My mother taught me that you don’t walk away from family – which is funny, because she drove me away by how she and her then husband treated me when I was fifteen.
This is when another break happened to me – a split, off from another reality.
A week before my sixteenth birthday, she stripped me of the friends I had gained and the Bachelors I could foresee by sending me away to take care of my grandmother.
She thought that removing me from the situation would help everything. Being with her mother gave her a sense of control over me.
It is one of my deepest regrets and a heinous tragedy that the wounding from both my ex’s and my own childhood ended up being passed to our children when they were in their teens.
At least I recognized tbey needed to be given the choice to decide their destiny when we lived temporarily with my parents and chose to return to their schools on the Central Coast and be homeless.
We climbed out of that pit together, although I “lost” my eldest to the confusion and pressures of what then transpired as she went to high school and tried to find a way to create her own family – free from our losses.
What’s important about all of this is that I saw the issues underlying throughout our family’s progressing timeline, yet was not taken seriously.
Like Cassandra with her prophecies, my sight was biased as triviality. I was branded a “mad woman” for begging others to see.
The irony is that my middle name is Cass. Her legacy has always haunted as a tease, playing with my conscious perceptions.
And, with such a strong, Greecian goddess name as Athena, I thought it was my duty to learn and uphold any wisdom I could find in all things.
It has been my goal in life to always improve myself, and Cassandra’s example has guided development of my intuition.
I’ve been surprised that no other person of my name that I have met has taken its meaning seriously – beyond the novelty, or an excuse for indulging ego.
Our names are an important aspect of who we are. They set the tone for how we could be living.
Candid Corvid Productions 