-I do better with boundaries if I develop my boundaries with the help of my sponsor.

-The first thing I need in order to set meaningful boundaries is a powerful determination to be myself.

-The most basic boundary is giving myself permission to say no.

-In setting my boundaries, my need to explain why I set the boundary undermines the believability of the boundary. I may want to give an explanation, but if I am afraid not to explain and justify, you may sense my fear and  want to see if I can be backed down.

-When I was growing up, i set many boundaries; all for other people. “If I do that, she will be mad at me.”  Or  “She likes it when I do that, therefore I have to always remember to do that”.

-The trouble of surviving by constantly searching for what the other person wants is that it leads to a life style in which I am defenseless. If I am searching for clues to what the other people want, I have to take in every nuance of their words, actions, and demeanors into myself. If I do that, I necessarily absorb every negative idea that comes my way.

-If I am trying to please people and not myself, I tend to overestimate the damage potential of other people because I add my negative imagination to what was actually done and said.

-I do better when I do not try to set rigid boundaries. All my boundaries should spring from the 11th step; that is from a search for God,s will. There may be occasions where I want to give up a boundary temporarily. However, It is better if I do not sacrifice a boundary to fear.

-Boundaries based on the gifts of the program tend to be informed by flexibility and love.

- I am better off if I select boundaries that depend solely upon me. “You have to stop screaming at me” is a boundary that depends upon your willingness to comply. “If you scream at me I will simply hang up”, is a boundary that gives me control of my own situation.

-Some boundaries don’t have to be spoken. In that case, my behavior and not my words let you know what behaviors are not acceptable to me.

-I do not think I can effectively set boundaries if I fight against or resent your boundaries.

-Boundaries have a tendency to set both people free.

I went to a great meeting this morning. The topic was perfectionism.

-I After I shared, I was filled with dread because I did not think my pitch was perfectly delivered.

-I hate seeing that I have not perfectly dealt with my perfectionism.

-My humanity is included in the love covenant I have with my Higher Power. To my surprise, She only wants me to be fully human. In other words, my Higher power only wants me to be exactly the person I actually am,  She wants me to thoroughly accept and love myself.

-Maybe the perfect solution to perfectionism is believing, ” I’m not OK, you are not OK, but that”s OK.”

-At my funeral, no one will say, “What a wonderful man George was. He was always right.”

-My strategy as a boy was to figure out what it was my mother wanted from me. I would say to myself, “She is very angry. If I can figure out what I did to make her so angry, I would never do it again. Conversely, sometimes I said, “She’s  being nice now. If I could figure out what I did to make her happy I would always do it.” That was definitely my onramp to perfectionism.

-Unfortunately, if I had found a way to always do it right, that would have been a major problem for my Mom. That’s because what she wanted from me was not for me to be the perfect son, she wanted me to be available so I could be the target for her anger.

-One of the ways she managed to keep me available, was to keep changing the rules. The boy she wanted me to be at noon today, was not going to be the boy she was going to want me to be that evening.

-She was nice to me often enough to keep me hooked.’

-Sometimes I have said,”I am only an expert in one area. I am an expert at knowing what does not work. Maybe saying that is one more expression of my perfectionism.

-I have learned that falling into the mud is not my problem. Everybody does that. My problem is staying for a swim.

-When I first came into the program an experienced program member watched for the times I would beat myself up with a verbal baseball bat. Then she would hand me a silver dollar and say, ” I have purchased that bat. Now it is mine and you can’t ever use  it again”. I made a lot of money.

-My really good friend Nicole and I have an agreement. If she hears me make a derogatory joke or statement about myself, she has the right to demand I make three affirmations about myself. It works the other way too. if she speaks in a derogatory way about herself, she owes me three affirmations. This little game has brought us some fun moments.

-I have become persuaded that all my character defects are driven by shame. Therefore shaming myself when I do I do something wrong only serves to make repeating the shame producing activities a certainty.

-Shame is the gasoline that keeps the car of my character defects running. I can’t get rid of that car, but I can keep the fool thing out of gas.

-In other words, if I stubbornly hang on to my serenity by using my program tools, I can gradually escape the prison of shame in which I have lived most of my life.

-I could not possibly count high enough to count the fears that the passage of time has proven to be totally baseless.

