Thoughts on the Taupin case and self transformation

Hello Gentle Readers:

I am eyin a contemplative mood and it is the stuff that is a little long to post on Facebook so I am choosing to write here and do a little thinking through the keyboard.

There is a case of child abuse that is receiving a lot of public attention.  The name of the couple involved is the Taupin's and since they still will have their day in court I will not go over the gory details here but I will say it has struck a chord with me.  A deep, personal chord that is resonating in a discordant key.

Among the speculations there is an assumption that a religious cult is somehow involved but not confirmed and that bothers me.  People can be completely wacado without religion being a part of it and abusive to their children in the extreme with out religion being a part of it as well.  It does not always go hand in hand.

There is a whole mess of personal  psychology, ethics, morals,  sex, and control that will eventually come out once this thing sees its day in court.  Justice for the children will be its own thing because they will have to go through several cycles  of transformation and understanding their past in order for that to happen.  That bit I speak on from personal experience and that is what I want to spend the remainder of this post discussing how we view our past after transformation.

When I was much younger my parents divorced and my dad made a series of choices that negatively affected my sisters and I.  While we were not physically or sexually abused, we were physically neglected and emotionally and spiritually abused by the person that had become our step mother.

There was a period that my father would not let us call our mother in the summer months when we were staying with him and would keep us late in churches and bible studies while telling our mother we were at girl scouts.  We were taken on a long road trip where we weren't really told where we were going but we had stopped in Wyoming long enough to connect with our step sisters and were able to call our mother.   It wasn't until I was in my 30's that my mother gave me her journals to read and she was told we were at an extended girl scouts camp and it wasn't known when we were coming back but after we made the phone call we were back in three days and picked up the day after by my mother and step father. 

I also remember that my father did  not want to sign the insurance paperwork  to pay for a tmj operation so he took me to every tent preacher in the tri state area and even a few trips into Oklahoma to have the faith healers of the day pray for me.  I was told that God wasn't fixing my jaw because at 10 I either didn't have enough faith or had unconfessed sin. So I now publicly announce that when I was 7 I cut the hair off of Kate's barbies because I thought they needed it.....

My point in bringing this up is that I have not made traditional relationship choices because of my past and the abuse involved.  I choose to be polyamorous because I don't believe we were created to be monogamous. I am wiccan and currently seeking initiation into Ifa because I don't believe in the christian paradigm I was brought up with mostly because of the crappy treatment by its followers.

At the same time, while I acknowledge the scares that I have from my childhood I can still say I feel singularity blessed.

I can say without reservation that I know both my mother and father loved me and continue to do everything in their power to show me that love.  Thank you.

I also had the privileged of getting to know all of my great grandparents with the exception of Great Grandpa Pete.  When I do ancestral offerings I know who liked apricots, schnapps, swisher sweets, etc and that even one Great  Grandmother was a spiritualist who hosted seances in her home mostly because it was the popular thing to do.   These are memories I hold dear.  I know which ones were the sticklers, who were the carpenters, and who collected seeds and sold them to Gurney's.  It is a great privileged to have a core understanding of who I am because of their contributions and thoughts.

My contemplative part is at what point are we minimizing our experience and at what point are we amplifying it.   I wish it were easy to have specific categories for every experience of who is the good guy and who is the bad guy.  As much as I hated those camp meetings, they are the foundation for how I understand the physical and spiritual world around me.  As much as I had to deal with the pain of the emotional and spiritual abuse I appreciate the code of ethics and morals that it instilled in me as to what lines I absolutely will not cross.  However, I still have to go through periods of reevaluating what I do with the  residual pain and how it effects my choices. 

That is the part that I get concerned about for the Taupin children even though there is nothing I can do to prevent the process they will have to all go through.  May they have the grace and courage to become the people they are ment to be.

Blessed be.