Sexual Sanctity: A Memoir of My Burning Times and Learning Times

Chapter One

Copyright ©️ 2023, Anshin B. Kelly, KaleidoShin

All Rights Reserved.

Chapter One

Section One: The Burning Times in a Modern Day Tourist Trap

For those of you who are not familiar, "The Burning Times' ' originally refers to the hundreds of years of slaughter, beginning in Europe of millions of mostly women, instigated worldwide by the Inquisition and Catholic Church. Narratives of fear, hysteria, and violence swept across Europe and the globe with the Christianizing of Indigenous Nations and Peoples. It is referred to as The Burning Times, because the primary way in which a woman, or man, was murdered was through burning at the stake.

In my harrowing life experience, this unspeakable violence that is inextricably part of Westernism, is very much still, in our DNA. "The Burning Times" of my life began at the tender age of about six years old, and would torment me right down to the core of my being, for 13 years.

My family moved to Salem Massachusetts when I was five, and again within Salem when I was six. For some crazy reason I will never fully understand, my mother and a close friend took us kids, including our friend's small daughter, to the famous "Salem Witch Museum," in the first handful of weeks after moving. I was the oldest in the group of small children. My mother and our friend confessed later that they had no idea this monstrous building right smack in the middle of Historical Downtown Salem Massachusetts was not a "museum" at all; it was a tourist trap, that is still there to this day, raking in millions a year, around and on Halloween time. Why those two maternal figures in us kid's lives at the time did not insist on leaving in the middle of the horror show (blocked doors be damned), is still, far beyond me. But I might understand more now, what prevented them from doing the right, and protective thing for their children.

The tourist trap in the middle of downtown Salem Massachusetts is a production that dramatizes and sensationalizes the trying, torturing and murdering of the numerous women, and a few men of Salem Massachusetts, who were accused of practicing black magic and witchcraft. It's meant to be like a "horror" theatrical production. But the true horror actually lies in the fact that these innocent women and men's unspeakable suffering is not remembered, or even remotely given the recognition they deserve, and let's be honest, we need. Instead, Salem's rich history, and the deep historical lessons needed in our present times, and always, are routinely drowned out, and the suffering of human beings extorted for monetary gain.

My mother, and family friend said that they wouldn't let anyone out of the building after the dramatization had begun. In my gut, even as a small child, that seemed like a very feeble excuse for allowing us to be exposed to such horrors as small children. However, nearly 30 years later, I now at least recognize in a small way why these two Western mothers didn't insist, and push the teenager who collected tickets at the door aside, and just leave with us: These women's ancestors were broken through The Burning Times, and these women were barely surviving their own.

Section Two: The Nightmare of Days

Sexual trauma and the predatory presence was and still is deeply woven into my family maternal line. It seems from that point forward, after the horror-show visit, something opened, a hemorrhage, in the spiritual fabric of my family, particularly, within my mother. This hemorrhage seemed to open the gates of Hell, and my mother's trauma and rage seemed to become deeply magnified. My mother's and father's relationship was chronically abusive; my father was seriously lacking in tools emotionally, and spiritually, and my mother had very little control over her emotions, which often led to the verbal, emotional and physical abuse of me, my siblings and my father.

For a year following the visit to the tourist trap, I had night terrors almost every night that usually involved the torture and killing of women, and small children. I routinely woke up in a cold sweat. One dream in particular stands out in my mind, and I never forgot it all these decades later: I was shooting a baby over and over and over again. The baby's body was clearly full of bullet holes and soaked in a river of blood. As an experienced healer now, and dream interpreter, clearly, my life as a child was horrifically riddled with chronic abuse and neglect. My Little Innocent Child Soul was desperately in despair, and learning a terrible, terrible dance of torture, one chronically abusive day at a time - how to loath myself. So began my lifelong wounded, learned existence as The Scapegoat.

