Sort of tired of talking about the past, and reading about how to resolve it, and thinking about it, and even talking about it sometimes. I need to come back to the present, plant my feet firmly in the soil of now. But maybe one last foray into my history or maybe I should call it herstory.
My brother Me, 16 My grandmother’s home
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My grandfather My son and I My mother
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My father Me , about 1 Me, 17
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My husband and me
This might be a funny thing to say but I married my mother… my husband has many of the characteristics that my mother had, perfectionism, OCD, not very complimentary, not showing love very well outwardly, but dependable to the millionth degree, and physically present and to be relied upon everyday of my life. I may have chosen my husband because subconsciously he reminded me of my mother, (and no abuse of any kind from my husband!) And even though I knew she had abused me, I also knew she had never abandoned me, so I knew I could rely on her to take care of me, when she wasn’t pummeling me that is… haha… and that stopped when I was 14. So I chose someone who reminded me of my mother, personality wise, because I knew I wouldn’t be abandoned. Hmmm, pretty smart of my psyche.
I did not choose someone like my father. My father was incredibly handsome, incredibly! He had these beautiful mesmerizing, light colored eyes. He was very intelligent and charming, and talked about anything and everything! But a good father he was not. He did not know how to relate to people of the female gender in any other way than flirting. And this included me. I remember him being flirtatious, and also mean.(He had affairs, came home drunk and did not have a job, my mother supported all of us with her salary as an OB/GYN resident. He was at least verbally abusive to my mother and physically abused me on occasion.) Once when I was about 5 years old, I’d swallowed an orange seed. He started telling me, in a horrified voice, that now trees were going to grow out of my ears and nose and mouth. Of course, believing him, I was horrified, and started crying. He just kept up with this story, laughing all the time at my distress. My mother was there also, and I remember she was giving him dirty looks, but he didn’t stop. Another memory I have of him is my brother and I, I was 5 years old and my brother was less than 1 years old, standing in a courtroom with my mother, at their divorce proceedings. He was looking at me and winking and smiling and my mother was throwing all the jewelry his mother had given me and her on a table. He had demanded my mother give him all the jewelry that his mother had given her, and for that my mother could keep us children. So he basically sold my brother and me to my mother for all the gold (quite a bit) that his mother had given to my mom and to me. And while he was smiling and winking at me, he wasn’t thinking of the effect it would have on me of him walking out of the courtroom and out of my life. Yes, that was the last time I saw him until I was 40, a total of 35 years, and then it was I who looked him up and went to meet him in Karachi. And yes, it isn’t lost on me that if I hadn’t looked him up, he would never have made the effort. I met him and one of his sons from his second marriage and his second wife.They were both very nice people, and I keep in touch with my half brother a little, I used to when I lived in Buffalo.
He seemed to be very loving to me and my son (who came with me) but even then when I saw him after 35 years, he told me this story: His wife was pregnant with their 4th child. They had had 3 boys. So he went down on his knees and prayed and prayed to god to let him have a daughter. Ouch diss! There I was, his first daughter, that he had so completely abandoned that he didn’t even think I was his daughter anymore. Well he got his wish, he had his daughter. And he failed to think of me and my brother ever. His wife and son told me that after my mother left with us children, he went into a severe depression. I marveled at the fact that they actually wanted me to feel sorry for him. And I actually did. I felt sorry for all of us, the humongous mess that both my parents had made of our lives.
My father was the scion of a very wealthy family from Bhopal, related to the Nawab (Duke) of Bhopal. He was the youngest child and was basically raised by his eldest sister and spoiled rotten beyond belief.
My mother was the most beautiful daughter of a very wealthy family in Sheikhupur, in northern India. They owned 1000’s of acres of land and were extremely wealthy landowners. She was her father’s favorite, and therefore, also extremely spoiled. My grandfather was the first person in his family to go to college, he became a lawyer, then a Magistrate, and then the Deputy Tax Collector in Queen Victoria’s government. He also had very liberal views and believed in educating his daughters as well as his sons. So he sent my mother to Medical School in Bhopal. Which is where my father was trolling the girls’ dormitories for pretty girls. He saw my mother and apparently it was love at first sight. They sang together in competitions, they were in plays together, etc. etc. Eventually they got married and I was born. My grandmother, my aunts and uncles took me to Pakistan with them in August 1960, I was 2 months old. They kept me for the first two years of my life, while my mother finished her medical school. Then my parents came to Pakistan and took me back and the fireworks began. My brother was born in 1964.
What started out with attraction and, seemingly, love, how did it go so horribly wrong? And so I sit here, trying to unravel the mess that my parents made 55 years ago.
So anyway, I didn’t choose someone like my father to marry, at least that was sort of smart on my part. I did not choose gorgeous light colored eyes, charming, smiling, outgoing, amazingly intelligent. That was what I had been abandoned by, why would I choose that? I’ve met people like that, and my subconscious somehow picks up on their traits, or at least thinks it does and sometimes I feel I have issues to resolve with them, but it is not with these particular people that I have issues, the issues are those I had with my father.
I have really forgiven my mother, now I must work on forgiving my father for abandoning me. It’s difficult to accept that all you ever were was just collateral damage from your parents wars and problems. I seem never to have had any importance for my own sake and being.
I wonder sometimes, what I would have been like if I’d grown up in a relatively normal family.
But now I have to stop. I have to go on with my life. Forgive, forget. Move forward. Do something, get a job, get a PhD, do something to stay busy. That’s my advice to my self. And of course keep writing my Blog. I love doing it and sometimes, it is very therapeutic!
Beautiful American
Yoga, Sufism, Buddhism, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Christ teach about love. All these great philosophies and teachers say there are only two ways to live our lives. One is in fear of everything, the other is in love of everything. I think everyone understands what living in fear means, but not everyone knows what I mean by living in love of everything. So I’ll explain. It’s not just romantic love, although that’s included of course. But what I am talking about here is “out of love.” Your heart is full of love for all beings, and all things. Even when you encounter something “bad,” you act out of the love in your heart. You never say to a child who is unhappy, perhaps needlessly according to you, “If you don’t stop, I’ll really give you something to cry about.” You act with the love in your heart and try to make things better for this child, for your friends, your neighbors, dare I say the world. Living in fear, in avarice, in lack has brought us to where we are at this stage in the world’s life. Living in fear. Not living in love, or gratitude, or inner peace or the sense of having enough. Living in fear. If this happens, I will die. If this doesn’t happen, I will die, this is fear. I’ll be fine no matter what happens: Love! Love for yourself, love and trust, not fear. 
So, I have met the demons from my life and faced them square on. I have learnt about my inner child, about reparenting, about basically getting over my PTSD from the past, and about desensitizing my fight or flight response, basically about moving on and living my life in a happy, enjoyable, productive way. When one has been through trauma like I have, one’s fight or flight response is activated by things that a normal person’s would never be. Normally, a fight or flight response is elicited when someone is in mortal danger, such as if a lion is about to sink its teeth into them. People like me, who’ve had trauma as children, and who have lived in conditions that seemed like life or death to a child, well our fight or flight is elicited by much less serious occurrences. We react to much less severe things like someone else would to life threatening things. The thing to do for us is to desensitize our fight or flight. So we don’t try to use a bazooka to kill a fly, we need to calm down and remember we have a fly swatter! Basically, I need to calm down, meditation, yoga, exercise, music, “talking to my inner child”, whatever it takes to not get the bazooka out unless I really am faced with a lion. And even then, I, the real me, would hate to kill a lion. Oooops, I’m rambling, but I hope you know what I mean 🙂
