Mama Jeni
There are many things that have shaped our actions as adults – how we treat others and how we let others treat us. At first, these events are unnoticed, forgotten. They’re intangible, locked away in a box, a treasure chest, if you will, for many years in the back of your mind. It’s difficult to try and find and then analyze these things as they are quite abundant. My advice is to choose wisely: start with something major, from the beginning. Start with something significant that occurred with Little You.
I’ll start:
When I was 2 years old, my parents moved to England to work for almost 2 years. My brother and I stayed with my father’s side of the family in a small town in Eastern Europe. My brother stayed with my grandparents, who lived on a farm just outside of the city, and I stayed in an apartment in the city with my uncle and my aunt, Mother Jenny.
As mentioned, I was 2 years old. My brother, who is 8 years older than me, was 10.
Being so young, I started calling my aunt, “Mama Jeni” or “Mother Jenny.” She is wonderful. To this day, other than my parents, I have never met more truly selfless and caring people than my Mana Jeni and her husband, my uncle, Peter.
They now live in my grandparents’ house, farming almost every vegetable, making wine from their mini vineyard, and raising chickens, rabbits, and taking care of 9 dogs and 7 cats – 2 of those dogs live next door. Next door, you ask? Yes, on my parents’ land – the land right beside my dad’s childhood home where he built my mom the most beautiful house, gardening the most beautiful flowers.
But I digress.
While my parents were in England, they were working to save money for us, my brother and I. They would send us clothes and toys – some of which my aunt still finds buried by my brother from 25+ years ago! Although their purpose and intentions were for their kids, they weren’t with their kids. Now, I can’t speak for my brother, but after many psychology sessions, I realized that this well-intended trip – for lack of a better word – that my parents took, planted the seed of this persistent fear of abandonment that lies within my heart. I felt as though my parents had abandoned me, without knowing it. And the cure to that feeling I placed in others, specifically my aunt, hence “Mother Jenny.”
This fear is, what I can only assume, what spawned the following characteristics:
• The need to please others so that they like me, so that they don’t ‘leave me’
• Letting others treat me however they wish, good or bad, simply so that they don’t, you guessed it, ‘leave me’.
Moral of my story? Finding a past event that simply corresponds with a current characteristic that you’d like to ameliorate or even eliminate can help you do just that.
So take a moment. Put your phone down while you’re drinking your morning tea or coffee or before you start drifting off to sleep, and think about what you would like to improve in your life and what is holding you back from doing just that. Then think back to Little You: what did you go through, how did you spend your time, who did you spend time with – and what happened? Whatever events pop up in your head first, that’s your subconscious already talking to you. Out of the many, many events over many, many days, those are the ones your mind chose to keep, locked in a box, coming out only to influence your decisions, without you knowing it. So unlock the box and start having a conversation with Little You, maybe many, because things have changed since then. And they’ve changed for the better.