Love Is Who I Am

Love Is Who I Am

‘You either walk into your story and own your truth, or you live outside of your story, hustling for your worthiness.’ Brene Brown

I have always been that hustler, that hooker, that looker, offering up my body as a token of my admiration, beseeching her to love me through my trifecta of tools: shame, blame and manipulation, with a soupçon of fairy dust thrown in for good measure.

Always dancing as fast as I can, all the while singing the same refrain stuck on repeat, “Please love me. Please fill me. Please heal me. Never leave me. I will do anything and everything to become the one you need. I shall make your every wish come true.”

Hoping always that ephemeral, elusive feeling of safety would land on my right shoulder like a butterfly’s kiss, like a benediction, like a blessing.

But that was yesterday. After a lifetime of yesterdays, on this early November morning I can walk straight into my story, thankful to proclaim my own truth, which is this:

I am worthy of love. I am inherently loveable. I did not need to change my surname to Love. I did not need to lie prostrate on my kitchen floor, begging her to please please please, make love to me now or I will shatter into a thousand tiny pieces.

I just needed to know, I just needed to feel, I just needed to own that my flawed and broken self has inherent value in this world.

And it does, and I do, and therefore I am, extremely thankful to be here now in this messy magnificent world.

I am here. I am queer. I am home.

This piece is an excerpt from my memoir ‘Perfectly Flawed’ written under my pseudonym Barrett Rose Baum.

Calling Myself Home

This past weekend I was fortunate enough to be celebrating with my almost daughter Emily, on the eve of her thirtieth birthday in Cornwall, Ontario.

When I write about Emily, I use the phrase ‘almost daughter’, although sometimes I write daughter, depending on how vulnerable I’m feeling in the moment, the truth being this:
I have loved Emily ever since my daughter and Emily became fast friends in Kindergarten and I began my first lesbian relationship with her mother. Emily refers to me as her ‘other mother’ but for this moment and for this piece, the ‘almost’ is important.

We were ten people strong celebrating Emily’s birthday when a friend of Emily’s mother asked me a question:
“So, is your name Katrina, or Katharina or Katharine?” I think the question was meant to wound, but nothing can harm me if I don’t take it in, so I simply said… “I don’t know, I haven’t healed this place of my name yet.”

I’m rereading the book ‘The Presence Principle’ by Michael Brown. He wrote that naming something calls it into being. Perhaps that’s why over 20 years into trying to name myself I’m not quite there, as I’m still working on calling myself into the world.

I have never ever felt I belonged. Not to my family, not to my community, and certainly not to myself. I was born into a wealthy, clannish, Jewish family where fitting in was imperative and I, from the beginning, did not.

My given name was Rhona and I had a speech impediment which made pronouncing the letter R difficult and because real life closely imitates the movie ‘Lord Of The Flies’ the kids in my school immediately took advantage of my wound and teased me endlessly, calling me Rahona and other names that are best left to the imagination.

I’ve always felt Rhona was a pedestrian sounding name and I wanted a beautiful name that would somehow grant me magical status so I would not be the weird looking kid with a weird name but a beautiful princess with a regal sounding name.

Let’s skip ahead a few decades.. I have now legally changed my name to Katharine Love so that I could finally feel that name magic but what I didn’t know then is that magic is bestowed from the inside out not the outside in.

A few months ago I tried toying with my name again trying to find the right fit. I thought maybe I’d add an a to the end making me sound more like Anna from the animated movie ‘Frozen’ but that too just didn’t fit.

I’m now thinking of returning to my birth surname of Greenbaum. That feels more grounded in truth and I want to honour my dad and to make him proud of how far I have come.

I have healed a decades long eating disorder, went from rarely walking to walking miles a day, writing and publishing a book, to most importantly, finally accepting myself, wounds and all.

I’m now thinking of calling myself Remington Greenbaum. Remington has a certain swagger and I get to keep my initial initials.

I am always a work in progress, as we all are. I am confident I will arrive where I am supposed to be, when the timing is right.

I’m sharing here my deepest wound – my nomad existence, roaming around this world unseen and unnamed and unaccounted for.

I do however have every confidence that I will eventually, call myself home.

