves like monstrous chalk on a blackboard and a song would bubble up inside me and I would sneak away in the backyard when and shut out the chaos by closing my eyes singing to myself on the swing at the top of my lungs .. .

 

And so it is with love for the little girl that I was and still am inside at times that I am sitting here at this computer today spilling my heart out to this machine.

Sometimes this child within breaks through the me that is now .Most times she smiles and sees the world through rose colored glasses and giggles and laughs and sings to herself and all is well , then there are other times when she doesn’t seem to understand why she can’t have the moon, why her Prince Charming never comes to her and she cries and tears fill up in the now in frustration because the person she is now is supposedly all grown up but she still has so much to learn about unconditional love and letting go and is learning how to stay in the moment.

I have been through nothing compared to some and much compared to others and so I can only speak through my own experiences in life in those younger days and how some of these affect me still.

I’m sure my parents would have had many tales to tell about their own trials and tribulations in those days and also many stories of their own concerning their childhood. I think everybody has a tale to tell , a book inside … a good read .. While we were growing up it never occurred to any of us children to see beyond our own private hells to what might have been going on within each other... especially our parents.

Was I satisfied while growing up? No way.!!! .

Maybe grandma was right after all because since the beginning I knew it could be better.

Was I happy? Not all the time but there were some great moments and these made life bearable... but happiness is certainly not a given. I really think it is a gift you come to accept from yourself for what life is and what it has been for you in every moment, every experience lived without judging yourself and others.

It is joy of life in the moment , with no questions needed and no answers given .