It's so very clear now, beginning with my mother, how my immediate and extended families, my church community, and my school community fed into, to varying degrees of severity, those volatile, psychological energy patterns of scapegoating me in some way. I would several decades later understand how my childhood despair that led to the severe self-wounding so accurately and grotesquely depicted in my dream, opened many, many hemorrhages psychologically, like the bullet wounds, that made it very easy for destructive forces to infiltrate and proceed to make my life a living torture chamber.

I was mercilessly bullied in elementary, and junior high school, by mostly privileged white children from liberal and/or progressive families. I, along with my sisters, was one of a small handful of children in the school of around 200 students, who were mixed race, or non-white. To say the least, this did not help matters when it came to my designation as scapegoat in a mountain lake of pale faces. When I went home, the abusive environment always meant that I would never know whether I’d be subjected to inappropriate levels of punishment, or my mother and father would fight to inappropriate levels of force and even bodily harm, or, Mother of God forbid, everything went relatively normally, for our lives, at least.

Section Three: Bloom of Maidenhood and False Accusations

During the terrible age of the Inquisition, that had several resurgences through other Christian denominations, altogether over the last roughly 800 years, the sadistic narrations that inflamed the hysteria about so-called “evil witches,” developed a heinous formula of trying and torture, that would eventually force women to “confess” their alleged crimes to the Inquisition, and/or leaders of other Christian denominations. This “confession” was not only to the crime of practicing “black magic,” but also to the crime of having had sex with the Devil himself.

At age nine I was raped by a close family member of my church community. Obviously this crime was the “nail- in-the-coffin” that sent my Soul straight, deep into the catacombs of my physical, emotional, mental and physical existence on earth. However, as I’ve explained above, many stages of abuse and neglect led to that heinous crime. After the rape, I remember suffering from excruciating aches deep inside my bones that were one hundred times worse than any severe flu. The damage to my pelvic area was also severe, and my health would suffer to an almost lethal degree for the next nine years or so.

Starting at around age twelve, I began to have bouts of severe post traumatic stress that created an easy gateway for the monstrous feelings and patterns of guilt, shame, rage, torment and scapegoating to flow right in; stemming centrally from my mother, then family, then church community and school community. I would figure out years later that my exponentially, more and more severe health conditions were inextricably connected to my trauma. The more I focused on healing my emotional, mental and psychological state, the more clear the pathways to physical healing became.

When I look back, after fifteen years of spiritual awakening and healing, I can see that my Soul was not asleep, but in hiding. Her earthly vessel, that is a living, breathing Sacred Organ made up of the mind, emotions, and body, was deeply damaged. Like the Healer Women and Midwives, as well as Healer Men, persecuted for hundreds of years for their gifts and traditions, were terrorized, broken and forced into hiding, my Original and Deep Self had no choice but to recede into the depths of Spirit, Mythos and the Underworld. It is obvious now that much of my growth, nurturing, and contact with the truth, came through my dreams as my body rested. What was mostly conscious and/or obvious to myself, but especially others, was no doubt a mere shadow of who I am; and what shown through of the Eternal Soul of Love deep within my Being, can be compared to that of the sunlight, on a stormy day. The self, myself, that was walking around, breathing, talking and semi-functioning, was broken and deeply tormented. The fleeting warmth I felt sometimes of the Light from my Soul, like that of the clouds moving away momentarily on a stormy day, came primarily through my contact with nature.

The following is an excerpt from my writings:

“I always naturally worshiped, loved and fully embraced the Woman God for as long as I can remember. But also for as long as I can remember that natural love for her was cruelly twisted into something perverse; in the religious world the Sacred and Original Feminine is many times deeply feared the results being Her essential creative energy (from which all life springs, we'll get to that,) is terribly misunderstood and cruelly shat upon. In the modern secular world sex itself is perversely interpreted as being one in the same as true intimacy, love, freedom, expression etc. In the end, the Sacred Feminine is deeply feared on both sides, and Her Original and Eternal reality as Mother and Creator is cruelly severed from the minds and hearts of human beings, Her children.

