Requiem for a Past Life

Before we were mothers, some of us were girls who learned lessons the hard way

I have a theory.

A theory that begins and ends with one thing-human nature. It begins with disconnecting from it, and ends with the embracing of it.

I theorize that women like me-sensitive, creative, rooted in biological reality, motivated by family and beauty and comfort and dutifulness above all-experience the culture we are existing in as an assault on our senses, on our hearts, on our very being. And as such, many of us grew up attempting to cope with this world that has expectations for us that we cannot reasonably accommodate and which bombards us with imagery and messaging that desires to plant seeds of doubt and dependency via engaging in dissociative behavior, namely, addictions.

The Same Drugs with Meghan Murphy

recently wrote “pretending away human nature did not serve me-nor does it serve most women” in her article"Feminism's Mistake" for Fairer Disputations, and reading this sentence struck such a chord with me as I realized that this concept can be applied to the individual and society in general. We are culturally pretending away human nature and the consequences are causing us to individually engage in mechanisms which only further alienate ourselves from our true selves. It’s a disassociation cycle of sorts.

So what is this past life I refer to in the title of this piece? It is the life before my children, before my little home full of wood blocks and Jan Brett books and canning supplies, before my garden full of herbs and irises, before my old minivan with multiple car seats. It is the life where I shot up heroin in the backseats of cars of men who didn’t give a damn about me in a part of St. Louis I had no business being in. It is the life where I lived in and out of motel rooms with a man who called me names and spit in my face. It is the life where I chose drugs over food and the ritual of addiction over the ritual of basic hygiene. It is the life where I abandoned myself.

I am only now, nearly 12 years out of this life, coming to understand why I chose to live in such a way. I can finally see that version of me with compassion and see that in a roundabout sort of way, while I absolutely was abandoning myself, I was also actually attempting to protect myself. I chose the word “requiem” here as it refers to a “solemn chant to bring repose to the dead”. This part of my life is dead but it also deserves some honoring and it most certainly deserves repose. I hope for all of the other women who have walked the path of self-abandonment to be able to put that part of themselves to rest, so I give this offering of tranquility to our collectively misplaced souls.

The emotional and mental disconnections in childhood that formed the foundations for the physical disconnections I would seek out as a young adult are almost universal. I find myself more and more attracted to the idea of “modernity disenchantment” as so much of what modernity offered to us as girls was pure swill. Tabloids at child-level at the local IGA hawking diets and photos of celebrity plastic surgeries. MTV dangling Christina Aguilera’a “Dirty” music video above our middle-school aged heads like bait to a starved wolf. The Victoria’s Secret fashion show as prime-time obligatory viewing. All pieces in the grand profiteering puzzle of self-doubt and insecurity. Human nature is being taken advantage of in the worst way with this sort of marketing and pop-culture popularity.

There were even more insidious hypothetical foot soldiers in the battle for our minds and bodies-things like the mass profiting off of true crime. I think of those same tabloids with pictures of JonBenet Ramsey or Lacy Peterson laid out for all of our little eyes to see and weep. I think of Oprah episodes about child molesters on the TV after school and only ask “why?”. They will say it is to “raise awareness”, I say it only proliferated problems that were already there and put the children who were witness to this media in a state of high-alert paranoia. The absolute worst of human nature being magnified in such a way and inserted into the masses was deeply unhealthy.

I also think about schooling, the compulsory motions we were put through as children. Firstly-I had some good teachers, I can recognize their worth and contributions to my life. I also see the value in children being exposed to people they wouldn’t otherwise get the exposure to and also being able to access materials and supplies they may not otherwise have access to. These facts do not negate the fact that children being separated from their parents for a good portion of the week is not in line with what we need as human beings. Five year olds need to be with their mothers and siblings the majority of the time, full stop. I remember bringing my Precious Moments-themed security blanket with me to school in first grade and sneakily taking it out of my backpack and shoving it into my desk so I could pet it during class as a way to stop me from crying when it was time for me to go to school.

I also was in the camp of girl-who-overachieves-by-way-of-anxiety. I was smart, I liked to read, I let it become a part of my identity. I failed to see the truth of it though- I exceeded in writing and things like weaving or sculpting in art class because those mediums were a way to tap into my innate femininity. I would berate myself for struggling with math or physics, thinking it meant I was stupid, not realizing that these areas of study were not actually what I was made to be engaging with. I see now that I am very much a creative human being who does not see the world in numbers, this is my nature. School creatively stifled me. Again, ignoring human nature does not serve us.

