Book One: English
Rose’s Amber Necklace
There comes a time in every life when what is within you, must come out. Shy people don’t like this period. Bold people become annoying with their open book approach to life. If you had a good mother, she was the one you use to tell all too. As an adult, you have to find that kind of rapport, again. Suddenly, Rose was feeling like she’d staggered into a dark room. Her vision was blurry one moment and non-existent the next. “Oh no.” Said Rose, “Not this again.”
She rubbed her eyelids, blinked and found some eye drops to put in her bottom eyelid. She was so tired of feeling this sudden panic, this hidden problem. The doctor told her it was called “fleeting blindness,” and in her case, it was brought on by emotional distress and conflict. Something in her brain made her vision turn off when she panicked. But the vision issue quickly stopped.
“No worry.” Rose mumbled to herself to control her mind and get rid of these symptoms, “All is well.” She willed her thoughts to go in a direction that made her feel positive. Chanting, “I’m alright, right now,” a brief calm came over her. Still, the panic washed away her strength and she leaned back against the gray textured wall. Then, she slide down to a warm carpet. Tears started rolling down her face. “No. No. No. No. Stop it. All is Well. I’m alright right now. You are ruining your eye makeup. Access! What’s the situation? You are in the Bodleian Library and going to meet up with Wenling. What else? I’m terrified someone will mention my children. What’s the solution? Shut up. Shut up the thoughts. Take interest in everything else people might talk to you about.” This was a quick self-induced method she used to get re-centered and stop having episodes of panic. They were so annoying. Were anyone to see her, they would think she was talking to a spirit, or to herself. Brainy people did a lot of self talk. It was because they had too many thoughts and lost their place in them, frequently.
“What’s the big deal about looking like I’m talking to the spirits?” She paused and waited for an answer from within. It usually came in fast and very strong. Gently whispering to her imaginary friend, or to who knew who, “I can’t keep composed if they do!” The entire cutthroat world of perfectionist professors weighed on her fragile, public and professional identity. It was so much pressure to keep her inner world of family “silent” and something no one could observe in her. It was also a lot of hard work to continually pretend that spirits did not exists. However, many, not all, of the professors at Oxford did not believe spirits could talk to people. They thought that was something we imagined. Rose didn’t know for sure. Maybe, she thought, the other planes of consciousness that have been proven to exists by the great mystic writers and scholars, are what regular non-mystic types call spirits. As if spirit to western erudite thinkers could be relegated to the imagination.
She didn’t care what the truth was about it. Her take on the idea of spirits talking to a person was, “Hey. I’m going to vote yes.” She was happy to try to never bring up the subject of spirits nor discuss her great pleasure in talking to them all.
The Oxford salary and it’s accompanying prestige required she not seem new ageish. Plus, she adored the practices a professor had to undertake, including the somewhat formal, classical fashion look. Acting stuffed and stuffing other aspects of herself could last as long as she didn’t crash too much, and could put on a good act. Or, protracting her other ways of knowing could last as long as the contract with Oxford continued. Right now, she was putting on her act just fine. She wore a lot of tweed. It helped.
She could control her fears another few days. Or, so she wished. You see, Rose could be easily disturbed if someone began to criticize the story she told about mothering and family. Family to her meant three people, herself, Zander her first son, and Sinclair, her second son. Moreover, she’d go into a full panic if people twisted her meanings. She could twist theirs, but they were not allowed to twist hers. Not on the subject of her mothering. Her reason, perhaps a flimsy argument to some, was because she had to prepare to become a mother, just like she had to prepare to become a professor. It was hard work to learn both roles and took years of dedication. She’d practiced on other people’s children before she took on the mama role herself. Secondly, she hoped she had done the preparation really well. Rose hoped frequently that in this life, she had done something really well.
Rose would do just about any mind game to herself so she didn’t feel disappointed. She’d also discipline herself for years if that is what it took to learn those two roles. Mother and Professor. At ten, she began visiting her O’Horo family cousins. They had just moved down the street. Very frightened of getting shut down by her mother, Rose asked Jean Lucille Bahm, that was her mothers name, to take her to the mother of those children. Joannie O’Horo was a good mother and without saying a word, or even knowing the words to say, Rose gravitated to this woman. Once Rose got over her sublime terror of her own mother, and asked if she could babysit at Joannies every day she was needed, Rose’s life felt a relief. She felt like she had done a very daring thing. But she realized, on some cosmic level, without even knowing what a cosmos was, that she had to shift her trust and loyalty to Joannie to save her life. Joannie never took responsibility for conjuring Rose to her house. It didn’t matter. Rose took care of the five Irish Catholic children every single day after school for several years. It was her way of finding bliss, being given a little bliss, and in life skills, practicing mothering. It was the only kind place in the world that Rose would ever know for a long time.
