[Janeytwo]

Interesting Day. I made contact with two sources re. my children.

Then out of nowhere today:

My eldest called me upset because her half-sister had called her saying really nasty things about me and my babies. ???? What the frig planet did this come out of?

I will not go into the details about what the half-sister said. They were viscious ugly lies. Better than that she chose lies that inadvertently set off triggers regarding my father and his past associations. Let's leave it at that.

But these lies were so outrageous and from so far off the wall that it shook my daughter and today she's on the phone to me saying, Mom, is it true?? I don't want to upset you but........

You get the picture.

Sigh. No. Not true and also very upsetting to be blindsided by something like this. I found myself having to justify the past and having to constantly reassure my eldest that these lies were exactly that while at the same time dealing with my father's face flashing before my eyes!

As for the lies? Well the damage is done. My daughter is only human and will now spend the rest of her life wondering about me; even if it a subconscoius wondering it will be there.

Then....

Today, I came in the office and found my youngest daughter crying asking me if I would forget about her once I found her half-sister and brother. Her saying, Mom, if you find them are you going to move away and forget me and stop loving me? She was inconsolable.

So I dealt with that by telling her she is the light of my life and that no one could replace her or her sister but that I need to know that my other two kids are okay.

In between all that, my boss has stopped speaking to me and is constantly looking sideways at me. I feel her staring at me and when I look up she looks away.

Nope. I'm not being paranoid....this is actually happening.

Now being no idiot, I have never mentioned my past to my boss but I have mentioned that I once lived near a certain Catholic Chruch (name deleted). This was due to a conversation about a news article regarding said church.

As bad luck would have it she had family from same neighborhood that she's still close with. (Neighborhood where I was during my pregnancy).

She went to visit these relatives two weeks ago and that's when all the stares and silence began. She has also switched my hours so that we don't actually see each other saying that, "There's no reason we should have to be in the office together."

I am guessing that she knows about me and my babies. A lifetime of seeing the judgement in women's eyes when I've taken the risk to share....THAT is the look in hers.

Five bucks she will not be asking me back next year to work.

And the band played on.........

Janey

[Janeytwo]

Hey All!

An addendum. Yep. I have learned to trust that street-self (or gut instinct to some). Boss left me an email saying she didn't need my services this week - to not come in. LOL! Oh yeah. I be right.

Guess I should stop mentioning the old hood to people, huh? You just never know. We got what? 14 million people in the Metro area and I run into someone who knows someone who knew me in the dreaded "back then". :-)


Oh well. On with the day.

Janey

[JustPeachy]

Good lord, I cannot believe people can still be that critical and judgemental in 2008! Janey, I am sorry you are going through all that. I have toyed with the idea of "coming out" to more people about my son, and thought about telling people in my workplace, but when I hear stories like what happened to you, I become afraid that there will be repurcussions such as you describe, or else it will be like when I was pregnant. Some people were supportive, but many others were so judgemental and, of course, I was the topic of all the office gossip. It stinks that things have to be kept so tightly under wraps. And I'm sorry about what happened with your daughter's half-sister. Is there anyone who can set her straight at all about spreading those vicious lies?

[Janeytwo]

Hey JustPeachy!

Whew! What a day! :-)

Anyway, my eldest was intially so furious because her half-sister said that these lies weren't hers - that they came from my ex! (half-sister is his daughter from his current marraige). My daughter was going to tear ex a new one but I told her to slow down first and make darn sure that he was actually the one that said it. That if she were wrong, she might say something in error that she couldn't take back.

Turns out (proven) that it wasn't him that said these terrible things, it was the half-sister all along. Since hal-sister is just 19, I told my daughter to take that into account, then take a moment and call her half-sister and work it out. Half-sister admitted making everything up and laughed as if it was no big thing!!! Good grief!!

They did work it out and I told my eldest to forgive her sister as I felt she might've done it out of jealously or fear. (My eldest has only recently reunited with her dad after a long enstrangement).

So that's the story there.

As for my boss? Welp, all I can say is now I understand why guys in AA don't tell anyone at work about their recovery. As one said to me, "Janey....unless I go to a meeting and end up sitting across from my boss...well...unless that happens, I just let him think that I'm a lifelong tea-totaller"

LOL!

Much hugs to you today!

