Creacting a Fire Inside of a Shell

My Mother continues to haunt me....

I have been thinking more and more about about how impossible it is for damaged children to raise healthy offspring.

I have been thinking about how difficult it is for one to love oneself when one does not know what love is.

Unconditional love is necessary to raise healthy children who will be successful and thrive in the world. Yet when parents have been raised in homes where there is no love, where there is abuse and neglect, the parents (who then becomes only children wrapped in the bodies of adults) whom have never known love cannot give love...

No matter how much they desire to give love to the children they bear.

Often, our magazines and self-help books like to point out the prodigies of adjustment--those wonderful folks who have overcome the most horrible of conditions of their own childhoods and have raised children who then become strong, productive, well-adjusted adults. They put them on covers and lionize them on tv. They become our Virgin Marys and Saint Josephs and their children are, if not Christlike, at least Saint-like saviors of their own corners of the world.

I'm very tired of these stories because they do not represent the reality. They are cruel, deranged, a-theistic fairy tales we tell ourselves so that we can either absolve (they've done the best they could) or condemn (well, what could we expect?) the parent-children whose offspring do not manage to live up to the best of their abilities.

But can we really expect so much from the unloved offspring of abused and neglected children? Fact is, we shouldn't. In so many ways it is truly not humanly possible, without love and support from some outside source, to become a whole, healthy adult who is capable of raising children into whole, healthy, successful adults.

I am struggling to understand, and overcome, this dilemma daily. Often, I feel there is no "me" inside because whomever "me" was at birth ended up subsumed under mountains of dysfunction I did not create. I learned from my sad-children parents that "me" was not lovable enough. To get some level of love and acceptance from them, I simply gave in and allowed them to dictate to me who I should be. At first, I was the Good Kid--later I was the Rebel. Yet even the Rebel Me was a Me they made and wanted to see. That Me was the projection of their own internal Fight for love and acceptance, which they never received from their parents, the world, nor each other.

They may have felt love for me, but they lacked the ability to express that love. This lack came from the simple fact that no one had shown them love. They lacked the abilities and resources to teach them to cultivate love in their own home.

Ultimately, all they could teach me was to Fight as they had fought. In their eyes, Fight was the determiner of strength. They demanded Conformity, but, deep down, wanted Fight.

Fight, though, is not love--and, quite frankly, fight does not prove stregth. Fight proves a strong instinct for survival, and comes from anger.

Anger, though, is brittle fire that consumes and breaks whatever it engulfs.

Fight and anger can get you pretty much anything you want in the world--at a very high price. Fight and anger, though, surround a brittle shell-self that, for its survival, is constantly in conflict with the world outside itself. Fight and anger create a physical condition like a fire, constantly burning on the inside, that over time, damages both body and mind.

A fire inside a shell eventually consumes the shell that once contained it.

How can I turn that fight and anger--all that fire inside this shell--into something like love and determination? This is a huge question that, as I can see, takes a huge amount of work to try to answer.

Believe it or not, part of the answer is moving from where I now live. Here, I am surrounded with people who, more than likely, come from hard knocks homes like my own, who have their own fires inside shells and are stuck in various states of rebellion while trying to prove to the world that they're right as rain. Some have collapsed into themselves, like the house across the driveway, where the lawn's never been mown and discarded furniture is strewn across the yard. Some are stuck in rebellion, like the guy next door--everybody's friendly dealer--whose business continues, as usual, to make money off of the misery of others while it feighns a pop culture coolness.

This is not to say that the place I'm moving to is full of people who are totally without dysfunction. I imagine though that some of the people there have perhaps turned the dysfunctional into something functional.

Maybe that's why I often perfer to spend time around artists and people who make things. That ability to transform raw materials into something beautiful has been, in my life, the outward expression of that internal fire.

The artists I know seem to be far more centered than the wordsmiths I know--who often seem to be at odds with themselves and with others.

I can't totally figure out why that is. Perhaps words are inefficient or incomplete means for dealing with that consuming fire-in-the-shell. Words are, after all, only the mind part of the body/mind equation.

So, I should start some packing today, in between a few other things, like learning to create podcasts, send photos from my new phone, learn to operate its video function, produce a blog post and another essay for H.P. A lot of busy-ness, really. Maybe, though, it is a busy-ness that will open a door to changing certain internal circumstances that will help me to drain some of that fire that resides within this fragile shell...