SA
How are you? Thank you for being here.
M
HOW AM I
I am good 🙂 I just did an ab workout and have been enjoying getting stronger and doing some light weight training – I think I thought exercising wasn’t cool but I am getting into it and getting stronger feels awesome!
SA
How’s your heart?
M
My heart is ok today, a little tender. I saw a picture of my dad holding a puppy today and burst into a full sob. I feel like I really miss my family and friends in Michigan today, they feel really far away.
SA
I’m sorry <3 I know that feeling acutely. Something I feel really drawn to about you, and why I imagine one of the (many) reasons we’re so close is that there’s this inherent depth to you with regards to family. You’ve had a complicated life in many senses, and you’ve experienced extreme lows, and I think no matter who you are, if you have gone to those depths, you’ve experienced some kind of abandonment. Does that make sense to you?
M
Yes absolutely. I feel like in the past year a lot of my inner work has been around how that surfaces in my relationship to my partner. How we both come to the table having been abandoned in familial structures, and in turn abandoned ourselves. This has really shown up in my private spaces and my public writing – what does it mean to reparent ourselves, to return to ourselves, and to not abandon ourselves even when it’s the most comfortable and safest feeling thing to do.
SA
Exactly. That’s something that really moves me about your mind, how you’re thinking about these things on such a level that also makes space to move through the sadness and to arrive at a place of wisdom and healing. What was the first time you realized you had to learn how to reparent yourself?
M
You know part of me wishes this moment happened earlier in my adult life, but I really have to give my current relationship credit. I so often found partners who would just sort of give in and parent me, or I was able to get away without many consequences without parenting myself – probably a mix of privilege, luck, being in the wrong places at the right time – alas! I found Jackie, my current partner – who shows up to the table demanding a really different energy in partnership. I won’t tell her story here but let’s say she uses words like “I need a partner who is strong and shows up and I can trust” and what that means to us is I have to build trust in myself with my actions, which requires me to reparent myself! WOOF! SO yah right about 2 years ago I really dug in.
SA
I mean so many people don’t ever make this kind of commitment to oneself, so really fucking applaud you babe. I think we’ve had similar timelines with the reparenting. For me it didn’t really start until I stopped talking to my mother just over two years ago. So for me, it’s a very specific parental grief that I’m reparenting, but I also know that I’ve known I had to do this for a long time. Long before I actually stopped talking to my mother I realized, for my sake, I had to take these certain steps to safeguard myself.
I’m proud of both Jackie and you for taking such a leap into intentionality. Most of my relationships (if not all, sadly) were so aesthetic to a certain degree that that kind of vulnerability wasn’t there. What’s been the hardest part of this journey for you?
M
I think the hardest part of the journey like you mentioned is accessing that grief. As a dancer I can really be such a performer sometimes, sort of performing my way through feelings. So part of the journey has had to be really FEELING the feelings, the ugly and scary ones. I think for me being in a relationship with my parents requires this interesting both/and space – of finding out how to be in the right relationship with them that isn’t codependent AND grieve what I didn’t get from them, or still don’t get from them. That’s still hard for me to hold – grieving someone you are IN relationship to.
SA
Yeah, wow. You touched on something that I’m now trying to figure out with my dad… like what happens when a parent sometimes just fails you? Or accidentally betrays you? It’s hard because I really, really understand what he was going through, how difficult it must have been with two young kids and a mentally ill, abusive partner who is constantly trying to harm the kids. He never intervened. Ok, once, when my mother (trigger warning) pulled a knife on us. But that was it. And now I look back, and really, with the aid of my therapist, I’ve begun to understand that he really did fail me. And that’s OK, I can say that. I love him, and he’s actually such a good person and friend to me, but as a dad he’s had his shortcomings.
How do you navigate these nuances in your own life?
M
Yes to everything you wrote, this story lives inside of my bones and feels very ancestral to me. Like it started so far before me which makes me think of how the tools aren’t there for our parents. Today I was meditating and it struck me that I am about to turn the same age my mom was when her dad (who she was very close to) died. And I was like … whoa… if my dad (who I am extremely close with) died this year (which hell who knows when we’re all gonna die!) that would be really fucking difficult AND it’s absurd how many tools and people and programs I have to walk through something like that. Tools neither of my parents had when their parents died at young ages. So I try to hold that fact as part of navigating the nuance – like YES these people have their shortcomings or really didn’t show up in certain ways, AND they just simply didn’t have the tools.
SA
How do you navigate ideas of their death when they’re far away? Is this something you’ve been thinking about during this pandemic? I have always thought about my dad dying, like a recurring nightmare. And even this week I was at my altar and I was just accepting that I know he will die like one day, lol. And I just don’t know what to do with that. It’s fucking painful.
