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Mouse in my Basement.

By on July 18, 2016
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By Wildcherry Jem

Whilst walking my pup and listening to Crystal Andrus Morissette’s live, telecall during Week 6 of her 12 Week Emotional Edge course, I felt an intense wave of sadness wash over me when she spoke of ”the mouse in the basement”….
I felt as if I was whispering to my inner child with words of comfort.
—–Oh my darling, how long have you been down here.
——-Are you ok, dear.
———-I’m so sorry you have been feeling so abandoned, precious.

The concept struck a raw nerve in me.
I had buried my teen self, deep down inside, when I left my land of birth and started a new life on another continent.
Thankfully, my parents and younger sister were my companions but we were all so homesick for Africa, that we weren’t much encouragement for each other.
Gradually, I adjusted to life in my new land but my youngest and happiest self stayed bruised for many years.

At 20, I fell in love with My Hunk Of Love.
I married him at 22, joyfully became pregnant on our honeymoon, left my beloved parents and younger sister as a 3 month old bride, and moved across an ocean to yet another continent.
My grief was an undercurrent that strangely buoyed me through many years of solo parenting.

Sadly admitting to myself that I’d lost my childhood playgrounds, I adopted my new country.
I fell apart anew when I had to once again lose that home and change over to settling into yet one more continent to call home.

Three continental moves, before the age of 23, is a rough adjustment.
Add my young wife status, and newly pregnant state, to the mix and anyone could imagine how devastated I became.
I warriored on, championed my cause, and decided to become the greatest mother in my world.
Loneliness was my constant companion.
It still is.
As a young wife, blossoming mom, parentless, sisterless, friendless, and figuring out that my husband was still the sexy lone wolf that I found fascinating. When single, I dried my tears and became my version of a shero.

Naively, I’d expected my young hubby to become my domesticated home-loving lion once we’d married.
This scenario never happened.
To this day, he still travels extensively.
Early on in our marriage, he roved as soon as business travel opportunities came his way.

Of course, I would be completely amiss to not express my gratitude for his provision for over 30 years.
I’m sincerely grateful for his faithfulness in making sure that my lights have always turned on.
Sadly, my bed has been empty of man scent for over 50% of my married life.
He has never sexually or emotionally cheated on me but I’ve raised our kids as a sole parent whilst he’s been free to pursue his travel lusts disguised in business form.
I don’t judge him for that anymore.
I’ve long ago learned that this walk is all about me.
He has his own demons to face, his own father image to yearn for, and his own conscience to live with.
I no longer carry guilt about his absence whilst our children were babies and young kids.
My children rely on me for loving support.
I am a shoulder to cry on when they deal with the emotional neglect of their dad.
My burden is heavy but lightened with love for each of them.
What’s his is his.  What’s mine is mine.  It’s healthier that way for both of us.

All grievances aside, I am quick to say that I am a very blessed woman who is married to the sexiest and sweetest boy/man that I’ve ever met.
We celebrate 31 years in 2017.
Even though I grieve at his inability to be my ideal of a doting dad, I love him as my soul-mate.
I honor my Hunk, adore his perpetual boyishness, and reframe my frustrations whenever they surge.
I have learned to have great compassion over his lack of childhood parental love.
His boyhood was marked with a gross lack of parental affection.
He has done his best to live as a man that he can be proud of.
I like him and I love him.
He is truly my best friend.
Our life together is full and meaningful.
As besties, we squabble regularly and quibble about each other’s screw up but as best friends usually do, we always kiss and make up.
Our love is established and sure.

Whilst dealing with the chronic lack of spousal parenting support, I chose to bury my young woman self and take on the older woman image of a martyr mother.
Although I have angrily chided myself for never asking my husband to man up through the years, and be the dad that his kids needed him to be, my journey into uber-mother-martyr mode makes perfect sense, today.

I see each step of my way, am thankful that it’s Crystal-cleared, and am beginning to quit judging myself as harshly as I have been for many, many years.

Realizing that I had buried a large portion of my personality in my lower soul basement, I psychologically started hugging my abandoned mouse self into my light.
This process was physically painful and took massive determination as I brought my hidden and frightened child self to my surface.

