What it looks like when we circle the wagons. For Recovering and pasajes4, this time. :O)

Childofmine

one day at a time
Through rain and wind and weather, hell-bent for leather...that's us Cedar! We are movin' 'em up, we are keeping them dogies moving, we are crackin' that whip!

But this time it's all for ourselves---for each other---not for somebody who doesn't want our help and won't accept our help.

I love the songs, they take me back to sitting in front of the TV at 6 p.m. on Sunday nights (I think) watching cute Rowdy and swooning...lol.

The wagons are circled. We are moving forward together.
 

pasajes4

Well-Known Member
How funny. I sing the rollin, rollin. rollin, keep those doggies rollin...when the kids at school are being pokey walking in from the playground.
 

recoveringenabler

Well-Known Member
Staff member
Thanks! I was a big Clint Eastwood fan and I love that song too......keep those doggies rollin.............that's terrific, thank you so much!
 

Scent of Cedar *

Well-Known Member
Ha! I love the part where he flicks the cigarette out of the difficult child's mouth. Also, the part where the two difficult children are sitting at the bar saying bad words while Elwood and Jake (me and Recovering) are singing the first song. And how typical is that, for the parents to be singing their hearts out to make everyone happy while the difficult children are throwing beer bottles at them.

Now that we are all back from our trip to town, pasajes4 and Recovering...how are things, today?

Cedar
 

recoveringenabler

Well-Known Member
Staff member
I was a huge Blues Brothers fan Cedar, I'm so delighted to be Jake!!

I responded to your inquiry in my latest thread.

I can't tell you how happy it made me to read this post and to sing that song and to imagine all of us circling around the campfire. Major smile going on here...........
 

Scent of Cedar *

Well-Known Member
Having received another nasty FB from difficult child son? I am especially enjoying being Clint Eastwood this morning in the second scene of the first video. The one where he is shooting directly into the camera.

:O)

Definitely a Clint Eastwood kind of day.

Cedar

We watched The Blues Brothers last night.
 

recoveringenabler

Well-Known Member
Staff member
Cedar, while you're getting your six gun ready to shoot, can you un-friend your son on FB or block him so he is aware of the block therefore he knows you will not tolerate any more hate mail? Geez. Our kids can be such ingrates.
 

Scent of Cedar *

Well-Known Member
I don't want to do that, Recovering. I like it that I am standing up. I like it that I am seeing without compassion, without understanding, without ~ really, without caring. I see the bare bones beneath what difficult child son is saying without my usual soft focus, my usual "oh he's had a bad day, I know he loves me just the same way I love him, I will understand for him until he can see for himself."

I even had a therapist tell me once that when the kids talk like this, it is because they feel safe enough with us to talk like this.

So, now I see that was (see me spitting a string of swear words out here and, being that we are on a cattle drive, explosively expectorating a stream of tobacco juice a truly amazing distance AND, IN A REMARKABLE FIT OF REBELLION FOR CEDAR, MISSING THE SPITTOON ON PURPOSE) given bad advice, to say the least.

I still need to see where I really am, Recovering. I have been so wrapped in the dream, so sure love would win, so positive the white would out the dark.

It is like the piece you sent about cutting the eyes open.

Now that they are open, I elect to see.

That's why I am being Clint Eastwood, today. "To heck with that whip, Ma'am! Get me my shotgun!"

He said that once, right?

:O)

Cedar
 

trinityroyal

Well-Known Member
I LOVE this. (Especially as I'm swaggering around my office in the new motorcycle boots husband bought me) I'm feeling Tiny and Tough, a pocket-sized Clint Eastwood-ette, ready to take on the Baddy-Bad-Bads (as my littlest monster tot calls them).
 

recoveringenabler

Well-Known Member
Staff member
Good for you Cedar..............you take that stand, we'll be right here with our guns at the ready to help whenever we can..........(I'm not too sure about that tobacco spitting though..................!)
 

Scent of Cedar *

Well-Known Member
I have been too "nice" in my life, Recovering. It tears me apart to see, to really see, the way my son sees me. He sent his sister an email. Looking for allies. He is behaving every bit as badly, is following that same toxic abuser's path, as Seeking's gfg32, MWM's 36, BITS' father and son.

I feel cheap, Recovering.

I feel so cheapened, so cheap, so foolish...disillusionment is such an empty place to be. I know I will come away stronger. I understand that "cheap" is an indication of growth and of compassion for myself. I feel the anger beneath it, understand the anger is what will blow the covering illusion away.

