PART ONE: Who and what do I need to re-lease?

Re-lease: acknowledging that our minds are occupied by things. People, events and emotions towards those people and events. We allow these occupatants to "lease" space in our minds, hearts, and spirits. Just as any other leasing agreement, the leasing or renting comes at a cost. Those occupatants pay our bodies in either positive or negative ways. One negative manifestgation is anger. That anger can then manifest itself in bitterness and poor relationships. So we have to ask ourselves, "who are we allowing to lease space in our minds and how are they paying us? Who or what needs to be re-leased?"

Re-lease 1: The ideal image that I want my mother to be
My mother isn’t perfect. I don’t think anyone is. But for some reason I want her to have all the answers. I think it is because of selfish reasons. I selfishly want to be able to call her, tell her my problems and her pull out a remedy from her back pocket. It could be because searching for answers is challenging. Self-work is a laborious tasks and I want someone who can give me the cliffnotes version and solutions to my circumstances. I have been angry at her because of this. For the past few years I have felt like the parent. I have felt like some of the decisions my mother makes and has made have been detrimental to her emotionally, spiritually, financially, and physically. The decisions seem to be glaringly obvious. And when I point them out it seems that I only make things worse. Often times I feel alone in my laborious task of self-work. Alone in the sense that often times I feel as if I don’t have someone to say what’s going on with me and they offer possible solutions and I am that a “solver” for many people. I can call my mother about something and the traditional response is, “I don’t know what to tell you Missy.” And it’s not that she doesn’t care or this is a response for me to leave her alone, rather I believe she genuinely doesn’t know what to say. I’m not sure why she doesn’t know what to say. I think she doesn’t know what to say to me because, maybe she hasn’t or isn’t used to asking herself questions and analyzing her life and life choices. Maybe she would rather push all the emotions down and trying to forget about them, rather than exploring them. Maybe I’m supposed to help her through that, but its challenging when we have our own issues between the two of us. I talked to her last night about the women’s retreat I went to last weekend. The conversation turned into how I have discovered that I still feel hurt by how she hasn’t protected me. By family members who have disrespected me verbally and physically and how it seemed as if she has sat back and tolerated it. This isn’t a new conversation. I have said this to her before. And she always says, “How do you know I didn’t say anything?” But if she was genuinely was hurt, angry, and was really as protective as she claims she is, why hasn’t she disassociated with molesting family members? Why does she tell ME to apologize to people who have hurt me? Why does she tell me to change my behavior towards the perpetrators or go out of my way to be nice to someone who kicked me and my son out of their house? Its like the stories of little girls who have been raped by their uncle and the little girl is punished and the uncle is still invited to the family reunion. Isn’t that a slap in the face? Then the little girl asks her mom “why didn’t you stand up for me” and the mom says “I told uncle so-and-so that what he did was not very nice, then I took him to go get ice cream.” Yeah the mother said something but how serious was she? If the disrespect continued to happen then she apparently was not taken to be very seriously. My mom is so focused on wanting people to liking her that she makes all these extra efforts towards people who are undeserving of her extra attention. She is so focused on the fictitious dream of a tight family that she dismisses the times when family has turned on each other. It’s as if she doesn’t know who to pledge her allegiance to: Her daughter or other family members? She chooses neither in hopes that it will all blow over. But what happens is her lack of a strong stance for me translates into no response. A lack of care, not acknowledging my feelings and silencing me.

PROCLAIMATION:
I release the fictitious protective image of my mother that has constantly disappointment me when I needed someone in my corner. I release my anger that has manifested itself from that disappointment. I release the duty I have given myself to point out the decisions I believe to be spiritually, emotionally, and physically damaging and allow her to choose her path however painful I think it is. I release the take-charge, all-knowing, spiritually supportive mother character that I have been praying for my mother to be. I release the boundaries that have ignored my mother’s greatness and only focused on her weaknesses. I release the “heightened-sense” that points out her faults and not acknowledging her triumphs. I release these actions because they were my subconscious way of trying to hurt her as much as I have been hurting because of what I viewed was her fault. I release placing blame on my mother. I release the anger-boundaries that haven’t prevented me from loving my mother completely. The way she deserves to be loved.