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    Light on the Pond Scum: A Memoir
    Light on the Pond Scum: A Memoir
    Light on the Pond Scum: A Memoir
    Ebook138 pages1 hour

    Light on the Pond Scum: A Memoir

    By Julie Little

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    About this ebook

    What I have learned over these decades is that my father is not my home, my mother is not my home, even my spouse is not my home. My home is within me.


    In Light on the Pond Scum: A Memoir, Julie Little invites the reader on her journey of self-discovery, growth, and healing. Readers will travel with her from

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNew Degree Press
    Release dateDec 7, 2020
    ISBN9781636762210
    Light on the Pond Scum: A Memoir

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      Book preview

      Light on the Pond Scum - Julie Little

      Contents

      Author’s Note

      Survival

      The Present

      Destabilization

      Childhood

      My Value

      Responsibilities

      Survival

      Independence

      College

      First Job

      Marriage

      After Divorce

      Ken

      Death

      China

      Compassion and Forgiveness

      Motherhood

      Spiritual Journey

      John

      No Mud, No Lotus

      Acknowledgments

      Appendix

      Author’s Note

      You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.

      –Anne Lamott

      To My Inner Child

      Several years ago, I decided to do some inner child work in an attempt to heal some of the hurts carried with me from my past. This was an activity recommended in the book Reconciliation: Healing the Inner Child by Thich Nhat Hanh, a teacher I had been following for a number of years. The healing practice combines the two practices of writing a letter and listening to what the child has to say. In doing this practice, it’s helpful to ask the child, ‘How did you feel?’ rather than reviewing the details of all that happened to you as a child, and also to ask, ‘What do you want from the adult that we’ve become?’²

      I started by writing a letter to my four-year-old self. At that age, I had already experienced a great loss, as this was the year my mother, my brother, and I had left my father behind in South America. My fatherless self continued to suffer for many decades, and my hope was that greater healing would be in my future if I did this exercise.

      Writing to young Julie that I am alive, am a mother now, had been a teacher, and am doing OK was emotional for me. I wrote that I knew her life had been hard, but that life had gotten easier in my time. I was a survivor. I asked her if there was anything that I could do for her.

      Then I sat down a bit later and allowed her to write back to me. My pen flowed without much intentional thought, and she wrote through me onto the paper, Hello, I’m glad you are alive at that age. In fact, I am shocked that you are alive! I really didn’t think you could be. I am glad that you have taken care of us. The one thing you could do for me is this, I’d like a stuffed animal on the bed. I didn’t get to have one in my time. Can we have one?

      I was stunned. I felt bad that I didn’t have a stuffed animal on my bed, but I also felt like my young self was proud—proud of what we had done, that we had survived so many decades. So, to help her heal, I put a wonderful little stuffed teddy bear on my pillow that day.

      Growing Up

      Some people never really grow up, and some people don’t get to be children at all. Many of us have been raised in homes that were not so conducive to becoming healthy and successful adults.

      When parents are not there to help children grow up, their absence leaves a significant impact on their children’s psyche, self-confidence, and self-acceptance. Parents who are absent, distracted, and even neglectful can be a source of trauma because children grow up feeling unloved and struggle to deal with chaos, inconsistency, and stress. Many adults raised in such a home feel as though they are most likely ruined for life. They have very little hope of change or improvement as they get older because they believe it’s too late to get what they needed as a child. Many feel stuck and tend to repeat the same patterns over and over again with relationship, career, financial, and lifestyle issues. Even when they reach out for help, there may not be anything out there that feels like a solution.

      I speak from experience.

      I grew up in a world of crazy moves, changes, and loss, which often made me feel completely invisible and unimportant. I was twelve years old when I learned that my mother had gotten married over the weekend and had not told me. What I thought was a family trip was actually her honeymoon! I felt so betrayed, and I remember thinking, How could she get married and not tell me?

      I literally shut down. I lost all faith in her. Emotional walls went up and stayed there. I didn’t have a real conversation with her for the four years they were married. All I could think was, How could you?

      My story, as you will see, includes many other unusual and difficult times and feelings of loss and betrayal. I am compelled to write my story because I’ve met many other women who were hurt, damaged, and discouraged by a similar upbringing. I hear these types of stories many times a year from my clients in my work as a life coach.

      Often people tell me of their mother wounds or difficult marriages, of their terrible loneliness and feelings of not being enough. When I speak about ways to become who you want to become in spite of your past, I speak from experience. I grew up with many different feelings that kept me down, lost, and discouraged for years. I grew up afraid, feeling alone and unloved, invisible and unimportant. As you will learn, many things contributed to these feelings. To some extent, they came from my parents’ own needs to be who they are. I now see my story with more compassion than ever, and with forgiveness and understanding. But I didn’t always feel this way.

      A Case for Hope

      In spite of how you might feel, my belief is that your upbringing and your losses don’t have to determine the rest of your life. I know now that with a hand to hold—a mentor or a coach—and people to look to for help, we can crawl out of the darkness we’ve experienced and come out the other side much better off than we ever believed possible. We can surprise our four-year-old selves!

      Many intelligent, creative, capable people feel stuck in the past or in life because of their experiences. The world needs these strong, courageous folks today, and I believe if we can transform, we can get unstuck and grow into the people we want to be.

      Change takes work and persistence, but we aren’t doomed to remain as we are forever. I now work with women who have suffered and are trying to get unstuck in their lives so they can move forward. As a wellness coach, I focus primarily on issues of well-being for businesswomen, helping them learn effective self-care that will support their accomplishments in their businesses. Seeing what the art of listening to and being there for someone can do has been so powerful.

      My lesson from this life and these years of self-discovery can be summed up in this concept from Buddhist philosophy: the idea that where there is no mud, no lotus flower grows. Growing and blossoming and emerging as a precious gift to the Earth without having lived in some form of mud is harder. This struggle and suffering are what make you unique and even more valuable to your fellow beings and to yourself.

      For over twenty years, I have been learning and gathering tools to pull down some of the solid walls I have carried with me for decades. I have worked with mentors and read many books. I have done a great deal of work on my mental outlook, self-talk, and the stories I tell. One part of my process has been to write this story down.

      I now see that my life has unfolded in three distinct phases.

      •Part I: When I was a youngster, before the age of twenty, I was focused on survival in my own life and in my mental health.

      •Part II: As a young adult, before the age of forty, I focused on becoming as independent as possible, on having a life of my own. This focus meant I created distance between my new life as an adult and my old one as a youngster.

      •Part III: Over the last two decades, from age forty-one to sixty-one, I have been working on the tenets of compassion and forgiveness, found in the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh as well as those of many other spiritual teachers. This phase has made it possible for me to reach out to my family after almost twenty years of silence. For a while, distance and silence felt absolutely necessary for self-preservation. Now I can show compassion once in a while in a way that felt impossible a decade ago. This growth feels like powerful progress to me.

      From My Story to Yours

      This book is for all those who have dealt with—or know someone who has dealt with—the aftereffects of childhood trauma of any kind and who feel lost in their life, their career, or their relationships. This book may help you to see a way forward, a way to let go of the

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