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Yes.


It has to do with how we perceive.


It has to do with the posts on how families come together around their births and their deaths and their challenges and joys.  Every aspect of each of those events is determined by perceptions of self.


In my family of origin, there is a determination that each of us will continue in the rigidity of the roles established to service the initial dysfunction.  Truly, those roles did enable a kind of balance and in that sense, did serve the family's survival.  The process for us seems to be to recognize the essential disbalance in those roles.  Serenity had posted for us a piece of research having to do with role rigidity in dysfunctional families. 


That is a key, for us.


It is not that the family of origin was defective.  It is that the family was damaged ~ that the family came through the generations bearing the disbalances of the generations that came before.  Roles were required, and role rigidity was required, for the family to function in the face of the hurt in what was.  To the degree that we are functioning from a role, we are not free.  (And we all function from our roles, sometimes.  Our professional roles are one example.  It is not a question then, of role assumption being a wrongness.  It is a question of role rigidity versus role fluidity.  Fluid.  Present.  Centered, and able to move freely, to respond to the current situation sincerely, and not from a role.)




Reading between the lines in the article cited, the difference between this woman strong enough to claim and believe in her beauty and in her value as a human person, and the dependency assumed in most eighty year olds seems to be...humility.  Arthritis, knee replacement, loss of all her money in her mid-seventies.  And yet somehow, she is not a beggar.


Did not see herself as a beggar, did not take that on.


So, did not see herself as a victim.


That is the difference.  As angry as I have been over what happened, to my children and to all of us...I saw myself (and my children, too) as victims.  Of circumstance or of my parenting or of a thousand other things.


So, I don't know what the lesson is here, but I do know that attitude of humility in the sense that Dell' Orefice did not say "Why me poor me I cannot". 


I think she never said "Why me."


That is the difference.




What illness did she have, Leafy?  Had there been some question of sexual identity as a young woman?


Perhaps I will begin to paint.  To begin taking photographs, and to paint.


And to write.


And to not say "Why me", anymore.


Cedar


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