On Being Authentically Me

My son John has deemed me an “armchair psychologist.” I’d be offended by this declaration if he was not speaking the truth. Over the course of the past years, I have culled a terrific amount of information about what makes people tick and how the human condition is often informed by the experiences we have as children. 

I had been in talk therapy with a professional--for a long time-- and engaged in near-daily vent sessions with my best buds and have for years. I have listened to podcasts, read books and magazine articles, and even did a group study at my sister's church 20 years ago to  make “peace with my past.”

I tried damn near everything to cure myself of my general mental malaise. I tried societal band-aids like church and mom-to-mom groups. I tried meditation and wound up losing my focus to mind wandering while trying to ardently maintain the “criss-cross applesauce” pose. I found myself playing with the cool, smooth mala beads and imagining what a pretty necklace it would make. I tried ignoring my feelings, feeding my feelings, medicating my miserable mind, making gratitude journals, reciting mantras and so much other shit, I cannot even remember all of it. If I am being honest with myself, most of what I did wasn’t to heal my damage, it was merely to conceal it.

As a working mom and wife, I found myself trying to be what I thought I should be as opposed to accepting who I truly was. (Which, to be fair, was never something I was taught to embrace. No little girl is raised to be more of who she is. She is raised to be more of what society needs her to be.) At roughly 40 years of age, the masquerade of being “me” was burying me mentally and emotionally. Not only was I not who I was trying to be, I literally had no idea who I really was. 

Well, fuck. If I wasn’t who I was trying to be and, I wasn’t who I thought I should be and, I felt lost in all the places I literally found myself…then…now what?!?!

I had a choice. Continue to hide or, seek. The hiding was killing me, it was straining relationships, it was making me feel crazy and self-destruction loomed on the horizon like an atom bomb waiting to implode my whole existence. I realized I had to stop trying to conceal the root cause of my pain and instead, make every effort to unbury it.

There’s a saying about trying to fix a gushing flesh wound with a small band-aid or something like that. It basically speaks to trying to fix an enormous problem with a ridiculously ineffective solution. I liken this time in my life to me stopping the application of all these itty bitty band-aids to my huge, sucking flesh wound and making the terrifying and brave choice to find the fucking cause of the massive, life-threatening bleed. That choice proved to hurt like a mother fucker but, it did what I needed it to. It revealed my truest, most authentic self.

I hated going to my therapist about the first 15 times. I hated looking at this total stranger and admitting I was a fucking mess from head to toe. (I mean, it’s one thing to know it and another to share it with someone you don’t even know and then give them half of a car payment a week.) I don’t even remember how I started that interaction with her. “Hi, I am a fucking mess. So, um, now what?” All I know is that I couldn’t get out of that hot seat fast enough and I dreaded having to be back in it.

After a few months, the dread lessened. My therapist was one that would assign me “homework”. I would arrive in the parking lot and snatch the papers she had given me the week prior and earnestly walk through the lobby eager to share my progress. Sometimes I would have whole hours that felt like eternity and other times I would see her nod to the basic black-and-white clock on the wall and stifle the urge to scream “NOOOOOOOO! I am not done yet! Please, ma’am! May I have some more?”

I shed oceans of tears in that office. I choked down vats of humble pie as she schooled me on the starring role I played in my own suffering. I trembled and shook through sharing events from my childhood, my past, and my present and I learned that I wasn’t to blame for any of what happened to me (as a child, specifically) but, I certainly was responsible for all of the repairs to the damage that had been done. I also learned that left unexposed and unmended, my damage was damaging so many others.

Therapy helped me to truly accept this and to confront it head-on. My further work outside of that office cemented my total commitment to further unearthing my authentic self. I made a pact to continue to reveal (face the trauma) and heal (take the power back from the trauma.) 

I learned that the damage done to me was collateral damage. The concept of “hurt people, hurt people” was never clearer to me than when I processed how the hurt inflicted upon my parents was now doing damage to their children. I embraced that I could actually do better, be better not just pretend to do and be better. I learned that I had a right to be furious with them, a right to be disappointed, and most importantly, a right to be…the person that ultimately stopped the cycle. I decided that I was not doomed by my upbringing but was blessed with an opportunity to make sure the injuries ended with me.

My mom--who is my hero--often tells stories about her youth and tempers them with the expression “Well, we didn’t know any better then.” That was an addendum to her stories that used to be lost on me until I became more aware of the business of life. When you don’t know any better, you really can’t do any better. But, when you do know better, you fucking have to do better or, face that you are actively making shitty choices to do shitty things. 

For a big part of my life, I perpetuated the “values'' and “rules” my parents instilled in me and misled my children with those uninformed, rigid, and pointless "values" and "rules". I actively hurt my four precious sons because I refused to dig deeper into why I believed what I believed. There were so many times I laid down unbendable laws and demanded certain behaviors or punished them for things and would later feel this overwhelming feeling of guilt and self-loathing and sob and hate myself. If this was the “right” way to parent my kids, why did I feel so horribly?

One of the things I did was force my children to attend Catechism. I hated Catechism as a child but, damnit, I had to do it so I could be the best person (Catholic) I could be and please my miserable, reverent Catholic parents. Well, of course, I would make my beautiful boys endure this misery so that they could be the best people (Catholics) they could be. I signed the papers, told my sweet kids to shut the fuck up and drink the Kool-aid, and figured this was a necessary part of the whole parent trap.