M
Of course you have that dream because I’ve had that dream since I was a very small child. It’s the same every time I am in a cherry market – no idea what a cherry market is. It’s like a farmers market filled with cherries. Anyways my dad always gets stabbed or shot and I can’t save him. I actually had a similar dream about my ex husband John recently where I tried to jump in front of someone who was about to stab him and woke up yelling and clutching my side.
There’s something about both these people, maybe watery scorpio men who love me haha?! Who I just cannot imagine surviving their deaths AND have gotten to a similar place, especially with my parents. I mean at almost 33 I do feel really lucky I have had them this long when a lot of my closest people have lost one or both parents. I think especially for me as an American and white person without a connection to a lineage or culture we just don’t really have tools for death, rituals for death, celebrations for death so it just feels …. Fucking scary. Jackie loves to remind me “we’re all gonna die” and feels so unafraid of death – probably because she has an intimate relationship with it affecting her – but yah! WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE
SA
Some really dramatic Spanish guitar just played as you wrote that. I felt like I was in an Almodovar film or some shit.
M
WAIT CAN U HEAR MY HEADPHONES. I’m confused. I was …… literally just listening to spanish guitar sounding brainspotting music. AND THE DREAM IS IN MEXICO, in the cherry market. Which I didn’t mention cuz felt weird and i’ve never been there. ANYWAYS OK WTF
SA
We’re always in sync! I love it. We are all going to die. It feels easy to say that but then to think it is just another process, but you’re right, there’s no death rituals I was taught (really, outisde of the one prayer you say as a Muslim when someone dies) and I feel angry about that. I think so much of my medicine work is about learning how to die and confronting (and also ayahuasca is called the vine of death) so whenever I sit with these medicines I feel immensely grateful that they’ve created portals for us to understand how to shift… but as people who are reparenting, what have you gravitated toward (rituals, books, podcasts) that have helped you on this journey?
M
I mean my biggest tool that I always try to sort of adhere to the anonymous traditions of would be 12 step programs <3 The tools and community there has taught me almost everything I know about reparenting, being in relationship to spirit, and trusting myself and others.
My altar and journaling practice is really important to me, I journal every morning and pray. I pull my cards and light my candles. As you know, I’m always talking to God. The god of my understanding or the god of my not understanding you could say. Spirit of the universe, great divine, whatever it wants to be called today. Clouds, I really do that because otherwise my brain is ME TALKING TO ME and that’s not really a space I need to be in because me talking to me can start to get mean.
And I love my comedy podcasts lol. Which isn’t reparenting specific it just keeps me joyful and laugh at myself and not take myself so seriously my favorites are Las Culturistas and Seek Treatment
SA
What would you say to someone who never found a reflection of this before, but is starting to maybe come to terms with their early life, and maybe seeing how perhaps their parents didn’t fully look after them? What would you say to that person—who potentially feels scared to take certain leaps of even just accepting this new reality?
M
Thank you for asking me these questions – first to anyone reading : it’s scary for me to answer them! So the first thing I would say is – do the scary thing, you will be held and you are not alone. Don’t wait to not feel scared to begin your journey.
Also consider looking for a book on being an adult child of an alcoholic – even if your parents don’t have a problem with alcohol specifically, it’s sort of like “adult child of a chaos parent” – I have found a lot of the language in that healing corner of the world to help me understand some of my own behaviors and what’s been passed on to me through many generations
And find writers and artists who continue to reflect this back to you in THEIR ART! This is why we need art. Read Fariha’s novel 😉 Find other books and writers and painters and quilters who are telling stories with their art – that is the other place I heal it can’t all be therapy and rituals and programs it also has to be beautiful and pleasurable and be in what I like to look at and consume
SA
I love this. Thank you for the shoutout my love.
Last question, how do you care for yourself?
M
Caring for myself has really changed what it looks like in the past few years. I have no problem caring for myself in the ways of like : I take a lot of baths, love to nap, love to masturbate, love to put on a face mask, love to buy my favorite candles, love to dress hot, love to stretch, love to walk outside
Lately though (and now circling back) Caring for myself has meant esteemable acts and building trust in myself, like the reparenting kind of caring. Which for me has been a lot around money – paying off debt, getting solvent with the IRS, having money goals, putting aside under-earning and accepting abundance. Oh and trying to cook which I’m not good at lol
Marlee Grace is a dancer and writer whose work focuses on the self, devotion, ritual, creativity, and art making. Her practice is rooted in improvisation as a compositional form that takes shape in movement videos, books, quilting, online courses, and hosting artists. Grace’s Instagram dance project Personal Practice has been featured in the New York Times, Dance Magazine, Vanity Fair, The Huffington Post, and more.