Childhood

Strength of the eternal Spirit (childhood, sickness and death)

/ sarahlissyjenkins / 3 Comments

I will be staying with my mother for a few days from early tomorrow until Wednesday afternoon. I feel very anxious about the visit for several reasons. It is always strange going back to the home I lived in for a brief time as a teenager; that is, before going to university and moving out for good. But this visit has extra complications and emotions attached. It will most likely be the last time I stay in that house, where my mother has lived for almost 30 years, because she needs to move somewhere without stairs. Her health is deteriorating due to heart failure and lung fibrosis, so I’m not sure how much worse she will be since I last visited in early February. I speak to her a lot on Facetime and we text, but such mediums are limited for knowing how someone really is. Also, Mum is stoic and independent to a fault, and thinks she’s protecting people by not giving them the full picture. It is hard to know quite how well or otherwise she is until I see her. She has relatives nearby but we’re not a close family, so I don’t get much information from them, even though they visit my mum regularly.

In addition, my sister is driving us all (my mum, me and my niece) to the grave of my other niece who died of cancer in 2019, age 34, both to leave flowers for her and to scatter my dad’s ashes (he died in 2015). To make this extra surreal and potentially painful, my niece’s grave is where my mum’s final resting place will be, when she succumbes to the heart failure. We will all be aware of it but of course it will be left as the great unspoken. How on Earth does one even begin to make conversation along the lines of ‘one day we will be visiting you here’? You just don’t. But it will be on everyone’s minds all the same.

I know my mum won’t really be in the grave, just as my niece isn’t, and my dad is not the ashes that we will be scattering. Wherever their spirits are/will be, they’re not part of the Earth, just as none of us alive today are our physical bodies and the dust they are made from. We are the spirits that inhabit them. When our body returns to Earth, so does our Spirit return to the place from which it came. I can’t begin to rationalise that because the mind cannot understand it. It is the ‘peace that passes all understanding.’ We cannot think about it logically, we just KNOW, with deeper wisdom, that this is the case; our Spirit is eternal consciousness and will fly free, as it is our true nature.

Remembering such truth is of course far more tricky while in the presence of your childhood family. Was it Ram Dass who once said ‘if you think you’re awakened, go spend a week with your parents?’ There’s so much wisdom in that statement. Our parents trigger us, remind us how far we have to go, as well as, positively, how far we have come. Throw in old age, sickness, and death, and that’s about as triggered as you can get.

I am ready to go. I hope it will be a positive, precious experience, and a reminder of the fragility of this Earthly life as well as the enduring power of Love.

I will be back. Thank you for reading. Many blessings x

/ sarahlissyjenkins / 2 Comments
Daily writing prompt
What are you good at?
View all responses

This is a weighted question for me. I would say, overall, I am good at being honest with myself, but that has a flip side. I am very self-aware, which is mainly a good thing, but without some discernment it is easy to fall into the trap of becoming too intimate with my faults. Seeing and learning from my faults is a good thing. Judging and criticising them is not. In fact, when I criticise myself I have succumed to the past conditioning which created an image of myself as worthless and a failure. The thoughts quickly turn into the familiar narrative of how it’s pointless trying because I’m so useless and before I know it I’m back there again – hurting.

But I can see it. And this is my gift.

As a child, I saw how people’s minds and emotions worked. I wrote stories about them. I had not developed a full self image at that point. I was in touch with my intuition. I wrote to God and made characters express the feelings that I was unable to. I didn’t think about or analyse anything, it just flowed from me like a river from Source. It was only after I was forced to change schools at age ten that it all went wrong. And of course, age ten is pretty pivotal in terms of ego development. I’m talking here of healthy ego or personality development, when we learn who we are in the world, what we like, what we want.

I started the new school a shell of the child I had been previously. I was scared due to what was happening at home and school was no longer a refuge. I was socially anxious and had been removed from everyone I knew. The kids didn’t know what to make of me. In typical kid-style, they took the mickey. A year later I started secondary school, still friendless. The bullying started. I had always been an introvert but now I was completely withdrawn and scared of people. So rather than developing a healthy personality, I saw myself as an idiot who nobody liked.