* When she went off to the American University in Washington, DC, and received her first Bachelors degree in Elementary Education, she did so just to make sure she would be a good mother. Ten years with Joannies children, her cousins, a few college years, then marriage. She felt her preparation for motherhood was exemplary. Were anyone to shatter her view of herself as a good mother, she couldn’t defend herself. She’d be too crushed to try. Right after she graduated, she married and made a contract with herself to be a certain kind of wife. Five years later she had her first son Zander on Ground Hogs day. Her great grandmother Petrine Jorgine Hansdautter Qvamme Sands was with her in spirit that day as great grandmother Sands lived in Punxsutawny, PA, the town famous for ground hogs day. It was one of those sure signs from the spirit realm. And Rose clung to the spirit realm to stay alive. She had to because to bury the pain and sorrow of separating with her sons too early in their life required some magical thinking until they could reunite. If ever.
Seventeen months after Zander came, Sinclair came on July 13th. Oh! Rose was ready for this incredible experience! Mothering was really the only role she ever wanted in life along with a total of eight kids of her own. That was her small, reasonable wish list and it was to occur in the setting of a wonderful father to the children. Rose didn’t think much about a great husband as she didn’t know what that was, at all. Perhaps her generation of women, and her small life as a child and teen was in a setting with creepy men. That was probably it. They weren’t really men. Just males who stuck a woman in a woman’s traditional role. In that case, the female was ignored. The dinner hour was provided and who knows what went on in the bedroom. There was no sign of love and respect but many signs of two people posturing so they look good to the public. That was Rose’s impression of her parents gig in life.
That sounded right. Rose’s own mom was ignored. Joannie, when Danny started to ignore her, she threw him out. So life gave Rose two sons and with those two Rose’s life expanded exponentially as well as brilliantly. The first son became her north star. Later he would betray her on that point. As the early days of mothering took root, insight came. For each boy, she channeled in their spirits name. She had no idea where these inner voices were coming from, but they were powerful and always so precise. Zander was to be called Illuminati, the spirit said. Sinclair’s spirit name was Serendipity. She decided right away, or I better say it was channeled into her, that she could, if she chose, in this lifetime, to raise her little boys as Kings. Rose pondered what this muse in her was saying, and decided for the most part, to raise the sons as Kings.
All her training at American University pointed to the probability that it was wise to raise sons according to their gifts. To do so, takes perspective, and a perceptive mother and teacher. So Rose looked in this way towards her sons for the rest of their life. She helped them grow up and wake up every chance they gave her. She was an advanced mystic, something akin to Ken Wilber and his knowledge. But telling anyone was useless. Being it through her mothering would work anyway. Because she figured out what her gifts were post divorce and had feedback from many great men who could identify her and her purpose on this earth.
Rose had a head start. But parting with her sons too early in life, like when they were 8 and 9, still was crushing. Necessary, but crushing. She was, in spirit and effect, the Mother of Kings. The sons weren’t spoiled. They were, more or less, trained by their mom in all ways they showed prowess as individuals. To just be with their nature, Rose moved into a forest to be in the womb of nature. This brought out the highest potential in her boys. Raised in or near a forest, because they moved many times, Rose loved her boys with all her heart and trained them hard and well. For this, she was sure. Make no mistake, she served their creative genius, their agenda, their gifts that shone through their spirit right from the beginning of their time in this incarnation. While at her post at Oxford, her sons were just beginning to get out in the world in ways that do not require parents. They did not want to be disturbed much at all and Rose totally respected their need for space. Space to explore meant space for their natural recollection of how to be in their own space. It was a no brainer. They would do brilliantly. Rose just knew it. And they’d do well with the knocks that come at them to.
Rose began college at Vincennes Jr. College in Indiana. She declared her major and visited orphans to give her gifts with children away, for free of course. The second year she went to Kent State and the courses in education required her to go into a variety of classrooms to observe and teach some, not much. At first, her colleges just had her observe and record what she was seeing. Undergraduate colleges had taught her the high value of really observing children and listening to where they were coming from on all levels. In a way, you could say that Rose’s first miracle in life after getting out of her parents house, was learning it was okay to observe.
Finally, secure in her own nurturing world of family and motherhood, life gave Rose a connection to this steady stream of warmth and care. Children, she felt, made her life a forever kind of deal! Love was, after all, forever. Rose could go on. Rose could live. This is how she thought. And she did observe such thoughts were rather drastic. But she knew the drama inside of her, the mysterious part, was coming to the foreground of her conscious awareness. It was because she gave birth and no interacted with two humans who treated her in such a way as to force her to admit her own husband was not treating her properly at all. Although, she had no words to describe what the husband was doing. But with the sons, she could tell it was not okay. Not even good. And eventually, she realized how dangerous it was. So she divorced on good grounds.
