Week 5: Great news!
Week 5: May 6, 2008 Tuesday — A great news day! Preceded by Monday which were more challenging.
The road block on my “interior journey” … the one question everyone asks me at every screening is how my relationship is with my mother. The real honest answer is “I don’t know” and “it’s my fault because I want to reach out and I’m afraid of rejection.”
I never gave the honest answer because I honestly didn’t know it until yesterday when I saw her. I met with my biological mom yesterday. I had to get something off my chest. I needed to tell her that I appreciated that she was not a drug addict, and she didn’t beat us. I told her that I thought her being good with us as babies is what gave us a chance. Me, my baby brothers, my older sisters, we are all human. We have our challenges of course, but we also have mental capacity and a ton of potential.
The recognition that my mom deserved some credit came after my baby bro took home the first prize in the Fresno State business plan competition on May 3rd!!! I’m so proud of him, and our older sister who is on his 3 person team. I have always seen something great in my baby brother, and my other siblings, they’re talented! We all have POTENTIAL to meet just about any challenge we are faced with. We have tenacity and we have smarts. I want to be proud of that and I want my mom to be proud of the fact that she left that potential in tact. She may have left me when I was 12, but for some reason her loving me from 0-3 made the most impact on me in my 3-0’s.
So I drove to Coalinga yesterday and I thanked her for giving me a chance to be great.
I even went a little further. I told her I would be here for her. That it mattered to me that she was around for a long time, and I said I thought I owed her something for the chance she gave us all in life. And that was just Monday!
So moving on to the exterior road block: I’m at risk of being marginalized, pushed out, or cast aside for demanding too much…
After “The Hacienda” issue and realizing the shambles the city is in, and has been in, I was feeling like I wasn’t sure if I could do it. I wasn’t sure if I was cutout for it, but then I thought again. What I was really faced with was that I was not popular anymore. I was losing friends in Fresno. Not that they won’t come and go, but people started questioning my intentions. I was being marginalized, then yesterday (before I drove to Coalinga) I met Sheri. I had heard from Sheri a week earlier, and it turned out that we were both waiting to meet each other for many years. I am so relieved to know that the region has more than one champion who recognizes and will fight the good fight.
Now that the interior and exterior road blocks have been recognized, I think I have a better chance at getting past them. I also think that good things (gifts) have a greater chance of getting in. The gifts didn’t take long, they came today!
The first gift was when I received a message from Mandi Perkins who wrote On My Own (Carissa’s Song), which is available now on iTunes. Well, Mandi is releasing her first album soon & is going to promote the song & the cause with BIG help!!! That message was a huge gift. Then just now I received an email from David, the filmmaker. It was a mass email to “Friends of the Film” to announce the documentary’s first big award: Best Short Documentary at the Newport Film Festival!!! It was announced today in the OC Register:
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/best-outstanding-festival-2032909-film-achievement
All this great news makes me want to let go of more garbage and become a bigger better person again and again!!!
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For local supporters…hope to see you on Thursday night! Valley Teen Ranch has some great news too. They are moving forward with an organic farm. The boys will be able to learn about organic gardening, they’ll eat organic, and they’ll learn all about a viable business.
Be sure to call ahead to reserve your seats and if you can’t make it you can definitely call in to pledge your support for the ranch and the organic farm! http://www.valleyteenranch.org/
