I have the utmost respect for all religions. I acknowledge the possibility that every single one of them might be true. So before you read this please note that I am not judging my experiences on the religions/beliefs/practices in those ways of life involved. I am just expressing my point of view. 

So when I was little my family was mostly christian. We went to Unity on Christmas and Easter and we were happy. Then, later, my mother told us about the Gods and Goddesses.

I already knew something about the other Gods, being an avid fan of Xena. I thought that they should come down and interact with me. My mother then told me that no, they weren’t like Xena, I couldn’t just go to a temple and call them and have them physically appear. Gods were busy, like people.

So for a little while we believed in Gods. My mother had her goddess, Hera, my brother had Pan. I never quite found one I liked, my mother told me to close my eyes and ‘hear’ the one who suited me best, so I opened them and said “Aphrodite!” and she said no, Aphrodite was not my Goddess, I was watching too much Xena.

Then she decided we were going to a new temple. This one had Jesus and Saint Germain. Unlike Gods and Jesus, apparently Saint Germain could just drop everything and be at my mothers beck and call constantly. He was always in her head, and later it was expected that he would be in our head too.

The one thing about the Temple though, was that we were all supposed to be ‘holy’. So everyone who went to the temple was supposed to wear white only.

My family didn’t own white. 

So there was a room full of angelic, lightly clad people who looked they way ‘holy’ people should. Then there were the three people in the back who were dressed exclusively in navy blue and black. Scary much?

Then eventually the Temple was not the right place for us anymore. So we moved on to a period where we met with Hare Krishna’s, then the self realization people who followed Paramahansa Yogananda.

Yogananda was my favorite, because it was mostly visualization and meditation.

Meanwhile, Saint Germain was talking to mother, telling her what to do and why she couldn’t swallow. He told her to go to a retreat in Washington for a week. So she did, and we stayed with friends.

When she came back she could swallow. She told us that she had found a holy place, the world was ending soon and the only way to survive was to buy two thousand dollars worth of food and move to Washington, where we would eventually build a concrete bomb shelter and live underground while civilization was purged.

I was eleven years old when we picked up everything two weeks later and moved.

So then we moved up to Washington, in the middle of the rain forest. It was absolutely beautiful and my mother decided that in order to save us she was going to have us go through the retreat too. 

I actually almost liked it. I loved the rainforest. I would go out all day in big rubber boots and tramp around playing. Sometimes with my brother, sometimes by myself. I could learn to live with the knowledge that we would be the last humans alive.

Then Saint Germain told my mother that that way of life was unholy. That it was a sham. There was another way of life that was the real way of life.

So we moved to the coast and pursued that way of life, which sometimes balanced mother out, except for the fact that we were being constantly watched by the FBI.

The big black helicopters that flew over the beach weren’t because of the beach, they were because of my mother, our lines were tapped too apparently, and we had to be careful about what we said. But it would all be ok. 

After the rainforest though, my mother was different, she began acting worse, violent even. She’d begin hitting us on the head, pulling me around by my hair, throwing things at us, slapping us. She also began using worse words. Swearing became a constant when she was in one of her moods, until I was called Bitch more than any other nickname she used on me.

Then we moved down to the Oregon coast, and then to Portland. Where she stayed in her current way of practicing, and I began to develop mine.

I was in freshman year when I decided I was going to be pagan, and I began practicing.

Her previous statements of “You can be whatever religion you want to be.”  became “You know those Gods aren’t really Gods right?” A couple times she accused me of conversing with evil spirits, and when she was really mad at me, she decided I was possessed.

Imagine what that did for my self-esteem. Unfortunetly, This was also around then time I began really utilizing my unsafe coping skills, so my mother had even more reason to justify her belief that I was possessed. My depression seemed to her a manifestation of all the evil spirits messing with me, and she believed I needed to immedietly switch over to her way of thinking. 

I didn’t. I continued to stick with the paganism, because it gives me a freedom and a sense of security.

 So yeah, i’ve lived with a bunch of different religions, a bunch of different ways of worshiping, and while it has been extremly colorful, in the end all it has done is teach me tolerance and respect. I’ve decided to land on pagan for a while, give it a couple of years before I settle down or move on. I don’t really feel holy, I never really have, but maybe I don’t have to.