Tears at the edges of things.

Raging, inside. I know what I knew all along. I just believed so unshakably that holding strong, that believing for the best, worked. It doesn't. My son is a grown man. He has been grown up for a long time. He is mean like a snake, Recovering.

Believing for the best is an illusion. A comforting illusion, to believe in a future better than the now.

It is true. All we ever have is the now.

It's a difficult thing to stand up, here.

It requires six guns blasting and tobacco-juice spitting.

Though I agree that a spittoon would be appropriate at this point.

:O)

Cedar

After I get through this part, let's go thundering down the beach on white stallions.

Barefoot, no saddles, no reigns.
 

recoveringenabler

Well-Known Member
Staff member
I know that feeling Cedar. Disillusionment is pretty grim. I am not sure about the word "cheap" that would seem to define your son and his demented view, not you.

One of the most difficult things for me to see is that my daughter is not a very nice person. In fact, she can be cruel and so incredibly entitled without any real ability to consider the feelings of others. Realizing your only child is probably a sociopath is a very hard pill to swallow. So, I hear you.

Who he is and how he treats you is all about him. It is not about you. Do not take that on nor take it personally. He is lashing out rather then take the reins of his own life. It really has nothing to do with you. And, of course, even as I say that to you, I know how much it impacts you. It makes me want to smack him upside the head and spit tobacco in the direction of his big (overblown with his own importance), head!

I care about you and how you are feeling...........I wish I had the right words to say to you which would make this hurt go away, to make you feel that anger inside and let it out, so that you could better see that compassion for yourself.

I too have been a "too nice" person. Our "fixed" identity. Well, that's shattering pretty well isn't it? I am still a nice person, I just dropped the "too" in the nice. And niceness doesn't mean you put up with crap and allow others to harm you with their words or their actions. Your son is a weenie, plain and simple. Think about it, a 38 year old man who has to find allies in his collusion against his own mother and use social media to attack her............ is definitely a weenie. His problem, not yours.

Someone once told me that when we are under attack like that to imagine there is a shield around us, perhaps golden or white, some form of protection........and imagine that when arrows fly at us with a harmful intent, that they immediately bounce off of our shield and return to the sender. Put your shield up and then forget about it, allow your imaginary shield to do it's work. I found that imagery to be quite helpful.

Our attachments to the outcome are another cause of suffering. I did a similar thing as you, thinking I could somehow manipulate the future with my love or my power, but I couldn't. It is not my future, it is our kids future and only they can figure that out.

In our reading of Pema's books, I'm beginning to understand how we humans want pleasure and want to avoid pain and that illusion is a great source of suffering. We can't avoid this pain, we have to allow our kids to take it over because it is their pain.............all we can do is handle the pain in our own hearts that comes from our own powerlessness where our kids are concerned. I think the recognition of that powerlessness is the key that sets us free from this seemingly never ending drama with our kids.

After I get through this part, let's go thundering down the beach on white stallions.
Barefoot, no saddles, no reigns.

I love that image. It feels so free, wind in our hair, barefoot, holding on to that horse (which incidentally in almost all cultures, horses mean POWER!) riding so fast that we are almost flying................along the ocean, that vastness and openness.........I am going to use that image for this new sense of liberation and openness that I feel..............it's just perfect.

So, Cedar, ready to ride?? Let's rock!
 

Childofmine

one day at a time
Oh Cedar, when I read your post I thought this:

Mean people think mean things. They do mean things. That does not mean they are right.

But of course you know that.

I suspect it just hurts because he is your son and he is thinking mean things (no matter how wrong and how rattled and how sick he is) about his mother, who loves him so much.

Mothers and sons. What a dynamic.

You are changing so much. Do you feel isolated and weird around the same people sometimes? I do. Sometimes I feel like a stranger in a strange land. I don't speak the same language other people do anymore.

But inside, I feel more sure than I ever have. By sure I mean firm and solid. Settled. Together.

I am contented most of the time now. I am so much clearer in my mind. I don't have as much angst about anything. I am keeping my life simpler.

I have been too nice too. I have been nice to a complete fault. It's something good than when it goes too far, turns into something bad. Like eating the whole cake instead of a piece of cake. I think I was just a people pleaser, if you want to really get down to it. Not so much nice, but nice all packaged up to get you to like me.

I still believe for the best, Cedar. Maybe I will shed that, in time. I don't want to be hard-hearted. This I know. But I want to be more measured in my responses.

To us, today! The sun is shining and I am grateful for that.
 

