What to do on Mother's Day when you mom doesn't love you..

I didn't blog yesterday because Mother's  Day is a painful day for me. I weighed and measured whether or not to share that pain and I decided that it would be much more mature of me to save it til today. Only a child is allowed to spew their pain all over everyone with no consideration for others. It' s a day of celebration and I'm sure there are many people out there who love their Moms and whose Moms love them. I happen to believe that it is essential to the maturation process to separate from you mother and sometimes that takes feeling some anger, but I didn't think people needed to be reminded of that on Mother's Day. When I was born, I only weighed 3lbs because I was premature. I was premature because my mother smoked and drank during her pregnancy. I spent the first few weeks of my life in and incubator and was given my last rights. That was back in the day when the doctors didn't know about the power of touch, so I lay there by myself for weeks.  While I was inside her I knew my mother didn't want me, and because of that, I was forced out of my home to early and almost died. Then, I spent the first weeks of my life alone in a cold contraption never being touched.  I am amazed that  I know how to nurture myself, because there have been studies that babies that don't connect turn into social paths.  I never really felt  like I could kill another human being but I definitely felt like I could kill myself until I read that under weight babies tend to get beat more that normal weight babies. And it hit me that maybe I hadn't been trying to kill myself. Maybe, I was just trying to get back in there and cook a little longer.  The sad part about that is that you can never get back in. I spent a lot of my adult life trying to get my mother to love me. Through other people or directly with her.  I read De Koonings biography and he talked about how sometimes he left space with his art so you could see what was already there. That's what I needed, space to see what was really going on, space to to become my own person, the person I was meant to be, not some version of my mothers own self hatred. And, when I took that space I realized that if I had killed myself I would have killed the wrong person. It wasn't until I was mature enough to accept that she may never love me that my life as a woman began. I accepted that maybe my mother was just the vehicle that I came through and whether she's good or not, doesn't really matter if I coninue to try throughout my life to find that bigger connection. A connection so profound that no human can kill.  Creating a child is one of the most spiritually, artistic act a person can commit because when we create we are the closest to our creator, but some people can't tolerate that unbearable lightness of being.  I'm glad I took my space, because now I might even have space for my own baby but you have to stop being the baby to become the mommy, and just like birth, the only way out is through.

Align you heart with your pelvis

That's the aim for all yoga poses. To align your heart and your pelvis. I think that philosophy should be taken from the mat, out into the world and into our beds.  It seems if we could live in a world where we all worked to have our bodies work in direct correlation with what we were sending from our heart everyone would have better sex.  In our country there's either too much sex or not enough, but just imagine a world where we taught our kids the power of healthy sexuality. That their bodies are to be respected, that they decide what goes on with it, which means something different for everyone. We could teach them to go into their hearts, engage themselves  by seeing their own authenticity so they can  express it in a loving generous way. Which just made me think of something the instructor said today when he was talking about our hamstrings. He said we need to engage our quads in order for the hamstrings to feel supported so that they can completely let go?    Sexy huh?

