When does this really become a gift?

"The Clown"

She grabbed one of her old journals and ran to the other room, planting herself in the big red chair.

She had picked this one spontaneously, at random, and flipped open to a page with big handwriting, the way she used to write before becoming an angst filled teenager, who scrawled in small and smaller script, demonstrating how small and useless she felt at times.

The page she opened to told her what she was noticing when she had visited her older sister in Canada the summer before high school.

It read: "Mia and Aaron had a fight earlier. She is very vulnerable and he manipulates her. Now they are gone and I am alone in the cabin. There is an atmosphere of hurt all around the space."

Looking back at what she wrote, she was struck by the fact that this was basically written by a child.
She was hardly 13 when she started to write about this sort of scene. No wonder she had not enjoyed being young, she was unwittingly analyzing and taking on the emotions and dysfunction of the adults around her. She had no real defenses, and no way at the time to explain how sensitive she was.

There was one defense she did develop, and this simply came very naturally to her, and she did not analyze why. She became a high energy, center of attention, clown! She developed skills to make her family laugh, essentially breaking tensions, and putting the focus on her, which was not exactly ideal for her but it allowed the energies swirling around that disturbed her to have a focal point.

While she was the focal point, all the ugliness could temporarily fall to the wayside. Of course, this was a highly flawed method which often failed, but at the time, with limited resources, it was pretty much all she had.

"The Sea of Ten Million Lights"

That trip in some ways had been a disaster. The best part by far was when she followed the path down, away from the cabin to the beach, where on certain nights there was a phosphorescent tide. Nobody seemed to be keeping track of her, not her sister, not any of the adults around.

After she found the beach and took in the moonlight and the waves kissing the shore, she slipped out of her clothes and entered the sea water, walking in deep enough so she could float about, every swing of her arm or leg creating a shower of tiny little lights from her movements. How beautiful those moments were, she would never forget them. In that time, she was swimming in pure magic. She had not yet had explained to her what caused those tiny points of light and while she was in it, she did not care.

Another beautiful moment was when she was allowed to hold the baby, her sweet new to the world nephew. She held him in her arms and walked just a bit into the woods where the hammock was. She got them both comfortably held by the hammock, and began to sing to him. His tears and vocalizations quieted down as he fell asleep while she rocked him and sang, in quiet, peaceful tones.

to be continued.....