Say Hello To Anger, Angelina

When Riana gave me my tarot reading for my birthday I cried but was unsurprised.  It has been three weeks since then and everything has been unfolding exactly as planned by the atmosphere, the powers that be, and by the terribly long and tangled collection of choices we have made for many years now that have led us to the present.

There is more going on than I can write about for a while.  What is going on is exactly like starting a brand new journal.  The pages are fresh enough at first but soon, if you haven't really closed the old journal or changed at all since filling it, your new journal will begin to resemble all the shit and shortcomings that you've been carrying around with you.

Every time you start a new chapter, or a fresh page, it is meaningless until you have also cleaned your spirit of old garbage.  My tarot reading spoke quite seriously about a need to face the past and past feelings and release them. 

Tarot cards are not fortune telling devices but guides.  Anything may still happen but the cards, if read by someone who really can see, will help you through what you are most likely going to face.

Too true.

After having written about our first step into getting Max properly assessed I uncovered some pretty raw feelings that I have never admitted to having but which have been quietly guiding me down dark streets where I am more alone than necessary and extremely vulnerable.

I have a lot of anger.  ANGER.

I am not a person accustomed to admitting to rage or anger.  It was a shock when I realized (at 21 years of age) that I had a lot of it from my childhood.  I am uncomfortable with anger.  I am frightened of its power.  Of what happens to people when they cannot channel it.  Of what it can make them do to others.  I have good reason for my fear.  I faced my anger back then and truly let it go.

Life offers many chances to experience fresh anger.  The healthiest thing I could do is learn to acknowledge it when I feel it and find a safe way to release it.  I have never had a teacher for this.  I have never had an example of how to release anger in a safe and healthy way.  No one in my family is skilled at this.

I am angry and I have been angry ever since I had Max. 

Not at him. 

I have been angry with myself for not being strong enough to buck up and take my parenting lot with better sangfroid, for not loving being a parent, for finding parenting impossible and for leaning on unhealthy ways of coping.  I have been angry with the universe for always giving me the harder road, the complicated everything, the "wacky" plumbing in every house we've ever lived in, and for giving us the one kid the smug "positive discipline" teacher didn't know how to deal with. 

I have been angry with every single parent of relatively normal kids for judging me and my kid.  When I wanted to say "fuck you!" to so much self-satisfied unhelpful advice,  instead I would return home and feel like total crap saying "what is wrong with me?".  I am angry at every parent who has ever told me I should just do as they do because then my kid would be just about as perfect as a sweet little cherub instead of loudly quirky, opinionated, and different like my kid. 

I'm angry at every time another parent's child misbehaved and they saw it without doing anything, and I didn't point it out to them when all of them were perfectly willing to make comments about my kid when he was not behaving well.  Why didn't I feel I was a good enough parent to tell my neighbor that her daughter twisted the skin on Max's arm when I wasn't looking and that she did this to other kids too?  Why did I let her make comments about Max being wild and willful when her own daughter was the most evil child I have ever met?  Why did I remain quiet?

I am angry at all the parents of relatively normal kids who don't bother to correct their own kid's rude behaviors to my kid when it happens in front of them but I go out of my way to correct my kid when he misbehaves to theirs.  I am angry at how I have been so wrapped up in feeling inferior that I have not had the balls to come out and complain to people when they are being inferior parents or letting their kids misbehave and hurt my kid's feelings.

I am angry.  So angry at myself.  And I'm angry at everyone else too.  But mostly myself. 

I don't yet know how to let this anger go.  Having just acknowledged it, it feels new.  It's not new, but it feels fresh. 

Now I know that I have been working with a harder situation than the average parent and I've been judged against their experiences and expectations, not mine.  I have had to work two or three times as hard as the majority of my friends with kids just to get my kid fed, clothed, and comfortable enough in this world so that he can also learn to be relatively well behaved.  He has done so well, and is such a fine child, and now I have the knowledge I need to be more proud of him than I was before.

It took the validation of our doctor to free feelings I've been cramming below my own radar.  I felt them there and they would periodically surface and be painful and I would not give them their due.  Go away- I have no right to be angry.  I have no right at all.  I am such a bad parent, such a bad mommy, and have no right to be upset at anyone for not suffering as I am suffering.

I am usually committed to telling the truth.  (At least as soon as I recognize it myself.)  You can't tell a truth you haven't admitted to your own heart yet.

I'm not going to apologize for my anger.  I have done that plenty over the years.  No one has had to hurt from my anger but me.  The only reason to apologize for anger is if you hurt others with it.  I have not, to my knowledge, hurt anyone but myself.

I have nothing to be sorry for.  I had very little perspective to shed on my situation.  I had almost no real support for raising a child who was decidedly not average in any way.  Philip and I have been raising this unusual kid of ours for 8 years without any answers, without any support for the choices we've made for him.  Our little family of three has taught me how full a body can become with frustration without actually exploding.

I now understand the cards better than I did a few days ago.  Validation for my experiences has let the lid off of the boiler and I've got a lot of steam to release. 

Just when I think I've let go of all a person can let go of there is always more.  Like a bottomless pit of crap that must be scraped from my soul.  I hope I am finally coming to the end of the list of "The Things Angelina Must Let Go Of".

What else is hiding in the corners?  What else is waiting for release from the cobwebs and must?

I'm not sure where to go from this place.  I think this anger is bigger than I am showing here.  I think it's pretty thick.  What does one do with it?  How does one shovel it out and dispose of it?  Where does it go?  How do I know when I have succeeded?  Can it slip from my body while I sleep-quietly and without a hiss of a fight?  Can I simply unsnap it from my insides like a useless liner?  Can it be peeled away like dead skin?  How does one process anger?  Anger that has lived so passive aggressively under the radar, stealing my comfort and shoving at other people from under the rock where I've apparently been keeping it. 

I have been unconscionably jealous of so many people.  So jealous.  Jealous in that vibrant internal-organ-devouring way.  So jealous that they can have the bliss to not know what it is to live in my head, my body, my life. 

On the good days I think people are so much poorer for not seeing as sharply as I do.  For not feeling all the colors of the universe filtering through their own blood the way I sometimes do.  I feel so lucky to know myself, to know my world, with that extra sense that madness gives those of us fortunate/unfortunate enough to have it, to feel with it.  Into the heart of all things.  More balanced people cannot see into the heart of all things and sometimes it makes you want to kill yourself, and sometimes it makes you love everyone like you were the mother of all beings because what you see is so gorgeous.

On the good days I see my son and I see the most extraordinary thinker who sees the heart of all things and can express it in three different ways.  He doesn't understand why others don't see what he sees.  He is only just realizing that they don't see much at all.  On the good days I feel sorry for other parents who don't get to have the conversations I do with my boy, who don't get to see the whole universe revolving through his head.  It is breathtaking.

There are a hell of a lot more bad days than good and we pay and pay and pay for our gifts.

I want my kid to grow up valuing what he has and who he is.  Measuring himself only against his own yardstick.  Yes, I want him to fit in, to be kind to others, to learn to live with other people comfortably.  But I want him to respect how different he is and to know that his gifts are the kind that can change history for the better, that can show us all what has been in front of us all along that we didn't notice.  It takes a person like him to show us that the earth isn't flat.

If I am going to teach him to love his gifts I will have to teach him to process anger and frustration which will be a continual obstacle.  Which means I'm going to have to learn myself.  I am open now, universe, if you will show me what to do.

Show me how to release this anger without apologizing for having been human.  For being human still.

Say hello to anger, Angelina.