Another (short) post in the series about the power of names…
I find out after everyone else. Apparently my boyfriend has been spreading rumors that we are doing it, and not only doing it, but while I am having my period. What provokes him to do this, I’ll never know.
“Hey, Red-Winger,” his friend shouts the name down the full table at lunch, and I blush, knowing it can’t be good, before I look at my boyfriend. He tries to wear a face of innocence, but I know he is guilty.
A friend takes pity on me, later, and shares the rumor with me. By now, everyone who wants to believe it is true, does. Including, of course, my two former best-friends. I can see their gloating smiles. They don’t know the truth, and they don’t want to believe it. Instead, it seems, everyone wants to believe the good-girl really has gone bad.
Alethea, Greek for truth. When I was a child I imagined I was Aphrodite when I wanted to be beautiful. Athena when I wanted to be strong. Once, my friend told me I looked like a Greek goddess in profile and I’ll never forget that. Lethe is a river where one goes to forget. I tried to dip my thoughts in its current to wash them clear of the pain. Too many memories fog my brain, most of them not mine. Grammy called me Leethie, which is only one e away from the river of forgetting, reminding me how we tried our best to forget each other, but she is still with me know. When I smell roses in winter, I know she is beside me. She whispers I love you into the cells of my heart, filling it with the grace of forgiveness. I have been called a lot of names and my life is not over yet. Alethea is not really Alethea, but Aletha according to my family, but not according to one of my best friends who refuses to drop the e that is there. I have no preference for either name, it’s the others I won’t own. Althea sounds like sandpaper. Ah-leth-ia, like a lisp. Then there are the others that are so far off I have to laugh. I’ve been called Bitch, Moody and Too Sensitive. I’ve been called Fish because my last name was Fischer, but I used to wonder if I also smelled like fish, which I might have once a month when I was too afraid to go to the bathroom. There were also the nice nicknames. Eeesh from my family when I was young, and then not so young, spelt Ish by my stepfather who sang me the song about sunshine when he was happy with me. When I smiled everything was okay. Now, my daughter calls me the master healer to tease me, and lots of other whoowhoo names that make me laugh because I know she loves me and in her 12-year-old way, she is proud of her mother. My husband calls me the Love of My Life, and sometimes that sounds too big. I am now Honey by my birthfather when he hangs up the phone and inside the warmth of the word I feel Love.
Second in the series about the power of names and what we can learn from them.
Where I was born
On August 30, 1973 a child was born inside the bedroom of a tiny house that looks like a milk carton. She was supposed to be a boy.
“Dave [my father] always wanted you to be a boy,” my mother often told me.
“I thought you were going to be a boy,” my father tells me now.
All wrapped up its hard to tell the truth
She was given the name Alethea Eamon Fischer. Alethea for the truth that cannot be agreed upon.
My mother tells me she found the name in a book. My father, that it was from the 1973 episode of Kung Fu with Jodi Foster called “Alethea,” which aired months before my birth.
My mother tells me it was a typical rainy day in Portland on the afternoon of my birth, my father remembers sun. He’s the one who gave me my middle name. Eamon became my demon. As I grew this name fueled the fire in my belly and the hatred I tried to harbor against my father.
“He never really cared about you girls,” my mother would tell us. How could he, I would think, if he gave me this name?
When I was a child I longed for an ordinary middle name, like Ann or Marie. Like the middle names my friends had. When they would ask me what my middle name was, I would refuse to tell them.
I tried to hide my middle name until it was shared without my permission, on the graduation program at the end of the 6th grade. There it was for everyone to see, beside my misspelt first name. “Eamon.”
No one said anything until the 8th grade, when I heard it sung down the hallways from the voices of boys becoming men. Each splintered note stabbed my heart and flared the fire in my cheeks.
It was a tool of hatred, of shame, of regret. My father’s gift to remind me I was the boy he didn’t get. It was the demon I held inside of me, reminding me why I shouldn’t love him. And it was the knife that stabbed through my thinning layer of self-esteem wielded by my former best-friends’ boyfriends.
