Journey Girl: Steps in Secrets and Sanctuary

By Susan Heffron Hajec

Journey Girl is a story about motherhood and a memoir about secrets-- more specifically, it is about breaking them. First-time author Hajec unfolds her journey of becoming a courageous family secret breaker and defeats her fears that she will pay a price to do so.
Her quest is to disintegrate the generational silences that surround the death of her mother shortly after her own birth and explore the mysterious childhood memories that still linger as she reaches adulthood.
As the author unwinds a tightly-held but harmful family silence, she also introduces to the reader simple, ordinary, and helpful types of silences they can use in their everyday life to bring them peace and balance, not harm and mystery.These are the Islands of Silence that begin each chapter before continuing her own story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781982252939

Susan Heffron Hajec

Susan Heffron Hajec finds her happy place in everything that has to do with words. With an early start of faithful letter writing to her grandparents, she began to play with themes and stories on paper and loved all English, writing, and theater scripts throughout her school years. After her college graduation, marriage, and motherhood, her personal life followed a natural path to quiet ways of life, contemplative prayer, holistic health, soul writing, and the arts. She then served these interests well in her professional and business life which included: being regional newspaper correspondent, becoming founding editor of a religious newspaper; being an international video spirituality producer; owning A Way with Words consulting and workshop production company. She accomplished extended training and practice with the Masters in SoulCollage®, Labyrinth facilitation, Centering Prayer, Lectio Divina, and Reiki healing arts. With a newfound passion for watercolor art, she states her purpose in life as being faithful to the small things and giving glory to God for the largeness of the gift of life. And most of this is centered in her loving life with family and friends.

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Copyright © 2020 Susan Heffron Hajec.

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except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use

of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical

problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The

intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you

in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any

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the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

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Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-9822-5292-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-5293-9 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date:   09/14/2020

Dedication

I dedicate this book to

Doris, Alma, Marion and Frances:

Mother, Grandmother, and Moms

CONTENTS

Dedication

Foreword

Introduction

Abandonment

1943 to 1955

ONE

Island of Silence: The Breath

Her Name is Susan

Reflection: Wound

TWO

Island of Silence: Self-Compassion and Loving Kindness

Speaking the Truth

Reflection: Tongue-Tied Silence

THREE

Island of Silence: Centering Prayer

Finding the Center of Truth

Reflection: I Begin

FOUR

Island of Silence: Stargazing and the Cosmic Silence

Grandpa and Grandmas Make Three

Reflection: Grounding and Flow

FIVE

Island of Silence: A Walk on the Labyrinth

Mommy, Where Are You?

Reflection: Stay the Course

Hushed Silence

1956 to 1964

SIX

Island of Silence: Lectio Divina

Me and My Shadow of Silence

Reflection: It Was Hard to Listen

SEVEN

Island of Silence: Island Layover

How Did I Speak?

Reflection: The Blessing of Eternity Passed On

EIGHT

Island of Silence: Living in the Questions

Next to Godliness

Reflection: A Puzzle of Seeds and Secrets

NINE

Island of Silence: Imaginary Friends in Living Color

The Unspeakable Deed

Reflection: Wrestling with a Friend

The Essential: Wound Festers

1965 to 1976

TEN

Island of Silence: Dear One, I Am Here for You

What is Packed in the Suitcase?

Reflection: Turning the Page

ELEVEN

Island of Silence: Remembering Your Birthright

The Happiest Father I’ve Seen

Reflection: Are You My Mother?

