Inhale, exhale

“ I believe in my needs, I am ready to receive”…

I recited this mantra one morning during a briefly guided, sacral chakra alignment. We were encouraged to ask our inner child; what do we need to have an easeful, and playful connection, with our sacral chakra (emotions, sexuality) center? My inner child answered-

“stop worrying”..

How does one simply stop worrying? As a parent alone I feel myself worrying from morning till night. It’s what we do, right? Especially with information turned on for us around the clock, every corner of my mind holds inches upon inches of anxiety…. is this food non GMO, free of dyes and chemical preservatives? Are these gummy vitamins just re-branded candy? Are they getting enough sleep, activity, mental stimulation, sunshine? Do they make friends? Am I creating well rounded human beings or scaring them for life?

But my inner child? She knows me deeper than this mom worry…or at least my kind of mom worry…

When I was eighteen months old my dad came home from work one day and told my mom to pack up and sell all we owned. Which at this time she had only just begun to own housewares like linens and pots and pans, dishes and decor.

He announced that he bought a boat. A 55ft lobster boat, with my uncle, and we were moving to the U.S. Virgin Islands to buy a seafood restaurant!

So my mom did. She packed up her first home in a quaint suburban town on Long Island, sold all her first home essentials, and flew to St. Croix, with her four babies all under the age of five.

Mom was born in Germany, and moved to the U.S. when she was six years of age. Her parents settled on Long Island and started a garden center together and built a cultured and beautiful home life for my mom and her only sibling, her older brother Frank. She met my dad when she was eighteen. He had just gotten home after a two year term in the Vietnam War, 82nd Airborne Paratrooper. He was twenty three.

Mom said hearts came bouncing out of her eyes like the old cartoon shows ( Pepe Le Pew comes to mind), when she saw my Dad for the first time, standing at a bar in his uniform, smoking a cigar. Dad said she had the most arresting blue eyes. They dated for five years on and off before making it official and eloping.

They went on to have four babies, in three years ( mom loved saying that), with a set of twins in the middle, my two older sisters. My brother was the oldest.

Moms mom, whom I am named after (Lisa) passed away before I was born at only forty four years old. An additional fear I adopted early in life. Since I was named after her, and told I had her eyes…and hand writing…and talent for gardening (as she did), that I too- would pass away young..

But, a bigger fear? As a child knowing the age my grandma passed away, I feared that my mom would pass at only forty four too. So I stayed near to her. Her shadow…

“It’s just me…and my shadow…strolling down the avenue” … she sang to me regularly.

Mom was close with her father. He doted on her as she did him. Mom bragged about her dad to us often. It was a way of keeping him close. He spoke five languages fluently. He could paint and draw and build, and cook. She called him a renaissance man. He was a General for the United States Army, stationed in Germany when he met my moms mom. They fell madly in love, he her senior of 22 years. He was granted permission to marry my grandma and move back to the states. They opened the garden center shortly after.

He passed away when mom was seven months pregnant with my sisters in 1975, a few years after her mom had passed. She had her brother Frank…who by the age of 18 was quite a moderate alcoholic and estranged himself from her.

I found it wild as a kid when mom shared stories of her European upbringing. Children as young as 9, 10, 11, even younger were given small glasses of wine with meals. “It was cultural” she said. Later I would learn this culture aiding in a physical dependency for them both.

That 1978 afternoon dad exclaimed “pack up we’re moving to a tropical island”, we were all mom had. and so the spontaneous move from Long Island to the Caribbean? she did willingly.

St. Croix was filled with long days at the beach swimming and snorkling, and come evenings we helped out at the restaurant, the “Captains Table”.

There were weekly pig roasts and nightly BBQ’s, with the neighbors in the condominium complex where we lived. Dad worked as an iron worker by day and helped at the restaurant by night. Mom was often alone with us, but she made many friends with the neighbors.

Some of my first memories of our condo were of giant lizards that crept along the ceiling trim- puffing up their colorful mouths, huge centapiedes, loud reggae music, climbing short palm trees, endless pool days and often wild parties the adults threw that went late into the night.

All the kids of Questa Verde condominium played manhunt during these weekly parties. I crawled around in the dark trying to find a hiding spot while trying to avoid cockroaches and centipedes…I once stumbled into my kindergarten teacher smoking a big, cigar sized joint. The way of the island…

Mom started coming home later and later from those parties. Sunburned from full days of tropical sun… noxema obnoxiously invading my nostrils. I lay very still in my bed- a wicker love seat meant for a patio, with big white and blue tropical flowered cushions.

I was long and my feet started to hang off the edge of the love seat. I had a single top sheet as a blanket. Mom would quietly slide the back screen door open, stumbling inside to her bedroom. The only bedroom in the condo. My sisters slept on cots in the center of the living room, my brother on a twin bed pushed up against the living room wall that served as a couch during the day.