Janey

[kakuehl]

Janey, How about taking the bull by the horns (and with fear and trepidation!) talk to your boss! What have you got to lose? As is the case with your daughter and her step-sister, what we think and build up in our minds is not often the truth. At this point your daughter knows where the lies came from! (Oh, and by the way, I'm a firm believer in both forgiveness and the ability to change... the biblical text is "Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.") You know you are not the person you were back in the 'hood... Your life is shaped by your experiences but not controlled by them. You have changed and grown and matured! If you boss can't understand that, it's her loss, but maybe you can help her grow!

As for your younger daughter, all you can do is continue to assure her that you love her... no matter what.

[Janeytwo]

Hey Kathy,

Janey, How about taking the bull by the horns (and with fear and trepidation!) talk to your boss! What have you got to lose?

Yeah I know. Heck, a lot of people have probably read this and thought the same thing. Problem is I'm dealing with someone else's pettyness here and that's a minefield and a half.

Mostly likely she wouldn't admit it, if only out of fear of a lawsuit. So why should I speak up and confirm her suspicions? Give her the excuse she's looking for? Why should I hand her the self-righteous ball so she can chuck it at me?

Nope. That's one game I don't play. If she wants to justify getting rid of me because she's ashamed of some part of herself...or simply because she's looking down at me for a past I can't change? Well...then she's either going to have to find an excuse to fire me or she's going to have to confront me. Not the other way around. I'm not making it easy for her by handing her my head to chop off. Uh uh.

Besides....it's not so painful really. A little odd when you consider the timing but oh well, I'll just have to get over it. Shoot, I only work there until October (if I still have a job that is!)

Lots of people up here have no job. I'm lucky to work.

Smiling as I remember the story I told someone in here about me and my friends in highschool borrowing somebody's molderly old boat and motoring out to Ford Cove. We ended up beside this massive 3-tiered yacht. Some guy up on the top tier of that yacht kept looking down at us from above and flicking his cigarettes at us.

One of my friends walked over, picked up one of those flicked smokes that landed in our hull, then said "Thanks dude!" and used the hotbox to light one of his Kool's. LOL!

THAT is the neighborhood I want to get back to. Not the physical place but the understanding that there's always going to be somebody flicking ash at everybody else so screw them if they can't take a joke!

It's about dang time I found that part of myself again, Kathy. I have missed it, ya know? And so maybe I need to be thankful to my boss for being in my life to remind me of who I once was. I think I should send compassion her way and let it go.



Janey

[Janeytwo]

Hey All,

Okay...this is getting bee-zarrrrr...

My nextdoor neighbor asked me if I could watch their pet for them while they're away. I said "sure no problem" and went with her to her house so she could show me where they keep the pet stuff.

While we're in her laundry room she tells me that she's nervous because she and her husband are going to be going halfway across the country to meet her husband's birthmother!

I must've looked as shocked on the outside as I was on the inside and I think she mistook my shock for disapproval because she immediately moved to cover herself and stop any further conversation by saying , "But we don't like to talk about it. You wouldn't understand."

Me looking at the floor and smiling sadly while thinking too myself, "Nope. I guess I wouldn't."

Then she waved her hand dismissively and began talking about her cats hairballs. I.e., that was the end of that conversation.

Janey

Instant karma's gonna get you. Gonna knock you off your feet. Better recognize your brothers. Everyone you meet. John Lennon

[Jackiejdajda]

God don’t give you lessons you can not handle..

I can not believe your boss is reacting to you giving your babies up for adoption.. Most people think what a good thing to do when you are down and out.. I am thinking she is reacting to gossip about you and the life you lived all those years ago..
Gossip..

Its reacting to people and letting them control us.. and its wrong..

Its about putting up boundaries and saying.. go no further than this.. and if you do.. I will no longer respect you or something like that..
How does one deal with a boss that is secret and does not say what is really happening.. maybe that is the question..

And I agree with Kathy.. confront her.. get it in the open..
If you lose your job so be it.. you are setting off on a journey that is profound.. and you need all your ducks in a row..

My mom would bend to others in order to survive.. she wanted me to do it as well.. I can not do this..

Jackie

[kakuehl]

Janey,
Have you considered going back to your neighbor and explaining your reaction? You may be the resource they need, a support, as they start the reunion journey that we sometimes refer to as the roller coaster ride! I know that "curiosity kills the cat," but if I were in your shoes I'd want to know things like, who found who? How long have you been in conversation? How is her husband feeling? (I am the insatiably curious child!)