Scent of Cedar *

Well-Known Member
Your son is a weenie, plain and simple.

I LOVE THIS. Ha, Recovering! It feels like you said a bad word in church or something!

A weenie?!?

Oh, my!

I must be a little afraid of son's anger, still. He still has that power over me then. I was unaware, until you said he was a weenie.

Ha! Recovering!

:O)

His problem, not yours.

Our attachments to the outcome are another cause of suffering

We can't avoid this pain, we have to allow our kids to take it
over because it is their pain.............all we can do is handle the pain in our own hearts that comes from our own powerlessness where our kids are concerned.

This is good, Recovering. This is how we separate, how we begin to feel what it would be to live for ourselves, for our own joy and growth, again.

Sometimes I feel like a stranger in a strange land.

I have felt this, Child.

I sent you a quote once, about someone in the midst of her change process. She too looked around herself, and found that all things, every smallest thing, was different. In the quote, that feeling is described as "poignant with loss."

Let's see if I can find that one for you.

*****************

"Extremely odd sensation, this new awareness, as though she had come a full step away from her former associates. The feeling was poignant with loss."

Frank Herbert
The Jesus Incident (?)



Not so much nice, but nice all packaged up to get you to like me

I believe that, until we develop the ability to hold both the cloud and the silver lining in our minds and in our hearts at the same time (Do you like that imagery, Child? It is yours. :O), until we become "present," we tend to operate from habit, from what worked in the past, more than from our core selves, our real, living, wide awake and aware selves. It is a little about fear, a little about not wanting to risk things we haven't found to be successful in the past.

Unintentionally, we become rigid, in a way. We become caricature's of who we really are.

My heart is good. I don't want to hurt anyone. I see that when I was young, I fell routinely into what had already become a caricature while scoring points through ~ as something Echolette posted about the power of being young and female (once ~ I am old, now) reminded me ~ physical presence. It all happens so subtly. Without a spiritual practice to keep us aware of who and how we really are, there is not much chance for us to develop ourselves in positive ways.

For me, because it was so demanding a thing, a thing with so little outward reward, the ballet classes I took as an adult was a positive way. Karate, with an exacting teacher and Tai Chi, with an even more exacting teacher, with a teacher awake on so many levels...these are positive, challenging ways. Part of the benefit there ~ most of it, maybe ~ is in allowing myself to be a beginner, to not know. To do that willingly, to look and feel ridiculous and like, mentally challenged (!), takes a certain amount of I don't know...is the word courage? Becoming familiar with that feeling by choice has enabled me to welcome it when it is not by my choice. That is the feeling of riding the edge Brene Brown writes about.

Well, how did I get off onto that, I wonder? What I started out to say is that we fall into these kinds of automatic selves. It isn't always that we help so people will like us ~ though we know, when we are in caricature mode, that they will notice us if we help, if we are helpful people. I have been aware of helping people for the pleasure of it, and I have been aware of helping for the "I am so wonderful" of it. If I am helping so they will like me...I think that doesn't work very well.

The problem is that sometimes...I am helping so I will like me.

So, there are all these layers of everything.

If we are learning, as Recovering suggests is best, not to judge but to accept...we, or at least, I do, need to understand that there are so many layers, like a sheave of colored scarves. There have been times my helping self has been a wonderful, giving thing.

I grew, then.

There have been times it has been a caricature thing.

I felt chased, then. Felt out of sorts; felt fraudulent.

Where the heck am I going with this, Child?

:O)

Cedar

"I looked and tried to see each face, not to fail each face, to meet the warmth of each face, when the song was done, not ever to slip back into pain and shyness and cringing as if my past was my shell and I a snail to weak for this ascent, too bound to the old track of ugliness, too full of self-loathing.

Anne Rice
Violin (?)

There was a time I never dreamed I would share my quotes with anyone. Therefore, some of my sources are incomplete. The writer will be correct, but maybe not the book.

Here is another beautiful thing.

"...one of his violin strings broke. The audience grew silent but the violinist did not leave the stage. He signaled the maestro and the orchestra began its part.

The violinist played with power and intensity on only three strings.

Asked later how he had accomplished this feat, the violinist answered, "'It is my task to make music with what remains."'

I have neither author nor book for this one. I'm sorry. It's beautiful, though. Sometimes, when I am feeling hollowed out by my children's affairs...I find strength in this quote.

Know that I wish you well, Child. I see your strength, your honesty and integrity.

I am very glad to have come to know you.

:O)
 
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