Rooted

Chakras are important to me. All my life, and I do mean since I was under five, I have felt my own power and energy. It was stronger when I was younger and free. It became truly confined while I was married to someone who thought such thinking was at beast weird.

Everything is energy. Everything. And energy cannot be destroyed, only transmuted. It is through energy we connect to the world and to others around us.

Chakras are centers of energy in our body, each center governs certain aspects of our bodies and our souls. While looking for information on balancing them, I ran across a small seemingly silly test of how well your chakras are balanced.

I had one terrible underactive. My root chakra.

The root chakra is at the base of your spine and it reflects how secure and safe you feel with your place in the world. If you feel you have a place or not. It is usually formed between the ages of five and seven.

Around my fifth year, both my parents were very ill at different times. First my father almost died from a heart problem that was never diagnosed his entire life. He had periods of tachacardia. His heart would race and the first time he almost died was when I was five. I couldn't even visit him in ICU, as it wasn't allowed.

Thankfully he came home. It was after that my mother was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Since my father was retired Army, we saw military doctors. Oklahoma City didn't have the facilities to treat momma, so she went off to San Antonio. She was away about 6 weeks getting radiation treatments. My father couldn't stay away from work that long. We stayed at home.

During my marriage I invested ALL of me into making it work, making myself fit in. It was an alien world to me that I wasn't ever quite comfortable in. But it was my world. I was Margaret Zick. then the divorce came and I lost all of that, I took my maiden name back and lost my home, and all of my friends for the last 13 years.

I was uprooted, swaying in the wind trying to find a nice spot to grow during the next phase of my life. So of course I was the perfect target for a lover turned stalker. Being stalked physically for several years, being afraid of going even to the grocery store, and even after leaving there being harassed by phone and email, well, it never allowed me to grow.

My roots have shriveled and turned to dust. I don't have any place I feel is home, I haven't had it for several years. I thought the stalker had made me afraid of him, but the isolation it brings has taken away my feeling of safety anywhere.

So I live with daily anxiety and depression, I truly believe results from my own lack of a home base, a place of acceptance and love, a place of safety that I can retreat to and enjoy. That feeling is currently so foreign to me, it is a nebulous memory that I can't quite grasp anymore.

I need something to stimulate that root chakra, to stimulate my own roots so I can learn to build my own haven from the world, that also connects me to it.

Admin

For those who stumble upon this blog, it is bits and pieces of what I hope will turn into a biography. Although I am not famous or special, I have lived through some wonderful and also some terrifying things.

I feel I have something to share.

Much of this is rough draft, trying to get what is in my head out. I hope then to assemble the entirety of it into something intriguing.

Fantasy Life

I grew up knowing I would never get married. I never had a desire for kids, and I was fiercely independent. This attitude was so ingrained in me that my Grandma repeatedly suggested I get a hysterectomy. It always shocked me when she said this, although I knew it was because she knew the truth of me.

My journal and my camera were my constant companions. In my early teens, I was the school photographer for daily life, and an editor for both the newspaper and yearbooks. It was a magical time for me, the early seventies with young enthusiastic teachers. I journaled, I wrote poetry.

Underneath all this bravado was insecurity. I look back now and wonder why it was there. I was well liked in school, won awards for my journalism and also science fair. Even though I was terribly shy around boys, I had several suitors.

In high school I felt even more isolated. At the age of thirteen I had been diagnosed with depression. My parents had gone through a hateful divorce when I was nine, and barely talked outside of court throughout my adolescence.

My high grades of junior high plummeted. (more to come)

I never noticed my beauty. And looking back I think that is what lead Alan, the ex-husband, to like me. His mindset is all about appearance. Ironically he was a sad sight when we first started dating.

The Starting Line

I was a late comer to the whole baby boom generation. Being born during the cold war, on an Army post may have been a clue as to what my life would bring to me.

The start itself was a struggle. My parents had given up hope of having children, for a decade it just didn't happen for them. Their life was built around the Army, moving every couple of years, poker parties and making home brew. They were stationed in Seattle at the time, my father the commanding officer of a missile base pointing at the U.S.S.R.

Does it sound like a movie plot yet?

One day little ol' me decided to show up. My Momma didn't realize she was in labor and I guess I almost missed the whole Army hospital thing entirely. My father, who had been through two wars and dealt with the daily threat of a nuclear attack, was panicking. But then, he really was a big gruff teddy bear of a man anyway.

I have often wondered what that drive to the hospital was like. They lived on post at the time, so it must have been a site to see the C.O. driving like a madman to get his wife there.

So into this world I came. Uneventful in the actual labor (rumor has it lasting only about 6 hours), the first born child arrived. The only child arrived. With a head of thick black hair which was promptly lost about a week later. I guess even then I had something to prove.

Unfortunately for all involved, my mother decided that she needed some more attention and had a seizure right before we were set to journey back home. She knew it was coming on, she was sitting on the bed holding me, waiting for the wheelchair ride to the front door.

Momma: Someone grab Margie, I think I am gonna faint.

Someone grabs Margie. Sometime later a nurse is explaining to my Daddy and my godmother that my Momma is staying for a while.

Gruff Army Nurse: So Major, do you want to leave your daughter here or take her with you?

Wicked Godmother: Of course he will take her home!!

Now I must mention here that my godmother is actually a wonderful person. Her and my "Uncle George" (my godfather whose name is not George) had known my parents for a long time, before the Army split the Air Corp into the Air Force.

I guess I should also mention at this point that my father had left home at the age of sixteen and knew nothing about babies. That certainly wasn't a class in his basic training. Fortunately for me they did live on base. I was close to the Calvary.

So off my father trotted with me. According to him the hardest part was trying to figure out how to sterilize a baby bottle without touching it. You see, the nurses told him how to sterilize it and told him he wasn't to touch a sterilized bottle. Being a good Army man he followed instructions. I guess that was about the time the nurses decided daily check-ins were needed, commanding officer or not. I am forever in their debt.

Blown in the Wind

Once I was married.

Suddenly, without warning, my life was ripped from me. Not my choice, didn't even see it coming.

But then, how could I? A few days before D(ivorce) Day, we had been talking of retiring to the Pacific Northwest and looking at a new vehicle for me. So I could more easily transport our animals.

A couple of weeks before, we had been celebrating my fortieth birthday. I was excited to see this new decade in. I was finally at peace within myself, making plans for the future, committing myself fully to my husband and the life I had with him.

Yes, it took me sixteen years to find that peace. You have to understand that time was filled with tourmoil which took a great toll on me. So much was out of my hands. But I was finally regaining some small sense of self-destiny, some baby steps to being who I had wanted to be so long ago.

And I had made peace with my own urging towards parenthood. I was extremely wary of it for so many, many reasons and had come to realize that it just boiled down to fear. And that I was strong enough to do it.

The day I waited to tell my husband that I wanted to try hard for parenthood was the exact day he chose to tell me he didn't want to be married anymore.

Before I had a chance to say anything.