Unconditionally

Believe with a kind heart
that your parents have loved you
and will always love you
as long as they live,
my child!
It could be just this:
They couldn’t give you
what you really needed
and what you really wanted.
You just wanted to be loved,
indeed,
but they went about it all wrong!
I know.
I know exactly how you feel.
Let me say this:
I feel terribly sorry for you.
For you did not get
what was actually your birthright.

Maybe, not now, but some day later
you will catch yourself in a quiet moment.
There
by the window pane on a rainy afternoon,
watching a raindrop trickle and
forming a tiny pool on the ledge,
a dusty, morbid veil of deep longing,
anger and frustration will lift
out of a sudden.
And for an immeasurable moment –
so you will recollect one day –
time will come to a grinding halt.
You will feel an immense shock
as if losing
a stifling yet familiar
suit of armor.
At the same time you will feel
a lightness
around your long sighing heart
as if it was released from a firm clutch
of an invisible iron hand.

Yes, once you were forgotten
standing outside the schoolyard.
In red platform shoes
that had slipped
the wire fence
you had started to climb
in the attempt to kill time
when a fence spike
pierced your chin.
Later,
you lied about
how it all had happened
to cover
feelings of guilt on both sides
when you were taken to the hospital.

Growing older,
you had hidden a high forehead
(where airplanes could land)
behind a long fringe
that old, peculiar Ms. Peck
who suggested all girls should wear woolen panties
used to part in a mechanical way
every time
she asked you to clap the rhythm of a musical score.
While you imagined
how she –
in woolen panties
with cherry pompons on each side –
would part the curtains
in her home.

No one really cared about
what and how you did.
Achieving good grades came easy to you
and that was all that mattered.
However, once you failed a midterm exam,
and you chose,
while everybody
was leaving
for a vacation,
to stay at home and study.
Silently,
your body protested
with a severe rash.
Eventually, you got some ‘love’.
In form of a skateboard.
It said ‘Aloha’,
meaning love in Hawaiian,
framed by blue and pink hibiscus.

In the end,
even though you will have collected
a decent series of accomplishments
that you could be proud of
like some deer hunter
of his wall mounted sets of antlers
over the fireplace,
you will feel like a huge failure.
YOU
were not good enough.
Even worse,
YOU
were not better enough.
And worst above of all
YOU
were not best enough.
Not enough
to be worthy
of your parents’ acknowledgement
let alone love,
so you tell yourself
and let your self-worth suffer.

When you thought it was all about you,
once the veil is lifted,
my beloved child,
you will clearly see
that it has never been about you.

You used to think
that your parents should know better.
You will gain the understanding
that even though they look like adults,
and look as if they are in charge,
as if they are on top of things
they hide inside a still hurt little boy or girl
that had just wanted or needed to be loved like you did.
And just like you they,
too,
didn’t get what they wanted and needed most –
from their own parents.
Look closer, my child,
and you will see
that their parents, too,
your grandparents,
didn’t know better
because they,
too,
didn’t get from their parents
what they had wanted or needed most.
It will dawn on you
that your parents couldn’t give you
what they haven’t had themselves
as they have never received it
in the first place.
As well as
your grandparents couldn’t give your parents
what they had never received themselves.

Do you see now?
That we can’t give from lack
but only give from abundance?
Do you see now?
How a chain was built
in which empty hearts were handed down
from one generation to the next?

You, beloved child,
have what it takes
to break that chain.

Now, that you understand
that your parents couldn’t give
but desperately needed themselves
what you were looking for,
who do you turn to?

You will see people
searching for it
everywhere.
But
gods, teachers, doctors,
friends, lovers, spouses,
children,
and pets
won’t deliver.

The solution is
to discover yourself,
beloved.

Looking in the wrong places,
you will miss to see
that love and acceptance
are already there:
within your sole self.

Unconditionally, you are enough.
Unconditionally, you are alright.
Unconditionally, you are love and acceptance.

Until you can fully own this truth
nourish, support and honor
yourself, my child!

Your prosperity
is in your own hands.
Realize
that you are the source
that feeds itself.
In the beginning, in the middle, in the end.

– ljs