 

 

So I just got back from the Cowboy Junkies/Indigo Girls Concert at the zoo. It was AMAZING! I haven’t been so happy in a while. I cried three times just from happiness.

Two months ago K and V (K is my foster father V is my foster mother)  were talking about going to a concert at the zoo, and I just happened to say “Oh, well I’ve been trying to see the Indigo Girls for years. I haven’t seen them since I was six.” So we bought the tickets and set the date for today.

Now, you have to understand that I have been listening to the Indigo Girls since my mother was pregnant with me. I used to dance around my living room every morning to their music videos. I have listened to and loved them forever.  When I was sad I’d sing their songs to make myself feel better, and when I came out I reminded myself that these were two very successful women who were also lesbians. They’ve been role models to me, and I’ve never known an Indigo Girls song that was not perfect for the feeling I had at the moment. 

We used to travel a lot. We used to pack up in the car and just drive, and play music. First it was my mother playing Galileo over and over, and then it was me with my little CD player playing Joking and Closer To Fine, and Jonas and Ezekiel, Chickenman, Shame on You, Southland in the Springtime . All these beautiful songs that just keep me going and remind me of peaceful, tranquil moments that happened in the storm.

So I went to this amazing concert, and i’d never heard the Cowboy Junkies before, so they just blew me away. I loved them too, they’re awesome. Then the Indigo Girls came on and I was so happy I cried. Which has never happened to me before, but listening to them again, kind of brought this to a full circle. I loved the Indigo Girls when I was little, before my mother got sick. I loved them when she first got sick. I loved them when I was a pre-teen, I loved them in the early years of high school, even when things got really bad and all I would listen to were songs about suicide and drinking, I still loved them.

Now, after almost eighteen years, they’re still here. One of the few things that has not changed is my love for them and their ability to match my mood, and usually make me feel better, and it’s really good to have constants like that. 

 

My brother and I were talking the other day about how when our Mother first started getting sick we began noticing something was wrong. We both had these moments when we realized she was crazy.

He and I have always had pretty different relationships with our mother. He was kind of a mama’s boy. She was his champion, and she loved him more than anything else, and vice versa.  I don’t doubt she loved me just as much, it was just a different type. I didn’t absolutely need her. So while he noticed later, I noticed really early.

The definitive moment was one night in late spring when we were nine. It was after midnight, and my brother and I had been dragged out of our beds to clean the living room, and she was screaming aat us while we picked up with the sluggish movements of sleepy kids.

She was saying things like “My life was fine until I had kids” she was calling us stupid, she was telling us that in the morning we were going to go live with our father, we were going to foster care, we were terrible, lazy, selfish children. We were white trash and we were killing her.

My brother was crying, and by this point I had stopped crying. It wasn’t because I was stronger than him, it was sometthing different, like if I cried I was weak or something, so I turned around and said “Stop calling us that!” and she got this metallic gleam in her eye that I hadn’t really seen before then,walked over and opened the door and she said “if you don’t like it you can get out of my house and never come back”.

She did this sometimes, she’d pull over on the side of the road and tell us to get the hell out of her car and never come back, but she never did it with that look, she also never kept us up past midnight telling us how we were killing her.  So I walked into my room, grabbed my pillow and Mopsy (my stuffed bunny whom I loved more than life itself) and walked out the door.

I was a nine year old little girl in a nightgown and bare feet. I decided I would sleep in the park two blocks away from our house, and then go to Gloria’s in the morning. I made it a block away before I was tackled by my brother, who took Mopsy and my pillow, and then when I continued walking grabbed my arms and pulled me, kicking and hissing, back to our house. He was crying and talking about how Mom was really sick, and she didn’t mean it, and we needed to stay a family, and it was because of him crying that I agreed to go back.

She had already gone to bed by the time we got back. So we decided that it was okay for us to go to bed too, but that entire night I stared at the wall and wondered where my mother had gone.

My mother was not always crazy. Actually, she was the best mom anyone could hope for when we were little.

My mom was amazing. She was a chef, and a good one. She was the type of woman who had power, and charm and beauty. If I was scared as a little girl all I had to do was go near her and I felt safe. She was amazing.