Make Your Mess Your Message

Here for you very early morning folks is my ‘I’ statement for Tuesday February 23, 2021. “I, Katharine Angelina Love will make my mess my message.” This sentence got stuck in my head last night while perusing through Robin Roberts memoir ‘Everyone’s Got Something.’

“Make your mess your message!” was something Robin’s late mother used to say to Robin all the time. This phrase resonated deeply within me because I now must make my mess my message.

I must now allow my wounded parts to soften and glow and I will follow their light into the most vulnerable parts of me, all the way in to the parts of me that I have buried under mountains of muck and shame.

I will then sit quietly with these fragmented pieces of me and say “I see you and I hear you and you are not bad. You did the best you could do given what you had to work with. It’s okay, I forgive you. You are safe now.”

I want to be a mentor to others who have also walked with their heads bowed down with defeat. To step into this mentorship it is now incumbent upon me to strip the shame and self blame away so I can see the gift in the wound, my message in my mess, and to let this gift be my stepping off point in mirroring compassion for myself.

Then and only then, can I be of true service to others for self-compassion is the most important gift we can give ourselves. Just like the reminder from the airline attendant to place the oxygen mask on yourself first, I must love and accept myself, flaws and all before embarking on any mentorship roles.

Though not as exciting a gift as a Lamborghini or a trip to the Seychelles, I have experienced many moments of joy in these last few months as I’ve began the sometimes painful, but oh so necessary task of excavation.

Each day brings me closer to feeling, not just knowing, that there is a place for my crooked little self in this world, and that I belong here. Then I can offer Tikkun Olam, the Jewish mandate reminding us that through kindness we can repair our world.

Love And Other Crimes Of The Heart.

Love and other Crimes of the Heart.

It was autumn of 2012. As a therapist, my mandate was to provide a safe space for my clients but I was having problems concentrating and my body ached all the time. I thought I might have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome so off I went to my doctor to find out exactly why I was so bone weary.

Initially all the tests came back negative, so it was at my next appointment that decided to speak about the elephant in the room, the one waving at me in her pink tulle tutu. Yes, her.

“Yoohoo,Katharine!” she called “Time to tell the good doctor what you are finally brave enough to explore, your facial differences.” So I did just that.

I look slightly different from most people, I can not move my eyes from right to left, and I speak slightly differently than most, perhaps akin to someone who had a minor stroke. I had always felt different because of my looks, an all purveying global sense of shame.

I braved through my fears and talked to my doctor about these anomalies and he then sent me to a neurologist, who then sent me to a geneticist. The decisive conclusion? I was diagnosed with Mobius Syndrome. Mobius Syndrome is an extremely rare congenital neurological disorder characterized by facial paralysis and the inability to move the eyes from side to side.

I was considered one of the ‘lucky’ ones. I could smile (at least with my lips closed) and I had 20/20 vision, even if I could not see peripherally. After I did some personal research I found that Moebius is thought to be an immune system disorder, hence my Chronic Fatigue like symptoms.

While I did not know I had Moebius Syndrome growing up among the beautiful and the privileged in my wealthy Montreal enclave, I did know that I did not fit into their high standards.

That alone was enough to make me feel different. The writer Andrew Solomon in his book ‘Far From The Tree’ writes about wealthy families who have a child who is different than the norm. Andrew originally thought that money would help these children have an easier life, and in many ways it did (better doctors, private schools) but what Andrew found after interviewing these affluent parents and their children, was the pressure to be and look perfect made life very painful for these different children in their strive for excellence at all cost families.

This described my experience in my family of origin perfectly. Instead of being empathetic or at least honest to describe my differences, my mother told me over and over again that I was weird. What constituted the weird was unclear, but not looking perfect played a big factor as well as a predilection for reading and music that did not endear me to my extroverted and tone deaf mother.

Add to that mix a slight speech impediment and a tendency, despite the impediment to always speak my version of the truth did not help matters. I remember one occasion when once again my mother was yelling at me for some real or imagined transgression I looked directly into her eyes and said “Good mothers do not yell” and she replied “What do you know? You are four years old!”

What I did know instinctively that nurturing was not part of my mother’s equation. I had hopes that school would be better, but the children at my school just continued the verbal abuse I was experiencing at home.

