03/31/10

UPDATE, MARCH 2010

Roses

                I hate roses…. That was how the most awesome piece I had written in a long time started.  I wrote it in a journal that is attached to this nifty application and is free on the web for Windows Users called Craft Calendar that automatically calculates the Sabbat, Esabts and New Moons for you. It has a great journal attached and I liked the idea of journaling while looking at the month that was passing. I have just taken up journaling again after not having done so in a looooooooooong time. After attempting to rewrite it while being angry with myself that I couldn’t remember to push that little button on the bottom called SAVE. I gave it up, ate lunch and took a nap. When in doubt, feed and sleep. This is one of the many things I have learned since falling off the Earth in the Late Fall of 2009.

                I hate roses. I have hated roses since the horrific day I returned from my best friend’s funeral to find that he had sent me a dozen red roses before he died. It confirmed so many things for me, things that only now I am beginning to understand. I took them back to his grave site and left them there for the elements to destroy one petal at a time. Ever since that time, I have warned boyfriends, friends, lovers and my Husband Priest to NEVER under ANY circumstances send me red roses. They spoke to me of death and loss love and pain.

                My rosy boy was one of my best friends. We were Kindred Spirits whose connection was the secret flames that burned in our hearts, the whitest hot a flame can be. He started sending me flowers when he overheard a girl in school teasing me because I didn’t get one. I didn’t date much in high school and was, how to put this politely, social inept during those horrible years. After that any time the school fundraiser was a flower to give to someone, I got them, red roses, white and gold carnations and even pink roses at Valentines. They were all addressed to me and sent from With Love, Your Secret Admirer. He was stealthy about the whole thing. Not even those who gave them out knew it was him. I knew and never told because he always had some other girlfriend or another. We had never been bound that way. Even still red roses came on my birthday to school, with the same signature. He wanted the preppy, popular crowd to wonder who cared about the awkward, heavy reader with weird friends. And just maybe he also wanted me to have some happy in my life.

                That vicious popular crowd never knew that we would sneak off together to a place he knew where the stream ran crystal clear swiftly around your ankles. We would walk through our own ripples and talk about everything and nothing. We would pick up rocks and show them to each other.  After his death I mourned not knowing which dirt road it was that would have taken me back to that spot.

                That crowd also didn’t know that we shared a secret. Oh, his secret wasn’t so much a secret as a communal crime. He would come to school with bruises on his face, around his neck and talk tough about how he went to our rival’s town and beat up people there. In his stories he always gave as good as he got. The town knew it wasn’t true. They knew that his father would get drunk and beat him and had been beating him all his life. They suspected that his mother might be doing far worse but, he was a boy and boys can take it. I can promise you from hours standing with the swirling water at my feet and rocks in my hand, he couldn’t take it. Neither could I, but my tormenters we better at hiding the evidence. So we stood in the water and gave each other rocks.

 He became rumored to be heavily mixed up with drugs and alcohol and reckless driving. OK, his driving scared the hell out of me, but I never saw him drunk or high. I think he liked getting tickets from the local cops. It was his way of being defiant in a world that he was helpless to shape. All of this justified the whippings he got. He was a bad boy and his father should punish him.

                When he finally drove off the road, cops hot on his heels, and took out four trees to come to rest in the ditch at Dead Man’s Curve, no, really, that was what it was called. He escaped his secret and had sent me a final gift that only in the past few months have I been able to come to grips with.  His family made a huge stink about the road and it was literally torn up and re-routed so that no one else would die like their son had.  There was a parking area of red clay next to the new road and I saw his father there sometimes setting new crosses or flower arrangements, guilt is a bitch.

                I went to the funeral and his father over come with grief literally began to shovel the red Georgia clay over his son’s coffin. I threw up and my family took me a some of his friends home. I was alone. The next day the roses came and that loneliness set in beyond my bone into the marrow. I went into survival mode and at eighteen found myself in a Battered Women’s Shelter with bruises all over my body, no recollection of how I had come to be there and missing three days of my life. The shelter swept me out of the county where my father was Deputy and into an apartment in another town. I got some therapy and a diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder with Major Depression.