TWELVE

Island of Silence: Beads and Blessings

Mantle of Mary

Reflection: Unfinished Business

THIRTEEN

Island of Silence: Beneath the Layers

Motherhood and Neighborhood

Reflection: At the Bottom of the Deep, Dark Hole

Connection and Peace

1977 to Present

FOURTEEN

Island of Silence: Make Something Broken More Beautiful

Another Goodbye

Reflection: Canadian Pines

FIFTEEN

Island of Silence: Ho’oponopono

The Secret Power of Secrets

Reflection: Connections

SIXTEEN

Island of Silence: Pilgrimage

Pink Rose

Reflection: Here I Am, Lord

SEVENTEEN

Island of Silence: The Silent Treatment

Acknowledgments

Inspirations

About the Author

Foreword

As humans, we are natural storytellers. By sharing our stories, we connect, inspire, grow, and learn. In Journey Girl: Steps in Secrets and Sanctuary, Susan Heffron Hajec speaks about her contrasting experience between the heavy silence of secrecy and the healing gift of contemplative stillness. Revealing how she found the courage to break the silence surrounding her mother—a hush that had a strong hold on her whole family—the author paves the way for others to bravely do their own inner work.

Transforming unhealthy family patterns and integrating ancestral history is possible and can start with you. From here, healing flows forward and backward in time. Susan offers her own examples to demonstrate the restorative power of stillness. Each chapter contains an Island of Silence where she encourages your participation through presenting different spiritual tools and simple ways of accessing the quiet. When we allow ourselves to slow down enough, we are able to clearly hear our souls and God to find our unique path in life.

It is my wish that reading about one brave woman's quest who triumphed over the challenges of secrecy will excite you to embark on your own inner journey, to start changing what wants to be changed, and to live the life you came here to live. Invite Journey Girl to become your trusted companion when you launch into the adventure of your inner travels and celebrate meeting the real magnificent you.

Dr. Angelika Schultz

Medical doctor, craniosacral therapist,

and founder of CranioSacral ~ Birth Integration ~ Healing Center.

Author and artist of Born in Love and Joy - A

sacred birth story told by a baby.

Introduction

Be still and know that I am God.

Psalm 46:10

Dear Reader, Friend, and Secret-Holder,

There is no perfect way to be a family secret-breaker—but I wanted one. Maybe that’s why I waited so long—too long—before I became that secret-breaker. I thought surely there must be a perfect way. A way to keep being loved, a way to not appear to be too nosy, a way to demand that information that was rightfully mine would stop being withheld from me.

There just must be a perfect way to ask the questions I wanted to ask my father about the death of my mother and who she was. Just let me find the right place, the right time, the right words—then I could uncover the mystery and primal secret that followed me in life, surrounding and suffocating me, and that became this unnamed essential wound in my body and spirit.

And when I found the perfect way to be the secret breaker, the family secret would no longer have a life. I would be able to speak the truth and bring that truth and my birth mother into my life and have her live among us, with the only parents I knew, as my siblings and I grew into adulthood.

Only that didn’t happen. Instead, questions went unasked and unanswered throughout my childhood. And at age twenty-six, a little more than four years into my married life with a one-year-old and three-year-old daughter, I found myself sitting across from my husband in our living room trying to describe what I could only say felt like a deep, dark, black hole buried solidly in the pit of my stomach. I felt an impinging sense of helpless depression. This was now a crisis of proportion that could not be denied. It needed the expert guidance of spiritual and psychological help, if I were going to save myself from disconnecting from all that was giving me happiness.

I didn’t know then, but I do know now that the way I was feeling was caused by an essential wound that went back to my birth and my birth mother’s death. In the book Write From the Heart, author Hal Zina Bennett illustrates through story an essential wound that a student in his writing class experienced. The student’s wound of having witnessed the National Guard shooting in 1970 of four students on campus, who were in a group peacefully protesting the Viet Nam War, was still affecting him later in life.

So many years later, the student still hadn’t gotten over it because he had never spoken to anyone about it. An essential wound stems from a trauma we experienced way back in the past and have been unable to speak about it. Bennett saw that his writing student was still experiencing trauma from the event that had happened long ago and he called this phenomenon an essential wound.

In barely being able to speak out loud the words he had written, it was clear to the instructor and the class that the unspoken wound still resided within the student and continued to affect him in this classroom in the present time. The writing instructor remained convinced that the essential wounds we all carry are powerful within us. He also concluded that most people don’t get through life without an essential wound.

