Sometimes it takes generations to feel something. Sometimes we have to grieve for things that happened years ago, sometimes even before our birth. Something may have happened in our parents’ or in our grandparents’ generation that was never grieved and has impacted us in ways we never imagined until we hear a story from their life.
My mother tells a story of something that happened to her when she was a small child. She tells it with no particular emotion, sees no significant implication for herself, for her life, as she was not allowed to feel it, to grieve it, by her own parents. They didn’t know how to mirror back, how to process feelings themselves, so they couldn’t help her with hers. My mother stuffed her feelings.
When I recently said to her, upon hearing that story from her childhood, “That was abusive, Mother,” she responded, “That’s the only way they knew how to discipline.” No feeling. No connection between that experience and her way of being in the world. As I push her to feel it, to process it now, she gets in touch with past hurts and disappointments, able to feel them, perhaps for the first time. We grieve together, process it together.
What this kind of exchange has done has opened up for us a whole new way of talking about our own relationship. Mother, now in her 80s, is more in touch with her feelings and vitality than I can ever remember. She feels everything, wants to resolve anything and everything that was ever unresolved between us, whether she knew its impact at the time it happened or not. She’s the mother she wants to be, could have been, had there been no hurt and damage in her own childhood. She feels, grieves, loves openly and wondrously.
Lately, I’ve been grieving experiences from my own past that are long over, but for which I never really grieved. I’m surprised myself by what has initiated such a flow of untapped grief. The joy my grandson brings me has gotten me in touch with the sorrow I never allowed myself to feel. I find myself grieving for all the times I was not emotionally free to delight in my own children with the same availability and sense of wonder I can now with my grandchild.
Experiences I could not previously bear to feel rise up before me like long-neglected children, wounded, hungry for the chance to be seen and embraced. Memories from my marriage, too painful to process until now, circle round and finally have their day. Wounding moments from a past long gone yet present still within my body cells.
I’m grieving losses I intellectually resolved but never fully felt. Sometimes it comes in the form of pure feeling, no content. I’m not even aware of what I’m grieving, but the pain and depth of sorrow that emerges in me stops me in my tracks. I have to stop and feel it. As I breathe my way through the feelings, I sense a letting go. As if a larger space is being carved out in me for joy. I’m more in touch with the natural highs and lows of life, find joy and sorrow wedded.
The body knows these things. She wants us to be whole. She holds back things we cannot bear to process until that time we can. She gently reunites us with unprocessed feeling from our past so we can release the energy it took to repress this until now. She allows our tears that wash light into body cells that hold our past dark wounds. We have only to trust her wisdom.
As my mother continues to do her emotional work, as I do my own, an inter-generational blockage that hovered over my own childhood is slowly breaking free. Feelings thaw and flow more freely through the veins of our family. It touches every level. We’re able to process and talk about things as they happen, not wait until a later, better time to come back to resolve.
My own children don’t seem as tainted with the same emotional stoppages. They weep, declare, emote freely, as experiences interface. If we each continue to do our emotional work, my grandchildren will not feel the need to grieve for past generations as I feel the pull to do. Feeling the fullness of life with its ups and downs will be a natural rhythm. No attempts to talk someone out of his or her feelings. No fear of what will be said or left unsaid.
This creates in me a litany of gratitudes. I welcome home what Mary Oliver calls “the warm animal of my body.” Emotions ebb and flow in natural cadence, gifting me with parts of myself I had long silenced. My feelings wander home like little lost sheep, wagging their tails behind them.