I couldn’t wait for the day to come when I could get rid of it.
When I was 18, my mother, sister and I booked the appointment and spent a pleasant afternoon debating our choices. We settled on Elizabeth for me. My maternal grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s name. Elizabeth, one of those names that any girl might have.
When I signed the paper with my new name I thought I was erasing the boy that was never born. I thought I was one step closer to erasing the man who I thought never wanted me. A father who never could have loved me.
I believe strongly in the cathartic power of writing. The energy of our words can free the trapped energy of our emotions, providing us with a pathway to our Light and truth. I am starting to offer workshops on spiritual writing that will focus on understanding the self through the written word. In the first series, we’ll be exploring who we are through the names we are given by others and the names we give ourselves. In this blog, I will be sharing my own written words around the stories of my names. Here is one:
“Leethie”
“Grammy” & “Leethie”
It’s just three months into my first year at Bowdoin when the phone rings beside my roommate’s desk. I watch her pick it up, listen, then hand it over to me. It’s my mother.
“Dave [my birthfather] called. He wanted me to tell you his mother died.”
While my mother talks, I stand beside my roommate’s desk, emotionless. I can feel her eyes on me, questioning, but I ignore them.
“How’d she die?” I ask.
“I don’t know. He didn’t share.”
I can tell she’s already annoyed, she always is when my birthfather is a (rare) topic of conversation, so I don’t press it. Instead, I let her move on to other topics, half-listening as she shares stories about what has been happening in town during my absence.
While my mother talks, I think about the grandmother who, when I was very young and she was happy to be with me, used to call me “Leethie.” I feel the warm wrap of a name that was only hers to give me, until I remember the grandmother who seemed to have forgotten she had two granddaughters across the country. I recall how quickly the gifts sent from Oregon on my birthday and Christmas disappeared after I said goodbye to her when I was thirteen. I think about how soon she became just “Grammy” in quotes signed on a card, then nothing at all.
While my mother talks, I realize I cannot remember the last time I heard my grandmother’s voice, or if she ever told me she loved me.
My roommate looks at me when I hang up the phone, her face a mask of concern. “Are you okay?”
In response, I tell her I’m fine. I tell her that my grandmother has recently died, but that I’m okay because we were not close.
My roommate looks at me like I’m a freak, and I realize if she had just lost her grandmother, she would be devastated. The emotionless words that have left my mouth mirror my truth on the surface. I honestly don’t know what I feel after hearing the news that Grammy is dead. Tears do not grace my face, nor do they simmer near the surface, waiting for a private moment to erupt.
I can almost ignore the loss that hides deep within me. I have gotten used to its heavy weight. In that unreachable place, I realize there will never be a chance for reunion. Grammy will never hear my side of the story, and I will never be able to show her that young girl, barely a teenager, signing the papers to make her mother and stepfather happy. But, I don’t know if I care. Loyalty, on that day when I am 19, is still heavily weighted on the side of my mother’s truths.
I’ll start with my childhood mistakes, at least the highlights that stand out in my mind:
In the 1st grade, my best friend of the day and I bullied another child, I’ll call him “Timmy.” Timmy was a year or two older than we were, and he was sitting alone on a bench because he was different. No one wanted to be friends with Timmy. He was heavier than most other kids, he wore glasses and he didn’t really fit in. On a dare, or double-dare you might call it, because there were two of us (energy grows with numbers), my friend and I skipped past him and declared, “Timmy, you’re fat.”
For pretty much all of grade school I watched and sometimes participated in the shaming of a classmate of mine because she was also different. “Sally” wore glasses, looked unkept, came from a tough home and didn’t seem to care about fitting in.
For most of grade school, I avoided a family of children because they also came from a rough home and were “dirty” and different.
If you knew me, you might be surprised. When grown-ups met me, they thought I was shy, but exceedingly polite and well-behaved. On the outside I was a model child, but I made mistakes. I was so afraid of being different, I participated in the shaming of other children. What most people didn’t know, was that I was a child in turmoil. I had many secrets to hide, and I tried desperately not to let them out. I would do almost anything to be liked and accepted.
