Come With Me If You Want To Live

Over and over in life, I got the message “You’re not enough”, starting in grade school. I don’t know about now, but the caste system was alive and well in the public school system when I was a girl. And my caste was the one labeled, “not popular”. Occasionally one or more of the popular girls would engage me in conversation until some other popular girl would join us proclaiming she had something very important to divulge. She would then turn to me and say, “I’m sorry, Pam, you know you can’t hear this.” And I would dutifully walk off. My mother seldom touched me except in violence, but she hardly ever passed my younger sister without displaying some act of affection. I was even glad about that. That meant I wasn’t the focus of her attention. But also, it just seemed natural. Other people were more valuable than me.

Then again later, I assumed my sexual orientation was indefensible. I accepted it’s character as disgusting and damning. These condemnations were accepted by myself as law, as the only way life could be. So I don’t even remember being upset by them. Figuratively, I dutifully bowed down as the better people passed by, then jumped to my feet on a dead run towards the only connection I had to anything that makes life worth living. As long as I had that, supplied to me by people who were considered to be the lowest form of humanity, I didn’t care about the other. Mainly because I had never had anything worth having until I got away from home and discovered romantic love. Next came intellectual and philosophical love, then spiritual love, and finally self-love. It was a circuitous route to authenticity.

Most people conduct child rearing based on whatever mood they find themselves in. But child rearing is not complicated, no matter how many books are written about it or degrees earned in it. Treat children as though they are valuable and they will in general go towards the good. Treat them like brain dead mental patients and that’s what you’ll get. Except sometimes these children come with a gun.

My biological parents gave me birth, but my real parents were the people, ideas and methods of The Prosperos. I didn’t yet know they were the parents that would nurture me, teach me right from wrong, value me, hold me through tough love, give me depth, and force not one bit of it onto me. They made me want what was “right” with everything in me because they stopped teaching me everything that made me hate it. When they so calmly held out their hand and whispered, “Come with me if you want to live”, I had no idea I was entering an incubator for a second birth. But I came to trust it because these were the parents I was always supposed to have.