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As my husband Robert and I got into the car for a mini vacation, I could feel the pressure of life releasing its grip as we began our late night drive to Tucson. This year has been tough. I recently found out that I have a fibroid in my uterus, which is the reason I’ve had two miscarriages in the last three years. Having none of the normal symptoms (heavy bleeding and cramping), I had no idea a fibroid the size of a soft ball was in my right hip. The doctors I had placed my trust in didn’t feel the need to explore the idea of this being a possibility, even though most woman in their forties deal with fibroids. If they would have cared enough to do their job, they would have seen it with a simple ultrasound. A couple of annoying tests later, before this trip and after, I finally found out the truth. This particular fibroid grows INTO the uterine cavity due to the increasing amount of estrogen your body creates while pregnant. It only enlarges while I AM pregnant, pushing the fetus out of the area before it can truly develop. Everything feels so dramatic and overwhelming with in these circumstances, like there is no end to this experience.
With the city lights behind us, a magnificent show began overhead, the Orionid meteor shower. The warm air, dry dirt smells and shooting stars all around, welcomed me. My being breathed in the desert. We were so excited that Robert was invited to paint at Neoglyphix Native Indigenous Aerosol Art Exhibition at the Arizona Art Museum. The second we pulled in, we were welcomed with open arms. Twenty indigenous artist were invited to paint an original piece for the show. It was an honor to join this wonderful community of artists. The day started with a blessing from a lovely man from the Tohono O'Odham Nation, his voice was powerful with his ancestor’s wisdom running through his blood. There was a stillness across the grounds as we all stood in a peaceful silence together. His wisdom carried. Creativity flowed through everyone as the sun shined above. It was a unique experience to see so many woman in this “brotherhood”. Rarely do I ever see women owning their artistic life force in this masculine arena. The people that created this event had a deeper intention for its existence. In most of the Reservations around Arizona and in the U.S., more and more teens are committing suicide. In the last year alone, fourteen people have committed suicide, and that number is only from one Reservation. Not only do these children feel that there is nothing to live for, but their voices aren’t being heard! The people curating this event want to be a positive voice for their community. They wish to bridge the gap for these middle children lost between two worlds. I felt a deep connection with everyone involved during the two days I was in Arizona. The sounds of spoken word and aerosol flying through the air, music and fashion with truth and passion reflecting everyones beauty. My husband and I left feeling thankful to be a part of something with such a strong message. I was able to live in the moment with the people around me and be thankful for life itself, rather than stress about life’s challenges. To be present in the now was my lesson for 2015. Now I have to make a choice: 1) I must suffer physically and emotionally to deserve something wonderful, and go through pain to receive it. 2) Know that in this day and age there are many alternatives to being a parent if you open your heart to the possibility of what family is. I didn't want to feel lost, frustrated, and heartbroken. I hate feeling like I have no control of my body and its out come. Witnessing the concentration of the artists that weekend and watching them stay so focused for hours, gave me permission to stay in the now. I am humbled knowing each challenge is different for us all. It is so important that I am aware of the world around me, especially the people right in my backyard. I am thankful for all the roads my life takes me on and how blessed I am to be around greatness in any form. I am thankful my husband and I have the knowledge to choose what kind of parents we can be, be it surrogate or adoption, to create our family! Great moments in life give me the courage to never press pause on my pursuit of being aware and awake! 2015 was the year of surrendering to the now and letting go of the idea of suffering for the possibility of happiness. I was able to break the mold and choose both roads at the same time, a conventional unconventional approach to life. Article on the event: http://ictmn.com/4z5i via @IndianCountry I felt so loved as a child by my mother. I also felt I was allowed to be an individual, which gave me the ability to find the strength to live without her at a very young age. Every child should grow up with parents that support, love, and guide them. My life’s lesson was to learn how to succeed without that guidance. My success came from what my parents weren’t able to give me. In the beginning I was angry, hurt, and confused with why she was unable to raise me. After age 12, I would never feel her touch, or see her smile of joy again. And year after year of this separation is where my spiritual work began. I had to work through the feelings of a child that had been abandoned. And re-write my story over and over, until I was able to live with that reality. I chose to learn how to be happy, and healthy. That decision gave me the tools I needed to heal my past. I had to learn that I could trust outside of my family dynamics. I let go of the feeling that my past was a dirty secret I had to keep hidden inside. I learned how to stop feeling like I had to protect my parents. Years of feeling shut down from protecting them from the choices they made. I wasn’t really living my truth, nor could I even see what my truth was! I no longer wanted to feel afraid of letting them go, to live without the pain that surrounded them in my heart. When I decided to forgive them, to see them for who they really were (two people who did not want to be parents), that is when I was able to live in my truth! And let go of the pain and hurt of what they could, or should have been. Instead, I learned how to grow with what I had, and become the kind of woman I wanted to be.
