Just Old Gray Tales

Baby of the Family Apparently, I wore a lot of red as a child. Certainly all of these were Todd Tiahrt t-shirts because my dad was a big supporter of his.  My youngest sister, Rachel is one of the most outgoing, stubborn, affectionate, and pure people I know. She has never known a stranger and is well-known within her circles as always having either a sweet or sassy comment to accompany her hugs.  I think she may be an Enneagram 2 with a 3 wing. She's very passionate about her family and loves each member fiercely. I suspect she knows more about the family tree than I do. Her little quirks have made it into the family style of communication and she corrects us anytime we get it wrong. She dreams of being a policewoman and told me recently that she has to work on getting to 100 push-ups. Damn girl, leave some ambition for the rest of us . She has always been everyone else's biggest cheerleader, and she is undeterred when it comes to what she wants. Essentially, she is a gem. A f

Siblings and the Patriarchy

Siblings and The Patriarchy I was talking with my one of my sisters, Shara, the other day about familial relationships. I guess wondering about the effect of trauma on family dynamics isn't just a "me" thing. Certainly, ever family has their own system of politics and flavor of dysfunction. The generational trauma that my father experienced and then enacted within our family created quite a few unhealthy ideas of boundaries, expectations, relatedness among the siblings. The older siblings were parentified and received far more physical abuse than did the younger ones; I remember hearing pretty often that I (as one of the younger ones) had it so much easier than they did. All of us are ridiculously hard on ourselves. Now that we're all adults, we all get along pretty well most of the time, but I wonder at how happy we all are. I've noticed that during one-on-one conversations, we tend to make ourselves feel better by gossiping and comparing different aspects of our

I've been avoiding writing this one. Maybe because I still haven't gotten to a solid position on my relationship with mothers, my mother in particular. The idea of them is so nice and warm and inviting, but that hasn't always been my reality. As I have grown and healed, so has my relationship with my mother; I now enjoy a richer friendship with her than I ever thought was possible. But I still have this gnawing question. Am I being too hard on her? This woman who protected and nurtured me with her body for 9 months. Why do I so harshly judge someone who would give up her life for me and did so to raise me and my siblings? "Perhaps", that cruel internal self whispers, "you're simply an ungrateful brat". I choose to believe that my journey is to accept the imperfection of her love for me and how that can heal my own quarrels with self-love. Mothers There have been many mother-like figures who crossed my path, most of whom I either tried to fit into my

Our attachment with our parents and caregivers are the first protoypes for our relational narratives. They inform gender expression, our ability to self-regulate, self-esteem, habits, values, interests, etc. That's a lot of fucking pressure! After working within the child welfare system for over 5 years now, I've seen how hard parents work to be good enough parents. No doubt, there's a bell curve, there are definitely shitty, toxic parents out there - a lot of them! However, I truly believe, in my heart of hearts, that people are always doing the best that they can.  Parenting is fucking hard, and children are not as resilient as we tell ourselves (Bruce Perry, The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog ), which means generations of people in the modern age make do with what they've got. Even when people are trying their best, many don't have the tools to be good enough parents, so 40% of children report at least one type of childhood trauma. These traumas can affect not only

The people closest to me know that I absolutely pour into my relationships and I keep the health of those relationships as my top priority. Those same people would also tell you that my relationships have been, and continue to be, a strange adventure. I feel like I was predisposed to be an amiable and meek person, and this is the narrative of how I'm learning to speak up for my wants and needs. Spoiler alert: apparently that's a key ingredient of a healthy relationship. As a 16 year old, on June 6, 2007, I wrote this in a journal,  "I think I'm one of those people that can get by with a little love given to them, but in turn tries to hand out so much more than they've received. I'm not saying I haven't been loved, because I have. But I've realized...I've got problems that, if I don't take care of them now, will become major problems for me when I'm an adult."  Somehow, I intuited that my ability to give more than I receive would be a do