My classmates called me names and would laugh at me in front of my face. I had no friends and would eat my lunch in the girls bathroom stall. For years after whenever I was walking down the street and heard someone laugh I felt instinctively they were laughing at me. My survival now depended on my retreating to the safety of my mind as it was too painful to be fully embodied and present in my world.

I taught myself to read at three. Books became my best friend and my salvation. I tried my hardest to fit in and be normal but normal was not made available for me. As I entered high school the bullying began to intensify and many painful years ensued.

The summer before I began university it occurred to me that my troubles would diminish if I could somehow become beautiful. Perhaps then people might stop hating me for having committed the cardinal sin of being born different, for all I had ever wanted was to be loved and accepted and to fit in.

Fitting in and conforming were my parent’s way of life, something they both tried desperately to impose on their misfit daughter. I was raised not to become a doctor or a lawyer but to become someone’s wife. To get that title of Mrs. and that final rose, I had to somehow become beautiful.

For their sake as well as mine, I tried. At the encouragement of my mother I had rhinoplasty and a breast reduction. I poured toxic chemicals on my hair turning my naturally brown jewfro locks into long blond hair that even Farrah Fawcett would envy.

Voila! It worked!

Instead of being an object of their derision, I was now an object of their admiration. Women would tell me how much they loved my hair. Men began to ask me out on dates. The bouquets appeared and the Cristal champagne flowed, and my plan for the beautification of Katharine Angelina was complete. The ugly duckling was transformed into a swan. My work was done.

Except that it wasn’t. I was hiding another secret, one that made me feel on the inside as different as I had looked before on the outside. I liked women. I did. But what could I do with those feelings? All I wanted was to be accepted. Just once. So I dated all the single Jewish boys in Toronto (having moved there in the great Montreal migration of the eighties) and was left each time feeling bored and disillusioned. Then karma called and his name was Bob, my future husband.

I had never used birth control because I thought whatever happened to me genetically probably prevented me from having a child. I always thought I would adopt when the time came, but just before deciding to leave Bob, I became pregnant.

Finally, for the first time in my life, I felt normal! I was having a child! Someone to call my own. Someone to frolic in the fields with, a little helper for choreographing Mother / Daughter Bob Fosse dance numbers. I became pregnant in July of ’91 and walked down the aisle in October of that same year praying, as I walked down that long red carpeted aisle that God would forgive me for betraying my soul’s desire.

Listed below my takeaway from those golden years:

1. It is much better to be feted than hated.
2. No matter how beautiful I was presenting on the outside, I still felt disfigured on the inside.
3. My blood sport was choosing partners (husband included) who would reflect my self-hatred back to me.

My daughter was born on April 11, 1992. I made the decision shortly after her birth to become healthy and own my attraction to women. I divorced my husband and began to explore the world of women.

Suddenly, being in relationship where I was not respected no longer felt sexy. Healthy attachments were assuming paramount importance. I now desired my person to show up, be responsive and attuned. Oh yes, and one more thing: to really really want to be present – here and now to help celebrate together every special ordinary moment.

A few months ago I was watching the news show 20/20. This particular episode featured young adults with facial anomalies who had the opportunity to have a renowned plastic surgeon repair their flaws. I was particularly taken with one young woman whose eyes and nose were unusually formed. I thought she looked lovely and compelling – much more interesting to look at than the classic cookie cutter version of beauty.

Those feelings of appreciation of her unique beauty were for her though, and her alone. All I had ever wanted, was to have a great big toothy grin so I wouldn’t have had to witness that fleeting look that passed over most people’s eyes when they first meet me. I abhorred that look. It singled me out and dismissed me, both. That look made me try even harder to charm and be witty so that everyone could see that I was not handicapped, but trying even harder left me feeling depleted and desperate. I needed to accept my differences and come to peace with my flawed and fractured self.

I came to realize that only through surrender would I find the love I so craved, the love I had been searching for all my life. And so I surrendered –

My craving to be loved and seen by my family.

My desire to be saved.

My wish to be beautiful.

Slowly I relaxed into my body and finally made peace with my crooked little self.

As I end this chapter of my story, I am reminded of the words of the late poet and author Raymond Carver that in closing, I would like to share here.

Late Fragments

And did you get what you wanted from this life even so?

I did. And what did you want?

To call myself beloved.

To feel myself beloved on the earth.