She could never tell anyone that the Elementary Education degree from American University was completed just to make sure any programmed habits learned from her own mother were eradicated. Saying embarrassing comments about so called classy mothers was not permitted in the society she grew up in nor at Oxford. Let’s face it, destroying your mothers character as a mother isn’t allowed anywhere on the planet! If that’s your dilemma, you’re fucked.
* Obviously, Rose had issues with the way her mother mothered. Remembering her impersonal touch was chilling and then numbing. Jean Lucille Bahm wasn’t really into mothering. If Jean Lucille had still been alive today, Rose would tell her she wasn’t a good mother. Or, knowing Rose, when she was in a bad mood, she’d tell her mother the un-garnished truth. “Your mothering was shitty.” Rose would then leave the house so her mother couldn’t process the information or argue against it. One way or another, Rose would have made her mother deal with it. Making her sizzle would be the better tack, with that kind of mother.
Everything good about “Rose,” was about being a mother, forever. I suppose because it’s about being love and attention to another human. Good attending. Directing the energies. Nothing else needed to be given to her except children. Or so she thought when she was in her teens. With that said, it’s not hard to feel with tragic proportion how Rose was never prepared to lose her family. In her mind, since the first family she grew up in wasn’t good, she always felt confused about whether she lost that one or not. How can you lose an idea, she thought. You see, family, was just an idea in Rose’s experience in her teens. It was just an imagined future. A future her present as a teen was not about at all. And it came to life when she went to Joannies. But she wasn’t Joannie. She was just a kid. A kid who found the energy of care in that other house. And if you dig deeper, she was a kid and teen who was being exposed to sexual predation just about every week. All that was being covered up. And the husband was into sexually predation too. He had her until she was thirty, and she divorced because she figured all this out.
What was happening in her mother and father’s family life was surreal. It was disagreeable. It was impossible to bond with. It was not likeable. It had no good reason to exists. So for whatever reason, Rose’s mom nd dad hooked up, well that could remain a bit of a msytery as the research project on that was not interesting to Rose. She skipped finding out a lot of that stuff.
The second family life she had with her husband and with whom she had her two sons was eventually lost too. For good reason. The treatment Rose was getting was bad. Subtle bad, but bad none the less. The guy she married was into predation. Period. Rose hoped his second wife taught him different. Rose could not. She had no idea why people acted the way they did when she was a kid and teen, or for that matter, in her first decade of adult life. She’d take up the study of why and how people acted the way they did when she was past thirty years of age and had the time. Rose considered her third family time, the one with her two sons, her best and only personally owned family and time. It lasted nine years only. And then the whole thing was was relegated to visits here and there. This is what evolution was doing to Rose. Ultimately, it was a very good gift to her and her boys. But boy did it sting do live out.
When she was a single mother and it was just her and her boys Rose did make a wonderful family. She felt the entire thing as a fun adventure. Every hour was an education, a bit of progress on some painting or writing, a focused set of directions for her boys. The loved her to watch them show their skills. They loved her around. They belonged.
Occasionally she reflected about how odd it was that her family didn’t have a father and husband figure. But she didn’t pay much attention to that idea while raising her boys because the job at hand was a busy one. In real life, her own father and later husband didn’t pay much attention to her at all. So she had no idea what use they would be anyway. They never gave her much of anything either. They did like the service they got in any form it showed up in. All the talk about great fathers and husbands meant nothing to Rose. She didn’t have the experience herself.
In actual clock time, Rose spent day and night caring for her family – the two boys and herself. Then the time came when there was loss. The loss of the boys in her life was not due to Rose’s preference or choice. But it did happen. Some of the confusion can be explained by understanding the husband. When she was a married woman and became a mother of two, the husband never considered Rose or what she needed. Actually, he never considered her before marriage but she was so use to men ignoring her that she didn’t have any reason to think any other way. During the divorce, the husband forgot to consider what Rose might need [typical] once the full time custody went to the husband. Rose said what she needed, but that particular husband never heard what she was saying. That marriage was all about helping the husband climb the ladder. Since it was so expected of Rose to help him, she did and liked it for years, many years. It was meeting other woman that made Rose wake up a bit to how she was being treated. Her husband did get his first, second and third degree and Rose actually did every single thing he asked of her. Rose’s dedication, support and love was unending, until she made it all end. The word relationship or family was not in his vocabulary. She figured that out and checked it out with him. He never used it. It was in Rose’s subconscious from when she was teen. But as a couple, they never mentioned it. Family, children, relationship, how to care for children, how was anyone doing. No. Never did any set of words come up like that.
