Unworthy Me!

Unworthiness is the inmost frightening thought that you do not belong, no matter how much you want to belong, that you are an outsider and will always be an outsider. It is the idea that you are flawed and cannot be fixed. It is wanting to be loved and feeling unlovable, or wanting to love and feeling that you are not capable of loving. – Gary Zhukov

I was restless. I wasn’t in the right place. I thought maybe I wanted to return to Southern California. But then I considered the smog, the traffic, and the prices. Hawaii is beautiful, but I’ve been there several times, and it’s expensive.

I need the ocean. The ocean is where I feel at home. Halfway between San Diego and Hawaii, while becalmed, I went swimming in the bottomless sea. Endless horizon (well, except for where the sail boat obscured my view), endless everything. God surely is in every drop of salt water. To enter the ocean is to be surrounded by God, hugged by God, baptized and blessed by God, anointed by God.

I had been living alone on my sail boat in San Diego when my daughter had an urgent need to get away from her abusive husband with her six year old daughter. She was an RN, Director of Nursing, and on call at all times. She needed a live-in person to cover for her when she had to go work in the middle of the night, or stay three days in a snow storm to ferry people to and from work in her tiny Suzuki. She lived near Seattle.

So, Mom to the rescue. On a Thursday my daughter made a definite decision to leave her tormentor and asked me to come. I flew to Seattle the next Monday having packed a duffle bag and consigned my boat and storage locker to the care of a good friend.

No ocean. No surf. No shore to swim from. No water but what came out of the tap and the sky, endlessly out of the sky. I was beached.

I did the job: homemaker, room parent, PTO member, homework helper, driver, party planner, substitute mom.

Twelve years later my daughter said, “Now don’t take this wrong, Mom, but you are free to move out any time.” My granddaughter had turned 18 and I was no longer needed. No more room and board. No more $500 a month for expenses. And a résumé twelve years out of date.

I did have some income at that time as a Posture Alignment Specialist using the Egoscue method and teaching people exercises to align their spines and bodies. And I had just become eligible for Social Security, $650 a month, $200 less than the cheapest rent I could find. Before that year was out, a teenager in a pickup truck plowed into the back of my tiny Geo Metro while I was stopped at a signal and messed up my back. I couldn’t exercise for some months.

So, what to do? This was before I realized that I am worthy, before I understood that this is a rich universe with as much treasure in it for me as I want. This was during the years I fought the “Unworthy Monster” and lived in fear and depression.

I read all the ads. I found a job handing out samples in grocery stores for $12 an hour. It involved six hours of standing, pushing a heavy cart around, repairing a cart with a hammer and nails and screwdrivers and main strength sometimes. It was hard on my body. In two years I got a promotion to field trainer. At first my territory was 101 stores: Kroger, WalMart, and Albertson’s. Then the company was reorganized and I was blessed to have only Kroger stores and only 31 of them. The job entailed driving up to an hour and a half north or south, sometimes two hours or more east, and getting to each store every month. I spent an entire day with each new hire. I had to keep all the carts in repair, two per store as a rule. I carried a tool box and often had to ask for some man-muscle to get the job done. I had to keep the storage areas clean. It is beyond belief how much of a mess a few hoarders can make. It was exhausting work and I had to do more and more of it to keep up with my upward spiraling rent. One Christmas season I had to sell my sofa to pay it on time.

A dear friend recruited me to tutor an eight year old girl in English using the Linda-Mood Bell method. It paid $18 an hour and I gladly accepted on my friend’s assurance that I could do it. Four hours a day, four days a week, and my training job all the other days. I’d never heard of Linda-Mood Bell, but there was a teacher’s manual and all the flash cards and other tools needed, so I read a few pages of the manual and started. It worked really well. I kept ahead of her in the manual and in four months the little Russian girl not only was reading confidently out loud to her classmates, and out-spelling her ten year old sister and friend we visited with during breaks, but had learned to visualize so well that math suddenly made sense.

When the job ended, my friend urged me to become an English tutor for real. I had no idea how to go about doing that and felt that no one would hire me anyway since I have no college degree. I stuck with the hard physical work that was harming my body and barely paying the bills.

And I fought the Unworthy Monster with prayer and supplication, and with endless journaling.