Surfacing my beloved young woman self, and seeing why she had chosen to become an old woman soul before her time, I cried unashamedly as I walked.
Tears streamed down my face as I thanked my woman self for merging with each facet of buried sweethearts, those Shes who were finally being welcomed home again.

On that walk, I came to grand conclusions about the past 30 years of my life.
Most importantly, I realized that I’m not guilty of having royally fucking up my life.
In fact, I made my life.

Since that morning, I’m no longer ashamed of my walk of motherhood.
I saw that I became the mother that my mother never was to me.

I’m not angry with my choice to become a religious zealot.
I chose to entertain the world of Christianity because it gave me a community to tie into and be accountable to.

I don’t feel enraged about choosing to homeschool my children.
I see now that I was shell-shocked by so much grief that I felt desperate about sheltering my children from the pain of loss that I’d gone through.
I made a safe haven of sameness for all of them.
I protected them in the only way that I knew how.
I secluded them from the pain of loss that I had experienced.

I now admit that I was wrong for sequestering them from outside influences.
If it hadn’t been for our family’s piano teacher, my kids would have been ultra-sheltered into their adult years.
She has been a second mother to my seven children.
Without her advice, oversight, discipline, structure, and love for the past fifteen years, I know I would have emotionally messed up my kids.
My children were saved from becoming misfits when I found her fiercely competitive piano studio.
I enrolled all of my kids in piano lessons with this teacher who cared enough about me and mine to demand perfection in musical form.
She pushed them out of themselves.
She made them into pianists who performed in national and overseas competitions.
My children were given the gift of being able to travel and see more of the world.
They were rescued by a woman who saw my duress and came to my aid.
I thank Goddess every day for the love of a woman who chose to see me.
Her love buoyed me, offered me a shelter of excellence, and lifted my head when I often felt like I was sinking under the weight of lone parenting.
Thank you will never be enough of an expression of gratitude for JK’s presence in my life.

Each of my kids stayed in their land of birth, in spite of my husband wanting to move them away from their homeland.
HIs dreams about moving his family to live overseas, in mission field venues every few years, were continually sabotaged by me because my children needed stability.

I craved stability.
I got it.
We’ve resided in the same state for over 30 years thanks to my refusal to entertain my sweet man’s wanderlust.

We’ve now lived in the same hilltop home for over 18 years.
I’m hold myself in awe as I realize that I brought about the security that I craved by creating a home life that has been stationed in the same country for over 30 years.
I overcame the instability of my childhood by making an adulthood of predictable sameness.
To my credit, I’ve stabilized my children’s lives by securing them in the same house for a very long time.

It all makes so much sense now that I can see the woods for the trees, so to speak…
My Hunk traveled, worked, and played with dreams about overseas lifestyle options.
I hunkered down, didn’t leave my home – like hardly ever driving out of my driveway, except for piano lessons or the purchasing of groceries – for 25 years straight!
I resisted his seemingly foolhardy adventures for the sake of being able to ensure a standard home life for my kids.

I no longer feel like a frickin’ failure because my adult kids decided to, “Get the Hell out of Dodge City”, by leaving home as rapidly as they could.
Now I know that they all truly love me as I love them.
Without a doubt, they are most amazing people for standing by me in my attempts to mother them.
Truthfully, I was far less patient with my mother as she navigated the turbulent waters of being my mom.
My children and I get along famously.
However, there has been this THING, for the past 6 – 10 years, hanging over our relationships.
I decided to take the blinders off my eyes, look at myself carefully, and see my mistakes as well as my failures.
Now I know what that thing was.
It was my fear of insecurity and instability.
I feared losing my home again.
I dreaded becoming unstable and hunkered down so solidly that I hardly left my home for many years.
I made darned sure that my children lived on home base instead of traversing abroad and suffering from the terrible loss of knowing where they would lay their heads each night.
Gradually, I have realized that my children did not reject me as they grew up, they simply embraced themselves and their journeys as stable-minded adults.
They were not damaged like I was.
I’d protected them from the losses that I’d lived through.
They were secure enough to move themselves on with their dreams whereas I struggled to let them go for fear of creating insecurity in their lives.
They saved themselves from repeating the pattern of my demise.
I hold them in high esteem for having the courage to grab hold of the opportunity to life on their terms.