Forgiveness Will Get Me Through

So hard for me to let go of resentment. I like the taste of it, I like to walk in it, love swimming 🏊‍♀️ in the deep end of resentment.

I have eaten my resentment my entire life. This is where I return again and again like those rainbow candy necklaces I used to love so much as a child. Each individual candy a different slight against me, each flavour a different person who has wronged me.

Best to speak my truth and then let my resentment go, but what I’m discovering in my seventh decade here on this spinning coloured orb is that often it’s best to not speak at all.

It’s hard for me to know when to go for it and when to just rest in the grrrrr of it, hence my current dilemma. I’m so grateful that I have healed my decades old habit of eating my resentment away, truly I am so grateful, but grateful only travels so far.

I’m trying to breathe through my rage and resentment, trying so hard to forgive myself for ending up here at my beginning.

Hubris is hard for us Jews, we are not taught the importance of humility rather the opposite, the belief in our grandiosity, at least that’s what I took in from my family and my infrequent forays into shul.

But I alone blew up my life, and I alone shall mend it. This requires forgiveness to the tenth power for those who have abandoned me and forgiveness to the 11th power for me. Again I’m so happy I’m awake and present but so frustrated with myself for not climbing out of the quicksand sooner.

I can and will lift myself up out of this resentment swamp of quicksand but oh the taste of resentment is still so sweet. I keep reminding myself however that forgiveness is my way through and that candy though momentarily pleasurable makes you fat and ruins your teeth.

Happy Thanksgiving

Today we celebrate Thanksgiving in Canada.

I have many things to be grateful for, family and friends who love me even so, my dog Lucille Pearl who is lying beside me as I type these words, my clients and my sophomoric attempts at art and poetry.

What I am most grateful for on this Thanksgiving is that I have finally rescued my own little abandoned child who was left floating somewhere in the Dead Sea, alone without wind nor water.

Left in her little boat with no oars to row and no water to drink, she just lay still – so shocked at this turn of events that she abandoned her little body and returned to the ethers.

My job for the last forty years or so has been to find my little child and rescue her.

In the beginning I was very resistant to the idea of rescue, after all, I was fine wasn’t I?
I had a career and a kid and all was well in my world right? Umm oh so wrong..

I was fucked up and broken in so many ways and so many places but I just kept going until I couldn’t keep going any more.

And so it began, my journey to my find my abandoned child that I had deemed unloveable and unworthy because that is what ‘they’ told me and since they were the only people I had any attachments too I believed them. I must be weird and ugly and not normal and unlovable for if I wasn’t why would I have been forsaken?

It took me almost forty years of wandering the desert aimlessly until I finally found her, and by the time I got there she was barely responsive and certainly wasn’t happy to see me. If she couldn’t have the only thing she ever wanted, she did not want anything.

After insisting she drink some fresh orange juice she came to life and surprised me with her rage and her strength. For someone with no agency she was surprisingly articulate. She only wanted what she wanted which was a four page written letter from her family telling her how sorry they were and how wrong they were to abandon her, after all didn’t they know who she was?

Clearly they did not but this was not the time to have that conversation. I put her little resistant body in a baby Bjorne and got us out of her little boat and brought her home.

These last four years were tough on both of us and we had to learn to trust each other and both of us had trust issues up to our wazoo’s but this year has brought a change. My little child has told me that she is grateful that I saved her from floating endlessly in the ethers and is ready to accept that though she didn’t get what she wanted, she got what she needed, which was a safe place to land, and me.

We have conversations now every day, my little lost child and I, and I believe she almost believes she is worthy of love and value just because she exits in this world, no more tap dancing as fast as she can, nor feigning death, her previous two modes of being.

She and I can now sit down together and hold hands at our proverbial thanksgiving table and say grace for all the bounty before us.

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Fearless

Here are some questions to ask yourself on this Sunday morning:

Do you own your power? Do you speak your truth? Can you claim what is rightfully yours?

I believe you can!

How can I be so sure? Because if I could do it, you can to.

I’m not going to lie and tell you that your journey will be easy. It will not. There were days I thought I could not get up, days where I literally was shaking with fear and shame for where I had landed.

I kept telling myself over and over that I can do hard things, that I can work through my fear, that I am deserving, as we all are, of love and safety and agency.

