~excerpted from the Introduction of I Am Her Daughter, copyright Licia Berry 2014, all rights reserved

I Am Her Daughter is an experiential guide to mend the relationship between us and our selves, through the miracle of self love.

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“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.” –Mary Oliver

The little girl stumbles through the dark woods.  Her hair, tangled and her face and clothes, dirty.  She sometimes calls out, but hearing no one, continues her searching.  She sometimes stops to cry, but not for too long; she cannot afford such a luxury as her survival depends on her successful quest.  She is hungry, for answers and for love.  She wants to know what is so awful about her that her mother is absent.  Why her mother does not want her.

She seeks high and low, under branches and in caves, peering into the dark for the face of her mother.  “Where is she?” she wonders.  She examines the faces of the animals, scrutinizes the odd chiseled features in the bark of trees, and studies the bloom of the flowers.  Her quest takes her to crushing boulders and foots of mountains, to cliffs and deserts and waterfalls.  She gazes into the sky and surveys the clouds.  Is she there?  Where is my mother?

She is a wild child, a daughter of the woods and trees and the dirt.  Nature has no agenda.  No manipulations, no games, no back-stabbings, no hurting her heart.  She feels safe with the unconditional acceptance of the forest, although she does wish for the warmth of a human hug or the light of a mother’s smile upon her.  She feels a sense of belonging here, and Nature guides her wisely.  But she still feels the ache of being an unmothered daughter.

~~~~~~~~~~~

I knew I was worthy when I was little.  I felt the Lion Heart inside my chest and saw the world through the eyes of God.  I remember my childhood after age 2 very vividly, and recall the wisdom and the grace that seemed to reside within me, but which the adults around me could apparently not see.  I remember being shocked when I was treated as an annoyance or, at worst, a piece of property.  I understood innately that I came from a “parent” somewhere else, and recall looking up at the sky at age 4 and asking if I could please come home.

No such luck.  My life would be a twisting, turning journey through a challenging landscape of sexual and other abuses in my family of origin and a culture of shaming of women in the bible belt of the southern US.  As I write at age 48, I see that my path has prepared me perfectly to be forced to learn self love, self valuing, self parenting.  It has pushed me to find and define my own relationship with my spirituality and forged a strong bond within me to the forces of good in the universe. And it has lit a fire in me be a voice in the wilderness…to stand on the mountain tops and pulse a steady drum beat that speaks the truth…beyond a shadow of a doubt we are worthy of love.

And to find my Mother.

To be continued….see next excerpt, The Cherished Daughter here

~excerpted from the Introduction of I Am Her Daughter, copyright Licia Berry 2014, all rights reserved

 PRE-ORDER your digital copy here! of I Am Her Daughter

delivery August 2015

Mother Bear by Susan Seddon Boulet

Delivery date August, 2015   PRE-ORDER your digital copy here!  and Thank You for supporting writers!