Hiding in Public

I just woke up from a really bad dream. I was walking with my friend and she had a little tiny flash light and when she shined it, it lit up the whole neighborhood and she saw some sort of monster. I didn't see it, but we ran like crazy. We went into a little shop and hid behind a skimpy curtain. I was closing my eyes wishing I could just disappear. I didn't want anyone to find me, the curtain kept swinging open and I knew eventually the people from the shop would kick us out back into the street where the monster was. As I sat up in bed I thought about playing hide and seek when I was a kid and how much I didn't want anyone to find me. I would lie behind a couch or curled up in the toy box holding my breath with my heart racing and my eyes closed,but eventually someone always found me and when they did the i was so disappointed. Then I remembered reading this book that talked about kids and shame. It said that if kids got exposed to  situations that they weren't emotionally equipped to handle they would use shame as a defense mechanism. Which simply means they blame themselves. Then I thought about when I had my TV show I was not ready for all the exposure, I did not feel worthy, and I was over come with shame and wanted to stay in, I wanted to curl up in the toy box again, because I wasn't emotionally equipped to handle it. I didn't think I deserved it. I was so scared that something bad was going to happen and it did. My younger brother was paralyzed in a drunk driving accident. My show eventually got canceled and I didn't even care. I thought "why bother?"  I associated my being happy with bad things happening. Then I learned about this little thing called magical thinking. If I was that powerful to make bad things happen, which is what they taught us growing up, if you think it, it will happen, and whatever you focus on will grow. Then why doesn't it work the other way around? So I took out my little flashlight and the world lit up and yes I saw everything. Then I went back to the dream,  and thought wait, I didn't even see the monster, my friend told me about him and I got scared. hmmm... Why am I gonna hide behind a skimpy curtain because of monster that someone else saw?  The curtain is not going to protect me and the  monster will always find me, because the  moster lives inside me.  But now, instead of hiding, I can chose to use my light to scare him away.  It's a scientific fact that darkness cannot cover light.

Monkeys die without hugs

Growing  up never got hugged so when I got older and someone tried to touch me, I bristled. Then I saw a woman on Oprah talking about an 8 year old kid who had been a slave his whole life and how good it felt to hug someone who hadn't been hugged in years and I thought "yeah for you" that slave prob wanted his head to pop off. It has taken many years for me to be able to be touched and I am very grateful to the people along the way who were gentle with me and gave me only as much kindness as I could handle. One person in particular comes to mind. It was right after my boyfriend that I lived with for eight years, moved out on me while I was away for the weekend. I was hanging out with a bunch of girls that I hardly knew and I was so upset I couldn't control myself. I think one of them said "oh that must've been hard and the flood gates opened I started blubbering "Yes ! Yes ! It was really hard!" One of the girls took my hand and held it for at least an hour while I cried. I remember looking down thinking , "this break up is not going to break me, actually it's breaking my heart open,  I realized that this was the first time in my life that I had allowed myself that kind of  comfort. The pain was so great that i was compelled to do something different. In the past I would have pushed the girls hand away and said "what are you gay?" This time I let her hand stay in mine and cried until i couldn't anymore. It was one of those times in my life that the pain of staying the same was far greater than the pain of changing. Now I loved to be touched. Actually now I can ask for a hug when I need one, and I can say "ok that's enough" when necessary.

Patches Patches Patches

Last night, I met a guy who topped my eye patch story. I told him how I had to wear my eye patch to correct my lazy eye when I was little and how the kids used to whip acorns at me and he said said "oh my God I had a patch too!" The idea behind the patch is, it covers the good eye so the lazy eye will get strong but evidently they covered his good eye so long that it got lazy too. So, he then had to wear a patch on the other eye. He was telling me how it would get sweaty while playing sports and how they had to keep extras in the nurses office and we revealed in each others humiliation.  We are bonded for life. It just goes to further my belief that we are a product of our experiences and once shared with another human being rather than alienate us they  brings us closer together.  It reminded me of a time in high school when our Catholic ministry went to Walpole State Prison to visit the inmates. I was terrified, all I kept thinking was, "what could i possibly say to these men that could mean anything?" When I got there, I decided to just be honest. I told funny stories about how the kids made fun of me and when I was done they all came up to me and shook my hand and said things like "They used to call me meat head." This guy had huge muscles and I thought," he must have made his body so big that no one could ever make fun of the size of his head again." Then I thought "oh my God we are all the same, the only difference between me and him is that he took his rage further and murdered someone."  Here he was locked up for life trapped with the feeling of never wanting to be called meat head again. You can't re write your story but you can definitely make an amendment to it. Camou did it, he took the Myth of Sisyphus, which is a story about a man who kept pushing a boulder up the hill and every time he got to the top the boulder would roll back down on top of him. Camou's question was "was doesn't he just stop pushing the boulder?"

