We hosted our first Dia de los Muertos party this evening.
We had planned a big party but changed and just had one family over. We spent much of today cleaning together which was really bonding.
We both came back from vacation in a better place. Jay helped w/ cleaning and it felt bonding and helpful with where we’re going in all of our changes and marriage connecting.
It was nice to talk about ancestors and healing and forgiveness in view of the ancestors that are the focus of Dia de los Muertos. I was curious about the idea of forgiveness with ancestors or people who have done such awful things in your life that you have a hard time forgiving or at least including them in your life as people of respect.
I guess I can appreciate the good those people did, but then I still can’t honor them. It seems like there is appreciation but not honor. I don’t know if that’s forgiveness, to at least acknowledge they are human, that they did do good things in their life, to not believe they are completely evil. I am hopeful opening up that part of my soul to forgiveness and acceptance of their good in some ways is better than nothing.
Some of their behaviors are not mine to forgive or judge; some is.
I have been thinking more lately of my mother’s family, how my grandparents worked together at their stores. My grandmother wasn’t a happy person and my grandfather died young due to lung cancer from smoking. I wish very much I’d known him.
i wish their family had been happier as it feels closer to who I am maybe then my dad’s family of uptight English people who were oppressive and patriarchal. My mom’s family wasn’t like that.
My mom’s family are as much my relatives as my dad’s family. I was just around my dad’s family so much more so they had much more of an effect on me. This is important to remember when I think about our own kids who are farther away now.
There has been something about opening my soul up more to my mom’s side of the family that’s been helpful. My grandmother’s sisters were all interesting, a few were pretty crazy. We visited them alot. My grandmother seemed quite content to live alone with her orchard and run around visiting her friends and family which she had a lot of. I didn’t get the sense she missed my granddad much. I don’t think she loved being a mom or grandmother. She did things here and there for us but mostly she wanted to live her life.
I have a lot to learn from that. In my hometown, I was surrounded by women who lived to be homemakers. They didn’t do much else other than cooking, cleaning and serving their families. They seemed to have no other ambitions.
It is crazy what perspective does for you and to you. I don’t believe my grandmother had great relationships with her daughters. She was difficult and eccentric, blunt, angry, difficult. I don’t think I would have been glad she was my mother.
But she was a pretty cool grandmother and the older I get, the more I can relate to her life and the frantic quality of not wanting to keep living to serve others.
After my grandfather died, she moved quickly back up to the Wenatchee/Chelan area to be back closer again to relatives. She had almost 30 years there by herself without remarrying, tending her garden and orchard with occasional visits to her daughters and us grandkids.
All of this came to me by taking time to consider the ancestors.
I am ready to move on from my dad’s family and all the trauma that seems to stick in your brain and continue to be prominent.
I’m ready for better memories for my future and getting this anger and resentment and energy out of my body.
Today felt like a day of rebirth in many ways.
Jay and I are finally starting to know how to help each other and love each other. I realized that even if I wanted to go to comedy, that’d be hard on him w/ his work load. He said he’d do it, but I didn’t want to enough to keep us out late. It felt good to be able to do that now with changed attitudes and feeling safe.
It felt like a rebirth to let the family go and to also reclaim better family members that were imperfect but safer, safe.
I am ready to move on and move upward.
*****
I hope tomorrow to head up to Greenbluff and get apples to dry for gifts for the holidays. I have some other chores to do too.
I am feeling more at peace these days especially after our vacation and our talk in the car about our past and about the bio family changes. We keep healing and growing and it feels right.
I do know now that if we hadn’t both changed and grown, our marriage wouldn’t have survived. I’m glad that isn’t what happened. I’m sobered by how close we came.
*****
I have so much less anxiety right now. My pelvic pain is almost completely gone.
We had a long talk on the way home from the ocean about our relationship, fears, boundaries and reconnecting with each other. It seems that that unearthed some things for both of us, things we haven’t addressed yet.
I am trying to be mindful and thankful that I am getting out of pain. Just a few weeks ago, I was calling to get an early Rx refill for my pain meds.
I spent time today with a friend that has chronic pain. We both have lost many years to pain.
I am trying to slow down and be grateful for the pain subsiding thanks to seeing Dr. L. It still seems like a miracle.
Alanon was good, reminders about self-respect as we keep striving to do better, but accepting the journey.