-When I first started my recovery, I often listed the things I was afraid of in the morning. That evening, I reexamined my list and noted how many of my morning fears had proven groundless. Then I would pray, “God, I give myself permission to be afraid again in the morning and not feel guilty.  Please help me to turn things over to you enough to rest well tonight. I repeated that process for months or weeks at a time. This process was very helpful to me.

-A good many of my evening fears came from a prayer I said every night when I was a boy that included the line, “…If I should die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul you to take.” It was not appropriate for me as a young boy to go to sleep each night wondering if I was going to die.

-Worse, what would happen to me if the Lord chose “…My soul not to take”. I needed to feel totally received by my parents to help me deal with the reality that I felt absolutely dependent on them for my survival. Because I was so young, I was not conscious of these fears . Nevertheless, this prayer only served to deepen my distress.

-That prayer also gave me a fear of life after death that I could not even begin to get into words because of my youth. Without the parental bonding I so desperately needed, that vague but stalking fear of eternal abandonment could only grow stronger as I grew older.

-The only comfort I have found for that stalking abandonment fear is the daily, intimate fellowship with God that the 12 Step people call conscious contact.

-The word “conscious” in the phrase conscious contact has two meanings for me. The first meeting has to do with the fact that I consciously set time apart each day  to learn to enjoy God. The second is that moment by moment sense that  I never have to pray God in from Chicago. She is always there.

-Fear can be successfully suppressed if the purpose is to help me deal with a situation that needs total focus.

-However, if that suppressed fear is not brought out in the open after the immediate threat is passed, the fear can stay inside me to do damage.

-If I use my Higher Power and my friends to help me process my tension, then I can accept and enjoy the reality that I successfully handled a tough situation.

-Using my recovery tools in that way, trains into me a growing confidence in and respect for myself.

I have always seen my self doubt as the enemy of my writing; something to be defeated. Thanks to a conversation with my daughter Jill, I now see My sense of self doubt as inevitable. When I write, self doubt is there and it always will be there.  However, it not just there as something to be overcome , but also necessary and even desirable and helpful in terms of me writing in the way that is truest to my own desire and nature .

Self doubt keeps me from seeing what I write as some kind expression of an infinite reality. I used to do lots of preaching. Preaching made me feel as if I had to have answers for people. I knew that wasn’t true, but I was often tempted to feel like I was God’s voice. I desperately want to avoid that duplicity as I write.

I just want to share things as they seem to me at this moment. If what I write helps someone, that’s wonderful, but my purpose is to express my own heart and hopefully have some exchange with those who read me. I want to say to you what I have said to so many people in my program when I have been asked a question.

“Here is how things seem to me, but if it doesn’t work for you, no problem. Remember, one of the nicest things about being an American is that you are never more than 15 ft from a trash can.”

Self doubt also provokes deeper soul searching that contributes to the openness, genuineness and humanness of my writing. Self doubt contributes to the connectivity of my writing with with my readers.

I like to listen to opera. I am mostly unfamiliar with the world of opera but I enjoy it. In fact I am listening to Turandot at this moment. However, some opera is so out of the world in which I live that it is essentially unavailable to me; at least for now. Self doubt helps me write in a way that is more available to more people.

So welcome friend self doubt. Thanks for your help.

Here are seven reasons I used to not respond to what seems to me to be female flirting.  I am getting very hard on my hesitations and have actually made good progress. The reasons listed are in no particular order.

1. I need to be pretty sure I am reading the signals right. It hurts to be rejected.

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2. Sometimes women flirt just to reassure themselves that they still have what it takes.

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3. To me, it seems like I’m in a pickle. The odds seem high that if I respond, in the long term, either me or the woman is going to hurt. I dislike both options equally.

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4. I am so damn self conscious.-

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5. Some women think of me as a fatherly type. I often can’t tell if their approaches to me are an attempt to ease their daddy wounds or if they would like to  investigate the possibility of a romance with me.

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6. If the woman is really attractive, I sometimes I tie up verbally.

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7. I am scared of intimacy dating back to my boyhood. If there is the possibility of intimacy of the sort that may lead to sex, I  sometimes lose the ability to be my true self. I feel a kind of macho defensiveness rise up.

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GmCay

From the age of seven  until the age of fifteen, I lived in Coronado, Ca. which means we lived there from1945-1953. Coronado is called an island but it is actually connected to the San Diego area  by a narrow strip of sand called The Silver Strand. Coronado, which is across the bay from San Diego’s downtown business district, is a wealthy city.

