HEY! ADULTS! GET A DAMNED CLUE ALREADY !!

It is our words which precede our actions which affect kids the most


It is with much and very real concern that I sit here and write this particular blog post today, because the more it sits in my head the madder I get - when the hell are we going to stop blaming those who are not responsible for the things that they do and say and I say that they are not responsible because the people being blamed, while not blameless, are being blamed for things by people who really and most likely do not have a real idea about why it is that a kid will strike out at the adults in their lives.

I know why they do, and like anything else in life that is learned, striking out is not learned - it is a survival mechanism that most abuse survivors know too well. I know it. I have lived it. When you are constantly being told, even if you are not being told, over and over again, that what you are doing doesn't measure up, isn't the "right" way of doing things, is somehow disagreeable in the eyes of those who are the adults in our lives, a kid takes it personally, and they should.

They should take the barbs personally, because we, the parents, didn't teach them the art of telling others what it is in their lives that bothers them so much about the things that we tell them that they can or cannot do. Case in point - right now, in the Hawaiian islands, there is a girl who ran away from home, and while it is that the belief is that she ran away at the behest of others who are also her own age - others who live on an island that is not the one she lives on - I must disagree with the idea that it is the other kids who are to blame. While it might be that those other kids influenced this child, we must ask the question of where the parents of the other kids were when the child was "enticed" by their words and their actions to run away from home.

Yes, I said MUST. 


I am a product of an upbringing that can outwardly be regarded as "fine and upstanding," and yes, I find myself to be quite the fine and upstanding adult, but I did not get this way because of my parents' influence only, if at all. Yes, they instilled in me the idea that I need to believe in something, but when it was that the things that I believe in did not match with theirs, I was somehow...wrong. I will not say that my parents did not do the best they could, at least over all, but I will say that they most surely do NOT deserve all of the credit for it because I had to go out into the world, much as any child does, and see for myself that there are other truths out there and that yes, we get to form our own truths as well. I Love Mom and Dad, immensely and without end, but the truth is that there are a lot of things that I went through and lots of ways of being that never fit me that I thought were the right way, but they were not right for me, and the problem is that I was never told that there was another way - MY way, and until August of last year I lived in truths that were not mine.

Well, I promise you now, though, that anything that I live these days ARE mine, ALL mine, and it is a good thing because there are things that I was taught through their actions as well as their words that I find to no longer be the truth because there was never any real truth to it all to begin with  - such as when you marry it is forever and nothing can break that bond...really? How about guns at my head and how about knives at my throat? How about all those things? How about all the names I was called and the shit I was blamed for....all these things, while not normal, became minimally acceptable because of the way that I was told to live was the real and the only way to. No, not that it was okay to have these things happen to me, but for me to live biblically in that "wives must submit to their husbands," and he took it to heart and used it against me, over and over again. By the time that I'd begun to figure out that changes needed to be made, I was already no longer believing that God cared about me.....but it was not God who did what was done to me - those were human beings who were still believing what the adults in THEIR lives told them...and those adults are freakin' DEAD!!!!

Let it be known right now that we cannot tell our kids that who they are is WRONG because it does not match what we wanted for them according to us, and the next person who tells me that I am wrong for this way of thinking is most surely going to get their asses chewed in a long, intellectually inspired email that will most surely let those who would tell me that it is a kid's fault that they make the choices they do because of other kids, I will remind them that they are kids, that kids have their heads up their rear ends for the most part and until they grow a little, and that kids, for all their craziness and all of their rebelliousness - kids are not to blame alone for the stupid shit they do. When a kid rebels, and this is me just being the preacher's kid that I was brought up as, it is not because they want to do what they want to do all the time - mind you, I am not one of those moms who is trying to hang out with her kids and be "friends" with them. I Love Them, and I want them to have the best of everything, and that means I cannot be their "friend" right now because I am too busy mothering them, yes, even the 18 year old...kids do the stupid shit they do, and rebel, and do things that blow our minds because we - the adults in their lives- were so busy defending beliefs that were handed down to us that we forget that it is our duty to hear them.

Oh yes...believe it when I say that this is also NOT a posting which vilifies parents, which makes it seem like kids should just run the fuck amok - it isn't like that at all. I am saying that we have to clue into what a kid is telling us they need so that we can have better communication with them - they are watching what we are doing, waiting to check us, but sometimes, when the message we give is assumed accepted by them and is discerned and deciphered the wrongest way? Kids lie about things that their parents did to them and cause havoc in the lives of their family, but you cannot place the blame on the kid for being a little shit - somewhere in their lives, an influential adult was there actively living the truth that the child thinks and believes he, too, is privy to, when not even the god damned adult showing the kid this shit is correct because he is NOT!!! Yet, this is the message that the child receives, lives, and creates bullshit in the lives of others with.

We don't hear them because we are ignoring the idea that they know what is bothering them, but they are too scared to bring it up to us because they do not want us to be mad at them for having a different thing to believe as their own truth While the girl in Hawaii should have known better, it would  not be up to the parents to punish her for her actions only but also to bring about a better and clearer understanding of why it is that they would be mad in the first place. Yes, she did something stupid, and yes, she should receive some sort of discipline, but of what sort? Does she deserve to be physically punished, or does more need to be revealed? My hope is that this girl's family will allow her to tell them what her problems are and will not judge her for them as much as I fear they will. It all boils down to just exactly what it is that we as parents and influential adults in the lives of any kid offer them, both verbally and through our actions. We must ask ourselves why it is that this child hurts enough to want to run away from the people who love them the most and more, we must be willing to accept their answer as the only truth they know, because it is a truth which they formed all on their own.

