## I have been nominated for the Gratitude Challenge by the lovely @trucklife-family, who is one of my most favorite people on all of steemit. If you haven’t checked out her posts, you are absolutely missing out. She is an incredibly heart-filled, loving mama who is all about encouraging us to love and appreciate ourselves and our amazing, beautiful bodies. Yes, I’m going to keep that paragraph for all seven days!
### I grew up in a very traditional, mainstream, conservative, religious family in the southeastern United States. It has been a long journey to here.
# On Day 7 of the #7daypositivitychallenge, I am so glad for the winds of change, growth, evolution, little whispers in my ear, etc.
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### Let me begin with my assurances that I don’t inherently have issues with those living as I grew up. There are a few things I will speak up about, but for the most part I know y’all to be good people because I know my parents to be good people, and I know how many of my friends and their families are also good people. I remember how much nicer people were before the mainstream media started pushing us to hate one another.
All that said, I am so grateful for who I am today and also for the extraordinary journey I have taken. I just want to talk a little about some of my favorite and most powerful changes, what inspired me to shift, and in some cases how those shifts interact with my “old world.”
The truth is we all change. There are those who say, “If it was good enough for me, then it’s good enough for little Johnny.” This can refer to anything from spanking to peanut butter sandwiches. I think that’s a ridiculous reason to do anything, and it is almost always either laziness or resentment. I read an incredible parenting book long, long ago that said we get angry at our children most often because they are doing something we weren’t allowed to do when we were kids. We resent them having more opportunity or freedom than we did. As soon as we realize that and how silly it is, we can remember to do better. Again, there is no doubt that we all change. We all do things at least a little differently than our parents did.
## Raising babies
Clearly, I have to talk about the parenting shifts. My parents were actually pretty forward for the time. My mother did natural childbirth at a time when there was only one hospital in the entire state of South Carolina that would allow fathers in the delivery room. I always wore cloth diapers, and I went to a montessori school for the first year of kindergarten. My mother was (still is, really) fiercely passionate about her children. She protected me and fought for me when the situation warranted.
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That said, she was still a good bit old school. Pretty young, I determined I was not a fan of spanking and that I would never do it. As I got older and read more, I committed to not putting hands on kids in that way. In my college years I dated a guy who had a young daughter, and she always slept in the bed with him. I was sort of shocked. I wasn’t even allowed in my parents room at night. He convinced me pretty quickly of both the safety and the benefits. They had also birthed at a birthing center, again a totally revolutionary concept for me. He may as well have told me they birthed on a spaceship. I liked the idea of it, but I wasn’t totally sold on that yet. Then I came to Belize. Everyone here sleeps with their children. People would consider it weird not to. While most everyone now births in the hospitals, when I first came, home birth was still common and, until very recently, the norm. People here are very suspicious of the medical and pharmaceutical industries. Hey! Me too!
Once I got pregnant the first time, I was already committed to a home birth, cloth diapers, breastfeeding, and cosleeping. I had just learned about water birth and figured that was the coolest thing since sliced bread. Deciding not to circumcise was a no brainer. I then started reading a lot about attachment parenting. I learned about positive discipline, bed sharing, baby wearing, and most importantly the incredible benefits of a deep attachment to my children.
Other than my adamant refusal to vaccinate and, oddly, circumcision (I still don’t understand why people are opposed to me not chopping a chunk of skin from my boys’ penises!), everyone pretty much sighed and shook their heads but left me alone. Until …
### School time!! Dun, dun, dunnnnnn!
Boy, everyone has an opinion on this one. This is one of the most controversial moves I ever made, but I am so glad for it. I started out geared toward homeschooling. Then I met an amazing mama and shifted to unschooling. Then I had a kid who really, really wanted to go to school, so we started a Sudbury school. I was a part of an incredible international community through Sudbury and had so much support and learned so many things and experienced such a revolution in my ideas about learning and freedom.