I have already written about the sadness around my writing when I started university so I won’t repeat it again. Suffice to say, I suffered a lot through school but writing became an outlet for my emotions and something I considered myself to be good at, until I lost faith in that too. But now, as an adult in my forties, I see and understand that writing was not something that belonged to me; instead it flowed from me, and it’s not something that can be lost, just like the essence of who I was as a child cannot be lost. In a way I have become full circle; I am integrating what the child in me knew with the maturity of age and the challenges I have faced, and realising that what I believed about myself at school was an illusion.

Self-awareness is a gift. Writing is my offering. It is my joy, my passion, and I still like to believe I am ‘good’ at it because that is something that matters to me. In writing, I understand my story, discern my faults, see where I am caught. In writing, I allow the beauty of Divine love to channel through me, remind me I am okay as I am. There is a balance. There is always a balance.

/ sarahlissyjenkins / 2 Comments
Daily writing prompt
Have you ever broken a bone?
View all responses

Yes, my right leg when I was a year old. How it happened is shrouded in mystery because, as with all my early childhood, no one openly talks about it. What my mother dripped into conversation over the years is that I slipped from her arms at the bottom of the stairs. I asked my oldest sister about it once, when I was about 11 years old and staying with her (which I hated; she didn’t want me there). She is 14 years older than me. In answer to my question, she said ‘What are you thinking about that for?’ making a clear point that I should not be thinking or talking about it. I took the hint and never mentioned it again.

I don’t believe that there is any sinister explanation for my broken leg. Rather, the secrecy around it is typical of the atmosphere I absorbed into my very being as a child, knowing that there were ‘things’ that were hinted at, dropped into the conversation, but I wasn’t allowed to ask about. Another example is when my mother asked my father to move out (after years of not wanting me to speak to him, despite us all living in the same house). My mother was complaining about him to me, something she always did (and continued to do until his death), so I wasn’t taking much notice as I hated it when she did that anyway, and she suddenly muttered under her breath ‘getting a divorce.’ I said ‘No!’ and she simply said ‘Yes, I can’t take anymore.’ And that was that. A few days later my father told me that my mother had asked him to move out. He asked me whether I wanted him to go. All I could say was ‘I don’t mind.’ Truly awful words. But such was the fear of speaking my truth in that household. Indeed, the fear of speaking.

I accept now that my mother was locked in so much pain and resentment towards my father, as well as suffering from mental illness, that she didn’t have the capacity to consider my feelings or let it occur to her that I had any at all. She dealt with things the way she has always done: packing them into boxes in her mind and carrying on. But she let them spill over when it suited her; mutterings under her breath, flashes of anger, comments like ‘the worst mistake of my life’ knowing I would see and hear them but, being the well behaved child I was, wouldn’t say a word. I suspect it was her way of reaching out, as strange as that sounds. She needed my companionship, wanted to express herself in the only way she knew how. She had no concept of my fear. And I was remarkably good at hiding it, being strong, moulding myself into the listening ear.

Returning to my broken leg, I’ll never know the truth, but I suspect she was at the top of the stairs when she dropped me and I tumbled down. These things happen. I don’t blame her for that. What I wish is that she could simply say ‘Oh yes, I dropped you, it was terrifying, you just fell.’ We could talk openly about it. But my guess is that she, too, was afraid. It was yet another thing she had to force away in the depths of her mind, lest it reflected badly on her. Mum has chronically low self esteem, the outcome of her own childhood. It so often is. The irony is that if she could have come out of her shell and dealt with her own pain, we’d have both been okay. But isn’t that the epitome of the human journey?

I know this post paints my mother in a terrible light. She is actually a very sensitive, caring, intelligent woman, and we get on well now, within reason (she still doesn’t do emotions). Her mental illness has passed. Her physical health is not good. I have healed a lot of my emotional pain. I have found acceptance. We relate as adults. We never talk about the past. Maybe in that way we will remain as we always were. But we talk more openly and freely about our lives now, today, and I can be thankful for that.

Remembering the creative Divine spark

/ sarahlissyjenkins / 5 Comments

As I was growing up I knew I was going to be someone great. I felt it deep in my heart. I was going to be a world famous Tv actress, or a writer. For a small child I had some pretty big plans. I was going to audition for RADA. I was going to journalism college. I was going to write a novel. I had no one to encourage me but I felt it deep in my being. I wrote pages upon pages of stories. Creativity was my lifeblood. I was determined to express myself doing what I loved.

