Skeletons

Gotta keep working even when you
are gone. Found here

Really enjoying Cris Derkson this morning, the mood feels appropriate for what I wanted to write about today.  I am an analyst both by nature and training.  I think about things and find the fault with them, break them down into their parts and look at ways to make them better.  But it can be a fine line, you can't destroy everything all the time, people don't always want to know the faults you identify and it can be hard some days not to fall into the mindset of breaking the thing to see if you can build it better.  I see analysis as a dance in the shadows trying to find a healthy balance.

I think I learned a lot of my analytical skills from my mother.  I learned from her distance, as the Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott wrote, that the child with a distant mother, will create a world of logic to protect themselves and make sense of things.  I also learned from going to church with her where we would sit in the loft so we could comment on who was going bald, who was not sitting quite close enough to their partner, and who was not keeping up.  It was a spiteful sort of game.  I learned to be very good at it even while feeling bad about the juxtaposition of church and judging others.  But there are moments when analysis can bring personal gifts, both the self analysis that can lead to good life changes, and also those precious insights into where we came from.

My father was a good man in retrospect or at least average.  He always took me for my visitation times.  It was not his fault that I was so poisoned against him, convinced that he was evil.  It wasn't his fault that I spend the hours after a visit in the bath repeatedly washing my skin to get the evil off.  It must have been hard for him to have this child so full of fear, but he always took me with him.  Because of the fear I don't remember very much about him, but one night as I was thinking about him it struck me that he must have really loved water.  He lived on a houseboat or by a lake or pond his whole life and our summer activities were always on or near the water.  Recently when Sophie brought up her affinity with water I could share this insight with her and linked her to the past, to a man I never really knew, but who I could find in the margins of other memories.

I really appreciate that the indigenous worldview has a space for the ancestors.  I missed this relationship in a colonized worldview.  I missed knowing these parts of me and recognizing the people who contributed to them.  I just finished the second book in Dean Koonz's Frankenstein series and it strikes me how we are Frankenstein, brought together from the pieces of our ancestors and animated by blood memory, maybe combining to be something new and other, but never free from those elements we have inherited. What treasures are waiting for you to find to the margins?