Unfortunately...


We adults have this stupidity about us that makes us think that just because we are older than our kids are that we know it all in comparison. Umm, no...wrong answer...no no no...

If we see a kid crying and we ask them what is wrong, and they tell us that they got into trouble, and we choose to go on about parenting them with our mouths through a lecture about why it is that we think they are in trouble, and we do not bother to let that kid have a word in edgewise, we are being just as bad as were the parents who brought us into this world who also, some of them, still want to see us as less intelligent than they are. While it is true that we will never have the quantity of stuff we know while our parents are living in this day age, make no mistake that it is not because they are smarter than we are - wiser, sure, but smarter? Nah...but rather and ONLY Because they have been here longer and the longer you have been breathing, naturally the more you are going to know in so far as factual information and life experience. Yet, not even that is enough of a reason to make a kid growing up now realize what it is that we are really saying when we tell them that maybe the choices that they made were not the best ones.

And further, we are not inclined to explain to them what they need to hear. We are only willing to tell them how their actions have affected us, most of the time. What they really need to know is that the reason we are angry is because of their actions and not because of who they are. This is something that was lost on me for a long time, both as a child as well as a parent and mores so, a wife. I felt like no one listened to me, no one who mattered and who could have made a difference. Truth of the matter is, it mattered, and also, it would have made a remarkably huge difference in the way that I have handled my life and my Self all these years.


Yeah - I said it, now deal with it. Our parents were not perfect, guys, which means that by no means are we perfect, but we want the kids in our lives to believe every word we have to say to them and we want them to grow up into being fine and upstanding adults in the world but we want them to go out there and spread OUR truth rather than allowing them to discover who they are through their own truths. This may sound like a whole lot of flighty bullshit to a lot of people, but the reality is that we do our kids no kind of service when we tell them that they are wrong about things which apply solely and only to them.

When I was a 17 year old girl my ideals about life, love, men and living were all formed through what I was shown as well as what I was told. I was told constantly that "a man, is a man, is a man, is a man," by my mother, but it was not until many years later, when in conversation with my kid sister, Napua, that I'd heard my own voice saying these same words to this child, and it was at that point where, when it came down to it, I figured that I should take this one chance to tell this child that no, little sister, not all men are evil. While they may LOVE the attentions and the physical attributes of women, no, child, they are not all pigs. No, child, they will not all hurt you. No, child, I am not lying.

It was then that I began to question what the motives were of all of the adults in my life up to that point. It turns out, and quite by my own finding this out through going through things that could have been way better explained to me, that a lot of what our parents tell us is meant as a face-saving mechanism that protects them while keeping their kids ignorant to the truth. I have done this. This is how I know that this, for real, is the truth.

And again - yup...said it...deal with it, because it is the truth.

I like it so much I will say it again!! YEAH! I SAID IT NOW DEAL WITH IT because you know it is the f*cken TRUTH!!!


Yes, I happen to be every bit as foul mouthed as I am because I am fucking MAD MAD MAD!!! We have the very nerve to tell kids to not make us look bad, but we do not realize that everything they know, they know because of what we have both said and showed them. It has little to do with a material thing that causes a kid to go out and steal that thing, and everything to do with the sense of superiority within their peer group that any kid will steal a new gadget (or shoes, or clothes...) RARELY is it because a kid is a thief and rarely will it ever be that the kid is a thief when said kid actually gets caught doing what they do.

It is the attention, and kids need lots of it. We parents are more inclined to tell them what they are not allowed to do than what they ARE allowed to do, and this is something that I learned in the rearing of both my kid sister as well as my own oldest kid, Jeremy. We are more willing to tell a kid what he or she is not allowed to do than we are to tell them what they are allowed to do, and we do this as a measure of keeping them controlled and thinking like we think we want them to.

We cannot do this to them if we expect them to have as much of a fucking clue as we think WE have (we don't...I promise we don't....it's the truth and I will never back down from it - we do not fucking know it all so please hurry up and get over your selves already, ok?). We are the ones who cause them to do what they will, because kids, until we teach them how to have a response, are reactive. Once we realize that kids are reactive and not responsive we can begin to teach them how to be responsive.

Too often we have reacted when it is that we should have responded. Our reactions are chock full of negative jargon and there is already enough negativity in their lives as it is ...yet we feel as though somehow it is okay to teach them through negative means who they are, and really doesn't have to be this way at all. We can hold them up and glorify them in their talents and tell them that it is okay to be who they are as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else, and more, we have to let them know through our actions preceding our words that they are fine and good people, that right now at this time in their lives the world seems like it is going to always coddle them and always going to Love them for them and we know that it will not.

When they find themselves in trouble we need to Love them rather than only chastise them, and when we chastise them we need to address the action rather than the kid. A kid's actions ...hell a lot of kids' actions...are stupid as hell, but this does not mean that we are allowed to call the kid stupid. It is one thing to call the action stupid, or foolish, but we do not realize the impact we have on people with our words, and the word "stupid" is one that was used to describe me by a math teacher...three of them, really...and it was used to address me by an anonymous male adult in my life when I was 17 that the reason that I might not have graduated was because I was too stupid to figure out math....can you feel the difference in energy between those two things?

