Spirituality and Old Wounds
Quietly
Quietly, and faded like the walls
Hair unwashed, in wrinkled clothes
They sit in class absorbed in other matters
Hard to spot among the colors fresh from shopping malls.
Dreamily they stare out windows
Flirting with horizons
Wider than their own
That sweep like hints of something larger
Something brighter
Than the dark and narrow borders of their homes.
In a world not quite their own
Like uninvited guests
They eat their lunches all alone
Laughed at, taunted, scorned to hell
They know
So much is missing;
And if you smile their way
They seek it in your eyes like strangers
Wandering through desert places
Open to the nearest traces.
Turns away again; then you sense a troubled closing
As the silences behind your back
So fill with such a weight of wanting
That you feel the heavy press of their distress
The delicate collapse and crumpled folding –
Of the struggling young girls
The straggling young girls
Who sit apart with uncombed curls
In rumpled clothing.
No one is perfect. Everyone is called in the direction of perfection.
If at all possible, find a way to love your parents. It settles some things and makes others irrelevant.
Wounds that won’t completely heal can be left behind, transcended for every practical purpose of our lives.
The only thing that more than makes up for a deficit in being loved as a child is a surplus of loving. Give better than you got.
Paul Martin
Quietly, and faded like the walls
Hair unwashed, in wrinkled clothes
They sit in class absorbed in other matters
Hard to spot among the colors fresh from shopping malls.
Dreamily they stare out windows
Flirting with horizons
Wider than their own
That sweep like hints of something larger
Something brighter
Than the dark and narrow borders of their homes.
In a world not quite their own
Like uninvited guests
They eat their lunches all alone
Laughed at, taunted, scorned to hell
They know
So much is missing;
And if you smile their way
They seek it in your eyes like strangers
Wandering through desert places
Open to the nearest traces.
Turns away again; then you sense a troubled closing
As the silences behind your back
So fill with such a weight of wanting
That you feel the heavy press of their distress
The delicate collapse and crumpled folding –
Of the struggling young girls
The straggling young girls
Who sit apart with uncombed curls
In rumpled clothing.
No one is perfect. Everyone is called in the direction of perfection.
If at all possible, find a way to love your parents. It settles some things and makes others irrelevant.
Wounds that won’t completely heal can be left behind, transcended for every practical purpose of our lives.
The only thing that more than makes up for a deficit in being loved as a child is a surplus of loving. Give better than you got.
Paul Martin
Posted by Paul at 11:19 AM Permalink
22 Comments:
which is actually a reason to be grateful for having intolerable parents--
and then, of course, the hard work remains of healing the wounds...
but all in all,
an advantage,in the long run--
over someone who has known only comfort and complacence, and never had a reason to look beyond that horizon...
Just one person's opinion, from experience, of course!
(trying to look on the bright side...)
Intersting that you would write of those ignored and have not verses those that have.
In my experience, having the family I did forced me to choose. Choose to be like them or be better than them. My children are fortunate, i chose to be better and not repeat the cycle of pain.
For many though it is hard to do. And even those that have much, may be ignored because their parents believe by giving them things they are loving their child. But that is not the case. THINGS to not mean love, love is free without judgment or complication.
I believe giving items teaches children to avoid their feelings and think that if you give presents or money (material things) then they are more loved or taken care of better than those that have little... how wrong they are.
Such a wise way of doing things - we fill ourselves up when we give, don't we.
I'm printing this one out.
Thanks Paul.
I have two young grandchildren (a boy and a girl ages 10 and 7 respectively) whose wounds are deepening due to the preferential treatment they see their two older siblings (boys 12 and 13) receive from the biological father of all four. It is a divorce situation. The father has abandoned the two younger ones emotionally and physically. He has rejected them. He never sees the two younger children, but manages to see the two older ones regularly. For some time it has been taking its toll on the two younger ones. The counselors have said that the pain will only get more intense for them when they reach about 12. What is worse is that the 10 year old boy has significant emotional problems (I wonder why) and is in special ed because of them.