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So, why am I so glad for this tremendous shift from a girl who went through 17 years of very traditional schooling to a mom who gives her children the freedom to decide what and where they learn at every turn? Why am I so glad that I went from a very authoritarian mother to being a co-creating, peaceful/attachment parenting mom with kids on my bed and on my body a lot of the time? I am so glad for this because I have spent the last 20 years with my children. I have made raising them my top priority. I have only taken jobs that allowed me the freedom to spend the majority, if not all, of my time with them. They have been loved and held and free and wild, and we all have heads full of memories. We were poor in almost all those memories, but that’s ok. They are growing into absolutely stunning adults. I am seeing the proof in the pudding, and I am so glad we have spent this time together and that I did things the way I did.
## A spiritual journey to hither and yon
I grew up in the Baptist church. I went to vacation bible school and church camp. I went to Sunday School and church every Sunday unless I was at my dad’s for the weekend. I went to many hundreds of Wednesday night youth groups. My mom was pretty serious about all of it, and for quite some time I was too. We moved to Indianapolis, and there was only one Southern Baptist church, and it was quite far, so we switched to Methodist. It was a little too woo woo for my mom, but she made it work.
Like many teenagers, it all fell apart for me slowly but surely. I was tutoring my pastor’s son and discovered his father was abusing him. I began seeing other hypocrisy in the church and in the larger world. I saw a lot of people talking religion while totally neglecting pretty much the entirety of the teachings of Christ. Then I was raped and ended up pregnant. My parents didn’t know. At six weeks pregnant, I had a miscarriage. The next day I went to church just like every other Sunday, and the pastor (the one who was beating his children) was railing with this hellfire and brimstone sermon, and that was it. I was done. My parents switched to another church, and I liked that pastor and would occasionally go with them, but I was done with God and all his people. I pretty well became agnostic. Losing one of my favorite teachers to cancer and one of my friends to suicide drove it in deeper. Then I saw a friend get struck by lightning and killed during a service trip to Bolivia, and that was the nail in the coffin. God was an asshole.
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**This picture cracks me up. God looks a little crazed.**
### Then I came to Belize.
I met a bunch of beautiful Rastas who had a different vision of God. They were happy and playful all the time. They loved a God who was pretty much the same - loving and joyful. They danced and sang often, and that was all a part of their vision of God. They believed God commanded them to live close to the earth, put nourishing food in their bodies, and maintain close bonds with their families and friends. The music reflected those values with a happy and sensual beat. The core beat of all Reggae music is the heartbeat. I had loved Reggae for many years, but I had never been immersed in Rasta culture. God was loving again, like the Jesus of my childhood. I fell in love with God again, and it was such a relief.
After coming back to the states, I started a process of spiritual tradition shopping. I wasn’t really a Rasta, and I was still pretty burned on Christianity. I started getting into some metaphysical and mystical teachings. I dipped a bit into Buddhism. I found meditation and Yoga. I was sure I could feel God. I was sure I could see the presence of God. I understood that miracles were happening all around me every day. Especially when I gave birth to my children, I stopped doubting the presence. I just couldn’t figure out how to connect to God. I liked parts of Buddhism, but there was something that really turned me off. It felt too detached for me. I needed a path that was a little more in the physical world.
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I stayed for quite some time in the metaphysical tradition within the Science of Mind churches. I talked a lot about them in my recent post on transitioning out of victimhood through the evolution of to me, by me, through me, as me. It was a beautiful and expansive time for me. My children were well nourished in the church, and I had a lot of like minded friends, but something was still missing. I had learned a lot, but it was still a one way street. Information coming to me. I needed something that was more of an interchange, something more interactive. That was when I found a weekly circle that was based in a couple different native spiritual traditions. We shared with one another as a circle. I was blessed to be a part of pipe ceremonies, sweat lodges, and do a vision quest. I was gifted my own drum and was even a pipe carrier for a while. It was a new kind of richness where I was learning to connect with God through my own heart and also the heart of my community.