Actually, Rose had no memories of how he characterized marriage and family because he never spoke about life from that perspective. Ever. Her memories from her childhood and teen life, rather, were all about how she planned for a husband and family. If she tried to talk about that, from that perspective, with those words, the husband didn’t say a thing back to her. Upon reflection, how could he. His parents had no such “woke” relationship either. Two people, a male and female, it’s how you paired up. It meant nothing or if it did, no one said a word about it. This, upon more reflection, is the way nihilists live. Their conversations were like watching two blind people doing completely different activities.
* Once a single, all powerful mother of two, she was responsible for raising boys to be men. This responsibility was of grave importance as well as a pleasure to Rose. She thought of them as little Kings and she the Mother of Kings. With the help of a bit of reincarnation theory, which Rose was studying since the beginning of her divorce period, her hope was that in the future, they would spend time with her and remember the gestures of kindness, service, creativity, democracy and love.
Her role model for behaving like the Mother of Kings came from watching videos and reading about how the Dali Lama’s mother behaved towards him after he’d been taken to the monastery. And she found other models as time went on. She knew her job had to do with helping them be present and preparing them for a future as men. Like Ken Wilber says, we grow them up and wake them up simultaneously. That’s what so called enlightened parents do during the time her sons were raised. One day, decades from now, her sons would be out in the world conquering their curiosities and fears too, just like she trained them and did to and for herself.
Indeed, many of their quarters were only one room and the mat for the bedding was on the floor. Rose thought it best to have a consistent, night time story and the one that always came to her was about their woods life with the deer. It became an extended saga as time went on. She would see visions and tell her boys stories of being in the woods with the deer. She could see it clearly.
WENLING
* At Oxford, where her mothering days were on hold, she’d get stuck feeling like an outcast. She wasn’t an outcast there, but she felt like it sometimes. Her private objections about Oxford were that it lacked the animal instincts she loved and it was awfully civilized. When places were too civilized all Rose could think of was “too much cleaning, too much sanitizing, too much organization, not enough communing from the heart.” She’d reason with her friend Wenling sometimes, “When people talk to each other from the heart, which can include brilliant ideas, they don’t use whole sentences.” That’s what irritated the hidden part of Rose, the most. The use of whole, fancy, laboriously long sentences was man made and not natural! Still, she learned how to get them and use them because it got her a job. When she was feeling irritated, she’d get locked in some visual mental zone and see that she had become defrayed from the flock.
The vision was of herself, standing alone, freezing to death. Needless to say, a gal who was mothered like Rose was, had a hard time staying connected to the norms around her. The reason was because, after all, norms were flexible and often enough, different for every single institution man ever made. Rose lock up internally as if it was necessary to stand back and re-evaluate if life was smart and safe in her current location. Call it back-lash from too much traveling, call it Rose’s way of checking out, just to turn around and check back in. Call it whatever you want. Rose never told anyone. She wasn’t that dumb. Most people at Oxford, talked about their self through the typical reference points of family. Rose would end up in an argument if she opened her mouth. The reason was because people assumed that in life, the only thing that could matter was family. But Rose needed to disagree with that. There were other forces in life and they worked very powerfully to create some human beings for a different purpose. Albeit, we all came out of a female body, but that could be the only reason to use “family” relationships as a frame of reference to describe a person.
Family relations were not the main function of a person like Rose, nor for her great friend at Oxford, Professor Wenling. Don’t get me wrong! Family functions use to be the main relation Rose had to this world. But once finished, she changed. Not to make an excuse for herself, but Rose, found other things in life of equal amazement as was her own personal family with the sons. After they left her life, she had become a cynical person for a while. After all, she was pissed and hurt. But after that phase, she wanted to laugh a lot. Humor was health, according to Rose. So she lied to herself some days just to do her job as a professor. No, that’s not right. Rose decided to set aside all the powers she learned as the Mother of Kings, and become what she called “an ordinary mortal.” And her “ordinary” was becoming a professor at Oxford. “Not a bad ordinary,” her friend Wenling would tell her.
* She stopped using her powers to advance each person’s life. I’m talking about the powers that came upon her as a mother and that she was guided to develop as their mother. Also, they were simply put, the power of potential that developed in Rose that were there all along, but that had the chance to develop due to all the dam suffering she had to resolve in her own spirit. It wasn’t just a side note that reincarnation theory helped. Psychological development theory helped too. If you force a kid and teen and wife to omit their own self, expect an explosion of development to occur later in life. Rose knew this at the time she was at Oxford, but her sons didn’t know it yet. So she kept writing.