Sometimes when she worked at night she would leave us at our babysitter Gloria’s. Then at midnight she would pick us up and smile, always smelling of the restruant she worked at (a blend of mac and cheese, pie and hamburger) and night. She would smile, take us out to the car and drive us to Dunkin Donuts so we could pick out a treat for being up late.

Once, we were in the car, and it was really hot, and we looked up at the full moon, and our mom smiled at us and loaded us up in the car to “chase the moon” and we did. For hours. Until we got out to the observatory and looked at the stars through their telescopes.

She was also the best storyteller. Not about fairytale princes and enchanted castles. That was Disney’s job. She told us stories about her life as a chef student, her life as a high school student, her family, her pets. She told us personal stories that had more meaning to us than the constitution, and we loved it. We had our favorites and we’d request them like songs.

As far as i’m concerned, she also made sure we didn’t grow up jaded. We travelled constantly, and we were forced to sit through four hour long symphonies. Mozart and Vivaldi were just as important to us as The Indigo Girls and Styx. Who were Gods as far as we were concerned.

We didn’t know our father very well, and while we mourned his absence, we could forget him sometimes. It was the three of us against the world.

But it’s the nature of the world to change, and ours did. In the worst and most effective sort of way. I’m still hurt and angry at my mother. That’s what  some of this blog is about. Maybe even most, but before I go telling about all the stuff that came later, it’s important that you know my mother was not always the way she is, and maybe part of whats so upsetting is knowing the way she was before, and wishing she could go back to the way she was. When she was my mommy.

When I was little, my mother got very, very sick. She was unconscious for three days and when she woke up she was paralyzed in her left arm and cound not swallow.

My twin brother and I were nine years old and we were launched into a position where we took care of ourselves and our mother. 

Shortly afterwards, my mother began talking to a man named Saint Germain, whom she could hear in her head. She talked to him almost constantly, and after a little while had my brother talk to him. They would sit in her room for hours, with her constant “Ask Saint Germain this” and “Ask Saint Germain that”, and it got to the point where I couldn’t talk to her with my brother in the room without her interrupting me to have him ask Saint Germain something, or if I was spending time with him, she would randomly walk into the room for a twenty minute barrage of questions for him to ’Ask Saint Germain’.

A couple of years went by with this, and we moved from our hometown Kansas City to a tiny town in Washington, to another tiny town in Washington, to Oregon, and finally to Portland.

In Portland a couple of things happened that i’ll get into in later posts, but during high school there was a period where my brother had been sent away. Now in the past I had been singled out to sit real still and ‘Listen’ to Saint Germain while my mother and I were alone. I always got out of it because I never could hear anything, and she sort of gave up on me.  But this time Alex was gone for a while, and we were in the car going to the store. I hadn’t eaten all day and I was starving. She asked me to ask Saint Germain a question, and I replied sharply that I couldn’t hear anything, and she looked at me and said “So you want me to die because you’re too selfish to listen to Saint Germain for me?” Then she pulled into a parking lot, began crying, and turned around.

“What about dinner?” I asked. She didn’t look at me as she replied “Why should I do anything for you when you can’t do a simple little thing for me?”  “I’m hungry! I haven’t eaten all day!” I yelled at her. ”Then buy your own food.” She replied in an odd voice. “I have no money.” I said. “I don’t have a job.” She shrugged. So, I growled fine, I would ‘listen to saint germain’ and she cheerfully pulled over.

So, for the next year and a half, I had to ’ask’ questions for Saint Germain whenever she wanted me to.  At any moment I had to drop everything I was doing, and go through twenty minute to hour long periods where I had to ask questions, and this usually resulted in my mother yelling at me because she didn’t like my answers, or because I got tired and asked her to leave me alone. 

Then, late in sophomore year, I was hospitalized for depression a second time and it was decided that going home with my mother was not the best thing for me to do. So I went to live with my best friend and her family, where I have spent a year sort of recovering, adapting to a family where i’m not woken up at two in the morning by screaming, and where I get fed, and where I know I will not be thrown out at any second.  

I have spent eight and a half years of my life with Saint Germain, and one year without, and it’s time to tell my story.