I hope that I can write more in here. Three generations were present in my family: my grandmother, Josephine Jewell Mooney; my mother, Sandra Lee Schafer; and myself.
I AM MY MOTHER, but I'm not.
I am my grandmother, but I'm not.
My capacity to write is in direct relationship to the women I descended - ascended - from. My mother-in-law, Diane gave me a book from the Mormon poet Carol Lynn Pearson, a progressive thinker writing within the framework of motherhood. This book has become a template for expanding doctrine into emancipation - these lines especially:
And all your
Faithless doubts
Will not destroy
The rising spring
In me.
I am trying to find my own way in the world. A tear is occurring in me. What matters most is time with my family, time in nature, and time with myself. I have traded some good friends for good reads. Books have become my moral grounding, my way of finding a philosophy that comforts me when church does not. In my heart, is the belief that nature holds the secret to harmony and unity, not just outside me, but inside me, not separate. I read this and copied it out of the book to carry in my purse with me, "and at all costs we must not lose consciousness now, precisely now..." I am not rebelling by smoking dope or drinking, I am testing ideas. I am experimenting with voice, what I can say and still be heard in an atmosphere of prescribed truths.
When I said, " I am my mother, but I'm not," I was saying my path would be my own.