I DID A GREAT JOB not collapsing beneath my history of instability and can proudly say that I’VE RAISED STABLE KIDS.

Overall, I’m comprehending the reliability and results of my awe-inspiring motherhood record.
In spite of a very rocky beginning, I’m a parenting success story.
I’ve lived a life filled with loneliness, insecurity, and homesickness for my own land.
I’ve overcome invisible hardships whilst creating visible victories, in the form of sound-minded children, in spite of being hampered by a gross lack of mothering skills.
My kids have had a stable childhood, played outside in the woods around our home, eaten like royalty as I’ve carefully fed them amazingly healthy food, and grown up together as close friends.
They have relationships like the one I dreamed of having with my sister.

It’s time to speak my truth without guilt because I now know that I have nothing to feel guilty about.
I’ve kicked my shame to the curb by realizing why I chose the path that I did.
It was the right one to take.
I saved my children from the instability of being raised by a post-traumatic stress disordered girl.

The martyr mother archetype, that my inexperienced and selfish self adopted, saved me from losing my temper.
She enabled me to homeschool three children, through high school, with merely a high school diploma myself…think about that one for a second. Yikes.
She gives me courage, today, as I complete the upbringing of my four younger children.
She gave me courage to face down my man when he wanted to uproot my family through the years as he proposed overseas moves, over and over and over again.
She grounded me in the fact that children do best when they grow up in stable environments versus being carted hither and yon from one country to the next.
She made me a homebound missionary of sorts.
She was the one who instigated soft rebellion toward a world traveler spouse whose wanderlust forced me to fight for the right to remain in our children’s land of birth rather than have them be chopped off at the soul-roots as I had been.
She used our joint love of animals as a ruse to avoid cross-continental moves when I adopted eight dogs simultaneously.
With the brilliance of a marshalling general upon a hill, surveying her troops below with keen instinct as to their survival, she strategized and maneuvered impossibility non-violent ambushes upon my husband’s hair-brained schemes to move our entire household overseas every few years.
With instinctive insight as to the financial impossibility of emigrating such a crew overseas, she lowered the boom on his plans with the precision of a master-minded strategist for her children’s emotional security.

She’s still my most reliable defender accomplice concerning the management of my mental safe-keeping campaign regarding the fortitude of my children’s home base.

She took in pound puppies to show my kids how to be unselfish as we took care of helpless animals.
She trained my sons to be amazingly responsible and world-aware men.
She trained my daughters to be self-loving and conscientious women.  They know how to tell the difference between a man or woman treating them well versus a man or woman treating them like sH!+.

My mother martyr archetype ran my show because she knew she had to save my ass.

I’m utterly in awe of my past.
I’m astounded at what I’ve accomplished, in spite of the severe upheaval I’d gone through, and all before the tender age of 22.

My mother martyr self helped me to lead my home when my husband was off on business-related travel trips.
I saw him flit off to work in France, in Japan, In Tunisia, In England, in Germany, in Austria, in Russia, in Romania, in Hungary, in Mexico and many more countries.
He still travels extensively.
Today, we alternate making our bed and adorably leave each other finger drawn heart images upon our fluffy blanket.

My mother martyr archetype helped me to sleep so lightly, as a young mom, that a footfall on the bedroom carpet, from one of my tiny children, woke me instantly.
This meant that I rarely slept fully for over 25 years.

Today, I snore like a lumberjack as I relax in heavenly and peace-filled sleeps.
I have done my motherhood life so very well.
This life that I’ve managed, thus far, has been nothing less than extraordinary.

I’m ready to encourage women who don’t believe that they can ”do” their lives.
I’m ready to tell my truth, as mixed up as it sounds sometimes, to help another woman see herself and then, feel proud of who she is.
A great wholeness is taking place in my inside selves.
I am becoming free to be more of me.  Yippee.

 

jeanetteWildcherry Jem writes about the joy of being a woman. She encourages women to embrace the sacred discipline of self-care with an emphasis upon pleasurable living.

For thirty years, she has been married to the father of her many children and has been a stay-at-home-mom. She blogs at https://wildcherryjems.wordpress.com/

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