Something beautiful happened. By practicing being happy, I was able to let go of wanting to fight what I can not control. My life was more about how I could let things go and enjoy what I have for the NOW. And That is when my peace of mind and happiness became more of my reality than anything else! I chose Me, and it was enough, and I am proud. First Post: June 15, 2015  The funny thing about the past is, that you never know when its going to kick you on your ass. When you are a child that as been abused either mentally, physically or sexually, triggers and reminders of that abuse can appear in the most subtle ways – a touch, thought or truth you might not have known. In my case it always comes from Truth. I was too young to know about how sick my mother really was, and now my truth is that everyone knew and didn’t do anything to protect me. This is the sad part of my truth I have to let go, to fully free myself from what I had no control over at the time. I know there were kind people that in the past helped as much as they could, but I should not have been the only one dealing with my mother by myself. Maybe, because it was the 70’s and people just minded their own business or they were to afraid to tell themselves how sick she really was. But no one talked to me about it or tried to get me out of the situation. The real truth of the matter, when she decided to get rid of me and concocted a story that I was out of control or I need to be put away, my family let her do whatever she wanted… And for years I thought I was the only one who knew how sick she was and I started to believe I was the one with the problem…
No matter how ugly it might sound, this is where my healing comes in. I can’t control their choice's. I can’t hold on to the why’s of my past. If I do, I will never let go of what happened. If I want to be a healthy, loving and compassionate person, I have to let it go. I also have to let go of wondering what the fuck was going on with these adults for them to allow a mentally ill person to raise a child!!!! Now as an adult I get to choice the people I surround myself with. My life is a lot healthier! Our human Self wants to hold on to the pain with every fiber of our body. YOU DID THIS TO ME!!! Rightfully so, they did… But if we want to know what it means to live our lives without our poor family judgments, you have to grow through the pain and see the freedom. When you truly let go, they can never hurt you the same way again. It will sting when it comes up, but it will get a little easier each time and the pain will not last as long. When my past would come up in my 20’s, I would be devastated for days, maybe a week. The emotional walls inside myself grew even stronger. They protected me, but they also prevented me from ever getting very close to anyone. Now in the Present, when some piece of information about my mother comes to me about living with her at such a young age and her debilitating illness, it hurts as if the wound is fresh and starting to open up all over again. The day this happens, and the following, I get very quiet in order to allow the emotional connection to my past leave my body. I deal with how it is making me feel at that moment. I ask what did it bring up? This might have been an area that was still haunting me and then I am able to let it go… The older I get, the more work I have to do. I have been able to set my self free and keep learning what kind of spiritual life I want to live, not be ruled by the past I can’t control. It is there to remind me there will always be work to do and there might be parts of your past that will come up later in life. I hate when they do, but I understand why. I have to forgive them to fully live in the NOW… BE MAGNIFICENT!!!!!!!! I made a contract with the TV, before I knew what a contract is. I recently I meet a woman who told me after she stopped watching television for three years she was able to fully connect on a higher level to her vibration and channel into her deeper self. By doing so, she was able to connect to a deeper part of herself. She knew it was always there, but was never able to tap into it because of the frequency of the TV was keeping her always on.
I’m a product of TV. I come from a mother that used it as a way of raising me. I was consumed by hours and hours of it. Later, I decided to keep that contract alive -unconsciously - which is where I find myself now. I need to understand why I am allowing this white noise to cripple my own spiritual growth. By allowing myself to practice this, it keeps me in a place in which I am unable to move to the next level. I have to ask myself how is this helping me to reach my Magnificence? How am I reaching my higher frequency within myself? Am I truly able to grow deeper within myself? The real question is how I have allowed TV to run my creative self, blocking my spiritual connection to source and God-like energy. I'm here trying to connect to my own story and find out what does my real story look like. How am I a storyteller? A guide? A mover and a created being? How can I use myself as an example of what it feels like to go further within your own self if i am wasting time watching Television?! Now, I do love being in the world of fantasy. I love to be able to go away to that far place that does not exist. But by allowing it to consume me as an adult on a daily basis is not reasonable. I need to practice what it really means to be reasonable within my time and not practice avoiding my own self. I need to spend time with a deeper part of myself and get to know ME better. Creating a bond, a trust and a love that knows I am listening. It’s never to late to rewrite any contract you make with yourself. You make up your own rules and its up to you to rewrite your existence however it best suits you. So here I am out loud, changing my own history within myself and realizing how deep I really want to get within myself. I choose DEEP!!! Nona- I decided to start each chapter of my book with a letter to my mother. Until now, I was never able to share my side of the story. Some are very lovely letters and others, are not…