I don't know how a parent can do this to his own children. The father has been told about the damage this is doing to these two children of his. It doesn't sink in. All we can figure is that he is a sociapath and has no soul. But how do you explain this to children.
I try every way I can to be there for these particular grandchildren. It won't take the place of their father though. It won't make up for what he is doing to them.
Sorry for writing on such a personal level, but your post spoke to me on a personal level.
And now, back to our program...
FIREBIRD, INSIDE/OUTSIDE: The psychology of individuals is certainly complicated. As you each help to point out, people react in different ways to different situations – and to similar situations.
As an elementary counselor, you rarely get much if any information on what becomes of children you’ve worked with. This poem was written based on my experiences with three third grade girls about twenty years ago.
RAFFI: The more self awareness we have the better. Learning from negative childhood experiences and not treating one’s own children the same way is a good example of that. And notice that there’s also the phenomenon of what might be termed the reactionary parent - so determined not to repeat his parent’s mistake that he or she goes too far in the opposite direction and makes a different one! Of course everyone makes mistakes and parents can’t expect themselves to be perfect people in relation to their kids. But the more we know where we’re coming from, the better off they are.
PAULINE: Absolutely. Or,if we empty ourselves, we are already empty and again lose nothing at all.
VISHESH, you too, thanks for stopping by –
CRYSTAL: Individual psychology is complicated. I’m not even in a position to be able to agree with the accuracy of your self perception on that, since what I’d infer from your blogging/commenting style would actually incline me to say the opposite.
Psychology is so complex it’s probably hard to come up with generalizations that ring true for everyone. In my particular case, I got a lot of great stuff from one parent and a lot of negativity from the other. So I gave much better than I got from the negative parent – but do acknowledge that I received wonderful things from the other.
I can think of one family I’ve known, and there must be a whole lot of others, where neither parent seems to have done a very good job. As a group, the kids in that family really struggled. Some clearly never got over their background but at least one of them somehow went on to “give better than she got.” I don’t know the details of what she picked up along her way, or how.
SUSIEQ: I know exactly what you mean. I think everyone who’s worked a long time in the elementary schools runs into at least a child or two that they wish they could adopt. And the elements in the situation you describe here are all too common in the lives of children in recent decades.
Fathers don’t have to be clinical sociopaths to have little to nothing to do with their own children following a divorce. It happens far too often for that to be the case. But frankly I’m with you on this – at a gut level, I don’t get how they can do it.
I’ve also run into situations, far less common, but they do happen, where the child is abandoned by the mother. I’ve seen much less of this so it’s hard to compare and try to generalize, but from what I have seen, I think this may tend to do even greater harm.
The results showed that monkeys would rather stay with the fluffy mother, even if she offered no food. The baby monkeys grew up to be bad parents themselves.
It really depressed me back then because I was convinced that like those monkeys, I'd make a bad mother.
I know of a case where the mother who was bipolar just up and left her husband and their three children (one was a baby) and headed for Florida. She has had nothing to do with them since. Fortunately the father is devoted and he has a supportive family.
The courts can't force parents to love their children. All the courts can do is take the children away from the parents when the situation becomes one of gross abuse and neglect.
Crystal, I think you would be a loving and devoted mother. I see how much you love Kermit your cat.
'Course, as slow as I am to see everything I'm supposed to see, I reckon I should read it a few more times, eh?
I mean, I really did think that the gal was deadweight lifting 420 pounds.....
Now there was a strange sentence...
SUSIEQ, that is an unusual twist. Hard to figure where the father's coming from. As to child protective services, like pretty much everything run by the government that isn't military, it's underfunded - and the funding has probably been seriously cut over the last six years. What we have in place there is definitely better than nothing - but, imo, like so many aspects of our national life these days, pretty disgraceful for the richest nation on earth.
KAI, thanks -
BONEMAN: That's what I have to do - read most poems at least a few times. Well, not the ones I wrote, LOL... But I think that's par for the course. Poetry often uses language in more complicated ways than prose, so you have to kind of decipher it before it hits you.
HAZZBUZZ: "If not loved for who you are it is easy to forget how to be yourself and that makes it harder to love other people." I think that's exactly right.
Keshi.
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