Once there was a little girl holding a string….

How many stories have started that way, if not on the printed page then in the lives of countless women?

Most of us big girls started out as little girls with strings rising up to the sky, attached to beautiful balloons, full of innocence and wonder. Hope and promise. We were sweet little cherubs with wild imaginations and beautiful daydreams. We slept without worries and left tomorrow to surprise us when it came. There were no tangles in our strings, only the lovely, colorful rubber spheres bouncing up toward forever.

And then…

And then, for each of us little girls there came a point when that balloon was popped and the string fell slackly to the ground.  Our worlds deflated a little that day, just like the beautiful piece of latex that now lay shriveled on the ground. Our strings went from soaring to droopily mourning the loss of the innocence that those balloons embodied.

This is the day that we realized that our world was not perfect.  Nor the people that lived there.

There are many pins of pain that pop our bubbles of wonder.  These pins do their damage and leave our strings limp and prone to entanglement.  And unbeknownst to us, we slowly begin our journey to become big girls with the same sad string that follows us throughout our lives collecting knots.  We forget that they were once our connection to the beauty that turned our gaze to the skies.

I was five when my balloon popped, leaving that loud, scary ringing in my ears.  Unexpected.  Terrifying.

My pin was Shame.

I didn’t have a word for it then, but it happened like this:

My mama used to get horrible migraines.  Excruciating pain followed by violent wretching.  At age five, it was one of the things hurt my little heart the most.  Seeing my mama in pain and not being able to help her.  To bring her relief from her misery.

One particular day, my summer before kindergarten, we were staying in a cabin at a family reunion. Everybody loved each other and laughed and played.  A lake to swim in, campfires to sit by and food galore. A place and situation perfect for lifelong memories.

But I have no recollections of any of these details at this particular reunion.

All I can remember is that mama got one of her bad headaches.  Really, really bad.  Not knowing what to do, I ran outside to look for empathy for my sick mama.  Someone who would listen and understand how my frightened heart felt.

I found my older cousin.  He was 10 at the time and I adored him.  I was sure that he would have some words of comfort or go in to check on my mama or let another adult know about her pain.

“My mama has a bad headache,” I blurted out, my heart on my sleeve, my voice cracking.

I was not prepared for his response.

“Who cares?” he answered and went on with whatever it was he was doing.

What I didn’t know at five was that this would be the typical answer of most 10-year-old boys.

All I could hear was “I don’t give a crap that your mama is lying there in severe pain just waiting to vomit so she can feel better.  I don’t care how scared you feel.  It doesn’t matter.  Who cares?  No one!”

The pin of Shame was was hovering over my my beautiful balloon of innocence, just waiting to puncture it completely.  But in panic and in an effort to not allow the pin to penetrate the surface of my “perfect” world, I ran to tell my mama what he’d said.

Surely, she would be just as shocked and appalled as I was by his comment. Hurt.  Sad.

But when the words nearly flew from my mouth, they were met with another response that, again, I couldn’t have anticipated.

“Oh, honey.  No one cares if I have a headache!”

As if this was okay.  Common knowledge that only I was unaware of.

The pin had its way with my balloon and I was left in that little cabin with a dangling string and an ugly piece of misshapen rubber lying on the ground behind me.

Little did I know that this would be the string I would carry with me until this day, 50 years later.  That the deflated latex was the first knot and that so many more would follow.

That is the day that I learned three things:

1.  It is Shameful to care too much.  Silly.  Ridiculous.  Because….
2.  Nobody cares, which meant of course that I HAD to care. No matter if it was silly and ridiculous.  Someone just had to care for the hurting people and I guessed that there was no one that could do that except me because I DID care.  And…
3.  If no one cared, then why oh why on earth would I ever share MY hurts with anyone?

I had zero idea how this string would affect the rest of my life. That string dragging behind me, collecting knots, getting heavier as those knots accumulated.

This string of Shame has impacted my thoughts, my actions, my mistakes, my choices, my self-esteem.  It has accompanied me into extreme anxiety, the need for control of my circumstances, co-dependency, perfectionism and people-pleasing. For 50 long years…

These past 10 months have marked my journey out.  It has been excruciating and exhilarating.  Hard work and sweet freedom.

I’ve untied endless knots, thrown myself fully into the counseling of a wonderful woman whom I trust with all my heart.  I’ve learned to care for the little girl in me who got stuck in that thinking.  I’ve learned to care for the big girl that is me who walked so wounded along that winding path.

But the most impactful thing that put me on the path to healing was coming to the end of the me that I didn’t even know was so badly broken.  I gave Jesus all the pieces of my heart that Shame had had its way with.  I gave Him my pile of knots and asked Him to help me make sense of them.  I cried out for help and made myself vulnerable to Him and to others.  Shame would die in the exposure of it all.

I found that He cares.  That so many care.  That I am not alone on this journey and have found many others that want to start their own journey out of Shame.

I am letting Jesus take my less tangled and no longer dragging string and reattach it to a new balloon, filled with the breath of God Himself, full of hope and promise.  I’m watching that balloon rise toward the sky and bringing my heart and soul with it…