Cramer daughters, and neighbor
“Whether men soar to outer space or dive to the bottom of the deepest ocean they will find themselves as they are, unchanged, because they will not have forgotten themselves nor remembered to exercise the charity of forgiveness.” ~ Meher Baba*
Last May, in an extraordinary treatment of vibrational medicine by a highly intuitive and experienced therapist,* I learned that I had a core belief (false and often negative) in my unconscious that had been governing me since childhood. As I lay on the treatment table, the therapist monitored two machines connected to my body, as well as my body’s responses. Simultaneously, she listened to me review my physical conditions as they related to my life experiences of emotional upset. As I said to her, “My beauty and my good grades were my value to my parents,” my voice broke, and at this, she leaned her face close to mine and said, “You had no worth.” I burst into sobs, and in between gulps, slowly, with major effort, struggled out, word-by-word, “I never could have said that.”
It would take a month to absorb what I had just heard, but she had given me the answer I needed. I had memories from childhood that had turned into adulthood observations. The echo of a comment made by my writing mentor years* before helped me make clearer sense of this: The images we retain are where our truth awaits. I needed to dive deep in my memories.
In a slide taken by my dad in 1947, my mother is seated in a wooden outdoor armchair set on a long flagstone patio of grayed blues and rose behind our colonial home. She holds my baby sister. In the true color of a slide, our deep-green lawn is rich with shadows and slopes away from the scene. I am there, crouched behind the chair, barely visible in its shade. For years, this is what I saw in the photo. But now I see what was missing—a three-year-old sister standing proudly behind her mother’s chair, facing her dad’s camera with a big smile because she knows her life is important and exciting, and different from a baby’s.
~
It’s spring . . . 1956. I am thirteen and hanging out laundry on the rope strung among four metal arms of a laundry post at the edge of the backyard patio. New grass has sprouted. Through the two blocks of our neighbors’ trees, I can partially see the Walter S. Parker Junior High School, where I’m in the seventh grade. I push stretchers into my dad’s long chinos to prevent wrinkles and pin them beside girls’ shorts and tee shirts. My mom is in Winchester Hospital before her labor pains have begun because she has a cough, and her doctor has sent her there. He is being extra careful. I am in charge. I feel useful. But with a new baby at home, what will be missing for me is parental help in guiding me in the age-appropriate development of my own self-assurance. In truth, a foundation for me to launch from into adulthood isn’t even in place.
~
By high school, with academic and social pressures, I develop a pattern as reliable as the moon’s phases. Every three months I am reduced to tears, seated on the edge of my twin bed, blowing my nose on my dad’s cotton handkerchief (part of the family ironing I do). Meanwhile, my dad waits nearby, in my grandmother’s wide-bottom rocker by my bedroom window that looks out onto our copper beech tree—a sitting place I often occupy in what I now see as the place where my moments of inner musing occurred. Because of my dad’s watchfulness, in a routine he develops and uses through my high school years, when I am quiet enough to hear, he gives his stock fatherly talk. “Women are fortunate they can cry. Go get a cold washcloth and mop up.”
There is a letup in this pattern of tears during my university years because I have a boyfriend, who eventually becomes my husband and the father of our daughters. But senior year doesn’t pass without an expanded version of the old pattern occurring as I face the reality of what graduation and a June marriage mean for my life. I fall apart grandly. With my parents’ consternation about my condition and the impending events, my dad boards a flight from two states away to land in Bangor and again sits in my room, repeating his words of encouragement and comfort.
I now view these memories with kindness, gentle humor, and wisdom—giving the comfort of my newly discovered understanding first to the young girl that I was . . . and then to the young woman, the married woman, the mother. I know my parents were playing the roles I needed for my primary lesson in this lifetime—real love. The adjustment I have made is forgiveness to myself for judging them. This is my knowing that we are one. This is my believing in a purpose for every happening, a truth that I hear in Meher Baba’s words, “What had to happen has happened; and what has to happen will happen.”*
My realization is, “A change from judgment to understanding radiates its new effectiveness, like a pebble dropped in a pond.”
* Meher Baba, The Moving Finger Writes (Mastery in Servitude)( n.s.: Pioneer Press Decca, 1967) Part 2:
85-86.
* Carolyn McMakin, The Resonance Effect: How Frequency Specific Microcurrent Is Changing
Medicine (foreword by James L. Oschman), (Berkley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2017).
* Pat Schneider is the founder and director emerita of Amherst Writers & Artists (AWA).
www.amherstwriters.com; www.patschneider.com
* C. B. Purdom, The God-Man: The Life, Journeys and Work of Meher Baba with an
Interpretation of his Silence and Spiritual Teaching (North Myrtle Beach, SC: Sheriar
Foundation, 1964). Visit at: www.trustmeher.com/chennai/pearls.htm