crippling fear of success

I love that term, it's my favorite, my second favorite is "addicted to the intensity of a bad feeling." I am trying to discipline myself to feel good. By "good" i don't mean" hedonism good" i mean "peaceful good". I was talking to a friend of mine today about how hard is for him to feel good feelings. I told him that I really think that for most of my life feeling bad made me feel alive. I guess I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. And secretly i wanted it to. I actually think that i subconsciously made it drop. It made me feel safe. Control was my life source for so many years. But, the truth is , control just gives you a false sense of safety. Actually I've heard it said that control freaks actually control themselves right out of a life. It makes sense, your world becomes so small that it literally implodes in on you. But I think for some people it feels better to take it down yourself rather than risk your heart and hope and have it fall apart because of no fault of your own. Plus for  me, when I am happy and light I feel free and when I feel free I feel vulnerable. But in actuality when I"m free I'm more open to let life happen and usually it's better than i could have ever imagined if I tried to control it myself.  Because whether I like it or not, it's going to happen, so I've decided to let go rather than be dragged. Happiness is not for those who need it, it' s for those who want it.

Its Sat morning and I just woke up, Not sure what to write about today but as promised I'm going to do it anyway. OK as I was writing that I thought of something, that's how it works I guess. Yesterday I bumped into a guy that I know from the city. The last time I saw him we were standing on a corner and he got a text from his friend saying that one of his friends had been murdered in Boston. A few days ago my face book post said that I had a really nice night and I almost got murdered. Someone from LA posted jokilyng that I shouldn't date guys I meet on Craigslist. Well when i saw the guy yesterday he told me that the girl was one of the people murdered by the Craigs list killer. When I got home my friend had posted a comment to the LA guy that his comment was in poor taste because some of my friends knew the woman who was killed. I had no idea how connected I was to all of it.I'm sure if the guy from LA ever thought it through he never would have wanted to hurt anyone. It has just got me thinking about how much we joke to deflect the severity of the tragedy that goes on in the world but sometimes our own defense actually contributes to the tragedy, as opposed to healing it.  There is so much power in feeling your own humanity, feeling your feelings and being in you skin. Other wise we just push the shit around  dump it on to one another until we are all buried alive.

They would be sad if I died.

So, yesterday I went to see my friends art studio in Brooklyn. She is a gay woman in a committed relationship from Israel. She met me at the train station and we walked to get a cappuccino. While we were in line we got to talking about how a lot of her friends don't have visas so they can't travel out of the country with their partners because of immigration. Then we went to her studio sipped our cappuccino and talked about Niche, and how his philosophy is that pain is a part of life and that you need to use it to propel your art. Then she showed me all of her art. One of them, I said, looked like a Richard Serra and her whole face lit up. She said he's the inspiration! She uses tools to spread the paint over the canvas with the movement of her body to creates the images.  In one of the paintings she uses one of those black and white Afghan scarfs and made a print with it. It reminded me of the book the Kite Runner that I just read about an afghan man and his boyhood friendship. His childhood friend told him he would help him always; " for you, a thousand times over" and it moved me. The simplicity of having someone love you that much. Earlier in the day I had been anxious, but as soon as we sat and talked, a calm came over me. Here we were two people from two totally different parts of the world sharing a coffee and some conversation. I left feeling honored that she allowed me to be part of her process.  When I got to Manhattan I got off the subway and walked smack dab in the middle of  a gang fight.  I got myself out of danger, but it really shook me up. My whole life I've wondered if anyone would miss me if I died, but this was the first time in my life that I really felt like I could have died, in a split second, I could have been gone. As I kept walking, I bumped into a bunch of friends that I hadn't seen in while. They were so happy to see me "Sue where have you been? We haven't see you in so long! It's so good to see you!" And at that moment I realized that if I had died there were a lot of people who would miss me.  And then, the afternoon flashed before me, If I hadn't died and just ended up in the hospital badly beaten, my family could come and see me and my husband, if I had one, but for my friend the artist from Israel she wouldn't be so lucky. So for the people out there who can't have their loved ones by there side, take that pain and propel your art as I pray for you a thousand times over.