Dear Mom, I was living out some sort of Medieval play of “the kid’s crazy and we are doing the best we can” when you decided to put me in a mental institution. What the fuck! You put your only child in a mental hospital because you decided to not be a parent You know what happened to me? During those months after my 13th birthday, I learned how to create my “own” secret place, where I could shut out the whole world, and that’s exactly what I did. I went somewhere so deep inside I almost wasn’t able to come back out. There’s a part of me - I don’t even know any more because of this time in my life - I grew close to loneliness, sorrow and not knowing if there was any hope. Because you isolated us from the rest of the world, I didn’t even know I could’ve asked the family for help. I just kept all my fear of what was happening inside of me, to the point of where it festered into shame. That’s what I had to do to keep my head straight. No time to cry - I had to stay still and wait for the next big punch! It’s hard to talk about this time of my life. I have so much memory of pain and there was no light at the end of my tunnel. I had no idea what my outcome was going to look like. There have been two times in my life when you pushed me so far that I was ready to give up on myself, this was the first one…  I find myself sitting with guilt while I am in the process of telling my truth.This kind of guilt I am feeling is so guarded and hidden internally, at times it’s hard to even know it is guilt. And I have to ask myself, how is this truly serving my life? Over the years of doing the work of letting go of my past with my parents, I have forgiven them for the choices they have made of not being responsible for raising me. They also showed me at a very young age what it looks like to give up on your hopes and dreams. Sharing my story and honoring my process has made it hard for me to ignore the truth, which is if I have fully forgiven them and have let it go, then why am I afraid to shine in my own light? Are we not supposed to surpass our parent’s journey in our own glorious way?
Yes, my growth is different than being the first one to go to college or become a doctor. My journey is to be a storyteller and my story is my life. One way or another I have been protecting my mother & father from their own journey of truth. If I have forgiven them, then why am I still protecting them from what they should have been responsible for? I have to remind myself that I am made of love, hope, compassion and forgiveness. There is fire in my belly and I am a truth seeker! I might have to scream it from the mountain top or write it on my bathroom mirror for those moments I forget… First Posted: August 26, 2014  Who fucking cares if they come from two different backgrounds? Or, what I should say is, “why do you care so much!?”
Maybe they didn’t get the memo that this has been going on for awhile now. Help me help you. Times HAVE changed and let’s decide together to step into the future. When I would read anything about my mother they would always refer to my father as “Roland Harrison who WAS black”! Like he isn’t any more??? I use to think that was so funny and so sad. Why would that be OK? Why do you feel like it’s important to state the fact of his color? It’s like you want people to judge. So when I saw US online magazine “What do you think about Kim Kardashian having a bi-racial baby?”, that’s just another way of saying Kanye West WAS and IS black!!! First Posted: April 2, 2013  Oh mama! What have you done? I went through a weekly roller coaster of bad hair days. We could call it a decade of hair WOW’s. My lovely mama was born with long, straight, blond hair. I used to love to brush her hair and if you tried
doing that to my hair the brush would get stuck! And my hair was her favorite, fuzzy, chia pet! Just add water and who knows what you might get!!!! Apparently, I would never stay still long enough for her to braid it. So every summer she would cut it short and it ended up looking like a boy’s cut. This went on till Junior High, which can really hurt a girls style! The many trials and tribulations of my hair, long, short, long and short again, then Jheri curl then an afro, because going back to the salon every month wasn’t going to happen. Then finally I rebelled and in the 7th grade I gave myself a mohawk as an homage to the lead singer of Bow Wow Wow!! |
Lolita's DaughterMemoir 
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Nona’s life began as a fairytale. She was the daughter of a famous actress Sue Lyon (Lolita), and NFL player (Roland Harrison). Her father was absent for most of her childhood, and being a bi-racial child, she had questions at a very early age about why she looked so different.
By age 12, Sue remarried, and her relationship with her mother was never the same. Nona was kicked out of her house and by the age of 13 she was taken to a halfway house. That same year her mother placed her in an insane asylum where she stayed for almost 3 months. That kind of betrayal by her mother, a woman she once idolized, broke Nona’s spirit in a way which would take years to recover from. The author currently lives in Los Angeles… This Site and all the materials available on the Site are the property of Nona Harrison and are protected by copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property laws. The Site is provided solely for your personal noncommercial use. You may not use the Site or the materials available on the Site in a manner that constitutes an infringement of our rights or that has not been authorized by us. More specifically, unless explicitly authorized in these Terms of Service or by the owner of the materials, you may not modify, copy, reproduce, republish, upload, post, transmit, translate, sell, create derivative works, exploit, or distribute in any manner or medium (including by email or other electronic means) any material from the Site. You may, however, from time to time, download and/or print one copy of individual pages of the Site for your personal, non-commercial use, provided that you keep intact all copyright and other proprietary notices.
~ Nona Harrison Gomez |
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