"You are too stupid to do math," versus "why are these math problems such a hard thing for you to figure out?"

Can you feel how each of these things can impact a kid, one way or the other? Can you feel that energetic shift in the middle of your gut go from tense to relaxed when you read them aloud? Do not forget that feeling, because that is the feeling which a lot of adults do not believe a kid feels when they are presented with one problem in two different ways.

HEY! ADULTS!! Get a FUCKING CLUE ALREADY !!!

STOP blaming kids for things that the adults in their lives are supposed to teach them how to prevent, ok?

In fact, why don't you go ahead and chomp off a little bit of that humble pie you've been actively telling your kids to eat but that you refuse to eat a piece of, yourself? Why don't you walk a minute in their shoes and recall what it felt like when your own parents reprimanded you when instead all they really had to do was listen and trust that you were there spilling your guts to them, fully trusting that they would, at least that one time, respond rather than react?

Why don't you remember that feeling and then hate on me once you have done as I and many, many other parents who have formed their own truths and have given those lessons in forming their own truths to our own kids and then you can come back and tell me that I am messing with your broken bullshit child rearing program as it is...and yes, if you are mad at my words, then that means I am sitting here either making you think outside of your own tired box, or I am making that kid of yours RIGHT!!!

Pie, anyone? Eat it, because you forced your kids to...in the catering business there is a rule that a good chef will always eat what he expects his customers to....so go ahead and chomp down on some of that humble pie, because very truly, YOU FUCKING EARNED IT!!

Listen to your kids, dammit!! They are the first ones who will know when they are hurting and more, when you are the one who hurt them...

And yes, of course...I still LOVE YOU ALL !!

ROX

Raising Kick-Ass Daughters and Sons Who Do Not Become Woman-Haters

...Society demands that we raise little women, but not little women with a clue, and this is wrong. We also want to put our boys on top of pedestals that they cannot for the life of them stand upon without some sort of Guidance.


I Love my two sons. My Big Boy is a blessing to me everyday, and my Little Boy makes me laugh because he is so damned silly all the time. But that girl? Yeah, she has captured my very essence, my very Soul, and it is because I see so very much in her, so very much that I know our social mentality has already tried to steal away from her but that I will never allow to happen.

And my sons...oh, my sons...they are strong and mighty, like boys are meant to be, but they are also willing to listen to a girl, listen to her when she cries, when she is stomping and fighting mad, and they are chivalrous, the Big Boy far more than the Little Boy. None the less, I can sit here at this time, smile broadly even though I am the only one who knows that I am smiling, and know that thus far, I have been good to these children.

I am well aware of the fact that our kids are our mirror of us to the world, and I sit here proudly knowing that they have not made me look bad, have not done anything so terrible that we would never ever recover from it. I know that these kids are the way that they are because this is the way that they have been raised to this point and while it is that there are times when I want to shake them by the shoulders and tell them that they have, for that moment, made me the madwoman, over all, my children have done me very, very proud.

My Sons, Jeremy and Joshua, for all of their very "boyness" can be thought of as courteous, as boys who love their mama, and boys who any girl can take home to their own mothers and never worry that he is going to make that mother question what my boys are up to - I am confident of this. I know my sons. They are good boys. Yes, they do stupid things that make me question why they did not use their thinking skills when they could have and should have, but again, over all, I can only sit here smiling because I know that I have done well with them. I have raised, to this point, three kids, and four if you count my kid sister Napua, who have a damned clue, not only about life, but also and more, that you have to Be a Part of Life and in order to Be a Part of Life, you must not be apart from it. You must actively involve yourself with other people, because if you do not , you will live an existence which is frenetic and crazy at best, or lonely and suicidal, at worst.

Boys and Girls are different


Boys do not need to be told how to be boys, but we seem to feel like we need to direct our daughters to places that we never were able to reach, and we want to tell them how to do it, how to get there, who to talk to...as though they have no freaking clue of how to do this on their own. I mean, we are all blessed with an internal guidance system - all of us, including our kids. On the other side of that is the idea that just because they are boys they do not need our guidance. When I said that boys don't need to be told how to be boys, it was meant as my saying that boys, in most cultures, have their path set out for them by a society which is still very patriarchal in nature. I know that to this point in their lives my sons will have a clue as to how to treat the women in their lives and it will come from the way that they see their sister interact with other boys as much, if not more, than they watch me interact with people from many different walks of life.

We expect our daughters to pop out of the chute, so to speak, just waiting to be idealized by some other mother's son. We expect the world to be in Love with them as much as we are without thinking that the reason that we Love them so much is NOT because they are a little version of us as much as they are a vital piece of the Universe at large. It is wonderful when a little boy is born, but when a little girl is born it seems as though we can see in her the very facets which make up who we, their mothers, are, and we are not willing to not see her as being not a smaller semblance of who we are but worse than that, we see them as little tiny do-overs of ourselves. We cannot do this to our kids anymore. We have idealized them into a corner that a lot of us are too afraid to let them no longer be in, and it is not because of anything other than that we do not trust them to make the decisions that we want them to make which will please us. We want them to think like us and do like us all at the same time that we know that they need to be their own person. This was my reality, and it was a reality that only recently I was able to come to terms with and finally be rid of.

