Survival Giving

What is a gift?

I give my heart, my hands, my thought to the comfort and well-being of my family, my community. I take joy in cooking, creating, cleaning, and organizing for myself and others. I most love to give from the place of abundance, not looking behind me at any cost or consequence in the giving.

There have been consequences.

I did not learn to give from abundance. I learned to give from fear. Raised in a family that struggled with domestic violence, I did what I was told. Daily from the age of seven, I completed long lists of chores with bitter determination. I learned the trade of homemaking well, and I am grateful for the efficiency it offers me as a mother.

I am also grateful that I saw early on that giving is a skill in itself. I saw that people welcomed my company because they saw me as "a giver." I have been told I am angelic, kind, and generous in my adulthood. The skill of offering my efforts to others were born in a home where my father threatened and chided me for laziness if I missed a corner in the vacuuming. They are only skills.

I learned to give because it met a need for power. I'm sure I wished to contribute, too, but in all honesty, the need for power resonates just now. I needed power desperately at a time when my voice and my needs were silenced. I clung to power as I watched helplessly while my father pushed and swung at my mother. This power shined so brightly that I could see myself in the dark when no one else could see me.

Giving was a strategy, a means to an end for safety, acceptance, and love. It served me well.

I remember hearing about school shootings when I was a young teenager. As the people around me shook their heads in horror, I could understand why the man in question pulled the trigger. I could understand the disjointed fear and helplessness, and most of all the power behind that cold piece of steel. I felt confused; didn't everyone else know what it was like to be in that place?

I didn't dare say it. I couldn't tell them how I could feel what I imagined he felt, that it made perfect sense to me why and how he could see his action as all-powerful and still meaningless, ultimately inconsequential. So fragile and so loud.

Giving, running, hiding, striking out, and striking back --all can come from such exquisite pain. And now I see that it is not the giving that had its consequences. Any resentment I now harbor is not from having given too much, or even from seeing myself as "forced" to give. My giving is ultimately inconsequential; there has been nothing taken from me or anyone else in its offering. In this sense, giving was a gentle strategy to have settled on.

What is left when I reconsider my history of giving is only the pain that birthed the strategy that I trusted to keep me alive. What is left is looking back and into the constancy of fear I was raised with, the eruptions and undercurrents of crisis from within.

Perhaps holding this pain will truly free me to give from my heart.

I am humbled, again, to witness the gift of compassion, no matter how terrifying or cold, that my childhood bestowed upon me.