To omit talking about family while playing out the role of professor herself, wasn’t such a big lie to others, and not particularly a deceit either. It was more, rather, just practical – a thing to do and become for the ordinary world of people all around Rose, all the time, no matter where she went. “There were, after all, other things in life than family,” she would tell her colleagues. The people she could relate to at Oxford were often single professional people. They didn’t talk about family. They talked about their work, and Rose loved that. Furthermore, conversations solely based around family made Rose feel guilty and heavy. She didn’t have a choice in finding out it would be too hard to live without her boys. It was thrust upon her. Suddenly, having no family just hit her life like an avalanche of emotions. The trauma of it all stayed in place in her subconscious. She could not sort it all out for many years. But slowly, she did learn to discipline herself and go back to college and become a professor. And slowly, in her private time, she’d work with dreams and memories that rocked her soul.
At least she could do that as an ordinary mortal! Everyone was meditating anyway to cope with what was happening to the American Dream, the American family, and just living in America. Change was all about during the eighties and nineties and it would continue. Big change.
Recovering from her upset, sitting on the rug, she looked up at the hexagonal gilt-lacquered brass lighting fixture above her head and sighed, ever so grateful. This beautiful work of art represents beauty and history in the world. Whoever had to climb a ladder to clean this fixture probably felt that he was a chosen one. He would take special care to do a good job, maybe a sacred job! “I’d hate to break the dam pane.” Rose murmured. All alone, she really enjoyed that old cynic in her. Not only did he make her laugh, but the truth was, ordinary mortals were foolish to live so ridiculously unimpressed with their self. She also loved those old stuffy Oxford Professors, and the young ones too, because by some magical wonder, they didn’t forget how impressive their work really was. This thought gave Rose some peace and satisfaction as she sat on that carpet, looking at the light. No doubt almost all the lighting fixtures at Oxford were antiques.
Every piece of furniture and interior accessory a room had at Oxford, was acquired by the selection of a great designer. Choice, periodicity, material, artistry, color, motif and style — everything at Oxford had its history. Famous designers who came to visit Boleian Library were hired to recompose the room now and again. Rose saw them walking around. Rose felt, in a sense, that she was living in a triple paradox at the time and it was the paradox of time, space and causation – something that mortal humans were stuck in, for now.
First, she could easily imagine that she belonged to the beauty and history of this world. So she was comfortable in this Ivy League iconic place. But maybe it was just because she was sitting in the world of Oxford history and it’s accessories. No. She earned what she had to earn to get here. Perhaps that is exactly what made her think so foolishly. For sure, it was a nerdy idea, conceptual, and left out all responsibility for regular, mundane tasks like mothering and housekeeping, or if a professor, grading papers until three in the morning. No. She was daydreaming now. So she touched her Baltic Sea amber necklace. It was given to her by her grandmother who told her she could become anyone she wanted. Sometimes Rose foolishly imagined she had become a heroine. After her sons left her life she had to imagine. She built her new life on extreme circumstances. That’s why it felt absurd sometimes. It’s suppose to be a mark of achievement to make it to Oxford, even though some of the students and professors grew up in a shack with a dirt floor and no plumbing. That wasn’t Rose’s story of becoming, but you get my point.
The second paradox, or maybe we are talking “reality check” here, was as follows: It was lofty to run around and say I represent beauty and history. But some of the professors did talk like that and were that. Why didn’t Rose know herself for sure? As she gazed up at the hexagonal shape, she told herself she could put on a good act where ever she was. This is why she felt she lived in a paradox. Time allowed her to morph. She did fake it sometimes until she made it to Oxford. Or so she told herself. But the cause of her success, she wondered, “Could that be faked too?” Handling her amber stone necklace with thirty-six soothingly smooth half inch roundish pieces, she remembered that each stone of amber was like an ember leaving a dying world of the living and to the living. She calmed. The amber stones had made it through ten million years of time. She could make it through her one lifetime.
Amber. Created in the Amber Forest of the Finnoscandinavia historical period, her point was, that space in time made some things lasting. The third, frank, paradox Rose lived in these days was that even she didn’t know what was true or real anymore. It wasn’t any one thing in particular and didn’t explains visions and dreams. What caused what to make Oxford part of her destiny? Life had improved. Playing mind games didn’t matter anymore. Classy places in the world saved her life because she liked beautiful, and highly organized, hierarchical working environments that had immense historical value.