I have fought hard to take back my power, to reclaim my body and to speak my truth to the world.

Here I am, bent but not broken, older but so much wiser, committed to healing myself and my world.

We can do this together, no need to leap, just take one baby step at a time. I am here for anyone that needs my help and encouragement.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

I feel closer than I’ve ever been before to loving all of me, the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful. And you folks? Can you embrace your broken parts? Can you love yourself through grief, through loss, through heartbreak? I can! I’ve come through the other side stronger in my broken places, because I did the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I stayed with myself when everyone else abandoned me. I had to believe I was worthy of love when everyone told me I was unworthy.

I’ve endured many many hours of panic, where I’ve literally had to talk to myself off the ledge as if I was my own good mother “Katharine, I know you’re scared and I get it and I see you and you will make it through this, just keep breathing.”

I have had to feel and own all the damage I’ve done to the people I’ve cared about and try my best to repair the damage I’ve done, understanding that I am responsible for all of my behaviour, accepting that some people can not forgive and that’s mortally painful but I only have control over me and no one else. If they’ve chosen to walk away I’m must not run after them, pulling at their coattails but gracefully let go. I’m still practicing grace. Now came the hardest piece. I had to let go of all the blame and shame I carried while still holding on to my responsibility.

Life truly is a chess game, and I’m excited that I’m beginning to understand how to play, and even enjoy the game!!

I would love to hear your stories, our stories connect us to each other.

The Lesbian Chronicles

I thought I was coping well during these Groundhog Day days, but this morning at three a.m. I woke up jarringly from a nightmare feeling breathless and panicked and could not get back to sleep.

These days (and nights) of social isolation have brought all my old wounds up to my consciousness, to finally be shaken free from my shadow tree that held them firmly in place.

Just like Isaac Newton, who needed to be bonked on the head by an apple to have his ‘Aha moment’ that prompted him to come up with his theory of gravity, I needed these days of forced isolation to help me review and rewind so that I could begin to heal my deepest wound, which I now understand is abandonment.

It took watching years of my puppy Lucille Pearl’s fear aggressive behaviour for me to finally acknowledge that I too am fear aggressive. I really didn’t understand how much panic and fear I carried in my body until recently. Like Issac I had a moment when I thought to myself ‘I’m just like Lucille!’

My constant complaining and my demands for justice are really just my little girl self screaming “Your behaviour is scaring me and when I’m scared I yell and scream and beg you to stop doing what you’re doing because what you’re doing feels like you are going to abandon me.”

I thought I had done enough work to heal or at least quiet that screaming child, but then last week entered Margot, stage right.

I had seen her profile on OKCupid, an online dating site, and within a day of my premier attempt to connect she responded. She loved my profile and wanted to get to know me better. I was thrilled as I found her profile witty and her photo butchily attractive.

She called me the next evening and I was instantly smitten by her deep resonant voice. I had been online off and on for so long to no avail for as much as I am desperately longing for love, I am also desperately picky and my picky has trumped my longing every time.

But here finally was Margot in all her butchy glory! We talked briefly and made plans to talk the following evening. The next morning Margot texted me and asked if 8:15 p.m. was too late. Normally it would not be as I’m up with the dawn and in bed by the dark but I was so starved for soul to soul contact that I said yes.

In hindsight I should have said that 8:15 was too late and let’s reschedule for tomorrow but as you probably have already figured out, I said yes. I have worked so hard to be boundaried but I had not been in a relationship or even liked someone however briefly in years so all my boundaries dissolved in the watery emotion of my desire.

I ended up talking to Margot for way too long and what happened to me was I got overwhelmed and overtired and I started speed talking and lost sight of the other. Was there another there or was there just was my naked unchecked desire for connection?

Then came my undoing, the denouement. Her once sultry voice now becoming harsh with frustration. “Katharine, I need to go to bed right now!” I of course complied but the tone in her voice scared me and when Margot called the next day, instead of working through my feelings with myself, I became my barky fear aggressive dog.

I became aggressively demanding that she own what she had done to me, and after a few tense go rounds I thought that we had worked it through and if she still didn’t quite get why I was so triggered then at least I felt heard. The last thing she said to me was ‘Au bientot’ which is French for ‘Till next time’.

