The Weight of a Sparrow

All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.   ~ Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Pioneer family systems therapist Virginia Satir wrote that all of the thousands of troubled families she treated had the same four problems in common, and all of the comparatively few healthy family systems she encountered had the same four strengths. My experience has been similar, and I’ve learned that people who grew up in diseased and painful family systems will carry their family dis-ease with them for decades, passing it on to their children and grandchildren and beyond. When one thinks of “sin” as being missing the best possible mark and running afoul, the Biblical law of generational reaping makes more sense and one can see the sins of the father being passed on to the “second and third generation” as being more about a human infliction of pain than a divine one.

In a troubled family or system or group:

• Self-worth is low.
• Communication is indirect, vague, and not really honest.
• Rules are rigid, inhuman, nonnegotiable, and everlasting.
• The family’s link to society is fearful, placating, and blaming.

In a healthy or relatively untroubled family, system, or group:

• Self-worth is high.
• Communication is direct, clear, specific, and honest.
• Rules are flexible, human, appropriate, and subject to change.
• The link to society is open and hopeful, and is based on choice.

After many years of research into systems, we know for certain that any system can be changed, and that sick systems can become healthier. We know that it takes only one person in a sick system to change that system by becoming healthier. We know that all people in all families and in all groups and systems deal with the same types of relationship problems and have the same types of human needs. What we don’t know is the particular ways in which a particular family group missed the mark and hurt its dependent members. What we don’t know is how problems affected a particular child or how they will continue to affect a particular adult. What we don’t know is just how very long the problems and pains accrued in a problem family will continue to pain a person who has come out of that system. What we don’t know is the exact path to healing and wholeness for a particular person.

what is your worth?

One thing we know is that everyone has a feeling of worth, either negative or positive. The question is, which is it? If you stop for a moment and think about this, you’ll probably know the answer.

Sitting here at my keyboard, the landscape outside my window a beautiful, overcast, uniform daytime tawniness of golds, browns, and russets, I know that my worth is high. Today, my container is very full, and I feel very happy and blessed. I sense my own weight of worth, and it’s substantial. It’s substantial even when I think of the people who have caused me the most pain in my life. Even when I stand next to the beautiful young girl in line at Starbucks and realize that I am no longer beautiful and young, and even look downright house-wifey today, and that I’d like to lose five or ten pounds, and that I have wrinkles and am perceived by others as definitely getting older, I am as heavy with worth as gold bullion. I might be a stack of gold bullion. You might need a forklift to move me. This is my sense of self worth: it’s great.

But my self worth hasn’t always been substantial. There were times in my life when I’m not sure that I even had a penny’s worth. There are times when, riding down the road, I might have rolled down the window and thrown out five or seven red copper pennies, and seen them bounce against the asphalt and into the weed-filled ditch and thought I was worth no more than those pennies, thrown to the wind. I might have been cast away just like that, seen by no one except that white hand, casting me to the wind, found by no one. Wanted by no one. Like a penny you’re not sure you’ll stoop to pick up.

I have written about this before, and each time I’ve written about it, I’ve been attacked for it. One time I wrote quite a long article about this for an on-line community I was paid to moderate, and later that article turned up in a court of law in which I was an expert witness, trying to help a birth mother get her baby back when slick, adoptive parent attorneys legally stole her baby from her. As her too-full breasts ached with breast milk, I watched them steal her baby legally and when I tried to do something about it, they said I was crazy because I over-identified with her infant because I myself had been an unwanted baby. Only a crazy someone, they said, would fight to give a baby back to a single, overweight, unemployed mother. Only a fruit cake would be unable to see that two wealthy East Coast attorneys would be better parents to her baby.

That was the first time.