The responsibility of four kids around the clock and my dad never home took a toll on mom.. She drank every day. Arguing about that began between her and my dad. This went on for a while and my relationship with worrying for them started.

I worried when mom stayed up too late, I worried that my dad wasnt home, and I worried if they would argue when he was. Their arguing was loud in the overcrowded one bedroom condo. Dad often left, or sought solitude with his guitar in the only room he could, the bathroom.

Dad self taught himself to play the guitar at a young age, and when he was 17 joined the band “The Crests”

He traveled the country touring with them, but his tour was cut short when he was drafted at 18 for a whole other “tour” experience. Vietnam.

When he returned home (thankfully), The Crests had a hit song, Sixteen Candles. Dad didn’t rejoin the band, but as kids we went to a half a dozen concerts of theirs as they later became known as Johnny Maistro and the Brooklyn Bridge.

Dad was one of five, all boys and the second eldest. His parents bounced around Long Island.

Dad started in construction and carpetry after the war. He quickly became a skilled carpenter. Carpentry lead him to iron working when we moved to St, Croix and he had a long career in the days ahead.

I was in kindergarten in St Croix, my sisters second grade and my brother third. My school was a row of small connected rooms, with hay rooftops and windows cut out, but not enclosed. Like a Tiki bar of sorts.

My classroom had a long picnic table and bench the students sat at. One large blackboard stood at the front of the classroom. If a student misbehaved they were placed at the front corner of the classroom with a dunce cap on, or scolded with a smack of a yardstick to the hand.

Once when one of my sisters became upset in school the teacher and kids surrounded her saying “baby want a bottle” laughing and teasing her with a bottle they used to feed the goats on the school property.

We were one of the only caucasian families in Christiansted and the other students often examined us from head to toe. Our skin, our hair. I’d come home from school with a full head of braids.

Mom often argued with the head of the school about their ways of discipline, and after a year of this experience for my siblings and I, mom decided we needed a better start for our education. A more stable life.

Looking back, I wonder if for herself too. Her exterior was growing tougher day by day along with her bronzed skin. We moved back to New York to the house and the garden center my grandparents had built. My uncle had made the house into a two story apartment. I was seven years old.

Dad stayed behind in St. Croix to sell the restaurant and tie up loose ends. A year turned to two years with him flying home on occasion for sporadic short visits. Mom was left alone again to find her way with four young children.

Money was tight so mom waited tables at a bar a couple of towns over. She drank more and stayed home less. I woke some mornings for school to find her not home, or just getting home. This became the norm, our norm, and as the years went by I continued a close relationship with worry.

I laid awake at night wondering if she was alright. At times I slept next to her just to watch her breath. There were pass outs and scary car rides, bills not paid and the bare minimum in the fridge.

Mom tried to make things better on days inbetween the benders. She found ways to get groceries and make dinner and chocolate cake for dessert. And when my anxiety took a turn to full blown, unexpected panic attacks in the night, she came to my bed, rested her hand on my chest, and made me imagine the prettiest light surrounding me. she called it the white light of protection. which she described to me as a shield starting from the top of my head all the way down to the tips of my toes.

When dad finally returned home the fighting between them increased and moms sadness grew. They fought about money, they fought about his absenteesm, they fought about her heavy drinking. the fights were loud and often physical requiring one of us kids to break it up or call for help. The last fight they had I was seventeen years old. It was the last fight I had to break up between them.

Right when mom decided to end her relationship with drinking, as she put it

“Had just had enough”

She was diagnosed with breast cancer at 48 years old. she started a new journey and discovered something she had abandoned a decade before while relying on the false empowerment, or numbing of wine on a regular basis….her inner strength.

Mom fought hard against her illness for over five years and right before full remission from the breast cancer, when she should have been feeling better, but hesitantly admitted she was not, she was diagnosed with lymphoma.

It was aggressive, and yet she continued to fight. I saw a strength come forth in her I had not witnessed as a child. I realized she was scared and not ready to give up afterall…that she did care enough to want to stay here for us.

One of the tougest realizations ( she had to feel as well as myself) is knowing it was too late. Lymphoma ravaged her body…it was everywhere- her pelvis, her neck, her jaw, her brain….her chest.

One afternoon while visitng her, lingering in the doorway of her bedoom, watching her failing body sleep…this time not far away from the alcohol, but still unavailable to me all the same…she opened her eyes and motioned for me to come sit next to her on the bed.

“ Lisa, I want you to know how sorry I am that in the times you needed me the most, I wasn’t there for you.”

Not wanting her to feel any worse than she already did I waved it off, hushed it with humor and replied “ I still turned out pretty good, eh”?

Mom patted her chest and asked me to come closer. I leaned in, and she patted her chest again and said “more” until my head was resting on her chest.

