Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems. ~Rainer Maria Rilke

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Kind of Feeling Better

Ever since I was a little girl I have had this attitude that sickness was a chastisement for some bad thought or action... or even if I had a wishful desire for something I wanted... but shouldn't have. I carry this feeling with me today and will probably take it to my grave. This isn't a full blown syndrome or a case of mental instability (I hope.) but it's always there in the recesses of my mind, telling me to look back and see what it was that I did, said or thought that caused this illness or distress.
This is a "confession" of sorts because I don't admit weakness or failings readily. I do believe that my Mom could have raised me with a more religious bent. I was a good candidate for carrying guilt around and being manipulated by visions of torment and darkness. She would have raised a good Catholic. I might have even been a Nun.... no! Scratch that. I was too boy crazy for that.
My Mom went to parochial school and was a practicing Catholic until she married my father. It was how she was raised and old habits die hard. We had fish on Fridays and said our prayers. But she didn't want us to have to search for reasons to confess our childlike sins. I always felt like my sister and I were raised with a liberal and freethinking theology. I think I picked up more than this.
I don't remember any direct hits on my "closet Catholic" tendencies. My Dad did have a way of making me feel REALLY bad about my behavior and he was raised in a rather benign christian church without the benefit of confession, rosaries or Mother Mary looking down on him. But he could make me feel awful just by not talking to me. Maybe the absence of "a voice" telling me why he was angry and what I did to make him angry was what started this odd behavior of mine. Maybe it's my father who is still guiding me, silent and angry, in the belief that I must have done something wrong to deserve getting sick. Don't know. I only know that the feeling is always with me. I do wonder about our ability to manifest sickness as a form of reaching out for love. Not in every case, but sometimes.
I'm feeling better, today, so this must have been a small transgression. Last year, when I got that virus that lasted so long... or long ago, at 39, when I found out I had breast cancer.... Those were real soul searching moments. But... this time I probably just yelled at someone. Like, when I shouted a rather provocative expletive at someone who pulled in front of me on the road and then I realized  that both of my grand babies were in the back seat... silent and looking at me. I apologized, but that may have been when the nose cold started. Who knows.
 Direct correlation?
Subliminal Catholic guilt?
 Farmlady is thinking too much into this?
She needs serious psychiatric help?
I don't know.... I only know that my cold is slowly getting better but my brain is exhausted trying to figure out where it came from and why.
I need to channel my "monkey mind" into a controlled environment for a while.
Take to the goats.
Feed the chickens.
Sleep...

12 comments:

  1. There is not one that cannot reflect back and wonder if things could have been different or better. Most of the times, our lives are what we make it.

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  2. needless to say you need to start acting better so you dont get sick...ha...smiles.

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  3. And I feel that I should be taken care of when I am sick. That's the only time that my Mom was NICE to me...

    From a BC sister.

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  4. I am battling bronchitis this week -- it knocked me for a loop. But I am blaming the mild winter we have had here in the Midwest -- I sympathize with you and hope you feel better each day.

    Jean - MN

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  5. Oh my, I have about a 10-page reply I'd like to write you telling you why your illness(es)is not a punishment for perceived sins. But I'll use some self-control and limit my comments to these. I don't believe illness EVER comes along as a punishment., but I do think that we can bring on illness ourselves because sometimes we feel that we need it as a way of soliciting love, comfort, attention, etc. and sometimes maybe even to assuage feelings of guilt.
    But in the end, as the quote often attributed to Freud says, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar".
    You were housed with a couple of little Beans who don't need to have colds themselves to pass on one of the MANY germs/viruses they pick up from their friends. That's probably all it was. Love ~Dawn

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  6. Being raised a Catholic myself. I do not think God gives us sickness because we have sinned. The Bible tells us it rains on the just and the unjust. We get sick because of the germs that are around. Have a blessed evening and feel better real soon. Madeline

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  7. Glad to see your back, feel better, ummm cheese and bacon omelet, and look forward to seeing what my goat buddies are up too!

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  8. Well, then, I guess you'd better straighten up and fly right! ;-) And the goats would like you to feed them as well as talk to them :-).

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  9. that catholic guilt will make your monkey mind do strange things...glad you are starting to feel better. I'm pretty screwed myself...when I was diagnosed with diabetes as a young child my mom told me it was because I disobeyed her and that was my punishment. Gawd, I need to carry that around the rest of my life!

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  10. If they come to lock you away, you better remind them to come back for me as I have a very similar way of thinking. Any ailment that comes along I see as, not so much a punishment for a wrongdoing, but a weakness in my moral fibre that I have allowed in, or negative thinking. I was raised Catholic and a master at guilt. We humans are strange creatures and the beauty of it is we can all have our individual strangeness.

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  11. Glad you are feeling better. Always glad when you stop by for a visit. Heaven forbid, I did not know when I made that picture, that I was taking a weirdo and a pot smoking pipe. Why does that "robot" thin coming up now? That is very hard to work with.

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  12. God is love and grace. God is goodness mercy and justice. If you who are unredeemed know how to give good things to your children, how much more so does your heavenly Father know how to give good things to those who ask Him?

    Those "catholic" thoughts may not even be catholic but they are lies from the pit of hell.

    I wish we could sit and discuss this over tea and fresh baked cookies. I would show you the loving Lord who took all punishment so that those who would accept His gift would never receive any punishments of any kind.

    Sickness is in this world because it's a fallen place. We have thorns thisles and germs.

    You didn't deserve to get to sick you just got sick.

    God blesses you constantly with gifts of beauty, grace and goodness. Please give Him credit for the good and not the ill.
    It breaks my heart to think that soemthing that brings you suffering makes you think of God.
    Confounded religion!!!

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