[Janeytwo]

Hey Kathy & Jackie,

Uhmmm...lets see. Oh yeah. (Sorry - me without coffee!) First hubby and I had a talk about my boss. He didnt' read your posts of course but I told him basically what you guys both said. He had initially suggested my confronting her, as being a guy he thought it was her jealously over my "excellent job performance" (his words not mine). He said he thinks she's threatened by me. I told him that's rediculous. I'm not an Exec. Sec. anymore. Now I just answer phones and greet the club members and ask them how their day is going - that kind of stuff. He still said she probably thinks I'm after her job. Men! Good grief!!

Anyway, I told him what I told you guys; about the adoption thing. He said he thought I was being paranoid because of all the stuff I'm going through, how hard it is for me. I wasn't too happy with him. Then he said "Baby, look, you respect these women right?" And I said yes, very much. And he said, "Well then take their advice. They're right, you've got nothing to lose. What do you care what your boss thinks? You don't right? And if she fires you...she fires you. I don't care. I'll still love you."

Long and short of it. Okay...okay! I'm going to confront her! :-) I shall tuck my pride under my arm and sally forth. Sheesh! :-)

So that's that.

Kathy - Howdy!

I had thought about that with my neighbors. Then I got scared, then I thought about it, then I got scared. You know the drill. I think though that you're right. I made a promise on another thread to someone. Maybe this is God's way of letting me honor that promise. We shall see. If not and they show me the door, well then....their cats shall meet with a terrible tradgedy while they're away! (Evil grin)

I'm kidding....I'm kidding....

Hugs to you both!

Janey

[Jackiejdajda]

I have to do my ‘stand knee deep in the flow of life and pay attention'.. quote..

The reason why is I believe we need to anchor ourselves in reality.. daily.. Or I need to anchor myself in reality.. daily..
This quote is from 'The Artist Way' written by Julia Cameron.. she writes about her grandmother who would write to her telling her about what flowers were blooming and what was happening in her day to day life..
Real things connecting things..


page 52/53 The Artist Way.. Julia Cameron.

My grandmother lived with that man in tiled Spanish houses, in trailers, in a tiny cabin halfway up a mountain, in a railroad flat, and, finally in a house made out of ticky-tacky where they all looked just the same. “I don’t know how she stands it,” my mother would say, furious with my grandfather for some new misadventure. She meant she didn’t’ know why.

The truth is, we all knew how she stood it. She stood it by standing knee-deep in the flow of life and paying close attention..

My grandmother was gone before I learned the lessons her letters were teaching: survival lies in sanity and sanity lies in paying attention. Yes, her letters said, Dad’s cough is getting worse, we have lost the house, there is no money and no work, but the tiger lilies are blooming, the lizard has found that spot of sun, the roses are holding despite the heat.

My grandmother knew what a painful life had taught her: success or failure, the truth of a life really has little to do with its quality. The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.

In a year when a long and rewarding love affair was lurching gracelessly away from the center or her life, the writer May Sarton kept A Journal of a Solitude. In it, she records the coming home from a particularly painful weekend with her lover. Entering her empty house, “I was stopped by the threshold of my study by a ray on a Korean chrysanthemum, lighting it up like a spotlight, deep red petals and Chinese yellow center……
Seeing it was like getting a transfusion of autumn light. “

It’s no accident that May Sarton uses the word transfusion. The loss of her lover was a wound, and in her responses to that chrysanthemum, in the act of paying attention, Sarton’s healing began…

The reward for attention is always healing. It may begin as the healing of a particular pain – the lost lover, the sickly child, the shattered dream. But what is healed, finally, is the pain that underlines all pain: the pain that we are all, as Rilke phrases it, “unutterably alone.” More than anything else, attention is an act of connection..


snipped some page 54

Writing about attention, I see that I have written a good deal about pain. This is no coincidence. It may be different for others, but pain is what it took to teach me to pay attention. In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past is too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now. The precise moment I was in was always the only safe place for me. Each moment, taken alone, was always bearable. In the exact now, we are all, always, all right.



I used this kind of thinking in my reunion.. when things got crazy I would think of Julia Cameron’s grandmother.. this woman that really really got it.. on terms of how to cope..
I think of Mary Sarton and that Korean chrysanthemum.. and her transfusion..

When we are putting ourselves ‘out there’ I think we need transfusions.. many of them.. and if we forget the slings and arrows coming at us.. (like your boss and the inference or whatever and the neighbor and all that entails.. (trying to help and outing ourselves)).... we are not sidetracked.. not thrown off the rails...