A woman's body, menstruation, birth, feminine expression in art, clothes, dance, nursing babies, and much more connected to specifically, the reality of becoming and being a woman, always filled me with such deep wonder and awe since I was a small girl. I remember walking into a friend's house when I was a very young girl and I just remember her entire living room was filled with images of The Goddess. Not images that were beautiful but in many ways, 'safe for human consumption,' no, these images were ancient and filled a person with altogether fear, curiosity, absolute astonishment, deep wonder, and excitement. Crude, but incredibly beautiful statues sat around her living room of The Goddess with Her mouth and eyes wide open and her hands holding open her gaping vagina as a baby's head was crowning. The same statue and other images had heaving breasts, nipples and dark areolas, black and brown skin, and bellies with soft rolls that smoothly ran into huge hips and thighs, big enough, strong enough, full enough, juicy enough to give birth to and hold up the world... because they do, because She does. That living room was like a forbidden, sacred grove for me. Even though I was was only a small child, instinctively I knew not to talk about this with anyone close to me; the liberal Western upper-class folks in one half of my life would inject their shallow and politically-driven interpretations about sexuality and poison the sense of deep sanctity I felt about The Mother of All Things, The Source of Life Itself, and in the religious community I was being brought up in would immediately take out their psychological jack knives and very painfully attempt to 'carve' the 'bad' part out of me like one would a bruised apple.”

As I describe above in detail, I always had a deep reverence for, awe, and fascination with The Sacred Feminine. This includes in the most personal ways, my own body. For most of history, most of humanity had contact in some way to the Sacred Feminine; as Mother, Creator, and Sacred Pivot Point on which All Things live, die and are reborn. The most central, long standing and powerful people in tribes, nations and clans were Women Healers and Midwives, for up to a Million Years. The fundamental chain of connection, community and continuity within most groups, was that between the generations of women. My in-depth study and experience, as a Woman, Healer/Medium, Mother and Midwife has shown me one very powerful, and profoundly regenerative reality about history, and that is that: No matter what tides of change, whether peaceable or brutal came to a people, a nation, or an empire, where women had contact with, through their Religious Rites and Traditions, The Sacred Feminine, they connected with each other; and that chain of generational, Maternal Continuity, though many times damaged, could, and would always regenerate and has sustained women, and therefore humanity through the mess, and the triumph that is human history.

My earliest memories of false accusations by the psychological Inquisition that embedded itself inside my family, and communities, came through my mother. I remember being very young, maybe not more than seven, when the vicious seeds of lies about my "impurity" would be injected into me. I remember the way I loved to move my body and dance, and the beautiful pictures of female fairies wearing sparse, delicate clothing, and the fascination I had with men much older than me. I remember loving to watch videos of animals giving birth, and pretty, flowing, feminine clothing. Most of all, I loved depictions of The Goddess; in flowing veils, or wearing nothing at all.

The simplest way to put it is that my mother had impacted, terribly unresolved sexual trauma, and was doing very little to help resolve and heal these issues. Her Burning Times were consuming her, and bit, by bit, she'd chronically succumb to the cruel mentality and behavior that people close to her inflicted on her from a young age. She'd scream, and scream, sometimes for a couple of hours, and one of the brutally insane things she'd say to me starting from when I was a small child, was, "there are demons inside you, laughing as me, mocking me, and I just want to hit you until they come out."

The truth was that I was a clear, calm pool of water, and she saw her reflection, pure and simple. But many, if not most of her verbal, emotional and physical attack sessions, were based on the premise that I was full of demons she needed to extricate through verbal and physical beatings. The parallel to the Salem Witch Trials, Witch Hunts of the European continent, and then executed around the world is uncanny.