If there is one thing that was unspoken but very well learned by me, not only by the example set by my own mother, but also my father's mother, it was that wives are to be second in place to their husbands. This goes against all that I know I am and all that I have always been, but this is what I was taught - that a boy would never love a strong girl because he is too scared to lose his masculinity to an ideal rather than find out all the things about me that made me who I was. The person I married clued in on this very early and used it to his own advantage. My watching my mother be so passive and her not telling me that not all women are passive but that she was is where the message in my upbringing as a child of my not voicing who I was and Am to this person I married came well into play. When I saw my mother not argue back with my father, I took it as her being obedient. In reality it was only that my mother is a passive person and that is just how she is. The same thing happened with my father's mother, but it was with my grandfather, who was not very careful with how he treated her, and she took all of his emotional blows, took his barbs and took every single little spiteful thing that old codger gave her. She took it all. This is what I saw growing up, and this is what perplexed me and made me think that maybe what I had been through with my then caretaker and then the kids at school and then with the man who I married was all normal. Outwardly it was normal. Inside of me was a very different version of "normal."

The examples we show our kids are the only ones they have, so when we do not bother to tell them that they are their own person we rob them of the right and the ability to choose what is right for them. I could never tell my parents what I recently told them about my caretaker, at least not when I was a kid, not even a big kid, because the lesson throughout my growing up was that it was okay to be who you are but you cannot stray outside of what is acceptable, not only to your parents, but to society as well. This takes away from our children the ability to really and truly know who they are. When we tell them without telling them that what their preferences are in regards to who they are do not measure up to our standard, our kids bristle and the fun part about that is that when a kid bristles, a kid does things that an adult cannot or will not. Kids fear us, no matter what, and it is not because of anything other than that, to them, we are the knowledge keepers of all that is right and real, even when they disagree. This is a universal truth and not one I made up.

If we cannot bother to tell them the things that they need to know because of some stupid thing we were forced to accept as our truth, then we should not have any children at all. It is one thing to raise a kid with our beliefs but it is quite another when through those beliefs we try harder to scare them into not changing their minds about what they choose to believe. It is no secret that I have told my children that it is up to them to believe the same way that I do in things Spiritual, and it is no secret that I have taught my children that a lie is a lie no matter if it is spoken or kept secret. It is no secret that I Love these kids well enough, deeply enough, with everything in me enough to never NOT tell them that they have their own truths to form, their own truths to live up to, their own Path to follow. I have done what I had to, to this point, not because I have some crazy vendetta against what I was told was the truth but more, because of what I was NOT told.

We can tell them anything we want to tell them, tell them that there is no Santa, is no Easter Bunny, is no Great Pumpkin, and they will not believe us because their little kid brain will not let them - these are entities which we told them for many years were real, even though we knew they were not. Why, then, would we expect them to not question and even doubt what we tell them when what it is that we tell them is the absolute truth?

We want them to follow what we believe in, but as we stand there and in their faces when they are little and tell them about a fat guy making it down the chimney after he has parked his eight flying reindeer on our roof, we think we are carrying on a childhood tradition but in reality we are leading them to the path of heart break because for all their little lives to that point, they hang on our every word!! When you take the example of our telling them about Santa Claus you can clearly see my point that what we say to them matters more than we think it does.

So, why, I must ask, are we so inclined to try to make it still seem as though our sons can deal with life because they are boys, but our daughters need to be tip-toe'd into the future, as though these little versions of their Mother's Full Self somehow have no capacity for creating an Original Thought? Yes, we mothers do this to them, and I am not immune to the sin of seeing within my Gracie the things that I knew were in me when I was a young girl entering into high school. I am not immune to wanting to be there with her every step of the way, and I am not immune to embracing before it happens the very first time her first major crush disappoints her, and I am not immune to "gettin' her back" when it seems that her friends have all abandoned her (No, not you, Jordy, and neither you, either, Nathalie...).

And more, I am not immune to being so empathic about my one and only daughter, Grace, so much so that I want to shield her from all the hurts that she hasn't experienced yet. I see things from my perspective only, and because of this, I assume, wrongly, that my daughter cannot handle getting her heart broken, cannot handle getting her Self into a mess of teeny-bopper-with-rabies crap without also being able to get herself out of it. I do it a lot, without even thinking that thus far, with my own kids, and particularly, that one child - my only daughter, Gracie, I have done an incredible job.

I can pat myself on the back because this girl child knows how to stand up for herself, and I can smile widely knowing that on more than only one occasion, my "little girl" has done me proudly, has bared her girlie teeth and those proverbial girlie claws, and it was not ever for reasons that had nothing to do with her personally. Already I have been witness to this child giving a boy hell for starting to give her hell first, and already I have witnessed this child vehemently show her opposition to a person when said person was being so horribly creepy that the only way to make said creep stop his or her creepiness was to give them a ration of shit that could only come from a girl - from my girl... from my daughter, Gracie.

Raising Kick-Ass Daughters and Sons Who Do NOT Become Woman-Haters means that we have to let go of what we were taught...


