Those are the words I furiously pecked out on my phone to text her father, full of emotion.
Fury, rage, all masking fear.
Who even says that to her 8-year old daughter…ugh.
I’m spiraling. What does a lady sit like even mean? Furthermore, why should she have to?
Don’t mind me I’m just processing my fear and emotions around having a daughter grow up in a hyper-sexual culture and I’m afraid for her innocence. I want to protect her I am also realizing I can’t. It’s not her or her clothes. She should get to be free.
And believe me, she’s as free as they come. She’ll put an impromptu dance routine in a heartbeat, no music but the track in her head.
Like no one is watching or like everyone is. She is a star in her world, her heart, and mind.
My mind flashes back to my mother giving me a similar speech about how I should sit. She adopted this motion where she would take her two fingers, her poiner and her middle, like a peace sign and whenever my legs were spread too far she would signal to me to close them by bringing her two fingers together.
Was she afraid? Was her mind littered with the fear?
Maybe that’s when I stopped dancing…
My mind is racing, it wanders back to the first messages of when I learned it wasn’t okay to be myself. When the things came naturally to me, the things that came easy and felt right…weren’t ok. Telling me a story, sometimes being Miriam wasn’t right.
I hear my fathers voice echoing in my head, “that’s not becoming, Miriam”…
My inner child wonders, becoming of what?
In that moment, the path to navigating what it meant to become, became as complex as a map, with valleys and mountains that were more than any picture could ever explain.
My healing journey and the work in therapy tells me, I have internalized the scariness I see and feel in the world in the forms of the fears from my parents.
I eye my daughter, who likes to sit,, however,, and make herself comfortable. Her legs sprawled over the chair, more opened than closed.
She doesn’t know there was an old guy looking at her in a way that made me so uncomfortable I stood behind her.
My grown body as sacrifice for hers. Her freedom or mine, I wonder, is there enough for us both?
Her young free body. As innocent as the way she sees the world.
She knows she feels safe.
How can I preserve that? What do I tell her?
How can I say be free and stay safe?
Do I need to?
I grace her aura with white spells of protection. Every day I tell her she is divinely protected, visualizing a pink bubble of protection all around her.
“You are always in your right and perfect place”, I kiss her on her for head as I imagine the glow of a powerful force field all around her.
It is enough. It has to be.
What do I tell her?
Sometimes I wonder about really sexy women that have control over their bodies in ways that draw others to them, models such, what do they tell their daughters? How do they explain the position of power their bodies have? My mind thinks about Eveyln Lozada, a basketball wife who is noticeable beautiful and sexy, she has a daughter who has charted a similar life. They model together, both of their bodies now earning the glowig admiration of many.
What did she tell her? What did she show her?
Console and explain. That’s my mission as a mom. My duty as my children’s guide through childhood.
Console when it’s scary, when emotions are big or exciting, or overwhelming.
Explain to provide context.
How do I do that when I’m scared? How do I explain the context for a world that has scared and frightened me?
My nose. They can have.
My quirky sense of humor, please take that too. My fears?
Let me hold them, locked away while I heal the parts of me held hostage to the beacon of their demands.
Free Us. Free the scared girl who lives inside of me…
Sometimes my inner child envies the freedom my daughter has. I catch it in glimpses over critical discipline. It comes out in moments of high frustration, when I’m afraid, or in the midst of chaos.
A scary mean part of me burst out like a monster with no home.
Like my father, yelling at me on vacation, me swimming in the ocean, past the place where he thought me to be safe, into the place where his memory reminded him he watched a boy drown in the riptide. Was he caught in his mind?
Vacation. Could he even enjoy it?
I find myself in places where I could and should be enjoying myself, but my mind can’t stop the constant patrol looking for something to worry about.
It feels so unfair for us all.
It comes out and looks like control. Please don’t do that and Do what I’ve said.
It sounds like, “no, I do not want to play.”
How could I?
I spent my childhood policed by the fears of my parent, and my adulthood is now threatened by my own when all I really want is to feel free.
Please free me. Please save me. Please heal me. Please help me. Prayers echoed into the universe, from the heart of my soul.
I’m ready to dance alongside my children.
I want freedom too, and as my breathing begins to settle I accept the idea that perhaps I am. What if Kenz is just my reminder of just how free I can be.
Each feeling and every thought that crawls from the depths of my own shame forged prison. I realize it has saved me, healed me, and helped me.