When I turned twelve I went to a church camp within my church organization. I was so excited because I was going to the camp the teens from our community went to, and I could go because the cut off age was twelve. To put a very long story short(er), it would be one of the most emotionally excruciating experiences of my young life. It was quite a brutal Coming of Age Initiation, in which I am deeply proud to say I triumphed. The Burning Times of my life may have been growing hotter, and more and more crazy, but I would triumph, like I did that summer, albeit at times by the skin of my teeth.

The young woman in my camp group who would torment me for the full three weeks, and get others to do the same, I would come to find out after the summer, was the daughter of a church member who tormented my mother. I would also come to find out during the three weeks that the young woman and her family's house had burned down, and they had been homeless, after having lost everything. Many in our church organization fantasized that The Burning Times so-to-speak during the seventies in America for the church organization, that was the intense religious persecution of our members, ended after the deluge of daily toxic propaganda ceased. But, like I am working to illustrate clearly now, The Burning Times don't end, until we get right down to the roots of its origins, within ourselves, as well as generationally.

“It is an ill wind, that doesn’t blow some good.” ~ Laura Ingalls Wilder quoting her "Pa."

The Great Mother and The Sacred Feminine, were never completely absent from my life. In Ancient Wisdom and Expansive Oral Histories, The Sacred Feminine is said to reside deep, deep in the wild forests, mountain ranges, oceans, deserts, plains and rain forests. During that burning summer She called me into the woods of upstate New York again and again, in which our summer camp took place.

I remember so clearly that my mother had taken care to buy, and pack for me pads for menstruation, even though I was not menstruating yet. This act was one of many other isolated acts throughout The Burning Times in my upbringing that could be likened to the sun coming out momentarily from behind the thick, suffocating ash and smog. Throughout the entire three weeks I spent at the camp, my body was preparing so resolutely, and busily for The First Blood, I kept thinking that my period had started. I would perhaps be in the middle of a rousing game of dodgeball, and all of a sudden I felt like I was leaking. So as not to be caught being stained red in front of all my peers, (some jeering, assholes at that), I would excuse myself, run to my cabin and take out a pad. I would then climb the beautiful, peaceful, forest hill to the toilet and shower house, lock myself in a stall and pull down my pants. No blood. Just an opaque, and/or clear sticky mess. I would go back to my cabin to clean up and change. This happened probably close to a dozen times. I would try to ignore it sometimes, but would soon feel immensely concerned about being humiliated in front of people, so I’d hike out to my cabin (it never happened in my cabin!), get a pad, then hike out to the toilets, and discover once again that my first period had not begun yet. I would not get my period until nearly two years later.

What a very personal thing to share, and certainly many things concerning Feminine Initiation should not be shared with just anyone, especially men; they are for women’s eyes and ears only, lest those Blessed Secrets be distorted and extorted; dare I say, the way they have thousands of times over in the wake of the Tidal Waves of Modernism. However, The Great Mother urges me on to share some precious fragments of my experience, in order that those fragments may be planted as seeds, for future women, mothers, and humanity, and we can one day see ourselves out of a centuries long, physical, then intra-psychic Burning Times.

Looking back I see how profoundly powerful The Great Mother’s constant presence in my life was. Her relentless, careful, fiercely loving and compassionate hands constantly helped to shape and mold, not only my Mind, Heart and Spirit, but the pathways through which perhaps at first I would get burned due to the downfalls of my various communities, but ultimately, forcing me ever more deeply, into the Initiative Forests hidden within.

Section Four: The First Spectated Burning

I can’t write this without weeping. Indeed, the memory was so painful, for so long; like shards of glass inside a deep wound, I couldn’t talk about it for over a decade, and even then, I could barely share it with that close person and friend.

It started before I entered my cabin at the summer camp, but I became conscious of my Soul's spectated torture immediately after I entered the cabin: All the girls in my camp group were throwing my handmade doll around to each other and shrieking, laughing and jumping around like a bunch of possessed banshees.

