Caregiving is the hardest thing you can ever do.
When a child is sick, or someone has an illness and they require care, you are filled with hope. Hope propels the caregiver forward.
Tomorrow could 🙏 be better.
It often, but not always is, but there is hope!
When you are caring for an elderly adult, a parent on the road to death, there is no hope.
Hope becomes, may they not suffer.
May I give them comfort.
May they pass quickly.
May I have the strength to do this for as long as it is required of me.
But, as the years roll past, fatigue sets in.
Guilt takes over.
Exhaustion overwhelms.
You are depleted.
You are left raw, vulnerable and easy prey.
After years of caregiving you lose your sense of self, your voice.
You simply try to get through each day.
Narcissists find you like a bee finds nectar.
They prey on your vulnerability.
They feed you with their demands and lies.
Abuse comes in many forms.
Self blame and the blame of others is real, it is your fault, it is salt on the wound.
Your voice gets quieter, and quieter until you have none, you feel invisible.
I lost my voice.
I lost my ability to hear the stories my pieces would tell me.
I had nothing.
My mom passed peacefully while I held her hand🙏 💔.
My heart was broken.
Yet it is a natural part of life.
Narcissists were slowly eliminated.
Healing began.
Perhaps I'll never hear the stories again, in truth this is the only one that matters.
But that's ok.
I am not who I was.
I don't tell you this for any praise or compliments or judgment. I speak this truth because it is the story of everyone!
That the human spirit evolves through pain and suffering. We are given an opportunity, the free will, to rise above what has been put upon us.
The irony of having a parrot, who chose her own name, the name of the goddess of the Lotus, is not lost on me!
She is my daily reminder of hope. She lived in the mud but is now blooming.
The goddess Kamala is a symbol of the human condition, of prosperity and abundance. That in order to grow in spirit, we must first grow through the mud.
Through a series of personal miracles created by my newly anointed guardian angel I was propelled on a different path with my Kamala and with my life.
I am learning how to give Kamala a voice of her own.
To be able to communicate to me her choices. As I watch her begin to bloom into this new way of being, to be respected, to be heard I have also begun to heal. The one who was rescued becomes the rescuer!
We learn, we sing, we dance, we communicate and we hear each other's voices!
The seed of the lotus can lie on dry ground for a thousand years. But given the right conditions it will grow and bloom!
And I have the great privilege of watching this beautiful creature open up and bloom into a beautiful flower.
Together we are finding ourselves and this is the beauty of the intertwining of life.
Choose to rise!
Life is hard.
Life is beautiful.
🙏🦜🪷