Acting was the first thing I lost. I enrolled on an A-level in Theatre Studies at sixth form college. Not long after starting the course I realised that I wasn’t really very good. I suffered from severe social anxiety as a result of my home and school lives. My dramatic monologues paled in comparison to others. The teacher didn’t seem to like me and gave me no suggestions on how to improve. I started dropping out and eventually spoke to my personal tutor about giving up the course. I told him that I wasn’t doing very well. Even as I spoke the words I hoped he would say ‘That’s no reason to give up’ or ‘We can work on that’ but he agreed and I left the course.

When I started university two years later someone set up a drama society and I went along to the first meeting despite myself. I still had the spark of longing. But I couldn’t bring myself to join. All I could feel was the terror of making an idiot of myself. I feared everyone laughing at me, as kids had through school. Until Theatre Studies, I’d clung onto my love of drama and writing, my passion for creativity, believing that would see me through everything. Until it didn’t work anymore.

Things got worse. I took a creative writing module as part of my English degree and suddenly my writing was torn apart and criticised. I know this is par the course, but I didn’t have the resilience to manage it. Even worse, the students in my group showed far greater ability and got higher grades than I did. And truly, writing at that time was terrible. I was trying to come to terms with my childhood and being away from home and my heart was in darkness. Writing was no longer a refuge. Like acting, it seemed to prove that everything I had loved as a child was built on a lie, that in fact I was NOT GOOD ENOUGH. It was my deepest fear confirmed: I was actually a stupid girl who once thought she was great. What an idiot I had been!

Those beliefs sent me into a deep depression for many years. I still battle with them sometimes, especially when starting something new. I attempted a creative writing workshop a few years ago but almost immediately I realised I couldn’t match the level of those in the group. I was too scared to read anything out. It’s still a real source of sadness to me that something I loved so much when I was a child produces so much fear. I feel grief at not being encouraged as a child. I wish someone had seen the spark I possessed and nurtured it. But no one had cared. My family didn’t read anything I’d written. I think they feared my openness and vulnerability.

However, maybe in all that loss there is a gift. Acting and writing are wonderful talents to have, but they emerge from what we ARE, which is a spark of the Divine. As a child I was completely tapped into that wisdom and desired its creative expression despite the dysfunction that surrounded me. I didn’t compare myself to anyone else because I had no concept of doing so; all I knew was how to BE. Fear wasn’t even on my radar. My heart knew the way. I was walking the path of Divine love and OF COURSE I was – and am – someone great. How could I not be? The mistake I made was looking for fulfilment in someone else’s opinion and believing their judgements as well as my own. I got lost in my head. We are individual souls with our own way of seeing and experiencing the world. While comparison and constructive criticisms have their place, what’s more important is remembering our true nature which is creative expression itself, no matter which particular form it happens to take. Our souls are like trees -we express in our unique ways, but we are all beautiful. As a child I knew this in my heart. My lifelong task is to remember, and keep remembering that despite what I seem to have lost on the outside, I am always good enough.

The wildness of our true nature

/ sarahlissyjenkins / 17 Comments

During the early end of my teenage years I developed an affinity with horses. I was a lonely young girl with very few friends, and I spent most of my time reading and writing. However, at some point I was given a second hand bicycle, and I frequently cycled the mile or so to a large field on the outskirts of my village to see the horses who lived there. They seemed to recognise me, trotting over to the gate as soon as I appeared, eating grass from my outstretched palm. I was an avid reader of the magazine ‘Horse and Pony’ and had posters all over my bedroom wall.

Not long after this I asked my mum for riding lessons. She was usually happy to do whatever I wanted as long as it didn’t involve dealing with emotions. Sure enough, she agreed. She and my cousin who was around quite a lot at the time (cousin is a whole other issue) drove me to the local riding school and waited while I had my lesson. The first few were wonderful. I rode a palomino called Tilly and a grey called Cobweb. Occasionally I rode a larger chestnut called Lacey.

Only the second time I rode Lacey, disaster happened. She was temperamental and my nervous excited energy was probably too much for her. I was pulling at the bit and she took off. I only remember screaming and gripping onto the saddle as she galloped through the field at the back of the riding school. Finally, she charged through the stables where several instructors, including mine (not sure where she had even gone?!) managed to calm her down. I slid off the pony and down onto my knees. No one could believe I’d hung on. Sheer willpower I suppose.