We lived in a government housing project that was built during the  World War ll to house workers in the aircraft industry. If you are familiar with the San Diego area, the project was right where the Coronado bridge now comes down in Coronado. The area is a country club these days.

The original intention of the government was for the project to be torn down immediately after the war. The buildings were plywood, nailed up with double headed nails so the project could be easily dismantled. Not only were they poorly constructed, they were also not kept up. Once we went months without hot water, which illustrates the low quality of the maintenance we lived with.

My dad was a sheet metal worker at North Island Naval Air Station which occupies more than half of the of Coronado Island. He never made enough money to care for whichever of his six kids were living at home at the time.

We were frequently hungry. I passed out from hunger on at least one occasion. Our diet was protein poor. Things were especially desperate the week we had to pay the rent. Rent week, we pretty well ran out of food about Tuesday and stayed out of food until Friday when my dad got his next check. On Fridays, we always had homemade hamburgers. I doubt if anything I will ever taste will surpass how good those hamburgers tasted.

On the occasions when we ran out of food, we lived on the kindness of a man named Mel who drove our neighborhood’s route for The Conklin Bakery Company. At that time, bakery companies delivered baked goods to neighborhoods much like dairy companies delivered milk. Mel was willing to give us credit. That meant we lived on bread, brownies and pies for days at a time. Once I got six brownies and ate them all within  ten minutes. Mel at least insured that we had enough calories in our diet to keep us going. I remain powerfully grateful to him.

The shame of our poverty did not come from our meager means. The shame came from the toxic, raging, anger my mom poured out on all of us. Her anger was in part over the shame she felt because we lived in the project and in part because she was angry at my Dad that  he only made enough money for us  to have a impoverished standard of living. She shamed him ruthlessly and relentlessly and simply destroyed his sense of masculinity. I identified with the destruction of my dad’s manhood, and thereby experienced the destruction of my own masculinity .

Finally, my dad shot himself with my gun. To get away from the scene of his death, we moved to a  project that was in another part of San Diego called Linda Vista.

My mother’s shame and rage was multiplied by my dad’s suicide. She needed a new target. Her rage was in large part, aimed at me. It was devastating. Sometimes when the rage seemed unbearable, my sister Judiand I would call one or both of our older married sisters to come over to calm her down. I was deeply wounded by Mom’s behavior and as a result I felt like I was very low class. Here is an example of what I mean.

La Jolla is a uber wealthy beach city just north of San Diego. When I got old enough to buy myself a car, I would not drive through La Jolla.  instead, I circumnavigated  clear around all the city. I didn’t feel worthy of being near such wealth.

That is all  background for the story I really want to tell you. I attend a 12 Step meeting in Orange County.  All the years I have attended the meeting I never quite felt like I belonged. The reason I  have felt that way, was that there is lots of money in area of Orange County. I felt separated form the group because I live in far more modest circumstances than most of the people that attend the meeting.

In all fairness, the people in  the group never gave me the slightest indication that the level of my income mattered to them in the least. However, in my emotions, my boyhood poverty shame was  a wedge between me and the other truly lovely people in the group. I tried many ways to rid myself of this feeling  but nothing seemed to help. The boyhood shame was still there after the passage of all those decades.

At a recent meeting, a woman I will call Jane shared that she sometimes felt like she did not really belong in the group. She also shared how she overcame her sense of not belonging.

As she shared, I heard that reliable voice within me that I have learned to trust over the years, telling me that I could defeat the sense of distance I had at the meeting if I would share the whole story with Jane. Jane is a fine, experienced and wise member of our group. All of that is positive. My problem was that she is also very pretty.

When I am feeling a deep anxiety, as I was that morning, I tie up like a painfully self conscious fifteen year old boy around a really pretty girl. I really wish I get outgrow my shyness. Maybe someday.

However,  I did promise my Higher Power that if she was available to talk after the meeting, I would get her phone number so I could talk to her about the sense of shame I sometimes experienced at that particular meeting.

Immediately after the meeting ended, she was standing  by her chair all alone. She was gathering up her things, preparing to mingle with other members of the group. It also happened that no one was right there wanting to talk to me as sometimes happens immediately after a meeting. This was my chance. I nervously walked over to her and told her I wanted to phone her to talk over what she had shared. She was of course very gracious. Still, I could hear my voice trembling.

Later that afternoon I phoned Jane and left her a message asking her to call me. For the next few hours I tried to figure out something I could say to her when she called, so I would not have to reveal my my painful feelings. However, by  the time she called, I knew I would tell her the truth and I did. It was a dear and sweet conversation.

