Oh my gosh Jeannette! I love you! I am so happy to see you here! I was wondering if you got my letter. I miss you too and everyone at the YWCA. Thanks for being a part of Boomer Women Speak! Love and Light always, Lynn

Dian, I am absolutely interested in an interview for DVAM. That is my work, my mission: to bring awareness. I appreciate your interest and inspiration to dedicate your work, as well, in Faithwriters and Sisters in October. Way to go: break the silence and the stigma so all can find hope and heal. I will return to the editing process and tell you how I felt about manuscipt changes in another post, Okay? LLL

Eagle, I appreciate your deeply personal post. I relate to your feelings about normal and belonging. When I was 4, I witnessed my father holding a kitchen knife over my mother. I knew that was not normal and I was not from a normal family, therefore I was not normal. Whatever the reason, I began comparing my family to others, and so wanted to belong to normal that as an adolescent I ran away often and I adopted any family other than my own in order to belong. I finally found normal within myself, as a child of God’s family, and no longer looked beyond my SELF to belong. It took me a long while to determine that I deserved to be a part of God’s family. I too experienced surrendering to my husband’s love and accepting that we belong. In the last couple of years, I’ve had external experiences that gave me a sense of belonging, where I could emphatically say, “God has sent me here to serve, and I belong here.” Therefore, I was served as well by being graced with the sense of belonging. I must say that when I started taking anti-depressants 10 + years ago I had a change in metabolism and brain chemistry that made me feel as though my body was normalized, and I started to feel like my body belonged to me. (That’s not a recommendation, it’s just personal experience.) Yes, it’s a lot less exhausting being an authentic misfit that keeping up the pretense of “normal.” I wonder if the ache is not so much about achieving normal as it is about longing and stretching to be authentic. The authentic self supercedes society’s expectations of what is perceived as “normal,” don’t you think?

Eagle, you know how to take care of yourself, listening to music, baking for therapy, defining what measure of functioning is right for you! You know, I was not attempting to define normal (heck, what do I know) I was just stirring conversation. We haven’t regressed, we have just reviewed. Our individual uniqueness is what makes us who we are, and that is what’s important.

Dian, I also thought normal was all of the above: no divorce, no DV, no abuse, etc. I’m sorry you experienced all of the above (and I thought I was the only one….) You were thrown into adult duties as a child, which is not fair, is it? It’s awful that your boyfriend had his father commit suicide in front of him. How does a young man heal from that? Your other friend has no right to judge what is normal. I’m glad to hear you express that your normal is a sense of being okay with yourself and the world. And you are a young boomer, my friend!

Eagle, I have to add something. I had to practice the feeling of normal and belongingness in other places. For example, I went back to college in my forties. Talk about not belonging! Although the college I went to had a 36% enrollment of "non-traditional" students (those over the age of 26) I still felt as though I did not belong on campus with the youngsters. Every day I would tell myself that I did not have to measure belonging in reference the THEM. I only had to consider belonging in reference to God's family, and God sent me to school, therefore I belonged. Last night I went to a meeting to sign up as a volunteer for CASA. I am in a new community, and I know no one, so my sense of belonging is really rocked off its foundation. But I put into my heart the sense of belonging in the family of God. Our new boomer friend Leagh wrote "life is lived to serve life" and I kept that phrase in mind last night, thinking, I am here to serve life, therefore I belong. I did have vague feelings of being different because I am an artist, author, and educated as a social worker, and the other volunteers were retired Air Force. But I turned that vague feeling of being different into acknowledgement of my unique self. So, I had to stretch my self to enlarge my concept of where, and to whom, I belong. I'm not suggesting or implying anything. I am just relating my experience. I have to acknowledge that you are coming close to your boomer friends in feeling like you belong here. You do belong, Eagle, and we are enlightened and enriched by your posts and your presence. You bring so much Love and Light to the forums that it is nearly palpable. Thank you for reaching out to your boomer friends. I hope I can in some way reinforce your feelings of belonging; we will not abandon you, that's for sure. I, for one, am honored that you trust us with a sense of belonging!

Oh Happy Day: I get to go to a watercolor painting class I found in CO Springs!

From Lynn: I wonder if the ache is not so much about achieving normal as it is about longing and stretching to be authentic

Lynn, that hits the nail right on the head for where I'm at these days. After a lifelong struggle to conform, mold and stretch myself into the "perfect fit", I now recognize that my authentic core self has been scrubbed raw by the grit of my own self-hatred, sacrificed to the whims of whoever's opinion I was believing at any given time, and obscured to the point that it is no longer recognizable - or easily retrievable - anymore.

A friend calls it the 12 o'clock dilemma, based on R.D. Laing's "The Divided Self" (which I haven't read.) He describes several stages of an (actual or hypothetical) process:

1. You start out just being yourself.

2. Somewhere along the line you decide that, whatever kind of payoff you're looking for, you'd get more of it if you were less like you and more some other way, more like someone else. So you start acting more like the person you've decided you should be. Laing illustrates this with a circle diagram; you started out at 12 o'clock but now you're pretending to be somewhere else on the circle, let's say at 6 o'clock.

3. There's nothing special to anchor you at 6 o'clock -- or anywhere else in particular -- so you keep adjusting your image until you get all the way around to 12 o'clock again, pretending to be yourself.

Laing points out that, close as that may be to just being yourself once again, they're actually a world (or 360 degrees) apart. The one is being; the other is pretending.

I know for certain I've been around the clock a few times! I don't know where I am at this point, only that it's somewhere full of "longing and stretching to be authentic". It's my hope that when I get there (and I'm making a conscious decision to enjoy the journey this time; you know, smell the roses - or fresh banana bread - along the way ), it will restore that long-lost sense of belonging. Maybe I need to belong to myself first before I can feel that sense of belonging anywhere else.

Hi Meredith, and thank you for joining in the discussion. You are not like anyone else! You are a unique and multi-talented woman! (I don’t know what way-tres means.) I too was considered “weird” (and I was) but being weird was not a deterrent to them choosing me. I did care how I was perceived. However, it did cause me to be attracted to weirdos more than being attracted to those perceived as normal. Of course I’d be attracted to weirdos: that’s what I experienced in my own family. However, in my mature years, I have learned that I am neither weird nor normal; I am, as you say, loving and fully functional, and that is good enough for me. I think it’s good to question the concept of normal. Someone, somewhere, sometime in society determined what is normal according to their standards.

Lynn - I just had a shiver when I read again about you at age 4 witnessing the knife thing. I was 6 when I witnessed a gun thing with my "dad" and mom. Instead of shooting her, he hit her in the head with it and damaged her eardrum. Blood from her ear ran down onto my youngest brother, whom she was rocking at the time.

Why should any child witness these things?

I'm curious about how many have witnessed such violence as children - say pre-16 years old? I'm betting there are many - I'm interviewing a woman who did, then there's you, and of course, myself and my boyfriend (who, by the way, is now my husband) - I bet the percentage is very high. What are the chances of four people right off the bat having this same experience?

I really believe in my heart that "normal" families have experienced many of the topics we've all discussed - they've just chosen to keep it quiet.

I'm all for sharing. It's healing and empowering, and above all - it helps us to feel not alone and see what we've accomplished despite all the labels placed on people who've gone through traumatic experiences.

I'd like to start labeling the labelers.