Foundations
There was a house that I went by everyday on my way to school when I was in high school. Many of the houses in this neighborhood were built without a basement. Apparently, this house’s owner wanted to change that. Unfortunately this house did not have the right type of foundation to allow for a basement. Undeterred, the owners embarked on an extensive project to put the right type of foundation for a basement. Their whole yard was dug up for a long time while this work was being done. Foundation work is hard messy work.
Much the same thing happens for those of us with childhood trauma. We get to adulthood to find that our foundation is not stable enough to support our adult life. We find that we need to do extensive foundation work if we really want to thrive in the world. So out come the backhoes and dig up the trees and gardens we have planted over the years. Everything is a huge mess for a while. We feel like everything about ourselves is exposed for the world to see… and criticize. We long for the day when we can begin to put the dirt back around our foundation. We long for the day when the earth around us settles. We long to plant trees. We yearn for gardens once again. Though it may be only a vain attempt to hide the scars. The point of all this is that often on the way to things getting better, things look a lot worse and are extremely messy for a while.
I originally wrote this almost 3 years ago. At a time when I was in the early stages of healing. I had recently begun to remember the childhood sexual abuse that I endured nearly forty years earlier. The excavation work had begun and soon I began trying to rebuild my foundations. I began to see signs of success as I went from twice weekly therapy sessions down to once ever other week. Eventually even taking almost a whole year off off.
I am back in therapy now. I realize that in the past two years, I have been trying to rebuild the foundations from the same building blocks I started with. The problem is that no amount of time is going to erase the impact of my mom’s mental illness on my childhood. No amount of therapy is going to give that young girl emotionally responsive parents.
What I have come to understand very recently is that although I did not feel that unconditional love…. unconditional wantedness from my parents, I do have a very real sense of unconditional wantedness from God. That is where I am now. I am filling in the weak spots in my foundation and wrapping the whole thing in some God tyvek.
Intersections 
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