What is there to be said for recovering from an essential wound after we gained the courage to talk about it? What are the protections offered for these wounds, which could still burst open and cause us so much pain? How do we decide to whom we speak about certain wounds? This requires a trust that could be so betrayed and produce ongoing regrets in the future life of the wounded. Bennett explored the answer to these questions among his students.

I had to find the willing explorer within and answer these questions for myself. I needed to touch this essential wound of secrecy and all that had grown around it over time. I needed to examine where and how it hurt; to surmise remedies to stop the ache and painful interruption in my life. I needed to create another way to bring truth forward and the way I found was one that balanced outer action with inner strength.

I began to find ways of trusting both the peace and the turmoil within myself by experiencing many different ways of inner silence. Contemplative practices in spirituality, health, art, and writing as a way of life and problem solving began to attract me. There, in my inner quiet sanctuary, instead of being silenced by fears of speaking, I found strength and comfort in solitary silence. I found an island within me that required no traveling plans.

I share some of these practices as I tell my story of re-storying my essential wound of a lost mother: I begin each chapter with you on a simple Island of Silence where you can experience a brief pause, a light-hearted rest, or the seed of a message that finds its way to you, before I travel into the places and times where being silenced was mysterious, painful, and confusing for me. I believe this brief soul-feeding pause that comes at the beginning of each chapter is just the right place for us to start each voyage.

The reflections that follow each chapter’s story attempt to get beyond the thinking mind, which is an obstacle to truth. I wish to arrive at the doorway of the heart to acknowledge the unspoken and left-behind trauma. This seems necessary in order to heal and transform the wound, with compassion, which refuses to be ignored.

Each reflection is like a taste of manna, falling from heaven, from our time spent together on the Island of Silence. It is the place where we can break the imposed barriers of words. We can feel the heart energy that calls for what is needed… more patience, more quiet, more acceptance, some letting go, or more definition. The reflections open the door beyond the words with a path that feels inviting and trustworthy to follow.

Many people who begin studying their genealogy find stories, all too quickly, of misplaced people on their family tree; a surprising crazy uncle who was never talked about, perhaps even a rich heiress that disappeared from the family. All of this new news could probably be traced back in time to an essential wound that would not be talked about in generations going forward.

Bennett writes in his book, It is our perceptions of the world, the inner vision of what we think life is about that is challenged in every essential wound. He says we must start trying out our perceptions, see what the wound mirrors in us, and seek out what we need to learn from the wound. Most importantly, we are to discover what we need to learn to embrace to take ourselves out of the role of victim. In other words, there is actually a blessing in these essential wounds. We need to have courage and ask for the grace to find it.

I had an essential wound at the beginning of my life also. But I didn’t have a name for what it was and I didn’t know what it was. I just knew it was there—for as long as I can remember. It was difficult, for me, to admit aloud that an essential wound of my lost and unknown mother, shrouded in mystery, lived within me. But it wasn’t hard to recognize. William Faulkner wrote: The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

This memoir is the journey I began and lived in order to connect my past truthfully and freely and find the grace and gift within my wound. Jan Richardson, contemplative artist and poetic creator of blessings writes in her book, Circles of Grace, that blessings do not work in a typically linear way. They twist and turn, make their own paths, and spiral back to find us when we most need to receive them. She says that blessings work within time but are not bound by it… healing a fractured past, provoking us to act for a more whole future.

The Islands of Silence I have found throughout my lifetime are catalysts for the grace of healing a fractured past, with all of its twists, turns, stalls, and detours. They also did not arrive in my life in a linear line that coincided with my age or when a current turmoil or secret-keeping ran rampant. But they did come, and like ripples on the water that form from the pebble dropped into the pond, they kept me afloat.

We often hear you cannot change the past. I am sure that is true, but I also say you can create building blocks from your past that open you to freedom in your present life—and a compassionate acknowledgment, forgiveness, and transformation of it. My Islands of Silence are where I found those building blocks. It is my desire to assist you in finding the beauty and strength of silence in your life.

