Re: from my mom's journal (fwd)

[Noelle <noelle>]

see my comments on what Lizzie shared. Oh should ask her about 
Netflix.

 > Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2023 06:58:52 -0700 (PDT)
 > From: Noelle <http://dummy.us.eu.org/noelleg>
 > To: Lizzie <http://www.sbcglobal.net/~l>
 >  
 >  Wow, thank you for this!
 >  
 >  I just came back from a yoga retreat in Soquel(Land of Medicine
 >  Buddha)where one of my yoga teachers likes to host retreats.  In
 >  the opening circle she said let us all be REAL with each other
 >  this weekend.  It's kind of like group therapy, yoga, exercise,
 >  hiking in the redwoods,eating veg food and swimming all in one
 >  weekend.  A newish friend of mine(who I know from the local co-op
 >  scene, she runs a co-op native plants and greywater conversion
 >  landscaping company) kept saying I want to do more yoga(we had
 >  attended a yoga class together the week before pandemic
 >  shutdown)and I haven't had a vacation since I started the
 >  business.  So I kept sharing with her about Julianne's retreats
 >  and how I enjoy attending them so I finally was able to get her to
 >  sign up for one.  She also likes swimming so during free time we
 >  both got in the pool.  since it' s a Buddhist center you aren't
 >  supposed to kill anything even mosquitos, so I would save the bugs
 >  that got in the pool.  then I was transported in my memory to our
 >  pool on Via Clarice where we had the "bee saver" stick to rescue
 >  the bees that fell in the pool water.Anyway, later that night we
 >  were talking, since I asked her at the pool about her earlier life
 >  in Honduras and how she ended up in the US(I suspected something
 >  traumatic since she is age 56 and back in the 80s lots of bad
 >  stuff was going on in Central America[hmm...it's still going
 >  on!}).  Her father was murdered because greedy landowners wanted
 >  to take over his coffee farm.  She was the eldest of 7 and was
 >  kidnapped and raped and bore a son at age 19 from the rape.  She
 >  fled Honduras and left the son there, and managed to work hard to
 >  bring the son & the rest of the family to the US(some got asylum
 >  in Canada).
 >  
 >  So she wanted to know about my parents.  I tried describing my mom
 >  and her being French, the difficulty of being able to keep French
 >  fluency, the power struggles we had around that.  And Elizabeth
 >  said it's like you lost that French culture from living in
 >  American society which was hostile to bilingualism.
 >  
 >  Anyway, reading your mom's diary entry brought back that mystery
 >  around my mom.  I remember them talking for hours(or maybe it was
 >  mostly your mom?  we know how much she talked).  I told E. about
 >  how my parents met and how she was this mysterious exotic French
 >  nurse who was temporarily in Yuba City/Marysville.  It must have
 >  been a whirlwind romance but when you get married you hope you can
 >  deepen the relationship and know the spouse more.  I guess my mom
 >  would not allow others in.  Reading the diary entry made me think
 >  wow, they were best friends yet your mom still after all those
 >  years of knowing her felt she did not know her.I told E. about
 >  how my mom was so young when the war started and it must have been
 >  traumatic, that she did not have psychotherapy to process this,
 >  and maybe some family dynamics/abuse trauma we will never know
 >  since she avoided sharing something like that.  Now we will likely
 >  never know, the mystery continues.