Mostly Jane reinforced the idea that no one in the group cared at all about the level of my income. She also said, “I certainly don’t care how much money you have. I do care about and respect the honesty of your sharing.” The love and respect her  and her manner conveyed to me gave me a powerful sense of relief.

Since that talk with Jane, I have not felt the old sense of separation. What an example of my Higher Power helping me overcome a Character defect. The experience gives me a fine sense of satisfaction and a pride in myself, that I did my part. I also feel deeply grateful to Jane and to my recovery group.

George Caywood

I saw her, with her shiny dark hair.

A smile so sweet, she so sweetly will share.

A quick warm embrace, love from her soul.

I gave back her hug, returning love as my goal.

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Her eyes are shiny, full of deep love.

Love that’s from God, down from above.

She is pretty, good, kind and bright.

Maybe we’ll talk, that would be pure delight.

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When I am speaking, she listens intently.

I hear myself speaking a little more gently.

She looks at me steadily, straight in my eye.

I look right back, feeling very alive.

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Note: Written in an effort to preserve a great moment.

Dear Tom,

I think of you often and frequently pray for you. I was so happy that the work situation worked out well for you, especially the way you got to go to the job you wanted.

You asked for tools you could use to build your new life. All I have to share is my own experience. My experience is centered around spirituality. I thought I would share some of my ideas.

When my girls were little, we formed a family singing group. We would attend a church, sing, then I would preach. It got so that the children were known as the Caywood girls, as in “The Caywood girls are so cute and charming”.

One day, Jill came to me and said, “Daddy, my sisters and I have been talking. We don’t want to be called the Caywood Girls any more. We all have our own names. We want to be known by Gina, Jill, Janelle and JoAnna”.

Hearing her say that was liberating for me. Until then, I had been trying to approach fathering in a manner that enabled me to treat them equally. After Jill’s comment, I could see that I should be treating them as individuals.

Instead of having the goal of treating them the same, I should try to be the father that each of them needed. I wanted to treat each of them uniquely, based on their particular need. I was willing to appear to be treating them unequally in the effort to treat them appropriately.

I see the same parenting relationship between God and people. God seems to want to work out an individual relationship in cooperation with each person. Each person has the same feeling that my daughter’s had. They want to be accepted for exactly the person they are. They want to be called by their very own unique name.

You have a right to develop the kind of spirituality that best suits you. I think that is the best approach for everyone. That’s why I no longer try to form other people’s spirituality. That puts me between them and God. That not is not only unnecessary, it is destructive.

Therefore, there are countless ways to be spiritual. I have known three in my lifetime. The first is the spirituality I see in my Son-in-Law Chad. Chad does not believe in God. Still, I sense God every time I get near him. Let me share a Chad story.

Yesterday, I was trying to eat a banana and drink some milk so I could take my pain pill. I was recovering from a bout of gout. I did not feel well at all, and had been having diarrhea all afternoon. When I was half way through the milk and banana, I became nauseous and dizzy. I tried to make it to the bathroom, but I couldn’t, because I was I was afraid I was going to faint. I dropped to my knees by my upholstered desk chair and proceeded to throw up right on the seat of the chair. What a mess.

As it happened, Chad, Gina and JoAnna were coming by to bring me some diarrhea medicine. When they got here, they all pitched in cleaning up the mess. Chad took the job of dealing with the seat of my chair. He put the whole chair in the shower, and cleaned it up. That is the way Chad is.

Chad has evolved into the kind of man that every legitimate form of spirituality tries to help humans achieve. I am full of admiration for whatever has made Chad Chad. I choose to see that formational something Chad has found, as spirituality. As Jesus says, “By their fruits you shall know them”.

The second kind of spirituality I have experienced is a church based spirituality. This kind of spirituality did not work for me. However church spirituality has worked extremely well for my sisters. Two of them go to a Calvary Chapel kind of church. My oldest sister goes to a Baptist church now, but for years she went to a Nazarene Church . Their churches all have loving, well developed humanitarian services and all these churches are conservative and Protestant.

My sisters are kind, warm, loving women. They all have found lives of frequent, powerful service. They have been wonderfully good to me. I accept their spirituality as completely valid in their lives even if their church based spirituality did not work for me.

The third kind of spirituality I have experienced is Twelve Step spirituality.Twelve Step spirituality has several foundational ideas. Here are a few that mean a lot to me.