This doll wasn't just any doll; I was twelve years old and had grown out of most of my stuffed toys, at least enough that I'd never dream of bringing them to camp, but this doll was handmade, and it had taken me months to make her in my "handwork" class at The Waldorf School. I was so proud of that doll, I'd named her Lane, after a bushy red-haired young lady from our church community I'd grown to love and look up to. As you might have guessed, my doll had flaming red hair. My "handwork" teachers were always such wonderful, talented women and they'd shown me each step of Lane's creation with such patience, fun and wit. Every tiny stitch in Lane's pale- pink fabric skin was hand sewn, no sewing machine was used in the making of my first baby. I'd learned to stitch and weave every strand of her yarn-hair into her scalp. I'd stitched her beautiful, emerald green eyes, and her sweet, little red mouth. She was stuffed with very fine sheep's wool. She was roughly the size of a smaller, newborn baby.

I can't describe the horror I felt when I realized what was going on. Lane had been comfortably tucked into my sleeping bag, and the invasion of privacy, personal space and my personal belongings was an indescribable attack to my heart and psyche. Like a Little-Woman-Mother I lept without a second thought towards my baby and the girls began to jeer and shriek loudly, as they played keep away with Lane. I think I screamed at them to give her back and I was ready to tackle the next girl to have her. I may have been bullied my entire life, but I was known to stick up for myself. One thing I knew for sure was if they didn't give Lane back in two seconds the girl who had her last was going down, and I'd scrap like a dirty street rat if I had to.

I think the girls sensed this because I was able to snatch Lane away pretty quickly after I'd entered. After I had Lane safely in my arms I began to weep openly and I told the girls I'd made my doll by hand. I examined my baby and to my utter heartbreak realized one of the girls had drawn on her with a pen. I couldn't fathom such cruelty. I'd been verbally, emotionally, physically and sexually abused since I was small girl, so I knew evil, I knew evil well. But Lane somehow had been this Light of Hope. A precious symbol of the baby girl my Soul was claiming back. The baby girl I'd learn to torture and hate through the monstrous acts of adults in my upbringing. It was like the blood-soaked baby all over again in my dream six years prior. The agony in my heart was unspeakable. The silence that fell in the room was extremely pained and heavy, and a couple girls managed to mumble that they hadn't known my doll was handmade. What a absolutely idiotic thing to say! I was speechless with heartbreak, and just wept silently on my sleeping bag and held Lane tight to my chest and let the tears fall on her. I never received any apology. But I know now that I'd triumphed over a deep, deep and unforgiving darkness that day. Instead of despairing, and cutting off from that precious little baby girl deep inside me, I'd held her tortured body close, and let my tears cleanse and heal our wounds, and most especially, drive out the evil that had tried to destroy us before our lives had barely begun.

Section Five: The Second Spectated Burning

I can see now that those weeks at the summer camp had been, though agonizing in many ways, a foundational Initiation into Maidenhood, or Young Womanhood. I had grown to understand without fully realizing it, that I was in most cases in my life, the single most mature person in my life. Somehow, being away from home at an age where you're on the threshold between being a little girl and young womanhood, in the "care" of adults who were many times just as juvenile, careless and helpless as the kids they were supposed to be helping to cultivate, forced me headlong into a small, but powerful awakening. Somehow, deep within, from that point onward I knew I'd have to fend for myself, find a way to obey my instincts, and at the same time protect my younger siblings.

The second Spectated Stake Burning, also awakened me further to my mother's now deeply embedded, thorny, tangled mass of issues, that in all honesty, I desperately did not want to believe. As I said previously, I was extraordinarily blessed to have had constant contact with nature as a child and young woman. Where we grew up on the North Shore Massachusetts, the sea, the woods, the rivers, the wildlife and…the poison ivy were plentiful.