Everywhere she walked at Oxford, a famous person had walked before. This intrigued her as well as delighted her imagination. And if she blurred the lines between being a lower level Oxford Professor and a world famous novelist, so what. It made her dream of a future that was healed. If she had stayed near any one of the family members of her first or second family, they would have killed her spirit that desperately wanted to evolve. A sacrifice had to be made. Fortunately and unfortunately, Rose was the sacrifice. But eventually, she reasoned, she was just the sacrificial pig to those two families. She didn’t have to be the pig to anyone else, ever again.
Rose’s family people weren’t the only people in the world with bad qualities. She’d met plenty more in her single years. So this whole mess in her subconscious that made her panic was essentially about finding the place in society where she could express the way humans were treating each other. And she wanted to express it in the setting of a college where it could be thought of as objective, empirical and not her personal, past life sage.
She was determined to get more involved in this bad place inside her self by becoming a novelist. “How am I going to make bad things, a good novel? Explaining her circumstance wasn’t narcissistic or one dimensional. It was an epic in American people’s lives that needed expression. One thing she felt she could rely on was the psychological disaster people lived through just trying to have a good life. In epidemic proportions, American society had gone wrong! Rose wanted to put it out there for all to read. Her own life story was merely a vehicle to express what many people suffered. In her grandmother’s Norwegian history, people struggled just the same. With much examination, Rose felt that there was no excuse for her not to get back to her sons and mother. True, they were older now and didn’t need the same kind of mothering, but she wanted to be available to them just the same. She simply had to make it in society, and get paid, to do such a feat.
This, she found so irritating. But it was practical and ordinary thinking. The journey there was long and waring. So too was the Viking’s journey her ancestors took to Bjarmaland, Russia. And they froze their asses off getting there. Yet and still, if they hadn’t made the journey, they would have never known of other things in this world. Decades had passed and the family war going on in the States, and against her values and ideas about how to live her life, just might be dead by now. She really didn’t know. Lives do go on. To live as a predator, goes on. But to live as a spiritual person goes on too. She imagined the coast was clear enough to go back. No one could try to hurt her anymore. It wouldn’t work! She was too highly trained by magnificent spiritual teachers who lived on this earth.
Furthermore she reasoned, right there, that day in the library in England, “It’s not good to imagine what life is like in a place where I am not. Just get there!”
She stared at the bug in one of the amber stones. “You are still living, aren’t you? Me too.” Letting go of her amber string of stones around her neck, she stood up on the plush, burgundy colored carpet to see if her strength had returned. Wenling had stuck up for her once. She said, “You have to know her startling journey to make a judgment about Rose. Do you like her or not? You can’t figure that out prematurely. You have to see the bigger picture and it’s so complicated it will take a while to tell. There was a time in her life when it was almost too hard to figure out how to get money for shelter and food. This is why she feels foolish blocking her own past about her family. What she had to do was absurd and most people would be incapable of getting through the mess.”
However, Rose reasoned, she couldn’t be with young sons in their teen life if basic necessities were an issue. Rose only knew how to parent in the privileged class. She had no idea how to parent in poverty. The sons would not, could not, understand how she lived like she was dying, lived like a warrior princess and hunted for basic necessities all the time! So she didn’t see them regularly for many years. They did visit, but rarely. A two week vacation with her boys most summers was about all she got. So she accepted her fate and set out to prove to the sons that she would fix the mess she was in. The issue was always that she had no capital to help herself faster and America had no jobs to help her fix anything. They could learn that much later in their life.
* More patience than she had was required to perform this feat of waiting and still loving with all her heart. So she studies and vigilantly practices acetic feats. She figures, by the time the sons were thirty or forty, they’d be ready to listen to her side of the story. And finally, once and forever, they could understand why they went to live with their dad when they were eight and nine. Why their mom wasn’t around and why there were no phone calls and no letters could be explained. Nor could Rose send presents as she was so poor she could barely get enough food to eat each day and that went on for over a decade. Sleeping outside was no problem for Rose either. That was always temporary, but nothing to tell the sons until they were much older. It was actually extremely easy to do. And it was necessary very often because she had to save some money for a rental.
Due to the divorce money, Rose was happy that her sons had enough money to live well when they lived with her or their father. He gave them a mixture of capitalism, creativity, a well funded education, and Rose had to admit, love. “They lived with their father very well.” There were things to feel grateful for. “You had your turn mothering the first ten years of their life.” She blew a breath out, trying for more composure. Fate, amazing new and important things, and fear lead Rose forward. So did hunger for food and a better life. Her best guess was that she could succeed by going the route of training to become a professor. For her generation of women, just getting out of the house to have a career was a feat. Most of the women in her class, did not go outside of the home to work. When some of them tried, they didn’t know how to do it, failed miserably and went on welfare. Secondly, Rose was thoughtful. She guessed and then firmly decided it would be wise to practice a skill and she chose writing and painting. These skills were suppose to provide her with a career that was even more suitable to her, which was as a published author and an American painter. She remained steadfast to these two wishes to be granted by life, upon her, for trying so hard to get to the thriving, creative, happy life she saw in her dreams of self.
