It’s just her and I. We cuddle in bed, stuck by sweat and old soft cotton. Her body is tired from the stress of her usual pre-bedtime tantrum. Tonight’s involved a kid’s chair being thrown across the craft table. It’s like she has a one last monsoon of energy that needs dissipation before she can finally settle down into sleep. I sooth her with a hand against her forehead, humming a lullaby that I hear from my grandmothers, a rocking chair creaking somewhere from behind and above.
Mama, take away all the bad dreams.
I cup my hand over her head and imagine what could be in her mind that needs a vacuum into my palm.
Tell me when I have them all.
She scrunches her face and breathes deeply. Minutes pass. And then even more.
My hand cramps. My eyelids are weighed down with the need to end the day. I feel a little drop drip down the corner of my mouth. And then finally.
Okay. You have them all.
My hand holds them with care, tosses them towards the bedroom window, out against the half moon-lit sky, a rare night of stars uncovered by layers of marine. There you go bad dreams, out ! To the Universe! Get recycled into something beautiful.
Can something scary turn into something beautiful, mama?
Mama?
Are you really still awake?
She tosses and turns, trying to find a spot against me and like a backpack she attaches her arms and legs around me.
Sometimes, sometimes…..sometimes……I just get so angry. I get so mad it’s…..it’s…..it’s……..{though vast, her seven year old vocabulary still limits expressions of the deepest seat of emotion. so does mine.} Sometimes I say to myself, Mia, Mia, don’t throw that chair across the room but I don’t listen. and I do it. and I don’t want to. but i do it anyway because I am so mad, Mama.
I flip over so we are face to face, nose to nose. I kiss her forehead. She smells like worms and green apple jellybeans.
I know, baby. You feel things deeply. You’re a passionate person. People like us have a fire inside sometimes.
A real fire?
It feels real. I have it, too.
Sometimes you yell at the top of your lungs.
Yeah, I do. We are a lot a like, Mia.
That’s why you are my mama.
Keeping it simple. Homeopathy is when matter is brought to energy by dilution and succussion. An individual’s discomfort or dis-ease is then connected with the quantum energy of a medicine which somehow reflects or resembles the energy of the person and the dis-ease.
Homeo means Similar. Pathy: disease. Like dis-ease meets like cure in the most primal, vibrating form.
What happens when the two meet up (the dis-ease and it’s homeopathic counterpart) is dissipation. Not cure, not distraction, not heroic destruction, but a subtle and sometimes not so subtle kind of transformation into a state of Nothingness. (this is not to say that the journey of homeopathy doesn’t come with it’s own interesting bundle of quantum “side effects”or as I like to see it: a process.)
I am toying with the idea that people can be homeopathy for people, when intent and consciousness are ingredients. At least this exploration is easing my internal toss and turn of the question: have I passed this angst on to my daughter? My father passed it on to me? Someone to him? Why? And where and how does it end?
I’m not gonna pretend.
I have anger issues.
I’m not scared. Or nervous or anxious. I’m not oppressed or molested or timid. I’m not uninspired or unmotivated. I’m certainly not passive aggressive. Not a pathological liar. Not an addict.
I got The Anger.
And my dis-ease with anger is not the Anger itself. Anger is just an expression of what all is: Love. It’s not something that needs to be banished, but something that needs to live harmoniously within, a paying tenant to the temple, a productive and creative force. In my case, when I am out of balance my anger taunts love, challenges love to a Battle. When Love isn’t looking or has it’s guard down as love does because Love doesn’t see the need to defend, Anger jumps out from that skanky dark alley and attacks Love, stabs it in the gut with a serrated edged knife. Love bleeds.
Anger is a living entity fed by my personal neglect. I imagine it starting out as Pure Force, an original energy spiral at my base where it has always existed, born to live and grow and thrive. It offers to be alchemical. It longs to be beauty as fine as the stars and the moon; as surprising as street art in London; as mysterious as the voice of Nina Simone; as warm as Dalai Llama’s laughter; as seductive as a story written in red ink on tree bark. It needs air and compost. Water. Time. Focus. With neglect the Force gets restless, hot, impatient, scattered. Bored. Anger gets Angry. Then is burns. And burns. It burns past creation and introduces itself as a raging forest fire. No tree is left standing.
I have yet to master the Management of Creative Energy. I’m young on this path, to put it nicely.
My daughter comes to my life with a particle of similar. Of course our children all resemble us, the good, the bad and the unspeakable. In this particular relationship it’s with wide open eyes I can see the sameness, the tube of colloidal silver that streams from my center to hers. Since the first reluctant breath she took I heard it in her yelp and saw it in her eyes. It was like looking in the mirror. With me my words and energy get thrown like daggers and with her, chairs get hurled across the room. This isn’t by chance. This is the medicine way
I will be damned if I see it as a curse that she holds my boiling waters. I will be damned if I wallow in the wounds of her future, the one which doesn’t even exist. I’ll be damned if I wonder and worry and fret about the flickering flames I see in her eyes and feel against her heart. Fuck that. I’m gonna flip it. Totally flip that sob story.
We are each other’s similar. I am her remedy and she is mine. Brought by cosmic stream, attracted to through the magnetic force of likes. And this cycle, me as mother, her as daughter, we’re gonna just meet up and dissipate each other’s attack mode until it’s nothing but a beautiful piece of something. We all are each other’s homeopathy. Somehow.
At night I have taken the practice of holding her. I succuss us through my mind, imagining the waves tossing us up and down, up and down, up and down and when we fall upon the soft sand we are potentized. Inside the atom to the belly of the quark is the fire and karma from so long ago are just like that, it breaks down into nothingness, then together, her nothing and my nothing meet up Eye to Eye. My prayer is Transformation to the most holy and grand style of Creation.
The Creation is always Love. Healed in all it’s forms of expressions.
I wept pretty heartedly when I read this post that was sent to me by one of my beloved patients. I rarely find resonant folks who actually embrace their own rage function, let alone their children's. I love the way the author illustrates her daughter, Mia's uncontrollable impulse, as a resonant, homeopathic dose of her own fiery nature when she says, "It feels real. I have it too ... That's why you are my mama." And this is why I am my children's mama. Most folks don't realize that their critical, blame throwing, negative looping is just their own unresolved parent's voices in their heads, whittling away at the spirit of their own children. A good solid, healthy expression of rage in a safe environment is the difference between knowing the orgasm function (grand mal seizure) versus masturation (clitoral/penile sneeze). God bless Mia and her etherically imbued Mama!
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