Up until twelve or thirteen I'd been immune to poison ivy. I distinctly remember running barefoot through the woods down to the Parker River. The woods throbbing with all kinds of life, including massive amounts of poison ivy, I'd never develop the terrible rash poison ivy is so well known to cause. One day however, I was riding a bike that I recently inherited, but was too big for me, and I fell headlong into a thick patch of poison ivy. I hurriedly got up and ran to the bathtub to wash with soap and water just as a precaution. Just about a week later however, little, puss-filled bumps began to develop in patches on my arms, then my legs. In the coming days, to my utter horror, the herbs, remedies and homeopathic treatments given me by my mother, seemed to not only not help, they seemed to make it worse! The fiery, blistering rash spread and spread. It spread all the way from in between my toes, all the way to in between my fingers. Somehow, the poison ivy infection had become severely systemic in a very short, and acute amount of time. It felt like being burned alive.

But the systemic rash was not the only reason it felt like being burned alive. For some reason I could not fathom at the time, and still, in many ways still can not, my mother stubbornly insisted that I could not get a prescription for Prednisone, a common anti-inflammatory medication prescribed for poison ivy rash. As an Alternative Healer and Traditional Midwife, I completely understand not wanting to use medications, as much as reasonably and humanly possible. But there are limits; limits to the use of medications, that I dare say, is not even remotely considered in most of the United States population, and there are also limits to how much is reasonable to suffer, especially in the process of healing and getting stronger.

My husband and I do not have a Primary Caretaker for us, or our children. We delivered all of our children naturally, and four of the five births we did at home, beautifully, successfully and courageously without any medical professional or midwife present at the births. We are not Prednisone-trigger happy, anxious people or parents. We modestly use over the counter medications in combination with herbal medicine when the needs arise. The drugs sometimes help to make the ailing person more comfortable while they heal, and used not only in combination with herbs and alternative medicines, but modestly so, with more emphasis on the alternatives than the drugs, I have personally witnessed being highly successful.

The humiliation of being covered in a pussing, dripping, swollen rash for an entire summer, was almost more than I could bear. But my mother would not budge, and I knew better than to express this too many times. For those who have had systemic poison ivy rash, you know there isn’t much to be done, except nourish your body as much as you know how, apply natural and/or pharmaceutical drying creams, and try to not think about it - or scratch.

The poison ivy rash on my body was not just everywhere but it was very raw, swollen and infected. I know for certain now, as a mother of five, that allowing my child to suffer like that would be more than I could bear, and I simply wouldn’t allow it. I happen to know now, how to prevent a poison ivy infection like that and heal one effectively, probably without the use of Prednisone.

I could tell that other adults in our lives were also beginning to feel guilty, ashamed, even uncomfortable about their little scapegoat having such an obvious, and severe ailment. I couldn’t articulate this at the time, but it’s clear to me now. Even the precious few adults in our lives who did not scapegoat me seemed to notice that the suffering of this child was too severe, but no one said anything, or if they did, they only limped in with it, and with the slightest inkling of stubbornness and backlash from my mother, were sent scurrying away to blind-eye-land.

Section Six: The Third Spectated Burning

As the Summer burned out its heat, and the Autumn Equinox was right around the corner, my poison ivy rash began to miraculously burn out as well. I remember feeling like I’d triumphed over evil once more. More than anything, the evil of neglect; the evil of not being able to face one’s transgressions, complexes and responsibility. Again, I could not articulate this at the time, but I can now. I know now that many adults in my life, starting with my mother, knew right from wrong, knew what was acceptable and not acceptable in the cultivation and discipline of children, but for whatever reason, could not face the music. We were all in the midst of The Burning Times, and many, if not most were being consumed by it, much like the proverbial frog in a pot of gradually-heated water, who does not know he is boiling to death, until it is too late.

The second time I contracted an even more severe poison ivy rash, I was fourteen years old. For some god-forsaken reason, I carelessly dove into community service work with my church community that involved being exposed to a lot of poison ivy. For some reason I’d told myself that I wasn’t going to let the first infection stop me from doing what I wanted to do. For some reason I’d convinced myself it wouldn’t happen again. But not only did it happen again, the rash became so violently infected and bad, my leg became deformed looking.

