Has anyone heard the Garth Brooks song titled “Mom?” I’ve watched him perform it and my tears flowed. It was about a baby getting ready to leave God and come to earth and being afraid because earth could be a scary place. And God said, “it’s time to go meet your mom.” I couldn’t help but put myself in the place of that baby. I almost passed twice before I was a week old. First, I arrived almost two weeks late. You see, I really didn’t want to come. I knew what I signed up for and I changed my mind about wanting to learn the lessons life had in store for me this trip. The doctor who delivered me should have brought me in by Caesarian section. But it was 1947 and well, doctors weren’t as advanced as they are today. He used forceps to pull me kicking and screaming into this earth school reality. By doing so, he injured my brain, resulting in cerebral palsy. And then, I wouldn’t nurse. So, for days, I had no nourishment, and the doctors gave me little chance of survival. But my paternal grandmother was a nurse, and she took over, insisting that the doctors feed me intravenously until I could suckle. My grandmother was always a reckoning force; if she decided I was going to live, it was a done deal. Score Grandma Beulah – 1, baby Cheryl -0. 

Even in the womb, I could feel my mother’s ambivalence about having a child. Her fear became my fear. My mother had lost her mother to tuberculosis when she was just 4 years old. And her mother had been in a T.B. sanitarium for a year prior to passing. No one told the four-year-old Amelia what was happening. One day she had a mother and the next day, she had a father who drank too much and a German grandmother who was annoyed at having to take care of a child. Her grandmother passed when she was 10 years old and she bounced from family to family, never really belonging anywhere.  So here she is at age 29, pregnant and unmarried.  She had little love as a child, and she knew that my dad wasn’t ready to marry. He was all of 22 years of age and fresh out of the Marine Corps and WWII. But she didn’t know that when Beulah found out there was a grandchild on the way; she would get involved. My grandmother did not give my dad a choice; you will marry the woman carrying your child. Now what Beulah thought of my mom; well use your imagination! But Jackson and Amelia Marie were married in March and baby Cheryl arrived mid-July.

Why am I telling you this story? Well, it’s the beginning of Chills, Thrills and Daffodils. First of all, I believe we choose our parents; we choose the lessons we are here to conquer.  I’ve always wondered when we forget that we are all from the same source. When do we not remember the unconditional love from whence, we came? Is it at conception? Is it at birth? Is it when the soul joins the physical body? My best guess is that it’s when the soul joins the physical. How else could I explain pulling in my mother’s fear while in the womb? Or is it leftover in our DNA from previous incarnations? So many questions! I don’t know that there is a wrong or right answer. We are all free to choose our own truths. So, it seems that baby CherCher who arrived in a cloud of confusion had forgotten that she was submersed in a blanket of love. She had opted to experience cerebral palsy because she wanted to experience the density, the heaviness of this particular physical structure. But its weightiness proved to be quite a difficult adjustment. She still knew somewhere within the higher self, in a higher vibration, that she was connected to source, but it would take her many years to allow this truth to resonate with her heart. And she wasn’t ever going to take the organized religion route through life; so, she was on her own to remember source.

Why did she forget the unconditional love engulfing her? Why do most of us forget that until much later in life if at all? Hmmm, any theories?