...or at the very little least, have to update the things that we were taught by our parents. I cannot and will not go into anything that sounds like or mirrors words of man-hating harpies (goodness NO! I LOVE men...and the ones in my life who know me know this about me very well...or at least I believe they do). What I will say, though, is that there is absoluteness in the truths that we give to our kids as being THE Truth, and there is a sureness that comes with seeing the things that we have taught them in their little lives that prove to us that yes, we have started them out on the right path to their own lives, and look!!! She can stand up for herself!! Look! She has a backbone and LOOK!!! She is growing into a fine and wonderful young woman...yes, even with her lip piercings, even with her hair color going from black and purple to black and pink or black and blue on any given day.

More than that, through my telling Jeremy that it is not okay to hit other people, namely women, and through my showing Joshua that it is not okay to let the little girl across the street be mean to him or tell him things that make his little 8 year old heart crumble into a million sharply pointed pieces, my sons have learned well what is NOT okay to say, or to do or to be when in the company of girls and women. While my older son has a keen eye for beautiful girls, he has told me on many occasions that he cannot see girls as objects because he knows that it takes so little to make a girl hurt that he just cannot carry that on into the future with a girl or with anyone for that matter. He has, all on his own, chosen NOT to carry on the tradition of making women stand five paces behind him JUST because he was born with a penis. He knows that women hurt deeply when we hurt, namely when that hurt has been placed by someone who we Love. He knows that I am capable now to tell anyone, particularly a man - and any man, by the way - that I am hurt, that the action or inaction upset me enough to drive me to tears, and I am now able to just let it go. Through my kid, my oldest boy, I learned that it makes a man crazy to be left on my hook for too long so that I can feel better about what might be something that he could in no way ever begin to think would be something which would affect me to the point of tears.

My sons know that it is not okay to make a girl cry just because they can, and they know how to take care of a girl's heart and emotions even as they are not yet fully grown men  - these boys know through the example which I have given them, through my actions being the end result of my own words to them the thing which taught them the very most. I sit here confidently in the knowledge that at no time will I really need to worry about either of them carrying on the cycles of control that they have seen in the men from both their mother's side of the family as well, if not more, as their father's side.

Hey Mom! Just let go already !! Yeesh ! 

We have got to let go of the things that we considered the Truth and are the truths which applied to us when we were much younger, when we were children. I say this because when we begin to find out that many of the things that we were told as children are no longer applicable to who we are now we also begin to find out who we really are. Who we really are depends on us, not on the things which applied when we were children. We no longer fit into the same sized clothing that we did when we were in elementary school, and the same things that can applied to our clothing and how they fit or even if they still fit also applies to the things that we believe which no longer apply to our lives in the present.

It no longer fits my life that a woman is meant to be all she can be to a man, no way. I mean, yes, I can be all the woman I want to be to whoever it is that I care to be to those people, but my own truths always prevail, and if we would each, as parents, see to it that the kids we raise now become the adults who will carry on the traditions we create with these little people while they are in our care are not doormats, are not willing to do everything in their power to please one other person in their lives, we can also see to it that the changes which need to happen within society on its own happen, not to us, but for us.

If we would bother more to try getting these children of ours to just believe, through our actions toward them and on their behalf, if we would just not do what breaks their hearts and do what we know is best for them, no matter how much it hurts them right now while they are still clueless, we will, just by our very examples, be the change that we wish to see in the world.

If it is change that we want to exact we will exact it and it will not be through our own actions on behalf of our own Selves but rather and only through our example as lived into perpetuation by those people who call us "Mom" and "Dad"


I Love You All !!!
Rox

(c) 2012 Roxanne Cottell/Twisted Kitty PRomtions, all rights reserved. twistedkittyrocks@yahoo.com

It is never a sin to Love the Skin You Are In - some words about competency

It drives me crazy the way a lot of us hide our brilliance 
...and the reason we do this, I find, drives me crazier, and I will not lie - I have done it, too!!


I have been told on more than only one occasion that the reason a whole lot of people judge us unjustifiably has everything to do with them and really not a lot to do with ourselves. I have done it, and you have done it - oh hell, we have all done it...judged others harshly because of something that resides within ourselves.

It is not something that is not normal for my ears to hear that I can be intimidating on some level, and when the words hit me, they do so like a ton of bricks. It is most surely because I do not realize that maybe what they are saying might be true, but then I get good and angry because the bottom line is that I bear no real reason for anyone to think this way about me, or anyone else, but they do, and it sucks, but it is part of our lives, the idea that people feel like this toward others.

There are days when I wish to hell that I could be like my best friend, whose ability to not let what other people tell her is the truth of her and their truth only and according to them bother her. Of course, I have had the "help" of many people in my life throughout the course of my lifetime giving me unconscious reasons as to why they would tell me the awful things that they had, but I find now, at this very moment in time, that it was never said for any other reason than to make me find out all on my own that the things they have said and likely still say to this day were said in defense of their own waning sense of self more than it had or has anything to do with me and the things that I am really good at.

And I find anymore that while there are a whole lot of things that I would love to be good at, there are things that I am great at that make those things that I would Love to be good at pale in comparison. It took me a little while to figure out what my best pal was saying, and until today I understand that her methods with me in particular have been, will always be, from a place of Love, of understanding, of no longer being afraid to be as brilliant as she has always told me that I am. She would know - she has always been right there for these last almost 8 years telling me often that the reason these people would have shit to say has everything to do with them and nothing to do with me, that what they say is to lessen my brilliance so that whatever brilliance they possess (we all are brilliant at something, by the way...just sayin'...) will be that much more magnificent.