In the 4th grade I laughed when my friend’s suspenders fell in the toilet water.
In the 6th grade I snuck inside at recess and changed my answers on a test about pH, lying that I had to go to the bathroom.
I also wanted to be perfect.
Why am I confessing all of this now? Because kids make mistakes, and sometimes these kids are the unexpected ones. But there is always a reason, even if it is as “simple” as wanting to fit in. To be a part of the crowd.
I am the mother of two children who have already made mistakes. I think it’s almost harder to be the parent of the child who makes the mistakes, than the child herself, now that I’ve been in both places. But, neither is easy. My early mistakes still linger uncomfortably inside the shadows of my mind.
In the eighth grade I was given a gift. I was bullied, shamelessly, restlessly, well into my high school years. It was, in hind-sight, a multilayered, difficult and beautiful gift. It helped shaped who I am today. When I moved from the center to the periphery of the popular crowd, I began to look at my world from a different perspective, and I didn’t like what I saw. I didn’t want to be a mean girl. I didn’t want to follow a crowd of girls that were not only outwardly unkind, but were experimenting with sex, alcohol and other activities that spelled trouble in my mind. So, I took the lonely path of the good girl. I still made mistakes, but not nearly as many as I would have, I am sure, had I followed the crowd.
Yesterday, I was given another uncomfortable gift. My daughter had made a mistake. A big one in some ways, a not so big one in others. There were consequences, there were punishments, and life has already started to move on. But there is a bigger picture to look at with this mistake, as there is with every mistake we are gifted. Unlike me, my daughter lives a pretty charmed childhood. Not perfect, but pretty darn good. Yet, she has had a habit, since early childhood, of making impulse “mistakes” without thinking through what she is doing:
She gave herself at least 3 haircuts when I wasn’t paying attention before the age of 5.
She sprayed perfume in her eyes to see how it would feel. I think she was 8.
She put gum in her hair to see if she could get it out when she was around 7.
Yesterday, she wrote some words in a friend’s memory book that were meant as a joke, but bore the energy of something much different. When I asked her why, she told me she did it because other people were doing it. She didn’t think about the after-effects, she was merely following her own impulse, buoyed by the energy of the crowd. The resulting gift was an opportunity for dialogue.
After my daughter told me what happened, we talked about decisions and choices. We talked about the pause required before we make a questionable choice. We talked about the consequences that can come when you blindly follow instead of pausing and thinking through. We talked about drugs, violence and other unsafe behaviors that follow the energy of the crowd. We talked about being a leader and not a follower. We talked about turning this mistake she had made into an opportunity. Into a gift.
I doubt this will be the last time my daughter makes a mistake (I still make my own), but I hope together we can find the gifts always waiting inside these uncomfortable mistakes and grow them together.
I was looking through photographs, hoping for an image of baggage and hit the jack-pot when I stumbled upon this one. Baggage and behinds. Perfect! The idea that these kids (mine) were waiting for the school bus, also seemed to fit with the message I was going for. I couldn’t resist.
But this is a post about dreams, in the broadest sense of the word, and for quite some time I’ve been having a dialogue with my dream-self in an effort to shift my realities both at night and during the day. As many of you probably know, I’ve got a manuscript that’s been sitting in wait for awhile that I’d like to have published. There’s another one in the works. The finished one I wrote out of a need to heal myself, realizing as when I finished, that it had a universal message about voice and truth that applies to, well, just about anyone.
So, there’s this theme of healing and writing. They both, in my opinion go hand-in-hand. I I write to heal. I heal to write. This is a big part of my life’s journey. I’m here to incorporate both gifts in a life that involves truth, freedom and letting go of entanglements.
For those of you on a similar journey of healing, you will know that entanglements are of the self, and therefore it is up to the self to release and set free. Easier said than done. We cling to our baggage like we would cling to a life-raft at sea. Well, I do anyway.
