Never Let Go of The Thread: What it means to be a family

Parent Vows:  What does it mean to live into your destiny? The one not given to you by fate?  The one you were given by design.  The Original YOU? The dream that is dreaming you?

I wonder about the dream that brought me here to this earth fairly often. I like to ponder things in my quiet moments. The one I have been pondering lately is coming out of the Parent Vows Project.  I have talking to my father for a long time about the vow my parents made when they were thinking about conceiving each of us.  My parents made a special vow... My Father has told me the story many times. 

They laid each one of us on the altar of Our Lady of Loretto Church, and vowed before God that they would do their best to have a loving family. They promised they would gave us back to God.

What does IT mean to me? I have many privileges my mother and father did not have...and I get to fulfill a dream that my mother and father sacrificed on behalf of my brother and sisters. They did it in order to bring us here. It is one hell of a story.

My mother was at the Christ Hospital School of Nursing when she met and married my father. He was a handsome, well dressed, wealthy Sicilian man. And he adored her. 

Back in those days, the hospitals had their own training programs. It was run like a convent. Nursing students could not be married. They worked long hours and lived in a dorm, and received training, room and board in exchange for their education. Their purpose was to support the doctors and the hospitals in the practice of medicine, but nurses started to apply the science of Florence Nightengale, and began to notice the patterns their education was bringing, and were trying to be a profession and claim their science.

Back in those days, nurses had to stand up when a doctor entered the room and if there was not place for him to sit, (it was most usually a him), they were expected to give up their seat. There were still very few University Programs, and many nurses had to get their doctoral dgrees in other disciplines. The profession was still very young, and my mother chose to get married and have children. She chose to leave the dream of her career behind.  It was a different time in history.  That is what many women did at that time. I believe that is why she got cancer.  She repressed a lot during her life.

So how did I become a nurse? In my mid-twenties, I worked two jobs. During the week I worked at a home health agency as a coordinator, and also helped my father run his Balloon shop on the weekends. I liked listening to the nurses.  The stories they told, and the patients I got to interact with when I scheduled the nurses' visits.

My partner at the time was a Certified Nurse Midwife. She had a very good intuitive sense. She held the energy of the ancient midwives. There was a part of her that kind of reminded me of a witch. It was pretty cool. We did shamanic drumming and hung out in nature and listened to women's music. We went to festivals, and had a full life. She also had a daughter.  I had a family.

My partner had a vision one night when we were on a retreat in the Hocking Hills of Ohio. We went there to help me find clarity on my purpose, and to learn what that would mean for us as a family. It was a women's retreat center. It was so peaceful and beautiful there. The food was simple and prepared with care. It was fresh, country food, and the air was clean and crisp. The nature was incredible and I could feel something in me starting to come together.

We drank in the moonlight while sitting in the hot tub. We marveled at the infinite blackness of the night sky. With no city streetlights to dim the scattered constellations etched against the inky darkness, we often fell into companionable silence. 

It was from that place that my nursing career was born. I had been seeing a career counselor. I needed to find a professional career, and my life purpose. I was 27 years old, and was struggling to find my place in the world. 

My partner awoke from a dream at 4 am on the third night of our journey. She sat bolt upright in bed, and shouted, "I got it, you need to become a nurse."

I rejected the idea immediately. I told her my mother also wanted me to become a nurse, and I was not interested in fulfilling her unfulfilled life. My partner laughed at my stubbornness and started asking me questions. With each question, more clarity came and it seemed like nursing was a perfect fit for the life I wanted to create, and the life we were creating together. My resistance softened.

It met all of the criteria I had laid out with the career counselor, for not only what I wanted to do, more like a natural progression of who I was already was...and who I wanted to become. I am still living into who I was meant to be. In some way or another, aren't we all?

That was 25 years ago, and I am still following the voice of the ONE who brought me here in order to be of service to our world. It is a time of great transformation in the way we know and learn about wellness and disease. I am gratefully excited to be walking this path with each of you reading this...and committed to the path of discovering new ways to look at IntegratingDNA into our collective journey of health and healing.