The lessons we are tasked with learning every single day of our lives and the teachers who bring us those lessons are meant to be there as a guide, not as a detriment, and while it is that I KNOW she has NEVER meant to say anything to me that was meant as anything other than just what words she has had for me, and this is something that is particular to us all, when we hear the truth it will hurt us, but what she knew and what I knew but did not want to have to deal with because of all the other crap that I am dealing with, was that if I wanted to be all the brilliant that she has always known that I am, I had not only to believe it without seeing it but more, I had to stop trying to get other people to approve of me because of my brilliance.

 If we all shine so brightly and no one sees it is not because we are not doing what we do correctly, but rather and only because the people we are trying to show our brilliance to already know about it and some of them may not like the idea that you are every bit as awesome as you have been told you are by the people in your life who care about you so much and who are also VERY tired of the drama that comes with not realizing or believing in things about ourselves - things such as our own brand of brilliance on every level.

I had to take the time to learn to not be upset when I had no one to spout off to, not have a snit when certain people haven't the time at the moment to share a few minutes with me - it doesn't mean that I am not as important to them as they are to me, it just means that they are busy. It used to bother me to think that I would take out a few moments of my day to call someone, to email someone, or to send them a text and not get one right back at that moment, as though my voice and my call were somehow the only thing that should matter to them on that particular day. From the passage of time, no matter how short it has been for me, I have learned very well that when others have no time to talk to me at the time that I make contact that it isn't the end of the world. It simply means that they are just goddamned busy is all.

Besides, if I wait until they did have time, where the hell would I be? I'll tell you where - waiting ...for something that I already have proof of !! Yeesh !

Recognizing the shining diamond beneath the coal is so totally not enough


Yes, I will admit it - after much cajoling, much cussing me out, much telling me that she would like to "take me by the shoulders and shake this stupid bullshit out of you, Roxanne!! Why do you believe that shit about yourself?F*CK!" and more Love than much else - I have been a huge sinner in the Church of Not Recognizing that I am As Brilliant As I Know I Am.

We have been taught all of our lives to let other people be better at what they do than we are at what we do when we are doing it, and we have been told this so that when it comes to the part about their liking us for whatever reason we want them to that they will not feel threatened by what we are good at.

This is a huge lie to have to live - I know it, have lived it and I do not like it, not at all. But there are reasons that I would ever have ventured into that area of crap thinking to begin with, and that reason is not only that this was said to me, but more, it was what was shown to me. Right this minute I want it known that abuse begins the moment that we are told and that it is made ok in our little-kid minds that we are told that we should not be all that we know we are, that we should try harder not to be as great as we are at whatever it is that we are great at. When it came to my ability to write, there was nothing that would stop me and during my childhood it was the thing that Mom clung to with me the very most - my intellectual abilities and how great they were, even at the age of 3.

However, there were other things that I was as good at as well as writing, such as dancing and drawing and painting and things of a nature that was more spiritual than they were anything else. These were not things which were respected in me, though, things that no one would ever think that I would be as good at. I learned something, or rather, accepted something, that is, and what that one thing that I accepted was as of recent was that while we might be good at something, if it isn't something that makes our hearts and souls explode with joy then it probably isn't something that we should be doing. There is a fine line and a balance which must be present all the time, and if the balance is unbalanced all kinds of not-so-great things will happen to us and to our lives. Again...I know it because I lived it but at least I know that it is not to late to change this.

I will admit, too, to always needing to be told that what I have done is good work, and it is because not a lot of people have said so unless it had something to do with what I looked like or how I might look wearing this, that or the other, and as well we all know we are so, so, so much more than only the proverbial wrapper that the candy comes packaged in. Just because I look a certain way, good or not, whatever it is, this is not where I should be judged from, because it is not what I look like that is responsible for who I am or even for what I look like.

Who each of us Is


When I look at the things that I have been and how many people whose lives I have been and how many of those peoples' lives I am yet still part of, I find that those who are in my life and mean anything to me are the very ones who have been willing to not lie to me just to keep up appearances. And these would be the very same people who have always made sure that I knew that to them, I was one of the smartest people they knew. It was not until recently that I accepted this one Truth, and it is the Truth, and not because someone else told me so, but more because a few someone else's made it absolutely clear to me that This Is Really Who I Am to Them and that This, too, needs to Be Who I Am to Me.

We needn't bother any further with trying to hard to make people see us for who we are to ourselves. It isn't worth the heartache, and no matter how many beatings you lived through, no matter how many times you suffered, no matter what any abuser says to anyone else, what those people think and do and who they are truly and really has and should have zero to do with how we feel about ourselves. This one truth is the thing that has saved me, every single time, and every single time I went over the list in my head about what it is that my best friend has always told me but no longer needs to remind me of is that I have a certain brilliance to me that is all mine and that I have been hiding this brilliance from the world  because it was and sometimes still is that same brilliance which makes people check themselves. This is the same for us all, not just me.

We shun Love in our lives because we think we will have to change that part of us that people we love cannot relate to. We banish from our lives the idea that since a few people were bad to us, a few people thought we were what we are not, a few people had a fucking horrid word to say of us, that what they saw and might still see is the truth. The reason we fight those words so hard is because we know they are not truth and we fight more the hurt from the lie that is someone else's truth. We cannot change other people and we will never have the power to change their feelings about us - we only have the power and the right to change those things about our own selves.

