Feral

1. (especially of an animal) in a wild state, especially after escape from captivity or domestication.

   …existing in a natural state, not domesticated or cultivated; wild. having reverted to the wild state, as from domestication.

Feral, has been coming out of my mouth a lot lately.  It has been the crown of my conversations lately.  And, the more I say it, the more it sinks in that my entire life has been wild and uncultivated.  And because of that my ontology is incurably feral.  It is the core from which all my philosophy, behavior, decisions, theology and actions stem.

Before I sat down to write this post I was ruminating on an abysmally deep longing to join myself to a group of other feral women who “get it” and just go off the grid.

I want to be gone for quite some time in some wild place where I become better acquainted with the moon and befriend the constellations.  I want to lie down in an unkempt field and look up at the sun and marvel at the tall grasses that sway with the breeze.  I want to laugh and share laughter while submersing myself in a cold pool of mountain water.  I want to stand at the cusp of an approaching storm and smell the rain coming. I want to sing, and drum and share wisdom and life experiences around a fire.  I long to feel the coolness of damp moss and gritty mud on my bare feet.  I want to wake up naked just before dawn breaks and feel the dew of morning all over my body.

Can I take it further?  I want it to be ok to have dirt under my nails and hair on my legs.

I’m tired of the pressure.  The pressure to have a customer service voice with a smile you can hear over the phone.  My mental well being just really needs the public at large to be comfortable with resting bitch face.

My roots.  Do you want to know a secret?  I have had a horrible life.  From the cradle to this now middle aged, self-actualized, and chubby woman I’ve become it has been just awful.  I was nearly put into foster care along with one of my brothers as a child because my mother had a raging addiction to all things narcotic.  The only thing about her that has ever been controlled were the substances she abused.  I have been witness to her death dozes of times starting at the age of four until just a few months ago.

So, my grandmother and grandfather raised me on a 100-acre cattle farm.  My grandmother the ever soft spoken saint and my grandfather the perpetually silent and often angry type.

The formation of the “me” that I know…has her roots in the soil of chaos.  My mother a lovable yet often harmful rebel, my father absent, my grandmother the family saint, my grandfather the condemning workaholic.  These, the four corners of my earth.

Now, the good that has come from this is that as I have self-actualized and done a considerable amount of healing I’ve been able to glean some beautiful things from these people who formed the four squares of the foundation of…me.

Because, of my horrible childhood my grandmother sacrificed her life to compensate for the sins of my mother.  By her hands I was swaddled, toddled, and coddled.  Discipline was entirely missing from my life. Every.  Yes, every.  Every life lesson from childhood and adolescence was caught rather than taught.  While the lack of discipline has contributed to a great deal of misery in my adult life I did get to experience a gentle love and compassion that I needed in order to survive.  Because of her I have carried with me an ability to nurture and restore others.

My grandfather was an engineer at Tennessee Valley Authority by day and a cattle farmer by evening.  He worked gruelingly hard every single day of his life until he died.  By observation I learned that he had great wisdom with finances.  By observation I learned that hard work was honorable and would give you favor.

My father…whom I am now close with.  I didn’t meet until I turned eighteen.  He was absent.  But, from chance encounters with family members on that side and from the brief conversations with my mother and grandmother I understood that he was a brawler.  He was in prison for a few years because he was a cocaine dealer.  In spite of the negative press about him I heard I detected that everyone had a position to not mess with him.  He was rough and rowdy and dangerous.  And, in the adolescent girl mind of mine I secretly loved this.  I loved the idea of being the kind of person that people admired yet feared.  And, trust me when I say that this root runs deep.  This root was nourished by the fear that was begotten by lack of boundaries.  For me, having no boundaries leaves me pushing all the time to try to find some.  Even as a forty year old woman.

My mother…now firstly she definitely has been the most harmful person in my life, overtly.  And, I am thankful that I wasn’t raised by her or I likely would not be alive today.  I can tell you many stories later.  But, from observing her life, I now in retrospect am able to identify some things about this incurably wild woman that I do love.  She has always been like a wild flower to me.  Her beauty in that she is wildly feminine.  Long hair, fiery nature, dainty, a loud riotous voice against toxic masculinity and political corruption.  Rarely do I have conversations with her these days that I do not hear some new way she is thinking on to stick it “to the man.”  Mind you I wasn’t able to have conversations with her until around last year.  Within a year’s time she has changed a lot.  I suppose age is doing us all a favor and tempering her.  Plus, she has been mostly sober this year for the first time in my life.

So, here I am shedding the final trappings of any semblance of my youth and trying so hard to face the fact that I am half way done with life and in the same amount of time that I have lived, I will also die…if I’m fortunate.

But, before time marches one more step I need a long pause.  I deserve an intermission. A rewilding.  An integration with all things nature…before I become nature.  I want wild flowers to grow out of me now.  Not just later.  While traipsing the forest of my adolescence I recall picking some sticky red wildflowers.  I loved them.  I loved them because they were inescapably beautiful.  Nearly literally.  I remember laying in the fields and blowing dandelions and watching the almost fairy like quality of their seeds dance away on the wind.  I remember stooping to gather dainty little purple flowers we called Sheepshare and bright yellow Dandelions and nibbling on them because my grandfather said they were edible.  The Sheepshare was so sour and the dandelion so earthy and sweet.  This combination was like divinity on my palate.

I don’t want to be told what to do.  I don’t want to be expected to appease anyone for any reason.  I have spent my life fighting, fearing, and fawning.  And, all I ever really want to be is feral.

Join me?