One thing I know for sure, there was a severe breakdown in Maternal Communication. To this day, I don’t know if it was simply my mother not listening to the needs of her child, or, the other mother who was housing me with a few other girls at the community service project, was not communicating exactly what was going on. What I do remember for certain, was how consistently caring and compassionate my host mother was to me. My heart was routinely broken, and the flames of humiliation licked me agonizingly from the inside, while the infection burned me from the outside, as my so-called friends, while smiling at me, would mask their jeering in the form of jokes, and refused to stand near me, lest they catch my affliction. Upon reflection, I feel that subconsciously, they feared catching my internal affliction, while consciously squeamish about my poison ivy rash. What they truly feared was being neglected, and ostracized, scapegoated, the way I was. Deep within they feared my seeming "station" in life.

Amidst all this, I remember my host mother’s fearless and gentle touch on my infected body. I remember, she hugged me. Something my mother never did. In fact, I remember the time I realized that my mother never said “I Love You” unless I said it first. I remember at around thirteen years old I gave my mother a huge, love-packed hug, thinking for sure I could get her to say the three words I desperately wanted to hear. When she did not, I was of course deeply wounded, but at the same time thinking back I see how in that moment, I matured to an emotional, mental, and psychological level far beyond my years. I knew at that moment, even if I could not articulate it then, that I was capable of loving in a powerful way, despite the way anyone treated me, even my own mother.

I remember my host mother never failed to remind me to apply my infected areas with Calamine Lotion, that she went out of her way to get for me. I remember she kissed me good night. I remember how concerned she was for me. According to my mother, my host mother had called to tell her about my infection. According to my mother, she hadn’t fully expressed how truly bad it was. Somehow I don't really think that’s true, for almost in the same breath, my mother cared to tell me how in awe my host mother had been at my calm, strength.

When I finally came home from the community service project away from home, I remember again, feeling a deeply, powerful sense of triumph over evil. I could not again, fully articulate it as yet, but I know I felt it. In almost the exact same way as the first, my rash burned itself out as the Summer came to an end.

Section Seven: First Blood

School had just begun in my Eighth Grade year. Our “Main Lesson Teacher,” the teacher in a Waldorf School who is ideally with a class from First through Eighth Grade, and who teaches most of the Main subjects; had arranged for our class to work at a soup kitchen for a day. I remember my mother being there to help with that class excursion. One of the main things about my mother that has made healing so very difficult is that I truly feel that most of the time, her intentions are good. But good intentions are easily hijacked by impacted pain, neglect and guilt, as I’ve learned all too well in the last 34 years. What most people saw when it came to my mother, were those good intentions. My mother also has a very powerful Spirit, that although deeply tormented, shines through the terrible heaviness in her heart. My mother is deeply caring, but her wounds and complexes dare not act upon that towards people close to her. I saw that depth of heart and love I was starving for in her that day, when she cared for the homeless.

I remember it was a very warm day, I think in October. I was running around helping prepare food and sort donated clothing. I remember feeling off. Just off, like I'd never felt in my life until that point. I think I was wearing dark pants, jeans maybe. I remember working up a good sweat, and by the end of the day, I found myself having an unexpected thought. That thought was connected to a damp feeling in my underwear. I’d brushed it off all day, but suddenly internally I said, “I don’t remember peeing my pants.”

I am astounded to this day that I hadn’t leaked through. The sensation was so odd I went straight to the girl’s room back at the school, and when I pulled down my pants I was amazed to find a considerable amount of blood soaking my underwear. Amazed, and actually, deeply joyful. I’d become a woman! Against all odds, and one of my greatest triumphs! I was a woman! My Soul rejoiced deep, deep in the catacombs, but I heard Her. However, I do remember the joy was also cloaked in sorrow, as it always had been for me, since my life began.