The latter two were her preferred identities to get money too. They came kind of naturally. She loved working on a canvas and felt relief writing out the story of an interesting woman. The latter being herself. But she never said her saga as a story-line was terrific as it was just happening to her. She always knew she was trying to have the courage to admit what life was giving her so other woman could feel the courage to improve their life too. Rose knew admission had to come first.
The Professorship won the most in Rose’s career life. Finally, after having thirty or more places to sleep and work for short periods, because that’s what America was like back then, she got a contract at Oxford. Her grandmother had told her that the family members that migrated to Bjarmaland, Russia, back in 900 AD re-bonded with the Saami nomadic deer hunters. This changed everything. It made Rose capable of using her Viking roots to live nomadic, in America, anywhere, anytime. Everyone she met was doing it. America was changing. The old ways of America were breaking up at the end of the nineteen hundreds. Many people never stayed at the same job like our forefathers did. Half the people who were married at twenty, did not stay married.
This was outlandish to Rose’s grandparents generation. It was refreshing for Rose to hear. She made herself comfortable among the many bewildered Americans and began to study how people migrate. If it looked like mom had finally stabilized a good life for herself, somewhere in the world, look again next year. It would change. But once she got to Oxford, the boys actually did think she had finally found a place that she could keep. They didn’t factor in her broken heart. She missed them the second they left her daily life and it was never her plan to be away from them again, once she gained a career and income. Poverty wasn’t her plan, but that’s what she got now and again. No. Rose could not be around her sons and bring bad news. It had to be an improvement. Rose would be away just for as long as it took for her to establish something that gave her an income. Why it took so long could be explained to the boys in more detail when they were older. Oxford did, however, give her a kind of a home life that was to her liking. It was the first home life to her liking. According to her, a somewhat upper class status suited her. The house share with professors began a whole new way to live as a single adult.
* Jillian was the only friend she had left in Connecticut. They talked on the cell and emailed for thirty years. Jillian told her, “The psychopaths, sociopaths and felonist ruined your life! You made it passed their fear tactics.” Jillian, told her that quite bluntly on the monthly phone calls and in particular, when she found out Rose was ready to come back to Connecticut to be near the one son who would stay there all his life. Or so he said. Maybe too bluntly because it felt like a stab in the heart and caused Rose to have visions of hovering over her fathers’ house as if she was his crucifix. The dream made no sense, not for many years, because she didn’t understand it. She didn’t know how men used her nor understand how or why any human would do such a thing. But she understood technical terms by now, like predator, sociopath and more.
Jillian stayed in Wallingford, Connecticut, but Rose had to leave over twenty years ago. The year that Jillian told Rose she could see the same horrifying truth, there was only one year left for Rose to have her sons, and by then, Rose had migrated several times, with her little boys, up in New Hampshire and Vermont. It was mind boggling to register what Jillian was admitting. Jillians’ divorce was messy too, but she stayed in Connecticut, whereas Rose fled. She became the first female attorney in her family. None of the other women in Rose’s circle ever went to college. Most of them stayed home and mothered.
Although Jillian could analyze the psychic condition of Roses antagonists, she had no clue about what was happening to Rose medically. Rose covered up her ailments. She was more aware of needing strength and could only conjure up getting some by drawing on her ancestral roots, her warrior woman imagery from her grandmother’s viking stories. Noticing her own hyperactive, hyper vigilant, blind and not blind condition was something to notice but there was no time to dwell on it. Rose thought meditation and following the guru’s directions would solve everything. Her mission needed to be focused on figuring out how to live life safely and if possible, choose life every step of the way.
Choice was actually one of the luxuries of life. After her sons went to live with their dad, Rose chose to spend a lot of time finding out what was the matter with her family and friends back in Ohio. More importantly, as her medical conditions worsened, she wanted to figure out what they did to her. Choice was not in Roses life when she was younger. Choice was stolen from her, raped from her mind and peeled away from her heart and finally molested from her very breath. Rose hated that she wasn’t strong enough to not feel the impact. No, Rose had to feel it all and the effect was catastrophic trauma. “Think of the Viking women who forged ahead with their wounds.” She told herself.