Little did I fucking know or, believe, that it was in fact a fucking choice to send my kids there. It wasn’t the law. The Pope wasn’t going to come cruising down I-96 in his bulletproof Popemobile and take me to the Colosseum for disembowelment if I didn’t send my kids to those shitty, weekly brainwashing meetings.

I just really believed I had to. Until…I was faced with watching my parents try to convince me that shaming my children’s sexuality was ok.

My parents were at our house one evening when my oldest son came into the room and shared that we had to fill out some bullshit sex ed homework from Catechism. He and I had watched the Priest and Nun-led sex education video and frankly, we laughed through most of it because A) two celibate people schooling us in sex seemed dumb as fuck, and B) The music and setting were quite accidentally comedic. 

He had already done sex ed at his public school and we had had “the talk” at home. I had made a commitment to be very body-positive and sex-positive with my kids from the time they could find their penises. They knew their body parts by their scientific name and we didn’t treat them as filthy or shameful. My boys knew that those parts were private and if they wanted to touch themselves, they needn’t subject an audience to it. I did not want them to feel the shame I had for liking the feeling of sexual pleasure in appropriate, safe, and healthy expression.

This particular evening, when Andrew was talking openly about the sex ed tape, I voiced my disgust with the Catholic doctrine. I know it was specifically because of how much they laud sex for procreation only. It infuriated me! My father adamantly voiced that “they” were right. He passionately commanded that I accept that “they” knew what was best. This triggered the ever-living fuck out of me. 

As a woman raised by a misogynistic, Roman Catholic poser (he was one of those, “do as I say, not as I do” believers) I carried so much guilt and shame for enjoying sexual pleasure as a woman that many times in the first years of my marriage I would sob in the bathroom after sex with my husband, who, for the record, never did anything to make me feel like I deserved to be shamed or guilted. 

Add to it, that by virtue of having been born with female gonads, my father often called me and my older sisters, “sluts, whores, and bitches.” The first time he referred to me in that manner I was five years old. I was sitting at the kitchen table eating waffles before school. My mom had left earlier for her crossing guard job, leaving my out-of-work, disabled father in charge of me. This emasculated him so deeply, being left to care for his own daughter, engulfed in his all encompassing deoression. that he let me know--and, boy was he in my face and damned near demonically enraged--that I, too, would grow up to be a filthy whore, just like my mother. I was newly five years old and had to go to my new school and my kindergarten class just moments later.

You can rightly assume that hearing him stand staunchly in the belief that sex was shameful and therefore it should be shameful to my son made the hair on my fucking neck stand up. He wagged his thick, calloused index finger at me and tried to rule my world and therefore my son’s world.

“Put your finger down, Dad. You look like an idiot and you're pissing me off.” (I was triggered, give me a break.) His bushy, black eyebrows raised like bold-faced parentheses on their sides. “Hey, Domenica.” He said threateningly. “You better watch your mouth.” He was sitting in an armchair and I was standing across the room. A room in my own houdse! I crinkled my own eyebrows in response and said “No. This is my house, old man. You don’t tell me what to do in my house. If you don’t like the way I am talking to you, get up and go.” I did not yell. I was firm. I held my own in spite of the burgeoning rage and anxiety charging up my chest.

“Andrew is a good kid. He was born without sin, innocent and perfect, Dad. Just like you. Just like me. I won’t have my son believe that sex is just to make babies. I don’t believe sex is just for making babies. In fact, Dad, I think sex is beautiful. Do you know that the Catholic doctrine forbids masturbation? It forbids people from celebrating their own bodies.” He looked truly confused. “Well…” he stammered. (Well is our parents' pat answer to everything they don’t have an answer to.) “No, Dad. No, well. No, excuses. I fundamentally disagree with it and I won’t condone that kind of control by a religious institution over my children's bodies. I respect your belief and you do what you want. I don’t have to do what you want anymore. You and mom raised us the way you wanted. Ray and I will raise our boys the way we want.”

My Dad backed down pretty fast. In retrospect, I realize it was because most importantly, I would continue to make Andrew and my three other sons go to the prison of Catechism and go through the motions of making their sacraments which somehow would help my Dad in his quest to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Ultimately, Andrew was the only one of my children to make all his sacraments. As I unburied my true self, I left the Catholic church and all of its Un Jesus-like bullshit behind me. I have several times apologized to all four of my perfect miracle babies for making them endure that. I explained to them that once I realized none of that was for my health and well-being or for theirs--and in fact, that I only “believed” that shit because I thought I had to--I did better. I did better because I finally fucking knew better.

This was among the first of many times I realized that I was not being who I was born to be. Who I authentically am. I think becoming a mom made me face how much of what I had wanted from my own parents. I became the person I needed as a kid to my own kids. I am still super imperfect and fuck up regularly. This is not some claim to be the greatest mom alive. I simply decided to love my boys the way I believe I should have been loved and that I believe everyone should be loved. Honestly, without shame, with healthy boundaries, and by admitting when you are wrong and not just saying you are sorry but, changing your behavior as well.

I may be farther along my journey of self-discovery than I have ever been but I’m keenly aware that my mindset and healing work will never be completely done. There are times I doubt myself, and times other people try to incite me to behaviors I no longer ascribe to or, even worse, try to shame me for being my authentic self.

Fuck those people. Twice. 

I know where I have been, what I have done, and who I have tried to be. I am now in the business of making sure that I like myself and am living in health, truth, respect, and authenticity. Of all the iterations of Domenica I've implored myself to be and burying and denying the beautiful human I was born to be…it turns out I actually like the person I sincerely am. 

 

No. I don’t just like her. I love her.