I: Clearly Lost
First you have to get lost. Start early, when you are small and have no guides. Not that you toddle out the door never to be found again. This is an inside job. You get lost within yourself, running away from your truth because, in a poor rural family that has too many kids, there is no room for what you would naturally say and do, no succor for your need. So you bury deep what is real then pretend to be ok, all the while staring out the window at icy Mt. Rainier and hoping for better days.
Better days don’t come because, like the protagonist in The Light in August, you have lost your parents, though in your case not to death but to distraction; there are oh so many problems. As the eldest you have to step aside and pitch in, your attention going to others, to watching, waiting and helping as babies arrive every year. “I reckon that’s why I got one so quick myself,” the Faulkner female says. And now you too, the teenager with big dreams, have a child of your own, one you are not ready to care for. So you give your baby to strangers to raise and now he too is lost, prompting you to leave the Pacific Northwest for strange new worlds to the south – Haight Ashubry, Big Sur and the Hollywood Hills; not benign places.
II: Seemingly Found
At age 30 you come to a halt in a land that is too hot and un-homey, filled with neon, glitz and skinny women. Strangely enough, here is where you meet a true friend, find a mate, get an education and forge a career, leading you to believe that you have found yourself. Buoyed, you search for your lost child and find him; not a happy young man. You go to therapy to tolerate his distance, try for nine years to have another child, finally succeed but then spend the next eighteen years raising your daughter while fighting with your husband because you don’t have enough money, enough help, enough rest. Despite feeling itchy and empty, you somehow wrestle down the everyday monsters until your daughter is a teenager and your angry husband has mellowed because you finally demanded it. You think this means you have mastered the challenges of adulthood; that you have overcome the pain and problems of old and are home free.
III: Truly Home
No. You are 60 and in quick succession your daughter leaves home, your mother dies and your husband gets cancer. You wake to face a stranger in the mirror, her eyes haunted by new and old losses, by separations both real and threatened. All of those earlier challenges you overcame? They only proved how strong your defenses were. Now you have none. No more stoic strength and calm demeanor. No more the over-worker, maker of nice and the caretaker of others, you are anxious, distraught and filled with self-blame. The abrupt change in consciousness, the altered identity feels like too much, too fast, bringing as it does all the grief, rage and sad, sorry fear that got foreclosed on early in life. Disoriented and destabilized, you scramble to understand. Am I having the breakdown I swore I never would after watching my mother’s hospitalization and electro shock treatments?
No, you’ve worked on yourself long enough to know that this is the return of the long buried child, cracking you open as she jettisons out of her deep, dark chamber. She needs to be claimed, calmed and integrated and you spend the next 10 years not relaxing in your retirement but parenting your inner two year old; not an easy task because pharmaceuticals have never been your thing and none of your old remedies, like talk therapy, are working. “Try alternatives like tapping, flower remedies and Chinese herbs,” a friend recommends. “You have to work with your nervous system, like in PTSD,” a body worker says. “It’s about healing the developmental trauma,” a new psychotherapist says. “The key is letting go of your childhood identity and attachments.” She means it is time to grow up; something you erroneously thought you’d already done. So now you finally do, dreaming that you stand staring at a young woman with dark hair as someone beside you says, “You found the girl you gave up.” She is the self that got squashed in toddlerhood, the troubled teenager who didn’t conform and in reclaiming her now you get back the freedom, energy, voice and choice that are truly you and yours.
Dear Little Lost 