Kurt and his mother

Everyone saw me interact around my sense of lovability...and how I've striven to "make up" for any un-lovability. And you saw, I believe, how I "was" a little boy in that process. What only one or two people knew was that earlier I had connected around the image of Peter Pan...

I'd always been brought to tears with Robin William's portrail of an older Peter who'd left Neverland to live in the regular world. I suddenly saw why I was so drawn to that story and why it made me cry. You see, when Peter Pan went into the world he became very adult, a successful business man. But he lost his playfulness, he missed musch of his young son's life...his baseball games, for example. And, now as Peter Panning, he was so afraid of heights that he was terrified to fly in an airplane! I'd alway knew that I cried when he found himself again as Peter Pan, but I had no idea why. During our first practicum weekend I saw the achiever he'd become and the boy in himself he'd lost. I also knew what it was like to develope a fear of heights, even though I'm a pilot (very irrational fear...as I suppose they are.) How he'd given up so much in order to achieve was lost on me before...

Anyway, Wayne's process gave me permission to visit something that is an undercurrent in the Peter Pan story: "I wish I had a mother." As I repeated it I began to cry. I was grieving what I had never had in my mother. (For that matter, she'd never had it in hers either.) I somehow new I was onto something by allowing myself to grieve, not "loss," but absence. (It has shown up as clinging for acceptance and approval and fear of abandonement.)

This was where I was when Robert and Wendy led me into and through my valley of the shadow of death...and all of you were in front of me. I will tell you that I went to a state of near-no-mind...in fact I wasn't so articulate, nor did I care, for awhile. I went to a place where I envisioned all of my fellow practicum participates could go onto being the greatest counselors on earth and me do nothing at all...be no one special...and I'd be perfect just as I am. It was quite the state of beingness...

Well, about 4 days later I spoke to my mother on the phone. And she was contracted, once again by a criticism of someone...bound by her dependency on others for a sense of self, and I just loved her. Things that used to hook me just didn't matter. I didn't need anything from her anymore...I was now just there for her. I talked with her for quite a while, very willing to just drop whatever was going on in my day to be with her on the phone. Most amazing though, was a particular event. When I asked her a question and she in her typical fashion went off tangent without even beginning to answer the question...she caught herself and said, "I didn't answer your question did I?" And we both laughed about it. I, at that moment...the first for as long as I can remember...saw how cute my mother is. I saw "cuteness" in her "stuff" and I told her how cute she was.

For so much of my life I've made the fact that my mother is emotionally frozen at about age 4 or 5 into a problem. This day I saw how cute this 74 year old 4 year old really is. Her beauty is just there in her beingness. I couldn't see it so long as I looked for something else.