Wednesday, October 27, 2010

I don’t know really why, but since finding out my dad has prostrate cancer I’ve been thinking a lot about how my dad is so beautifully feminine.

Actually I sometimes weep with a deep sense of knowing and gratitude that I get my goddess wisdom and love for the feminine from him.
I talked to him a bit about it, I’m never sure over the phone how much he understands me because of his hearing aid, but I think he got it.  I told him that I sometimes wonder if he was born in a different age if he would have been a radical fairy.  I described to him how they meet out on the land together.  He said, “well sometimes I have felt jealous of gay men, that they can dress so freely.”  I explained that in this new generation a man doesn’t have to be gay to dress like a fairy.  He seemed to really like this and went on to talk about growing up and how there was just one way to dress as a man.  He grew up in Chicago’s Polish town, his parent’s Lithuanian immigrants.  It was a big deal for my dad to enter the field of psychology.  My mom’s father used to harass him for being in a sissy profession.  And my mom told me that part of the reason she was originally attracted to my dad was because he wasn’t like her own father, that my dad was soft and gentle.  But ultimately she said as she aged she wanted more of a man for her husband.  They divorced when I was twelve.
There are times when I have felt that my masculine self is more feminine than my feminine self and that my feminine self is more masculine. 
This can create some confusion.  But recently I’m starting to appreciate this internal “freakishness.”  And I even brought it up to my dad because we started to talk about the masculine feminine thing and was there any connection to what was going on with his prostrate.  He expressed how he sometimes feels like he is too feminine and can’t access his male self.  I appreciate this, I have felt this myself as a wanting access to more of myself.  And I have also gotten really down on myself about it like my father was in this conversation and like our culture has taught us to believe that somehow we are “out of balance and sick.”  But in that moment talking to my dad some new wisdom came to me and I know now I was not just talking to him but also myself.  I told him that perhaps the cancer is not from needing to balance your masculine and feminine self, maybe you’re actually the balanced one and the rest of the world is out of balance.  Maybe the cancer is here to tell you to celebrate your balance of masculine and feminine, rejoice in all that you are!  There’s that broken mirror talking threw me.

I don’t think it is just a coincidence that I have recently started to let my masculine self show itself to others, well, even to myself.  Along with all this feminine energy in my early childhood came a kind of repression of all things masculine.  So ultimately denying that masculine within my own self, and he was there and he did go into hiding.  So it has been a bit frightening to reveal him to myself.  And like my father this inner masculine self has its own unique expression of what it means to be masculine.  It seems to be more like a line with masculinity on one end and femininity on the other.  And it seems my masculine self is probably just over the middle line towards the masculine side, probably the same for my feminine self, just over the middle line but on the feminine side (but not yet ready to reveal this closeness to the masculine).
Whew I’m getting tired of using those two words, is any one else tired?  It still feels a bit confusing.  And may I say it can also be confusing in the arena of dating, and especially after ten years of celibacy and five years later still confused about what I’m attracted to.  I’m guessing though, that the more I allow these truer expressions of myself to be felt and seen the less confusing it will be. 
“As I heal myself I heal all my ancestors ten generations in each direction” (each direction of that masculine feminine line also).  This is the medicine of the broken mirror, we are all connected and mirrors of each other and yet not each other but our own unique expression.

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