Seventy Thoughts on Turning Seventy

Boomer heal thyself

She's always been with me -- the 10 year old girl whose father wanted a divorce so badly he was willing to sacrifice his children on the marital battlefield. I don't know if he ever gave any thought to the impact of his actions on his children, especially his first born who was made to be the go between and carrier of their vitriol. "You tell your mother..." "Well you tell your father..."

And I'd repeat whatever toxic imprecations came next. Those words coursed through my bloodstream, my lungs and my heart.

It's hard to hear words of love when your heart beats to a negative rhythm. It's hard to learn self love, or even to accept kindness from others without being suspect. And while his presence in my life was neither healthy nor nurturing, it was his absence which did the most damage.

Psychologists say that a girl learns her value from her father. His love and acceptance of her is what gives her confidence to go out into the world as person who knows her own worth. I never had that. My mother did her best, but there is no such thing as being mother and father. Sure as one person, she did the hard work of childrearing -- keeping a roof over our heads and making sure that we had access to the best education financially available. ( thank you PHEAA, EOG and NDEA.)

To exacerbate the abandonment I experienced at ten, my father with the insistence of his second wife, erased me. She never got over how I acted as a scared and angry adolescent when she would serve as gatekeeper to my access to my father. And yes, at age fifteen, I DID stand outside her house and call her a whore and home wrecker, but that was only because she wouldn't let me talk to my father when I'd come to their front door to ask for help when my mother had been hospitalized after an accident.

From that point on, I ceased to exist in their world. And I was fine with that. I rarely saw my father and when I did at my sister's or brother's events, he would ignore my presence. He never got to know my children. Still. I made a life for myself. Took advantage of every educational opportunity and followed my mother's advice and got a good job as a teacher with the School District of Philadelphia ( with benefits!!!!) met and married a wonderful man who was the father I never had to my children and I turned my job with the school district into an exemplary career as an educator.

Throughout my 30's, 40's and 50's my childhood experiences and the wounds they caused faded into the dusk of irrelevance.

To say they came roaring back suddenly would be an exaggeration. I started feeling familiar nigglings of self loathing after I retired from teaching. But those voices ( my father's and his wife's) were drowned out by the generative nature of my "third act" and my life as a writer and artist in Santa Fe where I moved after my husband and I parted amicably.

It started during Covid -- that long stretch of time I spent totally isolated and alone. Despite a decade of Jungian analysis and study, in which I thought I had my demons under control, this one -- associated with my father's erasure of me -- knocked on my door, made himself at home and took up seemingly permanent residence. I felt like I was living in a constant state of annihilation - that everybody who knew me wanted to see me disappear.

All these years, I thought that I had addressed and healed the twin wounds of abandonment and erasure. I had even turned them into an asset as a teacher of adolescents; I could understand and empathize with their struggles.

But post Covid, turning seventy. I am feeling the impact of my childhood wounds more acutely than I have before.

It feels counter intuitive. I would have guessed that I'd continue to grow and the past would become even less relevant to my current life.

That I am now faced once again with these self deprecating voices, that I find myself unwittingly precipitating situations that result in my erasure with my family, intimates and friends is a warning that the healing was never complete. It is a clarion call to go deeper and heal these wounds from the inside out before I die.

Jung once said: “The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents.” I do not want to leave this earth bequeathing to my children and grandchildren the wound of erasure for them to heal.

My job.

So how do I do it? I've started the best way I know how. By reading and writing and searching for meaning. I've begun a work which I call "The Erotics of Erasure" in which I explore the lives of women who have been erased by history. I have taken courses with Rabbi Tirzah Firestone in intergenerational healing and I've invited my demons to an imaginary dinner party where we get to know each other better. We eat. We sing. We dance.

Perhaps if my father had healed himself (because only God knows what wounds roiled inside of him) I would not find myself facing this challenge at age 70. He died at 71. So who knows what healing he may have initiated had he been given more time.

Instead this "father complex" became his legacy to me. It is my responsibility to make peace with the past-- to engage in an alchemical process of meaning-seeking which will transform the dross of self annihilation to the gold of deeper understanding and compassion.

Boomers have a higher level of education than any generation before us. We've had access to education, knowledge and therapeutic practices not available to our parents.

I am not the only one to experience childhood wounds more acutely at 70 than I did in the past. So many others that I talk to are re-living childhood traumas that they believed were long resolved. What part of this story feels familiar to you? What have you learned from your engagement with your childhood wounds?