A Book Born From Aging Introspection

Guest Post by Author Sharon Diotte

Three incentives motivated me to write my book, Te’ora: From Vulnerability and Wounding to Wisdom and Freedom. 

First, I wrote through grief. 

My mom died of suicide at the age of 47 when I was 21. Dad died of heart failure at 79 when I was 50. After Dad died, I realized I didn’t know who these people were, other than my mother and father. I knew them only as parents, flawed, loving, parenting as best they could with their demons biting at their heels. 

Now that I’m old, I wish I could sit with them, share a cup of tea, and ask them all the burning questions about their lives. 

• What motivated their decisions? 
• What dreams never got realized? 
• Where did they feel more accomplished? 
• What were their disappointing failures?  

I’d ask the right kind of questions, now that I’ve evolved somewhat beyond the narcissistic view of youth. I would love them wholeheartedly now that I understand that they were carrying burdens far heavier than I could see as a child. I want my kids to know me better than I knew my parents. I want them to feel safe asking the critical questions while I’m still living. That was an initial impetus for my writing.

Writing my book gave me a clearer understanding of how growing up in a house with an angry, scary dad and a depressed mom set the trajectory of my life.

 I learned not to ask for anything that would inconvenience my parents, so heavily weighed down by their raw fears and sorrows. I learned to lie in bed, perfectly still, not blinking, shallow breathing, during the frightening nights of violence – my little girl’s way of protecting my mom from my dad’s anger. I learned to take care of Mom, physically and emotionally. I learned to try hard to make my dad feel loved, too. Maybe then he would not be so angry. I polished the tool of hypervigilance. Being parentified at such a tender age initiated me into the patriarchal woman-assigned role of caretaking and self-sacrificing.  

I’d always thought it would be helpful to have someone paint a mural of my life a city-block long, so I could stand back and see the why and how of it all.  Cloaked in shame and fear, many of the individual scenes seemed meaningless. I hoped that seeing my life in that way would make it all make sense. 

My second impetus was to write as a vehicle for healing. 

As I got into the meat of my memoir, I realized that many of my traumatic experiences were not specific to me personally. Sadly, I was writing a universal woman’s story. Holding my silence around traumas held me in shrinkage for too many years. I looked around me and saw an endless army of women doing the same thing, keeping themselves in shrinkage so the applecart never gets toppled. So much creative energy is stifled by the layers of self-protection.

During some of my own dark passages, I had been profoundly helped by reading the work of women authors who dared to break the silence about the consequences of deeply wounding patriarchal rules.  Their courage to break the silence and admit the truth buoyed me to dig deep inside myself and put my own courage into action.

My third incentive was to inspire others.

It became vital for me to write not only for my kids, not only for my own healing, but also for other women who might see themselves in my stories, so they might feel encouraged by their own strengths and resiliency as they follow their own paths of healing.

For a couple of years, I struggled with the book’s format. What was to be included? In what sequence? I didn’t want to write a biography. Still, I needed to examine my biography in minute detail to find the passages that best supported the theme of my memoir. I created a timetable of all the events I could remember. Reading back through my decades of daily logs helped me with that.  Some of the stories that initially seemed essential to the theme were dropped as the work progressed, and other memories moved up the list of importance. Whole chapters got replaced with new ones. 

In honestly sharing difficult to admit passages, if I was going to tell the truth, I needed a way to shield my underbelly from some of the embarrassing decisions I made during those struggle years. I stumbled upon a way… or perhaps more accurately, Guidance suggested the way. After writing about stories that made me cringe, I included an aside I called “Wisdom Speaks.”

On that page, I admitted what I learned looking back at that moment in my evolution. It helped me be honest in my writing. It helped me understand the purpose of my life as a continuum. And it is one of the parts of the book that women respond to with warm feedback. 

I’ve been told that those sections give them courage and the sense that their foibles have purpose, too, when painted into a full-life mural.

Holding my published book in my hands, I now know so clearly that I was always more than the daughter of an alcoholic mom who chose death by suicide—more than the daughter of an angry dad with an insatiable roving eye. More than the heartbroken teenager abandoned by her boyfriend after he did something that got pushed inside a black hole, so she didn’t know what happened, but which required days in the hospital receiving blood transfusions. 

More than the young girl impregnated by a married man and sent into hiding by church and state to give birth in shame and have my child given to a woman legitimatized by marriage. More than a twenty-year-old almost-woman who was drugged and raped by a group of frat boys. More than a middle-aged woman terrified by her violent husband with a closed head injury.  More than the deep disappointments of destroyed marital hopes, dreams, and promises that lead to divorce. 

It looks like quite a list of crises in one lifetime. For years, I thought my experiences diminished me, confined me to a lower social and intellectual level than others who had not experienced such chaos. In writing my book, I have come to understand that trauma is an initiation into accelerated growth, if we choose, or into stagnation, if we choose.  Wisdom is not a natural result of trauma; it is gained or denied by the responses we make when we are traumatized. When we understand this, the chaotic moments in our lives make sense. The traumas become doorways to deeper self-understanding, self-acceptance, and self-love. 

I’m also more than a loving mom, a caring, life-supporting Registered Nurse, an eager Teacher, and a successful business owner. I am so much more than the sum of my experiences. Yes, they shaped me. They taught me. They helped me become who I am. 

I will turn 78 in a few months. In these retirement years, I’m learning to relax in safety. I didn’t have that luxury throughout my life. It’s something that has developed over the past decade. Earlier, I had to stay in line, behave, edit my words, and follow the rules that said my needs were subordinate to men’s. If I wanted food and safe shelter, I needed to behave in ways that women were not created to act. Now, I move as I want, speak as I want, sleep and wake up when I want, get out of bed when I want, eat what I want, walk when I want, and visit friends when I want. I’m learning about healthy spontaneity. Life-freeing, muscle-relaxing spontaneity. What a treat! 

Now that I’ve published the book, I feel a heightened sense of “belonging” in a sacred circle with other old women, the Wise Crones of life.  In our elder years, we look back over the decades and see the wisdom-building aha moments and the slow meandering awakenings. We, old women, have held our secrets for our whole lives. That’s a lot of shrinkage over the decades. How might our creative energies have flowed if they were not cramped down around our secrets? Women learn from women who share their stories. In sisterhood, as one rises, we all rise. We link our arms, and we rise together.

We each determine the trajectory of our world. We crones are models for the younger women following in our footsteps, giving them clear, authentic footprints to plant their feet into. Old Women have walked bent over under the weight of patriarchy for too long. Let’s stand tall now.

Let’s be change makers.

Images Courtesy of Sharon Diotte and Pexels