My mum and cousin were still waiting in the car. They had seen everything. As I climbed in the back, my instructor looked through the window and said ‘I don’t know how you didn’t fall off, well done.’ My mum and cousin just looked at her. They didn’t say anything. I didn’t talk about it. But we all knew I wouldn’t be going back.

As frightening as that experience was, I saw something in those horses that I didn’t realise I had; the wildness and beauty of my own soul. I could envisage myself living in the field where I first made friends with those beautiful beings. I longed for the simplicity of such a life. To be honest, I still do.

As an adult I find it painful to talk about horses, not because of the experience at the stables but something I read about in the paper a few years ago which has stayed with me. I’m not going to write it here because it’s too painful to even do that, plus I wouldn’t want to inflict it on anyone else, but suffice to say it involves extreme suffering and cruelty, and there was a photo, which is even worse. It affected me so deeply that to this day I struggle to see a picture of a horse without thinking about what I read. I even wake up during the night sometimes thinking about it.

I am writing this post today to connect with the beauty that horses symbolised in my childhood; their innocence, purity, grace, as well as their power and majesticity, that made me feel at home in ways I didn’t with my blood family. I knew their hearts and mine were ultimately the same. Even Lacey, bless her, who was probably scared witless of me poking her about and longing to break free.

As souls, we all want to break free. We long to live in love, free of cruelty and suffering. Despite the sadness in the world, we each have the capacity to remember our true nature – beautiful, wild, and free.

The power of human kindness

/ sarahlissyjenkins / 4 Comments

In case anyone ever doubted it, even the most small acts of kindness make a real difference.

Years ago as a sixteen year old I went on holiday with my mum. It was a particularly painful holiday for me because I had to break up early for the summer break at college and miss a final week with a teacher who I was deeply attached to. Also, while away, I became very sick with some sort of bug, or possibly sun stroke, and ended up vomiting for a couple of days. Then, on the final day, my mum got very ratty with me although I can’t remember the details of this (probably blocked it out) only that it may have been over having little money as we were poor, albeit still had enough to scrape a summer holiday, but she blamed our financial situation on my father, just like she blamed everything on him.

My mum’s emotional state always affected me horribly, and I developed a severe headache while waiting in the hotel for our pick up bus to take us to the airport for our return flight. By the time we reached the airport and were standing in the queue for check in, I had a full blown migraine.

My mum was no good in these situations. As an adult myself, I now know that it wasn’t that she didn’t care; she just had little or no emotional energy left for me. She had depression while I was growing up, understandably given the circumstances we lived in, and her focus was on survival (and blaming my dad for everything). She has always been strong and resilient which serves her well now in terms of her ailing health, but back then her determination to plough on and give no time and attention to her emotions meant that she had little patience for her very sensitive and introspective youngest daughter (me).

I can’t remember what she said or did, only that she was sharp with me, and I went and sat on a seat in the centre of the airport where I could see the line of people queuing. I had my head in my hands. The pain was horrific. I’m not sure what was worse, the physical agony of the migraine or the sadness weighing on me. I can’t remember how long I sat there but at some point a man came over, sat with me, and asked if I was okay. I told him I had a bad headache. He went off to get me some painkillers and water.

Such a simple gesture but I still remember this 28 years later. It sticks in my mind because the loneliness I felt then – the disconnect from my mum and not being able to spend the final week with the teacher who I’d formed an emotional bond with – was debilitating. I didn’t even realise at the time how lonely I was because such devastating feelings are too much to process when the support structure isn’t there. A total stranger reached out and helped me when I most needed an act of kindness. That is why so many years later it still touches me.

Never underestimate a small act of kindness like this. It can absolutely make a difference, however insignificant it seems to be. One can never know how much it might be needed in ways that go beyond the surface. Knowing someone cares is the most powerful thing of all.

An ode to journal

/ sarahlissyjenkins / 2 Comments

Starting in childhood, I’ve been a prolific diary and journal writer, filling out pages upon pages with introspections and often deep emotional pain. I’ve kept them all. I rarely read back over them as I’ll be honest, most are horrifically painful to read, and easily send me back into a dark place. But neither can I throw them away. Sometimes I wonder whether holding onto them is the right thing to do and all I’m doing is clinging onto a past that has gone. Surely I should be willing to let them go, like everything else? The truth is that I can’t. The journals are the voice of the child, and later the teenager, who had virtually nothing and no one else, and to throw them away feels like dismissing her strength and courage to be her own person even when she felt invisible to the world.