So imagine my surprise when I did not hear from her again. I sent her a text in which I acknowledged that I might have been over the top in my intensity and I offered up an apology if I had scared or disturbed her in any way, but felt justified in my need to demand ownership of her deed. She wrote back saying ‘Hey kid, it’s me not you’, which is WASP speak for bye bye bye.

I’ve had a few days to think about what had transpired and here’s my conclusion –

I need to rein in my little abandoned child. She was my responsibility not Margot’s. I could have asked Margot if she was upset with me for keeping her on the phone or even better, I could have let the incident go and held my little screaming child tightly and told her that she was safe, and everything was okay.

It’s me, the adult Katharine that is responsible for my inner wailing baby. When I let my wounded baby lead what most often happens is that she ends up abandoned. This demand for unconditional love can only be met by me. Ironically the more I soothe my inner child and create healthy boundaries for her, the more an adult, healthy relationship is possible.

I’m trying to forgive myself for my faux pas, which is super hard for me to do, but I can do hard things, and I will keep trucking and trying to be the best me that I can be, whole and boundaried and open for love.

Vulnerability Is My New Black.

I want to thank you all for caring about me and responding to my neuroticly needy appeals for sympathy. I hesitated to put my sickly self out there. Could I be brave enough to be vulnerable?

I know some of you are thinking “Really? But you write memoir!” Yes, I do but it’s very carefully curated. As my friend Marcus’s voice coach told him “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story!” Which isn’t to say I made up any of what I have written, it’s just that I write in a way that protects my vulnerability so I feel seen, but not exposed.

I’m also terrified of reaching out. In my life experiences to date, reaching out has not met with great success, so taking a chance here felt scary and risky but I was feeling so alone I thought the risk might be worth the opportunity to be acknowledged and comforted.

I grew up very wealthy. I’m the first one that can tell you that wealth doesn’t guarantee happiness but what it does guarantee for me is a sense of security. Do remember Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? Maslow starts out with physiological needs first: air, water, clothing, shelter, and sleep. At this moment in my life, without going into detail, I’m struggling with the bottom rung. How does this play into my health? Since I’ve opened that vulnerability door, I might as well walk through it.

Last year I saw these small gold sleepers. I had three holes in my ears, two on my right and one on my left. Since I had to buy the two pairs to get the three earrings I thought I’d pierce my ear so that I could wear the four earrings and create a more symmetrical look. Balance is important to me as I am a Libra, which is represented by a scale signifying the desire for balance.

I pierced my ear a year ago September and for a year my ear did not heal. I thought that was just payment for me spending money on earrings that I could ill afford. You see, along with a decades old eating disorder, I also had a tendency to impulse shop which was fine in the past when I had the discretionary income but was dangerous now that I didn’t. I had worked hard to heal my eating disorder but had not yet gotten ahold of my tendency to overspend. I kept trying and failing and trying and fail to achieve the financial balance that was my birthright.

This past September I went into a tattoo parlour and showed them my ear. I had thought my immune system was so fucked up that my ear just wouldn’t ever heal, but the gorgeously pierced Amelie told me that the earring was not made well. I would need to buy the more expensive earrings made of pure gold and designed better so that my ear could have a chance to heal properly. Now I could not buy just one earring so I had to wait until last month until I saved up enough money to buy all four earrings.

By the following week, my ear was totally healed. I had gone through a year of infection, placing salted water on my ear four times a day to keep it from getting more infected than it already was, when all along I just needed a better, more expensive earring.

I feel this post has gotten away from me here so I’ll just end this by saying that having more money helps me to feel more secure in my body and at this very moment since my cash flow is low, I’m feeling very insecure and unsafe.

I was so sick on Saturday I truly thought I had contracted covid19. I had read about all the symptoms and had many of them. I also had symptoms of the regular old stomach flu as well. I tried to tell myself that this was more than likely the latter and not the former but my fear was bigger than my faith.

I started feeling better yesterday and today thanks to Fritzi Schnel’s comment, I took arsenicum 30 ch which I remembered I had in my medicine cabinet from a bout with stomach pain last year. That, combined with elderberry tea to help clear up the pain in my chest has me feeling much improved.

So thank you again all for your care. Truly much appreciated. I hope this rambling road of a post makes sense to at least some of you.

Maybe vulnerability can be my new black.