                I would enter college and date warning people to never give me red roses. It just reminded me of pain and loss love and a friendship ripped from me. I went through my life got married and divorced, giving birth to my son along the way. I remarried and agreed to the red roses the florist insisted on putting in the bouquet. I started advocating for Family Coven and started Family Wiccan Traditions International, while writing about Family Coven for ezines and print publications. I started writing full time and landed the deal of a lifetime with Llewellyn. Then in the late fall of 2009, my own car went careening off Dead Man’s Curve.  I was lucky enough to come out of it with my life. I landed myself in intensive therapy treatment for six weeks and a diagnosis of PTSD with Major Depression. I was under the care of a psychiatrist monthly and a therapist weekly. I returned home full time feeling like I had destroyed everything.

                Llewellyn dropped my book. My family was ripe with panic and worry for me and in the days leading up to my own metaphorical car crash, I was nothing more than a breathing corpse held prisoner by nightmares, flash backs and a feeling so hopeless that only going down the  deep, dark, welcoming ravine seem reasonable. It called me like a siren and I was helpless against it.

                Upon my return, I learned that you have to take things slow. Like you had just had major surgery and its going to take some time to come back on line. Over time, I have started doing things around the house and am once again active in my son’s school life. I was puzzled over why when everything was coming together, FWTI was getting off the ground and my career was mine for the creating and my home life was blissfully safe did I take a drive to that place.

                Unlike my rosy boy’s crash, my crash was a fiery one that burned through my soul and decimated it. Back home I would sit in the soot and charred remains of what had been me, who I was and tried to figure out what to do and where to go from here. Smothered with the rising heat and ash even the Goddess and God were impossible to find. I thought about changing religions and going back to the Catholic Church. Not that I ever really could, I fundamentally disagree with just about everything they teach, but that was just how complete my demolition was.

                Over time, I began to feel better. I dreamt about a blue rose and a great story that I woke and wrote the four page synopsis for at four in the morning. I decided that I could feel a faint shimmer of the Devine with me – whether it was the Lord and Lady, I am not sure yet – however, I went back to what I knew spiritually and began to seek for a new totem animal in the blackened desert of my soul. I also decided that I should look up other symbols I could use to nurse my spirit back to health.

                So I began to research the words that I felt the most: determination, tenacious,  courage, fortitude, purpose and the rose answer each call. I was truthfully annoyed. Roses meant a very few things to me, and none of them would be helpful. Deep into this second writing, I have realized something. My rosy boy planned his meeting with Dead Man’s Curve and my roses had been his farewell. I didn’t try that type of escape until 2010 when I realized my world was sitting upon a foundation of pain, violation, loss, helplessness and torment.  My soul needed a fiery crash because it had to go, it had to burn like a funeral pyre and leave my soul sooty with rejuvenated soil so I could start over.  I could plant other things. Like a red rose for courage and fortitude against the onslaught of thorns in my life. A yellow rose for the friendships I have even now after my decimation and for the friendships I want to have.  White roses for my loyalty to Divinity in whatever shape it is finally revealed tome.  Purple rose for the transcendental quality of my life, then and now. An orange rose for my adopted mother who during this past year, died. She would always say she was proud of me every time I spoke with her, without fail. She loved me and helped heal me in ways that nothing else has or will. Black rose for the death of my rosy friend because in death he found reincarnation and in that there is hope that he is pain no more.

                And the blue rose of my dream that promises the impossible actualized in my life, a mystical quest to rebuild the land of my soul.

                There will be future posts about what I plan to do about the book, Family Coven,  my career and my spirituality. There will be other posts about changes in Family Wiccan Traditions International. However, this post is the most important one to start with because there are others out there who live under the veil of shame around their childhood. They plow through their lives which are grounded in the same kind of sexual, emotional, mental and physical abuse my rosy boy and I bonded over. They are afraid to let that pain out, let it loose, give it free reign because it most assuredly will be destructive. And they are afraid of the biological family that they may still live with, interact with or who deny with every breath that the past is simply misunderstood by me, you and every other victim of child abuse. My biological family may read this and they most certainly will deny every accusation I have laid out. They will see my fall into mental illness as inevitable because I was always on the verge of madness. Some of my friends and those who used to know me will agree with them.

                But I am the one with the rose garden. What is in the flower bed of their soul?