At Oxford, no one knew her past life story except Wenling was learning some of it. They didn’t know she dwelled on the Viking imagery and drew strength from having piercing, targeted goals each hour. Rose played life hard and used her shamanic powers to complete her task list every day. Her colleagues just noticed now and again that she had keen mental powers. That her concentration could go for sixteen hours a day without skipping a beat.
Then again, everyone at Oxford had keen mental powers. Many shamanic people became professors. It was in their power to do so. Rose’s secret plan was to write to the world and tell people the deadly wrong doing her family members acted out with the aim of ruining her. It was the only thing she could think of doing to help other women who had no voice, could not find their voice and who were, basically, stuck in fear. Rose refused to let fear stop her, ever.
At Oxford, she wanted to feel the wellness she had achieved, and the status, so it was important to block out the past memories. Still, when alone, she truly enjoyed her visions. She felt she represented many women who had overcome hardship beyond human measure. It wasn’t just about her. She knew this because when the time came for her to write, she had found and interviewed three thousand woman. She kept track, she kept notes. No one knew this part of her work. The calamities that she would reveal, the moral indiscretions, the irreverent use of power, the criminal acts, all that caused her to be sick and to have to give up her sons prematurely, would be written down and documented for the accused to read as well as their grandchildren. They didn’t have to change. But if one story could make them consider something, like the use of just means to make fair arrangements, maybe that would be one small thing Rose could give humanity. Personally, this writing could or would mean maybe one small thing her sons read could be used to continue to change human beings.
She didn’t know. She’d never know because life swept her sons up and off into their own life. In the end, they only visited. But what would happen to her writings when she died. There was a large trash bin outside her apartment in Connecticut. When she thought about big pictures, it made her dizzy. Rose always said, “I’m not going down alone. We are all going down together.” She figured that if all the nit-picking kinship groups do destroy some of the people in the group, the ones she could impact were the ones desperate about keeping a good reputation. That was the group upon which she sought revenge. And if telling the truth is revenge, then so be it. “
““If” we want to learn to treat each other properly, democratically, my book gives the reason why.” Rose felt strongly that human beings needed to be treated a special way. No one in her families had learned how to do it. Nor had many of the men Rose met in her life. Eventually, she learned that this bad treatment thing was just the human condition. Rose made another mission statement to herself. She bet her God and life on the probability that she was right. It sounds like a high-falluting mark in history that Rose is trying to make, but really, telling all was the only release from pain she could create with her own volition and a lot of literary skill.
Never sure if the higher powers in the universe would let her pull it off, she still tried to pull it off. She couldn’t help it. Her family had become a word document she visited everyday of her life.
* It was lunch time at Oxford University and not unusual for Rose to flip out. Any kind of feeding time meant family energies to Rose. “I’m taking a break from freaking out.” And with that swift shift in consciousness, Rose walks forward to find her friend. The pace of her walking picks up. Now it’s a super fast pace. She’s beginning to feel rejuvenated, like a stallion. “Today had a particularly large pressure. Walk on girl, walk hard.” But she lost her vision again and stopped.
Counting, “one, two, three,” it returned by ten. She went to hide behind a bookcase. A flood of family memories and panic kicked in. She saw a vision of herself racing on a horse to somewhere. She didn’t know where. Next, Rose’s nervous system shook to the point of instability. “Here it comes again like a tsunami wave overhauling my body.” Leaning forward and gagging, she almost throws up. “Need to defuse, and cry, and talk to myself.” Phlegm slides over her tongue from the back of her throat, a handkerchief is grabbed. As quietly as possible, she spits into the linen. “It’s also, very important just to re-install a program of behavior that can protect me from over reacting in case anyone notices…” Her eyes drift off. She feels blurry for a short span. She likes it there. It’s not engaged with the world. She snaps back into focus. The witness in her mind’s eye sees her and makes her adjust.
Rose has done so much internal training she can direct herself like a robot. Nostril breathing, breathing, breathing was her main solvent. Her panicked breathing slowed down. She opened her mouth ever so slightly so no one would know what she was doing. “Ahhh whuu, ahh wuu, ahhh whuu, ahhh whuu.” She knew it was reasonable to have a meltdown: It was because she was leaving her nice house share with professors. This was the best home life ever. Also to leave was her teaching post, great food, plenty of money, her colleagues and really everything she’d come to know. All to do the great “return” as the spiritual teachers talk about it.
The thought of the change, seeing her sons in the USA, made her over the top with edginess. She could barely concentrate when she felt what the return of a great love like that enabled her to be. Buried in Rose, over layers of experiences and other memories, there was a family women who wore an amber necklace and she refused to give up.
Susan Louise Darnell 