No More Wounds—Only Love

INTRODUCTION At this point, the mind can begin to look with love on its own creations because of their worthiness T-2. V111.4.4 For many years I questioned where I belonged. I felt an alien in my adopted country, Australia, and also in my birth country, Spain. My family left Spain in late November 1962, just before my fourteenth birthday. Our parents told us we were going on a cruising holiday. It turned out to be a very long holiday! In 2013 I visited my birthplace, Cadiz in Spain, with my friend, LLa’Rah, for two weeks with the intent to finally put the past to rest. As it had done on previous visits, my home town tugged at my heart. I loved the life there. It was so different to the Australian lifestyle. I could see that the people still cared for each other and their families were important. Most people appeared to enjoy the simple pleasures of life. The local people have a saying, 'We work to live, not live to work', and this attitude filters through everything. Fortunately, materialism has not as yet taken over, although I did notice that smoking was rampant and mobile phones used everywhere. I met three of my cousins and one aunt who still live in Cadiz. None of them speak English so I conversed with them in my rusty Spanish. One of my cousins told me I spoke childish Spanish. This is understandable as I was so young and immature when we left Cadiz. At the end of the two weeks I really did not want to leave. I arrived back in Australia even more torn and heartsick. As a result, over the next few months I manifested one illness after another. I finally made the decision to return to Spain in February 2014 and live there for three months. This time, I told myself, I would definitely make a decision about where I wanted to live permanently. Before I left for Spain I was guided to listen to Gary Renard's audiobook, ‘Disappearance of the Universe'. I was particularly drawn to the story of the prodigal son and it made me think of my life with my parents, especially my mother. There was never any love in our family and as a result my brothers and I have sought love in various places and with many people throughout our lives. I was born Marie Angeles Navas Sandamoso Veras Sostomallo in the old medieval town of Cadiz, Spain, in the latter days of November 1948 during the reign of General Franco. Although it was the time of Franco's regime, we had a lot of freedom and as long as we were home by curfew there was no trouble. My parents, Maria and Julio, never wanted children. From a very young age I was the mother figure in our family. When I was four my mother had a severe mental breakdown. Things were never the same after that. Our family became more and more dysfunctional as I was catapulted into becoming an instant mother to my younger brother, Frank, and later to my brother, Tony, and to my mother as well. As a result of my mother's mental problems and bi-polar tendencies, we all suffered physical and mental abuse for many years at her hands. I am unable to remember much that was positive about my mother. Later in my life a counsellor told me to go home and dig into my memories to find something good about her. All I came up with was that she was very attractive with thick, dark, wavy hair. She always looked smartly dressed and was a good cook. I thought when I escaped home at twenty to marry that would be the end of the abuse; however, although the physical abuse ceased for me, the mental abuse continued. This treatment led me to hate my mother so much that sometimes I actually wished she would die. My resentment towards my mother grew as I felt she had robbed me of my childhood and teenage years and was continuing to do so in my adulthood. I lived with these feelings of anger and resentment until the age of fifty. I was then a mother myself and everything finally caught up with me. I became quite depressed and wanted to die. My self-esteem was extremely low; I did not love myself and I felt very insecure. Unfortunately, I believe I projected these negative feelings onto my three children. Eventually my body caved in and I became seriously ill with Bell's Palsy and later septicaemia. My recovery was slow; however, it did offer me time to reflect on my life. When my father passed away in 2004 my mother had another breakdown, and I began to see her vulnerability and recognised that she was a scared child locked in a world of her own making. After my marriage of almost thirty-nine years ended, my mother in one of her lucid moments, actually told me for the first time in my life that she loved me and that I was a better mother than she had ever been. After my separation, I began to look seriously at myself as a person and this is when I really started on my spiritual journey. Through my studies I found that gradually love, compassion and forgiveness were replacing the hatred I had hung onto for years. However, it wasn't until I began to study ACIM, that I finally realised how my mother had allowed her illness to wreck her life, and how I in turn had allowed her to influence mine as well. I am so grateful to have had a lot of substitute mothers in my life. In Spain there was my Aunt Marie Angeles then our neighbour Pilar. In Australia when I worked for Coles there was a Scottish woman called Ninea who never got on with her own children. She took me under her wing and helped me a lot. After Ninea came my mother-in-law Vicki, once the barriers between us came down, and then finally a wonderful English woman named Annie. My mother hated all these women with a vengeance simply because they liked and cared for me, something she was incapable of expressing. My life experience has led me now to embrace every day with so much gratitude and love. I feel peaceful within myself and sincerely wish that all my family will one day also experience this love and peace in their lives. ACIM has taught me to love everyone unconditionally, and to take responsibility for everything that happens to me. I have developed the art of detachment and now recognise that each person I meet is simply a reflection of me. It has been my belief that I have been blamed for, and suffered both physical and mental abuse because of everything that went wrong in my life’s journey. I have now been taught to see this differently. My children used to complain that their lives were hard. They have no idea what hard really means!