As I work on putting to rest the injustices of my life for over 40 years, I found these really insightful.
7 CARDINAL RULES in LIFE
Make peace with your past, so it won't screw up your present.
What others think of you is none of your business.
Time heals everything. Give it time.
Don't compare your life to others and don't judge them. You have no idea
what their journey is all about.
Stop thinking too much. It's alright not to know all the answers. They'll
come when you least expect it.
No one is in charge of your happiness, except you.
Smile. You don't own all the problems in the world.
And I stumbled right into “the beginning”. Doug and I had gotten married in Pennsylvania, where we had met and fallen in love in college. Now we were beginning our trip around the country – first major stop: KALISPELL, MONTANA, my childhood home, where I had grown up in what had been an “all-for-one-and-one-for-all” family, where my heart resided, where I had always known the full-hearted support of my Mom and Dad, and where dwelt the two dearest little people on earth – my little sisters, Aggie and Francie.
ReplyDeleteA lot of change was afoot. My Dad was deeply involved in conservative politics, but that wasn’t what troubled me. My mom was completely enthralled with the changes she observed in Janet, and it seemed that was where her enthusiasm lay – not a word about how happy she was that I was coming home, or that I was married to this wonderful guy and that he would be part of the family now. That all seemed incidental to the fact that Janet had fallen under the spell of a charlatan named francis schuckhardt. When I called from North Dakota, hardly able to contain my excitement that we were only a day’s drive from home, her response was “Sue, you won’t recognize our Janet. She’s out on a rosary walk in the woods now.” Everything that happened on that visit home seemed to revolve around the word that was being spread by schuckhardt. Doug and I spent as much time as we could with my little brother Rudy, and with Aggie and Francie. We spent time with Janet as well, and she was the same fun, crazy kid I remembered most of the time, but she also spent a lot of time praying. (Interestingly, Janet did go out to the lake with us one day, change into a two-piece swim suit, and have a great time frolicking in the water. But before we left for home, she changed back into her modest clothes so no one but us would know. From that time to this, she would only swim in her nun’s habit.)
My Dad had always been a man of few words, and I wasn’t sure where he stood on all that was going on. Mom was in the process of pulling the girls out of St. Matthews school because she felt it was no longer true to the Catholic faith, although we did still go to Mass at St. Matthews while we were home. Doug and I sat through a couple of schuckhardt’s lectures, where Mom was humiliated because her son-in-law (Doug) challenged him on a few of his claims (while I sat mute and tormented). My torment lay in the fact that I had always been very close to my Mom; I had always been a compliant child and as I grew older I like to say I was “discreet” when I dared to step out of line a bit (which is to say I made sure Mom wouldn’t know what I’d been up to with my girlfriends, etc…), and had always been reluctant to incur her displeasure in any way. Now things were happening that I didn’t understand and didn’t even want to understand. My family didn’t seem to be the family I had grown up in, and I felt that the loving support I had always enjoyed from my Mom was eroding.
And so it began – and it only got worse. Francis schuckhardt and his ilk nearly cost me everything that I held dear, but I’ll save this for another day….
The above comment is from my big sister, Sue, the one who raised me in my infancy while my mom was sick.
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