Jackie

[Janeytwo]

Hey Jackie,

The reason why is I believe we need to anchor ourselves in reality.. daily.. Or I need to anchor myself in reality.. daily..

No.* You are right.* It is we.*I can see how my unhealed self has reared its ugly head with all of this.* How it is speaking to me from its need and fear but not necessarily from reality.* That is okay.* I'm not the only one doing that.* There are people out there blathering away from their own pain, spitting spiteful philosophies and not paying the least attention either.* It is the human condition.* And I know I've been guilty too.

survival lies in sanity and sanity lies in paying attention.

When I came into this place, I came with a notion that I must learn the truth of my children...of their loss.* But it didn't occur to me that I needed to learn the truth of myself.* I thought that in the long years of Al-Anon, therapy and hospital stays that I had learned the truth.* Uncovered the me inside myself.* But all that time when people would reach out; those few who knew about me, and of course my therapists, pscyhologists, what have you...When they'd reach out about my children, my hand would fly up and I'd say, NO!* THIS YOU CANNOT HAVE.* IT IS MINE AND IT WILL REMAIN LOCKED AWAY.
Smiling here.* My therapist by the way, one of her favorite books was The Artist Way.* She could never get me to read it.* She was a fabulous woman, stunningly beautiful.* She was originally from Appalachia from dirt poverty, the kind even street people don't know.* Her mother abused her horribly but she "repainted" her life so to speak.* Became the first in her family to graduate, then got a Masters.* She was deep into the counter-culture.* Then came out the other side of that a Buddhist with a love of fashion.* :-)**
Anyway, the day I stopped seeing her; some ten years down the road, she gave me a gift;* a sterling silver acorn pendant and when you opened it; there was a little girl on a swing inside.She said her grandmother had given it to her and she wanted me to have it.* She said "that young Janey you miss is still in there somewhere and it'll be hard on you when she finally emerges".
She was right.

The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.

To live in the moment and not in fear.* I would very much like to get back to that place.* I am working hard to do that.* I think triggers are flying up at me and getting in my way.* Just have to slow down, look at them momentarily and then let them go by having learned what I need to.

pain is what it took to teach me to pay attention. In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past is too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now. The precise moment I was in was always the only safe place for me. Each moment, taken alone, was always bearable. In the exact now, we are all, always, all right

Wow!* Beatifully written Jackie!* I am reminded of the egg-timer trick that we used to teach to newcomers.* You now the one.* "If he starts screaming at you, calling you names, threatening you, look at the stove on the clock...tell yourself that for the next 20 seconds, the next 30 and so and so on, you will not listen.* You will simply be."Many would look at us like we were nuts but they'd always come back the next week and say "You were right! It worked!"Yesterday or last night I should say I was in a frenzy of fear...well...not fear really....a frenzy of triggers.* By chance, I happened to be at a fireworks/fair roughly four blocks from the courthouse where I surrendered my babies.* In the last week I have begun to remember why my memory was wiped away re. leaving that building afterwards.* Now I was back there again, physically remembering.* You now...smells, touch...that kind of thing.* I was thinking of "leaving" in my mind and shutting down.* But then I looked over at my two daughters walking side by side and my husband pushing my grandson in the stroller and I thought to myself "no, I'm not letting the past take this present from me.* The past will be there in the morning.* But in the morning, this moment will have gone by...just another moment that slips away in life.* I will live in it and enjoy it."*

When we are putting ourselves ‘out there’ I think we need transfusions.. many of them.. and if we forget the slings and arrows coming at us.. we are not sidetracked.. not thrown off the rails...

So true.



Janey

[Jackiejdajda]

Janeytwo

*I can see how my unhealed self has reared its ugly head with all of this.* How it is speaking to me from its need and fear but not necessarily from reality.*

It is so hard to face all of this.. so incredibly hard..
I think we need to take ‘time outs’ for ourselves.. but the thing will keep presenting itself.. this I know for sure..
I just replied to Carolyn’s thread in which her birthmom is shutting down on terms of her emotions (my take) and ohhh I understand..

When I came into this place, I came with a notion that I must learn the truth of my children...of their loss.* But it didn't occur to me that I needed to learn the truth of myself.*

I believe with all my heart that the only way out is through.. and face it we must..
We need to put things like this to rest.. we ne