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Life coach Deborah Trenchard healed her heart from the inside out

 

 

As I stood, my feet sinking into the beautiful white powdery sand, on this beautiful Barbados beach, I couldn’t help but notice the absence of bodies. Walking on the scorching hot sand reminded me of the fire-walk I had done the previous year as a part of my 'spiritual quest'.

I looked for a shaded spot in the midday heat. Not much was happening in the water at that moment. I took my sarong off and walked into the sea, only to make the acquaintance of the breaking of the large waves.  The water felt a bit chilly at first but I slowly eased my body in, turned on my back and floated.  My body lifted and dipped with the rhythm of the waves.  I had always liked the feelings floating evoked in me: the feeling of being carefree; of just drifting along; that 'who gives a toss what time it is' feeling.  As I floated, my outstretched arms making small, sporadic paddling motions, and listening to the music of the sea, I thought of my mother. Within a few minutes I got out of the water and sat on my towel under the age-old mahogany tree. 

I had often wondered why my mother never returned for me. But she was young, I thought. Not even quite sixteen, a mere child herself. She never told me anything about her life, my life.  What had happened to her as a young girl? What had made her lose her self-respect and end up with eight children? I sat looking towards the sea for a long time thinking of nothing in particular. I put my back up against the tree and started to read the book I'd brought as a holiday read.  But I couldn't. I was not on holiday.  I gazed at the sky, my eyes following the small patchy clouds like blobs of cotton wool in the amazingly blue tropical sky, when a thought came to me and I smiled softly. I didn't want the moment to end. 

In that instant, I realised that all my life my mother's relations, every uncle, every aunt, every cousin and friend had always embraced me.  It was as if my mother had ‘sent' these people out on a mission, and that mission was to care for me on her behalf. During my young years I had no idea that love and care were one and the same. My mother once told me I was different.  But she couldn't for the life of her articulate ‘different'.  She told me, on another occasion, that she had raised a young girl, whose mother had been on drugs, during the years I had lived in New York, hoping to overcome her guilt with me.  But this young lady didn't fill the gap, the deep chasm, and the guilt she had felt for most of my life.

On another occasion I looked my mother in the eye and asked her to tell me something, anything, about who she was. It's not too late to fill me in. That afternoon we were in my brother's kitchen in Harlem.  She was busy cooking.  I sat at the table and waited patiently, and somewhat tensely, for her response.  And when it did come, as my mother put the pan aside and joined me, it was a shock.

The outpouring gushed.  My mother told me about the white man who had fallen in love with her, but she suggested he took his love elsewhere.  She said how she had never forgotten him.  Was she afraid to be loved?  My mother also told me that she wasn't surprised when I married a white man.  Was I living her dreams? 'I had always longed for England,' she said. 

          As I sat looking towards the horizon I came to realise that it was the love and care that gave me the hope and confidence I had exuded for most of my life. Perhaps that's what my mother meant when she said I was different. With this realisation my tears trickled. I saw my mother's beauty and generosity; her heart, the heart that had always embraced me with the utmost love and affection. Unreservedly.  I had become a bigger me in spite of not knowing things about her past, my past. And what would knowing do for me now, anyway? Whatever plagued me in the past no longer mattered; my life has moved on.  In that moment I happily embraced my mother's life for the great woman she is, instead of hanging on, as I'd done for practically all my life, to the things she wasn't able, or experienced enough, to do; to give, to say; to be. I knew then that I had healed that deep dark part of my soul. I had healed the pain and anguish I'd held for so many years.  In essence, I had healed my heart; from the inside out. 

My mother died in December 2006.

 

An abridged version of a chapter from the book entitled FINDING ME – A Life in Transition by Deborah Trenchard available through Authorhouse.co.uk and Amazon.

Deborah is a Martha Beck trained Life Coach, Public Speaker and Workshop Facilitator.  Deborah's website 

Deborah's second book: RAISING TIFFANY - Portrait of a Special Girl will be out in the Spring.

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