1. “Come to God as you understand him.” I have very rich fellowship in my program and have been helped by liberal and conservative Christians, Agnostics, Hindus, Jewish people and Buddhists. One dear friend has made her cat her higher power. In my program, the subject of our particular religious backgrounds seldom comes up except tangentially in the telling of some recovery lesson.

2. “Take what you like and leave the rest”. The members are encouraged to work out their own recovery in their own way, at their own pace If a member says something that helps me I grab it. If they  say something I do not feel helps me, I just let it go by.

3.”Clean up your own side of the street.” What needs cleaning on the other person’s side of the street is simply none of my business. My business is honesty about my own character defects.

4. The first word of the 12 Steps is “We” Healthy recovery seldom occurs on an individual basis. When I tried to do recovery individualistically, I failed.

Now I want to make some observations about you.

1. You have found ways to work through the incredibly tough last years. That tells me, that you have an deep potential for spirituality.

2. You are a deeply loved and respected member of a wonderful group of people that I have met though Gina and Chad. That tells me that spiritual and emotional growth for you is based on a strong sense of identification with a loving group.

3. I am so touched by your response to my correspondence. I hope this is the beginning of a life long friendship. I hope to have the privilege of watching your growth and development over the years ahead

George

There are two types of language that as a boy I was taught were bad language. The first was taboo language, the second was taking God’s name in vain. I am not certain which type of bad language was the most frowned upon. I suspect that “Oh fuck” would have been more harshly received than “Oh God.”, especially if the phrase “Oh my God” was the expression used to take God’s name in vain.

The word vain means empty. So taking God’s name in vain means using God’s name in an empty way. One dictionary says vain means idle or useless. By that definition, most church services are guilty of taking God’s name in vain hundreds if not thousands of times every service.

Suppose that a church service is attended by 250 people. Then imagine that 125 of those people are either momentarily or habitually insincere about their worship. Maybe they are only at church for business or political reasons. Or suppose the inattentive worshippers are distracted from the service by an attractive man or woman, or distracted by financial problems.

Then suppose that in the course of singing hymns and participating in responsive Bible readings, praying or using the liturgy, the inattentive 125 people use God’s name in an empty, idle or useless way 10 times. In that situation, God’s name would be taken in vain 1,250 times, right in the sanctuary of the church.

Taboo language is different. It is language that is forbidden and banned on grounds of morality or taste. Probably, the two most used taboo words are shit and fuck. However, I would argue that these words are in such common usage that they are no longer taboo in a culture wide frame of reference.

At least in a religious setting they are still taboo. No one is likely to say fuck or shit in church, although I imagine those words are in fairly common use in the minds of more than a few worshippers. Probably, I am judging congregations on the basis of what goes on in my head during the very rare church services I attend these days.

What makes the religiously forbidden use of taboo language ironic to me is that Christ used language that was strongly taboo in the ears of his listeners. Phrases like “You swallow a camel”, “You drink from an unclean cup”, and “You are a whitewashed tomb,” are all powerfully, religiously taboo to his Jewish audience. In my experience, today’s Christian church goers are generally appalled by taboo language but tolerate the empty use of God’s name. Christ would not dare take God’s name in vain, but he was not all that concerned about taboo language.

I think Jesus used shockingly taboo language to make the point to his audience they were not shocked by the things that should have been shocking . Things like cruelty, harsh judgments and barring people from the God that loves them were not shocking, but taboo language was. In effect, he was saying ” Look at and experience your sense of shock at my language. That is the way you should feel about things that matter, like suffering people, not about far less central issues like taboo language”.

There is another kind of bad language. It is language that is wounding. Racial, ethnic, gender and homophobic slurs are in this category. So are terms that demean those that are handicapped.

Consider the advice of Jesus as recorded in Mathews Gospel, “But whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.”

What that means to me is that if Ispeak to others in a way that is cruel or demeaning it is a very serious matter. To humiliate others is an offense to God and is not without consequence in my life and in the life of my loved ones.

Here is a saying that addresses this point. “There is another way to spell toxic as in the phrase ‘He is a toxic person’. It is, He is a talk sick person.” That is to say, that paying attention to a person who uses sick and toxic language makes me ill, diseased, sick.

The harsh words spoken by Jesus as quoted above seem to me to apply to any lanquage I might use that is so insulting and dismissing that it is toxic or poisonous to the person to whom it is spoken. The child’s saying, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” is dangerously in error. Words can hurt and wound at a level that, many times, exceeds the pain of sticks and stones.

