Danced me Inside

I feel trapped.  I feel like I am suffocating. 

There is a knot in my guts and I was thinking to do anything I could to make it go away.  I think, really, that is part of the problem.  I have forced it down and run away from whatever “this” is my whole life. 

I was fine until after lunch today when the dancer came to our school.  She shared her harrowing story with us about her life as one of many – the middle of the pack of halfs and fulls – and how everyone found a home but her.  How she would make sure she was dirty and lice-ridden as a child because the only way someone would touch her, show her physical care and attention, was when she was dirty.  Both of her parents are addicts and were not able to care for her or her siblings.  They were not able to give her the love she needed because they could not give it to themselves.  They were survivors of residential school and survivors of lives with residential school survivors.  She survived her own addiction issues and relationships with people who were not good for her.  Relationships where she was beaten and abused.

She gifted us with her story and then she danced.  She danced her story.  She danced her story from both sides of her family: the Cree and the Metis.  She is a Pow Wow dancer and a Metis Jig dancer. 

I was fine through the story, more or less.

I was fine until she danced.  The drumming and singing dug deeper and deeper into me I had to bite my lips closed so hard, so as not to burst into tears and embarrass my son (seated next to me), that my mouth hurts even now, some 3 hours later.  There was a prayer to the directions and to the people seated with her and I had to really hold myself together.  My muscles hurt right now from it. 

I had to hold myself together.  I had to keep everything in…my stomach and my ribs and my whole body clenched together like a fist ready to punch.  I tried so hard to hold it all in…all of it…the pain the dance was causing me in places in my soul I don’t understand.  In the places in my soul where the toddler version of me heard those singers and those drummers at Fort Garry and in my dreams.  In the places in my soul where the fiddle music carved me up like some animal of sacrifice.  The fiddle music of my infancy:  Don Messer and my mother talking about her dancing and my Granny’s dancing.   In the places where I hurt for the loss of family and pieces of me I couldn’t locate except by radar or sonar or braille. 

I held myself together so tightly that I could feel the blood vessel behind my right eye pulse at the end of the day when I gathered my stuff to go home.  I saw coronas behind my eyes as I drove away from the school and was convinced I was about to have a silent migraine.  Then I drove into a thunderstorm on the way home and I felt comfort in the thunder and lightning.  Usually I am afraid of thunderstorms but I felt embraced by it today, somehow. Pathetic fallacy, maybe. 

I panicked.  I wanted to run.  I don’t really know where but I wanted to run to the forest, maybe.  I decided to stay and walk into it and write.  I don’t know where this is going or where it is from – ok…not true…I know where it is from:  the dance.  Releasing the shit I feel through dance. 

The fiddle music had cracked me wide open.  It makes me feel lost and lonely and disconnected.  The drumming and singing makes me feel like I’m drowning – I am floundering or faceless like that totem figure.  I know who I am but I have no way to prove it. 

It hurts at a cellular level.  That is the only way I know how to describe it…the pain is cellular.  All I have ever wanted, all any of us ever want, is to know where we come from – to know who we are.  On many levels that changes and evolves over our lifetimes, yes, but there is a core connection rooted in family connections to “a people” that many people take for granted.  I have searched for most of my life for those “people.”  I have not been able to find them, really.  My Mother’s Mother’s people are fairly easy to trace – up to the indigenous part. Everything else is smoke and mirrors.

Maybe it’s just me.  Maybe it’s nothing to do with family history.  Maybe I have just never known who I am or what I am doing or where I am headed and I have been living someone else’s life for as long as I have been here.  Maybe we all do.  Maybe I am having a freak out exactly one month from my 50^th birthday.

Exactly one month from my 50^th birthday. 

Fuck.

That’s probably some of it.  A friend of mine today said he loves his 50s.  He said he feels legit now in many aspects of his life because he feels like his word and work have weight.  I can understand feeling more competent with age and practice.  I do feel more “settled” in my work – more focused…like I understand some of the nuances of the job a little better than I did a decade ago.

I guess I just figured things would be different by now, family wise.  That there would be some magical fairy dust that would make all of the family shit go away or heal itself or something.  That, maybe, by the time I was 50, I would find a place in my family that would be ok for me, somehow.  Really, all I am seeing and feeling is that the fairy dust fantasy I have always searched for does not exist.  I have been fighting to give up the fantasy for many years and in the last few months have realised the fantasy doesn’t serve me anymore.  It does not define me.  And, actually, I don’t think I’ve ever grieved that.

I have never grieved the death of the fantasy that my family was awesome and “normal” (whatever the fuck that is) and that the kind of relationships I needed and wanted were never there.  Never. 

They couldn’t be because people didn’t know how to have those relationships – especially my mother.  I wasn’t going to write that.  I was going to hold that one in because I was afraid.

I am not afraid anymore.  I have radical acceptance around the fact that my mother couldn’t mother because she wasn’t mothered.  She was terrified and young and not ready to have me.  I understand and I am sorry that was the case for her.  I want the fairy dust to let her see that and own it and say she’s sorry but that is never going to happen.  I have radical acceptance around that.  Now I need to parent myself and move into the next phase of my life in a place of healing and repairing any damage I have done to my children – when I didn’t know how to be the mother they needed. 

I am not sure why I am going public with this – why I didn’t just journal this and put it away.  Maybe it’s like when people begin a workout program and post the “before” pic to keep them honest to themselves.  I feel like it’s more like a declaration that I am not wanting to be alone anymore.  It hasn’t been fair to the people closest to me that I have pulled everything in – like I did today at the presentation – and separate myself so I don’t have to feel anything around anyone else.  What worked for me in the past doesn’t work anymore.

Guess it’s time for a new way to do things – just in time for my 50^th birthday, in exactly one month from today!