It’s an interesting dilemma though and I often ponder how I’d feel if the journals were taken from me. Would I be devastated or relieved? Would I feel lighter and more present to my day to day self or as if I’d lost a part of me? The time may come when I won’t feel the need to keep them anymore because what they represented has become fully alive inside the self that I now am. In truth, I’m already there, but for now I am honouring the child through their presence.

/ sarahlissyjenkins / 5 Comments
Daily writing prompt
When you were five, what did you want to be when you grew up?
View all responses

I wanted to be a writer from as far back as I can remember. I filled notebooks with prayers to God before turning to short stories at age ten and journals at sixteen. As a five year old I loved creative writing class on Monday mornings because we had to write what we’d done over the weekend. Most of it was made up of course. The reality was that my childhood home was pretty dysfunctional with secrets and violence.

Writing saved me. I have absolutely no doubt about it. I escaped into my own world where I was best friends with my favourite TV actors and used to meet them every day at made-up studios for lunch. As I grew, I wrote about abandoned animals finding loving homes, family dramas, and teenage romances. I wrote huge amounts of fan fiction based on my favourite shows, believing I was the characters. Years down the line when I considered that the characters I had created didn’t really exist, it was a visceral shock to my system, because they were so real in my head.

Then I went to university to study English and undertook a creative writing module as part of that. It wasn’t the first time my writing had been criticised of course; I had my share of constructive comments at secondary school. But this was on a whole new level. The tutors didn’t like my work. Worse, I was surrounded by people who were very clearly a lot more talented than I am. This destroyed my sense of who I was. You see, writing was my very heart and soul. It was the only real friend I had. I lived and breathed it. To have it torn apart by people who had no clue was like having my insides ripped out very slowly over time. I was struggling to come to terms with a painful past but this time I no longer had the writing I loved. I was on my own.

I gave it all up. Things changed when I started seeing a therapist to cope with my young autistic son and she commented on something I’d written about my childhood many years previously. She said ‘you write very well.’ I was stunned. I told her that I no longer believed that. I said I couldn’t bear to even hear it because it wasn’t true. She said ‘of course it is.’ Bit by bit, I began to tell her how studying a creative writing module had broken my heart. Telling my story, this time out loud, once again helped me to heal.

Tentatively I started to write again. Not as much as I did before as I no longer had the physical or mental strength, but once again it became an outlet for my feelings. I wrote a couple of stories about my son. Then I began journaling as an outlet. I no longer cared what others thought. Over time I began to reclaim the natural joy and creativity I’d had as a child. This led me to start blogging to share my thoughts and experiences with the world.

I no longer hold tightly onto the identity of ‘writer’ but I write. It is what heals the soul. My five year old self knew that all along.

Reflections on childhood and God

/ sarahlissyjenkins / 2 Comments

Over this Easter I have been thinking a lot about my childhood and realising while it was painful in many ways (very dysfunctional, disjointed family and chronic bullying at school) I have a lot to be grateful for. I spent a lot of time in nature, whether it was picking blackberries down the field over the fence that backed onto the bottom of our council estate, or hiding in a makeshift ‘den’ which consisted of a tree stump surrounded by overhanging hedgerow over the fence that ran alongside our house. I spent a lot of time in nature and had freedom that many kids these days can’t even imagine.

Most of all, though, I found comfort in the Bible. I took my Good News Bible down to my den and read it there. No one forced me to read it; on the contrary, I grew interested in it myself being an avid reader of Enid Blyton books where, being the 1950’s, every child went to church and Sunday school. I decided I wanted to go and my mum, being drawn to religion herself, took me every week. It was there I bought my Bible, some workbooks, and several wonderful books by Patricia St John about children of my age who were troubled in some way before finding God and becoming Christian.