Everyone has secrets. Some are safe and proper to keep silent. But if, in the reading of my story, you feel touches of essential wounded-ness that still cast shadows in your present day life, I wish to assure you that this past trauma can be touched safely with the trusted guidance of your choosing and with a purposeful increase in time spent on your favorite Islands of Silence.

I hope that the story of my own essential wound-tending and transformation open a way that begins any needed healing on your own part, for I truly believe:

We know that all things work together

for good to them that love God.

Romans 8:28

Blessings Be,

Susan

"Birth is a beginning and death a destination…

Until looking backwards or ahead, we see that

victory lies not at some high place along the way,

but in having made the journey stage by stage."

Rabbi Alvin Fine

Section One

Abandonment

1943 to 1955

ONE

Island of Silence

The Breath

The Easiest of All Practices of Consciousness

Wherever God lays his glance, life starts clapping.

Hafiz

Your breath is an Island of Silence that is with you at all times. You cannot live without it. A baby’s first important work to do when he/she arrives and separates from the maternal umbilical cord is to… breathe.

There are many meditative practices that focus on different ways to engage with your breath for stress relief and relaxation, but taken down to its simplest level, one may just choose to watch one’s breath.

If you don’t want to go to a gym, if you are not ready to engage in Pilates or Yoga (where the attention is put on the breath), you are perfectly free to sit comfortably alone, turn your thoughts inward, seek the quiet, and simply breathe… in… out… in… out.

You will see this Island of Silence will come to you and you will appreciate the restoration it gives. Beautiful scenery will not take your breath away. It will give you more breath.

If you don’t wish to sit, you may walk in one of your favorite landscapes, amidst flowers and trees, birds, and animals, still focusing on your breath coming in… going out… coming in… going out.

You may be stuck in traffic with things to do, but still… you are stuck in traffic and you can breathe in… breathe out… breathe in… breathe out.

Return to this Island of Silence many times during the day. It is perfectly fine to take short stay vacations of breathing tranquility. It is low cost, efficient, and brings rewards of renewed energy and purpose. Turn your attention to your breath daily and give this a try.

Her Name is Susan

The spirit of God has made me, and the

breath of the Almighty gives me life.

Job 33:4

Maybe it’s those oysters we ate for New Year’s Eve, the frantic husband offered as he steered his way through sloppy, wet Wisconsin city streets on their emergency run to the hospital.

They had welcomed in the new year of 1943 the previous evening with a few friends in their modest, white framed corner lot home of the working class; she a registered nurse, he a city patrolman of the Eau Claire police force. They didn’t make their celebration a late affair as she wasn’t feeling well and retired early to bed. It was just a simple gathering with a few of their closest friends. There was joy in the air and laughter resounded between them to the jokes and playful taunting from his fellow officer friend.

You thought you’d have none! he jested, popping some famed Wisconsin cheese into his mouth. "Now, you’ll probably have one dozen."

Oh no, the young father, who would turn twenty-eight in just four short days, responded. Extending his hands around the festive punch bowl, he pronounced in gypsy imitation, I see three wee darlings in my future and I think that’s about right.

She felt a wave of nausea sweep through her torso but raised her cup of tea high with the others as they toasted to all good things in the coming year, gave thanks for their adopted son, a part of their family for almost one year, and hailed the expected birth of their firstborn child anticipated to arrive in a few short weeks. She silently turned her thoughts to the seed of their love now growing in her womb. Then her heart shifted to her toddler son safely snuggled in bed in his own home instead of the orphanage from where she chose him. This is our baby, she proclaimed to her husband as she took him from the nun’s arms into her own. For no one can love him like I can.

She went on to bed quietly after the party guests left while he refrigerated the left-over lutefisk sealing in its pungent aroma. He snatched one last home-baked sandbakkel Nordic Christmas cookie and covered the garnished and sweetened holiday bread for morning breakfast. Quietly and quickly, he changed into his pajamas and checked on his young son. After turning him on his side, the young father tiptoed out of the room, leaving the door slightly ajar.

Then