If you were to flip through my dream journal, you would see a reoccurring theme of baggage. Our dream-selves love to use symbols and metaphors and some are rather blatantly obvious to get the point across. Quite frankly, though, I had had enough of these dreams about baggage. It was almost a guarantee that I’d go to sleep at night only to be immersed and a scene of frantic search. Usually I’m about to embark on, or leave from, a journey, and I’m in a frenetic race against time to collect all of my baggage in the form of clothes and various belongings I think I need for the trip. Things are often scattered in a cluttered room. There is too much of what I am looking to take with me. There is not enough time to collect it all. Heck, sometimes I’m even trying to wear it all. Crazy, I know. But, telling.
These last several nights I’ve been having a dialogue with that dream-self who is holding onto the idea of necessary baggage. “Give me a new reality,” I tell her each night before I succumb to slumber. For several nights I’ve refused to record her dreams, rebelling against the repetition of messages. “Show me a new reality.” And, last night, she did.
The funny thing is, I almost forgot the dream, and then I remembered.
It began as it typically does. The chaotic search for my hotel room and the things I think I need to take with me. I won’t bore you with the details, but it sure did seem to drag on endlessly. Then it shifted. There I was outside, doodling on a pad of paper, while a spirit guide with an Irish or British accent (hard to recall now) chattered in my ear. I glanced across a dirt road and saw belongings piled under a tree. They were not scattered or bagged, just a small pile in wait. A test.
“You know, you can leave it all behind,” she told me. And so I did.
It was effortless. Easy. There was no turning back. I simply left it. The female spirt guide became the physical manifestation of a man, who reminded me of the character Kane in the ’70s TV series “Kung Fu.” (For those of you who don’t know, I was named after the Jodi Foster guest character in an episode called “Alethea” that aired before my birth in 1973). I followed this Kane-like figure across the countryside and found myself without a scrap of baggage on me. Together we dove inside a hillside cave where a wondrous home was unveiled to me. Picture Dagobah mixed with Tatooine mixed with a Shaolin Temple on steroids and you’ll have an idea of what was offered to me. Suffice it to say, it was glorious. It was so worth it.
When we “leave it all behind,” we open the door to the magic waiting. Leaving the baggage of our pasts behind does not mean that we will forget that we had it. The life events still shape who we are. We learn from them, knowing that someday we will no longer need to hold on. When we strip bare the trappings in a bold release of freedom, we realize that what we thought we still needed was just baggage weighing us down. It has nothing of value, only the lessons we take with us, which are weightless. Last night I became The Fool in tarot, starting again at 0, only, unlike the fool, I carried nothing with me.
Each year I await the quickening pulse of Mother Earth as she slowly wakes from Winter’s long, intoxicating slumber. Spring offers the rebirth of life in layers, unfolding in multitudes before watchful eyes. Each glimpse into the miraculous unveiling is a gift, for it is the story of life told in the narration of rebirth’s beauty.
White risen from green
After she delivers green in every shade, Nature births white in New England, followed by a tumble of colorful twins. I call these the fairy flowers, and await them more eagerly then the blooms I lovingly plant in gardens. For these are the gifts from invisible hands. The magic seen from a child’s sight.
Purple often follows white
No, I could never have a chemical lawn. Not just because I value a healthy body and a healthy environment, I find the uniformity of artificial green in one shade dulls the senses. I walk my mottled lawn each spring in glorious search, evoking the child within who still delights in magic, as I search for the gifts of the fairies.
Common weed or miracle?
Today that child-self received a long-awaited gift. I had waited 7 years for one particular, and quite common flower to appear on the earth beside my home. There it was, in two beautiful circles. Those tiny flowers that look like stars dipped into the palette of a waking sky. I could feel the fairies smile beneath the petals as the child within skipped in joy.
In fact, it is infinitely beautiful. This, quite simply, is Truth, all else is an illusion. Let me show you why.