In my addiction recovery I have of course pondered the “why did I choose to be this way?” question again and again. I lended weight to the common idea that childhood trauma brings about these problems but I looked at my parents-who were good to my sister and I-and the general goings on of my pre-addiction existence, and saw no real glaring issues that would validate the roaring, feral heroin addiction I came to have. I can look back now and see that it wasn’t my parents or my economic status-it was the culture.

Where did this lead? Binge drinking, smoking weed, and porn addicted boyfriends in my early-to mid teens. Much of modernity is isolating and the experience of isolation, in my mind, is very rigid. Rigidity has often translated into self limiting beliefs, and in my case this has shown up as debilitating shyness, anxiety, and a pattern of people pleasing tendencies I am finally finding some respite from. The first time I felt that rigidity melt away was the first time I got properly drunk. I was transformed in a social butterfly, all the boys loved me, I felt alight with my own spirit. I even wrote in my journal about the experience, “this is FOR me, I finally feel like I have landed where I belong”.

I binge drank every weekend. I had a boyfriend who compared me to Carmen Electra and who kept porn magazines in his bathroom so I could see exactly who I was being measured against. I smoked weed almost daily and had the accompanying requisite Bob Marley poster above my bed, which fell on top of my face while sleeping more than once. I admittedly sort of delighted in the contrast I held between my opposing roles of student-counsel-treasurer-national-honor-society-good girl and covert-weekend-bad-girl-stoner-slut.

While I don’t necessarily prescribe to the idea of gateway drugs for all-marijuana and alcohol gave way to Xanax and OxyContin eventually. Oxys gave way to heroin, my high school boyfriend gave way to an older, even more toxic one. If alcohol melted away the rigidity of modernity, heroin annihilated it (ever so gently).

I don’t desire to wax poetic about my relationship with heroin, I desire to communicate the depths to which it allowed me to find a calm I never knew in this world that isn’t made for women like me. I have always said it feels like the instrumental intro to Atmosphere’s song "God's Bathroom Floor". It is a neutral place where we can look at ourselves honestly without judgment, and that is the draw. The cost of this experience was immense though, and I am grateful beyond measure that I made my way out via the redemption of birth and pregnancy and the soul I am entrusted with that is my eldest child.

People online often poke fun at my affinity for heritage and history, stating things like “I guess you want to go back to the good ol’ days when women were property and couldn’t have credit cards” when I talk about or use images from pre-industrial society. What they are missing here is not only the factual inaccuracies (such that women’s work in the home was actually often in symbiotic relationship with men’s work or that taking women’s work out of the home was in many ways actually very harmful to women and children-but we can get to that some other time) but the emotional reality of the box that modern life shoves women into. Mental health issues, addiction, a general sense of dissatisfaction, lack of community, materialism and the general anxiety that comes by way being forced to live in accordance with a culture that encourages women to work outside of the home and contribute to the economy rather than to their familial culture-this is that emotional reality and it is the social manifestation of the ignoring of human nature.

There is a reason so many of us got wrapped up in American Girl dolls and their stories, the Oregon Trail computer game, and reading things like Caddie Woodlawn and Little House on the Prairie. The resonance of simpler times is easily accessed by children who don’t seek to over-intellectualize it all or search out any politically incorrect but historically accurate aspects they may exhibit so they can cry “cancel!”. Yes-history is often ugly and unfair, but it also holds valuable lessons for us.

How do we-the girls who learned the hard way, now mothers-embrace what is already ours, the righteous embodiment of feminine human nature? We listen to those lessons.

We embrace it gently. We embrace it in a way that reminds us that this hallowed ground we walk on as mothers is made to cradle the soles of our feet. We must choose to see the culture for what it is, and accept it, while actively choosing to reject it as a matter of care. A matter of caring for ourselves and our families. We have to honor our fragility and prioritize our strength. We have to look at our pasts with an honest eye and a generous heart. We have to remember to nourish our bodies that we didn’t always treat so nicely.

If you are a woman who was once a wayward girl, a mother who was once a young woman lost, I invite you to join me in putting that part of your life to rest, with a requiem of somber tone and tranquil repose. Listen to the lessons of our collective female heritage. Weep the tears of gratitude and become the example our daughters need. Thank you, thank you.