Finances

For the first time in two and a half years,  it’s the end of the month and I’m not in a panic about not having enough money to pay the mortgage and property taxes.   For the first time in two and a half years I have enough money to meet the bills.   In fact, I have more than enough.  Not a lot more, but enough to ease my stress.   And enough to pay my cousin back half of the money she loaned me a year ago.   And that makes me feel good.

 

The Animals In My Life

My current animals include dogs, cats, a pot bellied pig, a guinea pig, 2 baby axolotls, 2 sheep, 2 mini-donkeys,  3 ponies,  and a llama.   Past pets have included cockatiels, lovebirds, rabbits, goldfish, ducks, and goats.   I did have chickens for awhile but they weren't pets ….  they were for eggs.   Thinking back,  I remember a budgie or two in my childhood;  and a gerbil at one point.   They didn’t have long lives  ☹   I remember being told, and I think there might be a photo somewhere, that I had two tortoises (turtles?) as a small child in England.   They were named Danny and George after my grandfathers.   I don’t know what happened to them.   I don’t remember them at all.  My cousin Louise and I  ‘rescued’  a turtle when we were about ten years old.  He probably didn’t need rescuing, but we found him crossing the road and thought he was out of place, and so he became our ‘pet’.    Eventually he went inside his shell and wouldn’t come out.  After a week or so we thought he was dead.  I don’t remember what we did with him, but some years later we were told that he had probably been hibernating.  Remember,  those were the days before computers and google.  The information highway where one can find immediate information on any subject did not yet exist.   As I said, I don’t remember what we did with our ‘dead’ turtle, but whatever it was, I hope he survived and lived a good life.

 

Service Dog

I was at the dog training school tonight and one of the other trainers had a service dog that she has trained.   He is fully trained and waiting for placement.   The dog seemed very interested in me and wanted to come to me.   He was really focused on me and seemed mildly anxious by my presence.  After telling him more than once to “settle”,  the trainer said to me,  “are you having a bad day or feeling anxiety?”,  to which my answer was yes.   I had woken up anxious and those waves of sadness were creeping up on me all day long.   “Ah”,  she said,  “that’s why he wants to be near you”.   His job is as an emotional support/service dog.   He sensed my anxiety.

 

Religion/Confession

Being raised in the Catholic religion was very damaging to me as a child.   As an adult I don’t follow any organized religion because I feel that ‘religion’ is man-made not God made.   Religions and all their rules were created by humans for the purpose of controlling other humans;  for creating a divide between the ‘chosen’ and the ‘sinners’, as determined by the rules of that religion.    I don’t know what the Catholic religion teaches now but I do know how we were taught.   You were born a sinner.   You were created into existence by an act of sin.   You lived in fear of being rejected by God and being relegated to eternal damnation.   We lived under the constant threat of punishment and rejection from some higher power.   As if the world wasn’t scary enough, we had the added fear of an omnipotent power.   Parents and teachers used this threat and fear to control children.  The entire teaching was that we were not good enough, we were sinners by our very existence; we were perpetually begging for acceptance from a diety.   .   And so the seeds of our core beliefs were planted.   

And then there’s the practice of “confession”.   Who thought that up?    Good Catholics are supposed to go to confession and tell all their sins to a priest,  who then doles out what he decides is an appropriate penance.   The priest’s superior connection to God allows this fallible human to absolve you of your sins.   And as Catholic children under the scrutiny of Catholic adults who were  far too concerned with ‘how they looked to others’,  we were expected to actually have sins to confess.   If you said you didn’t do anything wrong or have any sins,  you were told you were lying.  And that’s a sin.  So we were actually taught to find things wrong with ourselves so that we would have sins to confess.   How screwed up is that??   Is the anger I’m feeling right now coming through on these pages?

 The dictionary definition of penance is:   voluntary self-punishment inflicted as an outward expression of repentance for having done wrong.   Voluntary self-punishment.   We were actually conditioned to be constantly seeking acceptance and approval.   To be self-deprecating.    And I wonder why now my self-talk is not positive.   Why I feel I’m not enough.  Why I berate myself.   It’s not just the coping mechanism to survive trauma,  it’s also religious brainwashing that forms those core beliefs that cripple me.

I realize that not every person raised in the Catholic Church was affected in the same way as I was.   What made me more sensitive?   What had me living in such fear?  What made me believe I was possessed by the devil at one point in my childhood?   How did these teachings destroy me so?   Was it because of Liam?    Or was it that there was real trauma in my life that compounded the religious indoctrination?   And vice versa.