A Flower of Life
Like you, I am the embodiment of Light. This is the the truth of all life, yet sometimes we choose the path of shadows. Years ago, I made the conscious choice to walk the path of light. It’s the path we have all agreed to walk, whether we realize it or not. A shadow is a barrier of illusion, its purpose is to give definition to light.
The Birth of Life-Light
Yesterday was a beautiful day, as each day is. My day brought me the gifts of friendship and the love of family. It showed me the infinite glory of life in the state of becoming. Spring blooms abundance and joy bursts forth in song from winged beings. Each moment holds everything offered, and since that is all there is, it is always enough.
A Winged Being
I was reminded of this yesterday. If you asked my ego, it would tell you how it suffered two major blows. That the hopes it held onto for weeks had been crushed. Two punches to the gut. And, I crumbled into its energy of defeat, until my dreams brought me back to reality. I woke this morning remembering that my life is beautiful.
A Symbol of Fearless Abundance
Mother Nature called to me to join her in the state of becoming, and I listened. I walked into her embrace. Here she showed me life is always beautiful when we choose to see it. to feel. To allow. That at any moment we can choose to embrace the light, or stay in the illusion of shadows.
A Beautiful Grump-Stump
There is even humor, and therefor light, in the symbols that show us shadows. Today, I laugh at doubt, knowing that it is an illusion. That I can shake its frumpy clothes free and run naked in the light. This is my destiny of becoming, and it is, always, in each moment, enough. It is beautiful. My life is beautiful.
The pain I was trying to release was jagged and sharp. Imagine light trapped behind clouds for 40 years. Imagine the imprint of a hand on a face that wasn’t mine. A memory only a young, open child can create and trap, even though she didn’t see the hand. Ah, but that tangled cord that binds a child to her mother’s womb is hard to break, and some of us walk the path of our mother’s darkness for years before we free our own light.
We carry our mothers’ wounds like armor. We carry them with the fierce loyalty of guarded love, until we realize that the burden is not ours to harbor. I thought I had let the memory go. I no longer felt the quickening of heart when I thought about my parents’ rage clashing into lightening. I no longer felt the paralysis of fear when I recalled my impulse to save her.
But, the imprint of the memory still lingered, embedded so deeply inside the right side of my head, I grappled physical pain as I worked to release it. With the the memory, my young mind had also sheltered darkness, and the notion that any expression of my inner light/truth would result in pain and harm.
I was born into a legacy of silencing, my fears fed with her stories of abuses and incest. There was no surprise that I had trapped my earliest memory and almost made it my soul’s truth, a shadow that would hover for decades over my light.
The letting go is almost as painful as the holding on.
Why do we fear light? Why do we doubt the power of love? We live in a world of abundance, yet we trap ourselves in our fears, even when they are not ours. We turn to war and conflict more easily than we turn to love. Thus we fight to keep our fears alive, instead of letting them go, even though our souls crave light. We long for it not only in ourselves, but in others. We crave union, we crave harmony and balance, but chaos is allowed to reign. Fear is a shadow that blinds our inner truths, but we may choose whether to walk the path of its darkness.
Last night, before falling into sleep, memories from high school returned to me, one in particular. The day I was asked to be year book editor. See, despite everything, you still shined, was the message I received with the memory, and the idea that someone saw a gift I embodied to fill this role. A voice worth hearing.
The truth is, I swallowed my voice the vast majority of the time. People thought of me as shy and reserved, if they did not really know me. Some considered me a snob. Most did not see the scared, paranoid child living inside. And, there were the few (but it was enough) that fed upon my insecurities and caused a great deal of torment, anguish and paranoia.
Yet, still I shined. This is the message I was being asked to hear, to see, last night. Despite the internal and external battles I felt I was waging both at home and at school, I persevered. I never gave up. I never gave in. Instead I shined my light to the best of my abilities.
So today I am remembering the light, and the “Visions of Change” I held onto. I am remembering the steady voice of the accomplished young lady who stood above a crowd of gatherers and talked about how the past can become a marker, but not a place to stay. I am remembering the beauty of her soul and her truth. I am remembering her strength.
The Light Behind the Story 