It’s Saturday, December 23rd, and I am doing something today that I haven’t done in years. I am writing this for my blog. What have I been waiting for? I don’t know and more importantly I don’t care. I am doing what I am doing and it happens to be NOW.

I was moved (surprise, surprise) by a movie I found many years ago, “Henry Poole is Here”. I’d never heard of it when I saw it on one my many movie channels. I love Luke Wilson, so I watched it then and many times since. I watched it again today. It’s about a man who has been told he is going to die, so he buys a house and sets out to drink himself to death to expedite the disease that is going to kill him anyway. 

On one of the stucco walls outside his house is a stain that is interpreted by his neighbor as the face of the Christ. Many things occur over a short period of time and at one point Henry goes to the wall to touch it, as miracles have already taken place with people he comes to know. He just can’t do it. In that moment, he resists to take a leap of faith and touch the wall that has healed others, he doesn’t, for whatever reasons, he doesn’t believe it, he doesn’t buy it, he is unwilling to surrender to the possibility that even he could be healed. It reminds me of a question posed to me many years ago, “What are you not praying for”? 

Each and every time I watch this movie I am deeply moved for a myriad of reasons. Today it was about the resistance. As I have quoted so many times, Rev. Michael Beckwith once said, “there are 4 kinds of pain, resistance, resistance, resistance, resistance.

I have recognized this pain in my heart that arises during the holiday season, thanksgiving, Christmas. It’s been here for years and years. Interesting word, holiday, it conjures up celebration, time off, fun and on and on. I say it and write it and don’t feel it. 

I’ll stop trying to explain and attempt to tell you what I’m feeling. I am 83 years old, and there are things I want, experiences I desire, so many conversations I want to share and there is a resistance to more deeply expose myself. Thank God there are a few people in my life that may be interested, none of which happens to be related to me. I am beginning to trust it with Rob as Spirit moves and I am listening. Before I leave this body I want to release any resistance to being exactly who and what I am.

I first attended the Church of Religious Science in 1989 and I joined a few months later. At the reception for new members I introduced myself as a writer. I had never really written anything and yet I said it out loud to a group of people. I always thought I would write a book about my life. 

I began a job as a social worker for the State of Kentucky when I was 24 years old. As part of the training, I took classes at the University of Louisville along with other new employees. I shared stories about my life and one of the teachers told me I should write a book. I never forgot that, I also never did anything about it. A few months earlier I had given birth to my daughter, my first child, at a home for unwed mothers. I didn’t tell that story for years, it was a shameful thing to the few family members who knew. Interesting that now, women give birth with or without husbands or even partners without being thought of as whores.

My Mother picked me up 10 days after I had given birth. This was the rule, you couldn’t leave for 10 days no matter what decision was made about your baby. Earlier that day I had held my daughter in my arms for the first time, for 10 minutes, that’s all we were allowed was 10 minutes. The girls, I didn’t think of us as women, who had faced this moment, told the rest of us that if we weren’t going to take our babies home with us, to not hold them as it was too hard to let them go. 

When Mother and I were in the car, I was telling her about Paige, which I had named her, from the leading lady in the movie, “The Red Shoes”. I saw it when I was 8 years old, I was taking ballet lessons at the time and wanted to be a ballerina when I grew up. That dream haunted me for most of my life. For whatever the reasons, and they were many, I didn’t pursue it. 

I’m telling my Mother how beautiful Paige was and what I had experienced when I held her. I went so far as to attempting to describe the emptiness of having to let her go. It was like all the life was sucked out of me and all I was, was skins and bones, it was like feeling dead, except for the pain of it. Mother stopped me in mid sentence, told me right then and there to stop and never speak of it again. I realized in that moment that she was asking me to dismiss, discount, forget and erase my experience of having a child, from my mind, my heart and soul. I never did.

This was to remain a secret forever,  too shameful, embarrassing for the family, what would people think, and on and on. Many years later I attempted to connect with my father, it was the last conversation we would ever have and actually it may have been the first and last one we ever had. He told me I was a whore, because of what I had done by getting pregnant. I realized he really thought that. Thank God I knew I wasn’t. I had less sex that anybody I knew.

I think anyone reading this may resonate with moments of suppressing their feelings, hanging on, moving on and making do. It took many years for me to experience healing, which began when I felt free to share it with a group of friends, six years after the day my Mother told me to stop talking.  Healing is not living with the pain and yet the memory of what happened, for me anyway, has not evaporated or disappeared. In this moment I am reminded of how far I’ve come. God is here and all is well has been on the the truths that has saved and comforted me.

How did I get here from where I started this missive. My mind is racing with so many thoughts of this life I have lived. I often wonder why is it that I want to have a witness, someone to say to me, I see you, I hear you, I witness you, and in the midst of that, I  LOVE YOU. I have been granted this blessing, again and again.

These cherished blessings have been granted to me and I am grateful, so I wonder what is this desire, the seeming need to tell these stories. I have a place in me that misses those Christmases when Rob was little. For weeks and months I would plan and prepare what to give him and see his delight when he woke up and experienced all that was under the tree was for him. It made me so incredibly happy. I miss it so much. When I was growing up, the biggest fight of the year my parents had was on Christmas eve, I wanted Rob to have a different experience. 

I remember talking about him all the time after he was burned. My experience, for the most part, was people didn’t want to hear it and yet I felt so incredibly alone. I wanted someone to know this, I wanted someone to comfort me. I recognize God is here, in this, right now and it comforts me. I am in this body, a human being, a feeling being, so willing, on so many levels, to experience and express myself. I don’t want to resist anything and yet I do as I don’t want to be perceived or seen as a complainer, as a victim, both I am familiar with. I want to tell my stories. I no longer want to qualify them, just tell them.

Am I now in the state of overwhelm and rambling, maybe so. This is my life and I have purged today, with hundreds of tears and a degree of satisfaction that I am, most of the time, willing to FEEL my life. I love this about me. As relentless as it sometimes feels, I promise to be alive with what is alive in me. This happens to be what is alive in me in this moment today, watching my movie, remembering past Christmases with Rob, being touched deeply again by recounting that day when I held my daughter for the first time and then finally hugging her again in the spring of this year.

As Julie London sang decades ago, I have “cried me a river”today and my body is telling me to eat and God knows I don’t my friend Molly upset with me because I haven’t eaten. 

I want to continue to write what is alive in me. I believe it is more for me than anyone else and yet, I have always wanted a witness. 

I have had them, you know who you are, I welcome you again to be my witness. I welcome you all. 

Love and blessings, 

Maggie