My sister, Janis, has been working with some wonderful
old photos of our family. This comes, in part, by the recent awareness we have
that our paternal grandmother is of Native American decent. My sister has been
very drawn to that spiritual path, and, of course, I have been blessed to enjoy
it as part of my own interfaith journey. The interesting news of our
grandmother comes from an older cousin who reported that she was “found” as a
child, and raised by a family. He said that while everyone knew she was “an
Indian” no one ever said a word about it or about where she came from.
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| My paternal grandmother, Mary Smith, with her husband, Dove, and four of their children. |
As I was pondering hiding in plain view as part of our
family history, Mark Nepo’s sharing of a quotation by Angeles Arrien touched me
to my core:
My grandmother told me, “Never
hide your green hair—They can see it anyway.”
I started thinking about all the things that have been
hidden. My mom had been married before she was married to my dad, but I did not
know of that until after I was already married myself. My mom and my
mother-in-law were sitting at the table having a cup of coffee when my
mother-in-law casually said, “Cathryn, I know Howard was married before and had
a daughter by that marriage, but were you married previously?” Imagine my
surprise to hear my mom respond that she had been married once, briefly, but that marriage had been
annulled.
As I sit and witness my belly continuing to heal from the
surgery to remove a 21 cm tumor that had formed on my left ovary, it makes me
curious how much other stuff is hiding in plain view and what freedom can be
experienced when we move beyond the fears that come from (and might just
possibly cause) hiding.
Mark Nepo (The Book
of Awakening, January 5) hits the nail on the head when he writes that
blackmail is only possible if we believe we have something to hide. In my life,
much of the guilt and hiding has been around sexuality. The most obvious of
this was having become pregnant before my sixteenth birthday. As the years
unfolded, that event resulted in the birth of our wonderful daughter (the mother of my amazing grandchildren). It has all been a blessing in my life, but at the time there was much pain around the experience given
the influence of patriarchy in our world.
I lived with the shame of “having to get married” and
then the shame of being a high-school dropout because married females were not
allowed to attend school. Married males were… but a married woman was sexually
active and would be a bad influence on the other girls.
Times have changed since 1966, but I wonder how much we
have changed, and more importantly, I wonder how much I have changed.
Mark’s closing words in that writing: “The inner
corollary of this is that worthless feelings arise when we believe, however
briefly, that who we are is not enough.”
It is my sincere intention that I have allowed my body to be free
from the burden of having hidden sexual guilt. As I prepared for my surgery, I
knew you can have other “stuff” removed. My own life, my mother’s life, and my
paternal grandmother’s lives had been full of secrets. I was fully aware my own
healing was able to reach back in time and make all the adjustments to allow
for moving forward free from all of that.
(Here is an article about female sexuality on a global scale, as it relates to
patriarchy.)