Obviously, good people should avoid racial, ethnic, homophobic words. Also, words that demean the handicapped or people who are in some way different, are to be avoided. However, there is another kind of word usage that seems demeaning to me. For example:

Pussy or Cunt: “He is a Pussy”. “She is a cunt”. Those are words that demean women by demeaning the reproductive organs of a woman. The word”dick” as in “He’s a dick”, demeans the sex organ of the male.

Boob: That is a reference to the breast of a woman. The phrase “He is a boob”, demonstrates that calling a woman’s breasts boobs is demeaning to women and to one of a woman’s most feminine body parts..

Mother Fucker: Imagine the pain of that phrase as it hits the ears of a person who was molested by his mother.

Sucks: “That sucks.” It seems to me that “sucks” is a pejorative reference to oral sex among gay men. In that light,it is homophobic.

When Jesus says that negative language carries the threat of damnation, I do not think he is a threatening me with eternal hell. I think he is using extreme language to powerfully make a point. The point is that I bring terrible hellish, destruction to myself, to my loved ones, to my social environment and to my culture when I use demeaning language. Hence the title of this piece, “Damn bad language.” Insulting and demeaning language are a damnation to me and my world.

I do not mean to list all the ways language can be bad in this essay. I do mean that kind, gentle, uplifting speech is an important way suffering can be reduced in the world by each and everyone of us. There is a saying: “Say what you mean, mean what you say, but don’t say it mean.” There is a powerful wisdom in those words.

All my life, I have felt a deep loneliness. The persistence of the loneliness has been frightening. It has seemed to me, that the consistent loneliness was inarguable proof that something was wrong with me.

I tried to talk myself out of the lonely feelings. I tried to uncover wounds out of my boyhood that gave me inappropriate feelings of loneliness. I went to five or six meetings a week so I would be around people. Some of the things I tried gave me a few moments of fulfilment, but soon the lonely feelings re-emerged.

Then I had an experience that led to an insight that helped me. A friend of mine, who was a social worker, called me and told me she was all torn up emotionally. She had to take a child out of an abusive home. Of course the parents were angry, but she had been surprised at how angry the little boy was. However, she felt morally and legally obligated to protect the child by getting him out of the situation.

We talked awhile about how difficult her job was and how she had no choice in the matter. After thirty minutes or so she felt some better, perhaps from just venting her feelings. I knew I had no answers for her, but I did listen to her and validated the realness of her agony.

The rest of that evening I thought about the little boy. I wondered why he was so angry. After all he truly was being abused. I could not figure out his angry feelings about being taken out of his home.

Then I asked myself, “What would I have felt if a social worker had taken me out of my abusive home?” I realized that I would have been furious just like the other little boy.

The reason I would have been furious was obvious to me. Back then, I was totally persuaded that if I tried hard enough, long enough, I would finally achieve nurture from my Mom. I was resolute in my determination to win that battle.

If I had been taken out of my home, I would have felt that I was being denied my chance to have a Mother’s love. If I was not with her, I could not win her love. If I had been removed, I would have felt I was doomed to grow up without the maternal acceptance I so desperately wanted and needed and would ultimately gain if I tried hard enough.

Of course, my boyhood assumption was entirely wrong. My mother’s rage was in her. I did not cause it, I could not control it, and I could not cure it. No matter what I did or did not do, she would have dealt with me as harshly as her personal psychology demanded. But, as a boy I did not have that understanding.

Then I saw the root of my adult loneliness. I was still trying to win my mother’s love, even though she had been dead for almost twenty years. I was the target of enormous love from my kids, from my larger family, and from an absolute wealth of program and other friends. However, none of that love was from my Mom, Louella, and Louella’s love was the love I was demanding and the love I was totally committed to finding. It was like I was starving to death, seated at a banquet table full of food.

When I shared at a meeting about me demanding my Mom’s love from the world, I made a joke. I said, “I have found a solution. I need several of you woman to change your name to Louella.” Immediately two or three women jumped in on the joke and raised their hand and said, “I’ll do it.” We all had a good laugh.

Since then, I have worked at grieving my boyhood lack of motherly nurture. In that way, I am gradually able to let the obsession go. As I release my grief into the hearts of my loved ones and into the hands of God, I am able to accept and enjoy the abundance of love there is for me in the world.