Opening My Heart to Healing
First of all, let me say that I write this post from the standpoint of a person who has been blessed with nearly 52 years of very good health. I do not have any chronic or genetic or ongoing major health problems, nor have I ever, with the exception of being legally blind without my glasses (20/400 to 20/500) in each eye). With them, I am fine. So, my views are naturally skewed against the “traditional” medical profession, not having ever been helped much by them. That said, here’s the story:
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Ten years ago, in October 1999, my then-16-year-old daughter told me she was pregnant. At that moment, it seemed that the ground opened up, and I could truly see and feel the fires of hell licking at my feet threatening to pull me right down into the depths. Since I can remember, I have had completely negative feelings about pregnancy and motherhood. Not because I had a bad mother–quite the opposite. But there was something in ME that never wanted that as a part of my life. Conversely, growing up as I did, in the tail-end of the 50’s, that was something that was “assumed” would happen to me, if not by me in my secret heart, then by everyone else around me, and it was a hard assumption to ignore. However, by the time I got to college, I KNEW I did not want to be a mother. Real life intervened, as it is wont to do, and I did become a mother, much to my own dismay, and probably to the detriment of my daughter, although I did and continue to try to be the best mother to her that I possibly can. I have never blamed HER for my inability to stick with my original decision to be childless.
So.
She’s pregnant, 16, and dropped out. I am having PTSD flashbacks to my own depression-laden pregnancy, guilt-ridden life, and financial worries that only had only gotten worse as my daughter got older. My then-husband (not my daughter’s father) wasn’t much help, and all I remember saying to him was that I would make sure that none of it would impact him financially. At first she thought she was going to move out with the guy she said was the father. That lasted all of a month, then she was back home, stating that he wasn’t the father, but some other guy was. Eventually, we moved into an uneasy detante. She worked at a few jobs early in the pregnancy, but then as she progressed, not surprisingly, no one would hire her. I was working for a large HMO that was in the process of closing in my city, and having to commute 120 miles away 4 days a week, which probably saved both of us. I had to keep that job because it paid more than any job I’d ever had, and I knew once it ended, my work situation would be totally up in the air–and that I would have 6 months’ severance pay if I stayed till the end. I was worried about my life and career, mad as hell at my daughter, but scared for her, and I couldn’t even think as far ahead as the baby. My mind would just NOT go there. All I could think was that here I was going to have to raise another child all over again.
In January, 2000, I had an abnormal mammogram. Oh, they said, it’s probably nothing, we’ll just do a 2nd one on the “abnormal” breast, we just need to get a “better” look. So, I went. Oh, well, they said, we need an ultrasound now, so I went. Well, they said, we still can’t say for sure, so now you need a biopsy and an appointment with a surgeon. It was like a big “tease”, and they just wanted to do more and more procedures with me as their guinea pig.
Some time before all this, and ongoing with it, I was also in the throes of a spiritual awakening for lack of a better term. I had never been traditionally “religious” and had found my comforts in nature and following a spirituality that was an odd mixture of Pagan/Wiccan/Native American/Buddhist. To call me “ecclectic” was being mild. During all this angst and upheaval, I was trying to reconcile these spiritual beliefs and practices which truly affected and comforted me deeply, with these other, horrible feelings that I was having around my daughter’s pregnancy. Now that I think about it, it was no wonder that all of that mixed up energy in my body showed up radiographically!
You see, the thing was, I NEVER believed that there was anything wrong with, or in, my breast. In fact, I KNEW there wasn’t, but I could NOT convince anyone in the medical “profession” to listen to me. Poke, prod, zap, cut. Poke, prod, zap, cut. That’s really all they know. I tried to get them to listen to me, but everyone seemed so incredibly shocked when I said I didn’t want another mammogram or an ultrasound or a biopsy, that it was hard for me to go against the “current’ of modern medicine.
One of the books I was reading at the time was “Anatomy of the Spirit” by Caroline Myss. If you’ve never read it, run, do not walk and find a copy. It might just save your life. Anyway, in a very diluted and simplistic description, her message is that ALL disease comes from some kind of energy imbalance in your body. At that point in my life, I was about as unbalanced as I have ever been. Finally, I agreed to have the biopsy and just make everyone shut up about it.
About a week before I was to have it, I had a dream. I dreamt I was in the hospital where I had recently had the ultrasound. In fact, I was in the same room, only it was not an ultrasound room but the office of a doctor–a man that I had never seen. He was sitting behind his desk, and I was sitting in the chair in front of the desk. He was looking at a file and some films that I understood to be my breast images. I was waiting for the verdict, and he kept looking at one film, then another and another. Finally, he very decisively laid all the films down on the desk, put them in the folder and kind of slid them across the desk to me. As clear as day, he said, “Hmfpf! I don’t know WHY they’re making you do all this. You’re FINE, you know!” And then I woke up.
Even though the dream confirmed for me what I already KNEW about my body, there was a deeper message. I began to realize that this “abnormality” in my breast (which is also in the heart area) was like an energetic warning. If I did not “open my heart” and begin to be more accepting of what was going on around me and in my daughter’s life, I was running the risk of REALLY becoming ill. I was not hurting anyone but myself in the long run. During the times that I spent living away from my house those days during the week, I journaled and raged, and let out all the pent up “stuff” inside me. I finally realized that *I* was not the pregnant one, that the coming baby was not, in fact, MY child, and that I was not going to have to be responsible for it as a parent. The reality of that began to sink in, and I finally began to relax a bit and communicate in a more positive way with my daughter and try to make suggestions for her and to be more of a grandmother to be rather than a nervous “mom”.
Oh, and I did have the biopsy and it was completely negative. In fact, my daughter drove me to the hospital and waited for me, getting quite the eye-opener when her down to earth mother got totally “loopy” when they gave me the “happy juice” before the procedure! I actually remember that whole event with a smile, and now I realize it was a big step for me in realizing the incredible health benefits of an open heart, and allowing other people to live their own lives and make their own choices, even then they seem totally alien from what you would do.
In the end, I would say that keeping an open heart is better than all the doctors’ visits or prescription medicine in the world!
GG
Original message from Grumpy Granny here…