My view of God was very simple. I could talk to him daily and did through the Bible workbooks I completed in my den. He was all powerful but loving and good. I wanted to be good to please God. That was massively important to me, so much so that I completed many notebook entries simply asking God to help me to be good. My childhood inevitably tapped into this need to be good because I was the ‘good child’ for my mum whilst my sister had severe mental disturbances and caused my mum a lot of pain. I wasn’t told to be good, however, and I certainly wasn’t threatened with God’s wrath if I wasn’t. The desire to find God and do right by him belonged to me alone.

In some ways I miss the simplicity of those years. I had no doubt that God had my back. I saw him as a loving parent, someone who cared for me. Someone who was always THERE. My view of God is now much more complicated. When I pray, I no longer feel just as though I’m praying to someone outside of me, but affirming something inside. God isn’t a personal being sitting on a cloud, but an energy that exists in each one of us and the entire universe. This means the power lies within and always has done. My childhood dreams of God enabled me to tap into that power and transform myself through my faith.

What I’m missing is that certainty, that focus, that point of power. I’ve lost that innocence and now my mind questions and critics everything. It’s no longer straightforward. I have purchased a few of the Patricia St John books that I used to read to help me tap into that energy again and the part of me that knew the truth no matter what form it took. I didn’t even consider any other forms. I didn’t question it. It just was. I’m finding my way back there through meditation and – yes- prayer, but I need to be mindful that I don’t get side-tracked by critical thoughts such as ‘but God doesn’t exist outside of you.’ Says who? God is everywhere, inside and out. It doesn’t matter what term we give it – God, Divine, Energy, Source – we are all part of it. But the point of power has always been within. The difference between the child and the adult is that the former didn’t know this, but the latter does.

Family, being triggered and grief

/ sarahlissyjenkins / 4 Comments

Ram Das once said ‘If you think you’re enlightened, spend a week with your family.’ Now, I don’t think I’m enlightened at all, very far from it, and I’d be suspicious of anyone who said they were. But I have worked hard on my spiritual awareness and can access a certain level of inner peace when I keep my focus on being in the present moment and responding from love rather than the less conscious and wounded part of my personality. However, Ram Das was right on point by saying that it’s our family who trigger us the most.

Even after all these years (I’m in my 40s) the essence of my struggle lies in not being able to let go of the wish my family were different and the need to belong to some sort of family unit. Even as an adult this need has been denied me for so many reasons. I try to see the positives; I am free to live my own life in the way I choose now and I don’t have to answer to anyone. But somehow this need survives and at times it is all pervasive. Christmas stirred it all up of course but the reason I am writing this is not even about Christmas, it is due to the realisation that deep down I still carry hope and expectations that my family will change and so many unconscious wishes still underlie my (albeit limited) relationship with them.

I know that how they were and are with me is not personal. There’s some sort of comfort in that. Most relatives don’t even know me as a person so it couldn’t be personal. A baby came into the family at a certain time and it happened to be me. Their lack of interest wasn’t a reflection on me but what was happening in their life at the time. For years I blamed myself because, well, as a kid you always think it’s your fault. And if it’s your fault you can potentially fix yourself. There is a lot of grief in realising there’s nothing you could have done because the problem lies elsewhere. It’s freeing, for sure, but devastating all at once.

It’s so hard to break free from longing for a ‘proper’ (I hesitate to use the word ‘normal’) relationship with my family. I get on well (on a surface level) with my mother, so it’s not even the lack of a parent, albeit we don’t have a deep relationship; it’s more the longing for a sense of belonging because growing up that just wasn’t there. My family was divided in ways that I can’t begin to write about despite living in the same household. There were secrets and rules, family members I could talk to and those I couldn’t. Nothing was ever said, only implied. Mental health issues were rife. I wasn’t brought up, I pretty much did it all myself. I was so withdrawn at school that I had very few friends and was bullied. I turned to God so I never felt truly alone even though I was terribly lonely in my family.

I’ve moved on. I’ve had loads of therapy. I’ve come to terms with so much of it. And yet…there is a part of me who can’t let go, who is still crying out for external acceptance and belonging, to know I am valued as a family member. I’m still seeking their approval even now. I’m glad I have realised this so I can grieve for what never was and won’t be. I don’t need anyone’s approval any more other than my own, it’s just so sad for my inner child who longed for it when she should have been given it. I know I’m far from alone on this healing journey. I’m grateful for that knowledge. That and my spirituality gives me strength.

Thinking of those who are struggling with similar issues around families. I hear and feel you. You’re not alone!