Dare to be all the Brilliant that you know you are, and do not be afraid that you will hurt someone else's feelings because of it!


Yep...again...I'm a sinner! I have been known in the past...even as recent a past as this very morning...to hiding who I am to save someone else's trouble, and well, I think I am really very tired of doing that. We have all lost opportunities that in some way came to us because our Brilliance called it into being for us, and we have all made the mistake of thinking that people knew everything about us but in reality they didn't because we chose to hide it from them. This is wrong.

This is making you wrong for being you, and if there is one person who no one will ever tell you NOT to be You it is your SELF!

Make it a point, beginning right this minute, to take the time to heal that part of you that was hidden, first by you, and then smothered by those in your life who chose to tell you who you are and chose to tell you that the Big Deal that is You is really not that big a deal at all. Don't listen to them, and don't bother trying to prove them wrong because you never will.

Be right in all your Brilliance, and be okay with you and who you are, and Love the person you have always been. Yes, it is difficult to break out of a thought pattern that for many years you were forced to take as truth because that is all you ever were taught and that is all you may have been literally beaten into believing - to let others tell you who you are. I know this monster, and it was only recently that I chose to break the pattern that was indicative of my not Loving me for everything that I Am and more, forgiving me for not being all that I am not.

We cannot be anything but our very damned selves, so, folks, it is my promise to you that if you choose to be the You Who You Are, You can never go wrong. STOP trying to make other people Love you, because right now, in this very moment and at this time of reinvention and healing of the battered soul within, the best self care that any one of us could practice is very simply being all the Brilliant people we know we are, and not make any apologies for doing so.

I LOVE YOU ALL !!
ROX

The Path of Letting Go

We are never told that there will come a time in our lives when we can just simply let it all go and heal...
We cannot heal according to the whims of others, only from a place within our own selves will healing begin.


While I would love to sit here, pining away at all of the ugly things which have befallen my life these last two decades, and more, while the things that I didn't have control over as a child I now have control over, and tell a victim on their way to survivorhood that they just need to get over it, I know personally that it just is not that easy. There are things which happen to people that, for one reason or another, it seems, they have a very difficult time healing from. I am no different. It took me a very long time, not to get over what this person who I married half my lifetime ago has said and has done to me, but more, what it was that I blamed my mother for not having a clue about or worse - simply turning a blind eye to.

And let me set the record straight for you all right now - it is never going to be up to the people who were the adults in our lives at another time in our lives to make things right within us or for us. We are not ever guaranteed a thing in life, no, not even that the person who our parents choose to be our caretakers when we are children. I was a very angry child to a mother who, for what it is worth, knew what was happening to me, at least the part that she thought of as being "discipline," that is, but not the verbal or psychologically abusive stuff. And in her defense I must say right now that there are a lot of people on this planet who still believe that corporeal punishment is a very good thing. It isn't. I Know this, because I lived through it and was only alerted to the thing that happened to me so very long ago very recently.

I cannot tell another person when their time to let go of their hurts from the past will come to them, cannot tell another person when is the right time to just allow the healing to start - I mean the real healing - because that part is all of our own and on our own. No one can tell us how or when we will, but I want you all to know that eventually, with time, lots of tears, much rage, and a pounding anger which will either subside and we will learn from it, or, conversely, we will not accept it and will not allow it to just fade away from our lives and we will choose to carry on with it as though it was meant to be a part of our own Selves, and while it may seem odd that I might say so, for some people, that anger is what fuels their healing which means that their anger is the truth of them.

We cannot tell other people how they should deal with their own history, for that belongs to them and only to them, and most of the time I have been known to see the truth on the Scenic Route of Life, choosing to go through all the motions and whether I want to think about it or even believe it, savor each and every moment so as to garner what learning that I can from it all.

It is your Path, Walk it...


Just as any other Path we take, so, too, is the path to healing along the Path to Enlightenment. We do not ever realize that what we each go through is meant as a learning tool for us all, and along the way we do what we will to cope.

When we choose to walk the Path of Enlightenment, we are choosing to Know what we are made of, and through the tears and the surety of heartache, and over the course of time that it will take for us to Know our own Selves very well and well enough to realize when it is that what we needed to know, we know, we also walk the Path to healing.

No one said it would be easy.
But as all else that is meant to be had through pushing through it and dealing with it, so, too, is the Path to Healing a hard Path to walk...but, it is the Path which we all eventually will choose.

That is the time when we Know that we can finally let go of the monsters in the closet, the time that we can take the hand of the younger version of ourselves, the child who will Live within us all, the Soul of us, and Walk the Path we chose in this lifetime...

When that time comes, we Know that we chose the right Path and we can finally see the reason that we were so hurt, and more, we can see how it came to be that somehow, we made it through it all and now here we are, better, smarter, stronger and with a conviction of heart and soul, both which can only be had through the birthing of our newer Selves through the Pain that caused us to have to go back to a time where things seemed right because someone else told us things were, only to later be the very person who, through no fault of your own, would also be the one meant to Enlighten others of your own Path and where it took you and more, where it is leading you now.