Finally it came full circle when I made a friend who had a similar path. She had been raised in the Pentecostal church and left when they told her she could not be a deacon because she was 12 and also because she was a girl. Together we walked in rivers in the mountains of North Carolina and sang. We made peace with Christianity by singing old hymns and songs from church camp, letting the water of the river wash away the poison of institutionalized religion. The teachings of the Christ were beautiful beyond measure. It was hardly his fault they got twisted. So here I sit in mostly mystical Christianity, absolutely delighted with people like St. Theresa.
***Not Yet Tickled***
*How did those priests ever get so serious*
*And preach all that*
*Gloom?*
*I don’t think God*
*Tickled them*
*Yet.*
*Beloved - hurry.*
I found Unity churches where Christianity meets metaphysics. It’s the perfect mix for me. I could ground in the faith of my childhood in a way that felt good to me. Of course there’s none of that here in Belize, so I’m sort of waiting for the next step. It feels like things are shifting, like there’s something somehow unfolding. I’m digging deeper into my mystic poetry book. I am feeling a strong desire to spend chunks of time alone and immersed in my own process. Is becoming a sea witch a spiritual tradition?
## Uncle Bruce, are you a hippie? This question I asked, as a small child, of my favorite uncle. He told me it was all he had ever wanted to be.
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**To be clear, I was never quite this cool. Look at those glasses!!**
In kindergarten, we were asked on election day who we wanted to vote for. It was November of 1980. There were three choices - Carter, Reagan, and My Dad. I scoffed that anyone thought they could vote for their dad. I was much too smart for that. So I tell you with great sadness that I cast my vote for Ronnie. I’m not proud of it. Carter is now one of my biggest heroes, but my mom was a Reagan supporter, so I was too. Well, it didn’t take me long to figure out he was a dick, though I was well into adulthood before I realized just how much of a dick. Then the elder Bush and his first Gulf War when I was in high school. I had drifted slowly into the left lane.
Like I said, my childhood was pretty mainstream. My parents made decent money, and I went to movies and the mall and all the things mainstream teens do, but I was becoming discontented. I went to an inner city high school, and I saw some pretty profound inequality in schools and in neighborhoods. I started getting involved in a couple social movements. I read some powerful books like *Johnny Got his Gun.* I was radically changed by a competition class I took with my favorite teacher about the Bill of Rights. I saw a similar hypocrisy in government as I had seen in religion.
I did become a hippie, I suppose, whatever that really means. I followed the Grateful Dead and Phish all around. I took a lot of drugs. Does that count? In all honesty, I found something within that culture that spoke to me more deeply than you might imagine if you were never blessed to be a part of it. I found community. I found people who thought like me and loved like me. We cared for each other and looked out for each other. I was actually incredibly shocked the first time I went because I genuinely didn’t imagine there were that many people who clearly shared a lot of my values. Of course it had its dark elements, but it was surely the first place I found community. Without question, that was when I left the mainstream.
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Of course it’s all tied together. It was around this time I was introduced to home birth and bed sharing and then to Rastas and mysticism. All these things are really connected in that thread of leaving the mainstream. I wasn’t really a hippie. None of us are really these names we call each other, but I knew what Uncle Bruce meant. He meant that we stand up for one another, for our families and our communities, that we love and give with our whole heart and that nothing can be more important than that.
I have spoken many times about how Belize shifted me politically and socially. Seeing all the consequences of US foreign policy and the dirty rotten World Bank moved me to another level of activism. It was no longer enough to just have the government protect the marginalized. I realized we needed to totally dismantle the structures upholding racism, sexism, and capitalism and eventually I realized government itself also belonged on that list.
From 5 year old mainstream Republican to 43 year old anarchist mystic mama. It’s been quite a journey, and I don’t know how it will go next, but I know that these changes and evolutions in my life and my heart are among my deepest gratitudes because I am so profoundly glad to be who I am right now. I hope you find yourself open to changes in your own heart and keep following the quiet whispers.
This has been an amazing challenge and just what I needed to help me shift to what’s next.
**Much love, y’all!**
***As always, all pics are mine or pixabay unless otherwise noted.***
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