“ It wasn’t all bad, there were good times. Think of the good times too, okay?”

She said while stroking my hair. It was awkward laying on her chest. It had been quite sometime since I had been comforted by her. All the times I had longed for her and now all I wanted was to pull away.

That afternoon after our visit I cried in the car as I drove to pick up my daughter, just three and a half at the time from pre-school, my little shadow.

Mom passed away at home surrounded by her children and my dad, friends and relatives that loved her. It was the day after Mother’s Day, 5/11/2009.

After she passed my siblings and I began to clear out her room a little and found so many notebooks filled with affirmational writings:

“ I am a thin, non smoker”

“ I am light, I am energy”

“Life is what you make of it”…

Pages of insightful discoveries… epiphany’s she gained (once lost), about the years she wasted of self destruction, and the often painful years of grief she felt after she lost her parents.

She sited the ways of experiencing the human condition, and wanted more than anything for her children to not go through what she allowed herself to…loneliness, loss of independence, harbored emotions… over and over she scribbled in various notebooks

“ I am energy. We are all energy. Our bodies falter but our energy remains”

Before she passed mom hung affirmations all over the house. She was petite at 5’1 and so they were always at my eye level, which made me smile seeing them after she was gone.

“ Your mind is a computer. What you put into it will print out”

“ Its not your position in life that matters, it’s your disposition”

She had left a letter for us. She put it in our metal photograph box. She knew we would be looking at photos in the days after her passing. I was the one to find it. I had just looked at a photo of myself at maybe 4 years old.

A bronzed caribbean coconut, with platinum blonde hair, sitting on our back stoop in St. Croix. I am holding a book and looking up over my shoulder at my mother standing behind me. I loved that book- it was a book of Childrens gospel songs. We used to go to the Gospel church on Sundays in St. Croix and I loved to sing along

“This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine….this little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine, let it shine, let it shine!”

I could see me and mom hand in hand singing and swaying to that song.

“It wasn’t all bad, mom”…

The letter almost appeared to me as I took it out and read it aloud to my siblings. It was truly one of the most difficult letters I have ever read to date…filled with apologies for her drinking and for abandoning us during our developmental years. But something she wrote at the end shielded our sorrows…

“Life is hard, don’t make it difficult”.

Years went by and I could never, can never go a day without walking in moms shoes. As a parent. As a wife. As a home maker. The woes of survival financially, emotionally, mentally as we try to navigate as strong as we are capable of doing… how often the fight and flight syndrome is initiated. Stay and fight or give up and run, escape.

Understanding on a soul to soul level as a woman as a mom, why mom drank to escape. Some days it’s super surreal as if I am mimicking exact situations, circumstances, life..experiences. Is this what we are meant to do? Is this true learning? It’s almost cruel that we have to wait this long to get here.

One particular night after the birth of my second child, Evan, I couldn’t sleep. He was an infant and insisted on sleeping with us despite our endless attempts and every method imaginable to get him to sleep in his own bed…we “failed” regularly.

I was dangling off the side of our bed as my husband and Evan slept soundly. My mind raced with thoughts like a firework show grand finale, blasts of random thoughts firing one after the next.

I was Evans main caretaker. Trying to get back to work, but stuck between lack of day care, or being able to afford it and so thoughts rambled consistently for me… from desperately needing to wean Evan off nursing, to how will we afford Mayas dance recital costumes, to why didn’t I go to college after high school, to how I depend on Al for more than I was comfortable with, although our love thrived around the respect and support of one another…

I started to feel mentally suffocated. I felt lost amongst the domesticated life… caring for other little humans… I was slipping away more and more from self with each nursing session, or baby library class, or birthday party, or grocery store trip,..or the ability to sleep comfortably in my own bed…

I felt that panic creep in, tightening my chest. I sat up, but the room felt diminishing and hot. I went to the sofa in the living room trying to ground myself planting one foot on the floor. Breath. Inhale, exhale, breath.

Suddenly, as if I had turned on music as clear as wearing earphones, the song

“This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine”

starts rehearsing in my mind. I am so still as I instinctively start to sing along quietly to myself.. I hear my mothers voice as if I am dreaming…clearly say to me

“Don’t look to others for your light…the only light you need is right inside you. Your light is inside you”

It was so surreal. Tears streamed down my face. I was woke to Al gently shaking me saying go back to bed as he was leaving at dawn for work.

I am 45 now. Mom and I made it passed 44. I don’t think I will ever be free from worrying. And I will probably have anxiety attacks here and there, remain. It’s shaped who I am. It’s brought me here..to write, to create. To share.

I found my light. This little light of mine…I’m gonna let it shine…”

This little light of MIND…

It’s not all bad, life is what we make it…

Inhale…exhale…

I believe in my needs…I am ready to receive.