It is your Path, so walk it, and do so in the Light of Peace and of Love.
When you are ready to, you can call it the time to Let it All Go and Breathe Again, or maybe, if you are like me, perhaps breathe for the very first time...

Let Go...it will only hurt for a little while!!

I Love You All !
ROX

It is time to ROCK THE LOVE !

We cannot effect change unless we are willing to look the demon in the eye and love it, rather than try to kill it with yet more rage...

Rage.

Rage works when we are speaking in terms of very kick ass rock music, and rage works when we are readying ourselves for the balancing or the leveling of things in our midst that somehow no longer work for the greater good of society as a collective whole. While it is a wonderful thing to bear witness to the rage that is presented to us via the long drawn out primal scream of an indie band's lead vocalist, the last thing that our world needs anymore for any one of us is a sense of rage that is lonely and desperate and has no where to disipate.

And really, that is where ROCK THE LOVE came from - a place within me that was so very angry that often times it would bring me to tears. Sometimes when we are angry with the things that we have had to deal with alone - and by alone I mean that even as there were people who wanted to help and wanted to understand, no one, without having first been there themselves, would ever know what it is to be in a constant mindset of "why is this happening and why am I not good enough for someone, for a whole lot of someones, to just love me just as I am? Why is it that always, even though I am the one in tears, why am I still being treated in a manner that is just not fit for any living creature to have to live through?" It took a very long time for me to wake up to the idea that it was not me alone who brought me to this place where the idea that other people cause violence in our communities is a wrong, very incomplete picture of the reality of where it is that violence in our communities is spawned from.

The answer to that is very simple - it starts at home.

Yes. That's right. I said it. Now deal with it and know for sure that the things that many, many people in my own generation are now sitting in anger management group sessions, many women who suffered abuses, like me, from the time they were small children and who now take up space two or three times a week in therapy, and who are now questioning where it was in their own lives that the abuses began and worse than that, why it was that those abuses led to the acceptance that the bigger ones would be accepted, would be ok...well,. they never were ok, and never were they accepted - not by any one of us, but it was the thing that defined us, every one of us...all of us -a sad outcome to the sisterhood that none of us cared to be a part of but have been, by now, well educated in the ways that we allow what happens to us to happen. Yes, by not knowing or recognizing that we made what we have been through acceptable through our own fears of what might happen - that is how we, the victims and even the survivors, make abuse normal...through our fears of what might happen we unwittingly make it normal and acceptable, even though for the very life of us nothing that shows hurting someone else as being acceptable really ever is. What it is is the rationalization of the thing that invades our lives...no abuse, no violence, no fracturing of hearts, minds, souls, bodies is ever, ever acceptable.

There is not one person who has "been there" who will tell me that I am wrong, who will be able to convince me that to an extent, from the things that had happened to them from a very young age in their lives, that somehow, the actions placed upon them in childhood did not somehow contribute to the things that we each allowed to become the monster in the closets of our minds. While I will not sit here and tell you all the ugly story of my life beginnings, and neither will I tell the world who it was who opened the door for me to believe that "this is just the way things are for me," I will say that after a lifetime of belieiving all that I chose to take as the truth of me, I am finally accepting that what I went through, even and up to a year ago this coming September, was never mine to start with.

No one asks to be treated harshly, namely not a three year old child, but this is when it starts, and normally with a person in whose trust and sense of safety we are placed. That my mother did not see the truth of the thing that was started back then when left in the care of the person she trusted is one thing, but that no one other than my dearly departed Uncle Jack chose to help me see my way through is the ugliness that became what I know as "real". No one wants to believe that they have allowed their precious children in the hands of caretakers who are more akin to schoolyard bullies, but it happens everyday- and the crappy part is that when those children grow into adults we end up blaming everyone else OTHER than the person who first abused us, and we do so out of fear. Up until just a few weeks ago I feared a whole lot more than only ugly hairy spiders. I feared being wrong in my decisions, and more, I feared that I would never be good enough to be Loved by anyone, that I had to work for and even beg for people to Love me.

This is the lie which spawns the Love and this is the lie which gave birth to Rock The Love...

This is the madness which prods me on to telling the world that this is not ok, that we are not ok, that the world needs to return to its origins and begin to Love again, to return to our place in life that tells us that we are not now meant to be of anything other than that of Love and very, very giving service to one another. We have stepped aside from our inborn nature to Love the pain away, to be there in times when it is that our larger communities are affected by the idea that force and a mentality of brutality are what will turn our world around, but the truth is that we are who have and are stil, as a whole, the very ones who wish to rebuild our lives by still instituting methods of force and anger rather than with the only thing that has ever killed any demons ever - the only thing that kills the demon is Love, much like the only thing that kills the darkness is light.

ROCK THE LOVE will shed light on the darkness of all that has become our normalcy, and it will be through the beatuty of creativity, of music played loud and in your face sometimes, and other times quietly and gently like hula, that our message of Love, of hope and of happier communities brought forth through the magic that is the happiness that is family, and know, too, that family is not only those whose bloodlines you share, but are also, through the things and events which have visited your life, my life, our lives collectively, those people who share the similarities - the ones who we can say get it, not because they read about it but because they lived it too...

So thank you so much for choosing to change the way things are done and more, thank you for your support, your Love and all you are...aloha !!

JOIN THE LOVE REVOLUTION!!! Click here to join ROCK the LOVE today!!