The second time was when I wrote about it here on this blog, and said that I had never felt at home or welcome in my mother’s arms, and some drive-by adoptees came here to read something else I’d written, and poked around and read more and concluded that I was crazy, and that I was a crap mother to my adopted children, and that I had been unwanted and so had tried to heal my own orphanhood by adopting unwanted orphans myself. That I would never understand my adopted children. That only adoptees Know The Truth About Abandonment. And that nobody else can know.

What they meant, or what I think they meant, was that my own mother had not wanted me, and therefore I was Unwanted. My own children also found me Unwanted, just as these adoptees found me Unwanted. In my very essence, I was the epitome of Unwantedness. I was crap.

Their words reminded me of the zombie movies I’ve been watching with my 16-year-old son, who is an expert on surviving zombie attacks and zombie invasions. These zombies bite you wherever they can, and they bite and hold on, tearing flesh, sinew, muscle, tendon. They will put their mouths in your abdomen and eviscerate you, and gnaw on your intestines while you’re still alive. They’re dead, but they need life to sustain them, so they attack others until everyone is similarly dead. Then you all shuffle around together, zombies. This is what it seemed like to me.

bam! you didn’t see it coming

My words about my own orphanhood pushed buttons in others, and then they pushed buttons in me. The button-pushing is what Jung called a complex, a set of emotional charges that go off whenever a certain spot is touched. It’s like a land mine, or a booby trap, or a trip wire in a movie like the ones guys like to watch: the hunter, and the hunted. The watcher, and the watched. The sneaky and the sneaked-upon.

BAM!

You didn’t see it coming.

I tripped over a trip wire, and fell headlong into my own past. This was a past that began badly. I’m not sure I want or need to go into specifics, and there’s nothing all that dramatic about my own beginnings, but suffice to say that to this very day, my mother is the last person I would call if I needed real help. If I needed someone whose presence or spirit would uphold or support me in a time of crisis, weakness, or need, I wouldn’t call my mother. Nor would I call my father, although I’d think about calling him. He, after all, still calls me “sugar.” I would sit on his lap right now, and he would welcome me. I love my father, and he loves me.

But.

He married my mother, and so the two of them are in it together. And back when it all started, the two of them together, it didn’t start well. Initially, there was no blessing on either side, from either set of parents, for their union. But a child-me-was in the middle. An unplanned, unwanted one coming at the wrong time, in the wrong circumstance, of the wrong gender and the wrong temperament. Nearly aborted (I know that drill), exiting early from a hostile womb, its bulge hidden by my mother so that Nobody Would Know the Truth (this is how my life began), and then months in an incubator, my Eyes Taped Shut. No mother to hold me. No breast milk. Army nurses in a time when I should have died, but didn’t. When a priest came to baptize me and my parents refused. When my mother (the same one who tried to expel me from her womb) says she saw a Being who said to her, “the child will not die, but live” and so my life had a Very Special Call on it.

So, let the crazy-making begin, for people whose lives have a Very Special Call ought to be treated Very Special, eh? And when they are not, then there’s a lie in there somewhere. And because infants and children cannot possibly impute wrong to a parent, the wrong accrues to the child. And this is one way in which a child comes to believe that she is worth not only less than other children, but worth less than nothing. Less than nothing, because if you cause pain and discomfort in your own parent, then your very existence is a deficit to that parent, and thus to the universe. You are worth less. They make sure you learn the math in a million ways.

This is quite a hole to climb out of, as many of you must know.

the weight of a sparrow

What is your feeling of worth today? What was it yesterday, last week, last month, last year? Does it fluctuate? Does it generally go up? Do you see a steady increase? Did it start high, do you think? What do you feel?

Your immediate, knee-jerk reaction to these questions, and your truthful, reality-based reaction may differ. Objects may appear smaller in the mirror. But this is where you begin, with that question: what is your worth?

My answer is, I am worth much. I am worth my weight in gold bullion, or maybe the weight of the universe (sometimes). I am worth as much as anyone, and as little as anyone.

I am worth the weight of God. I’m worth the weight of a sparrow.