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A Spiritually Enlightening Online Magazine. September's Theme: "Freedom"
Volume 7 Issue 6 ISSN# 1708-3265

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 		Freedom Child:
Excerpts from a Dauntless Life
by Martine Mathewson

I was born in early July in a ramshackle green farmhouse under the midnight rays of a fickle Midwestern moon. My father, a long-haired retired hippy, was a muscular young farm boy with scholarly glasses and a penchant for singing the Eagles. My mother was a resilient farmer's wife with six children already in her brood before I came along, and a lifetime of sorrows sunk deep in her sheer blue eyes.

I was born on the day the American Declaration of Independence was signed, two days before the national holiday. Mother once said she knew from the beginning I was her little firecracker. The symbolism of the timing of my birth and the power of my star-sent Moon Child origins conspired together, and I soon proved myself to be our family's first (and only) Freedom Child.

The expression of my natural independence surfaced early on. Shortly after turning a year old, I ran away from home for the first time. (Yes, ran. Mother says I never crawled… that I went one day from lying on the floor staring up at her with massive, curiosity-filled blue eyes… to standing upright and navigating around the room hanging onto walls, chairs, and unsuspecting dog tails.) So there I was at a fully-developed year of age, exploring the wide world with my Freedom Child eyes. The story goes that I toddled to the neighbouring farm, a full two miles from the green house, and there my frantic Mother found me, playing contentedly with the neighbour lady and waiting to be returned home. I no doubt thought I had done something truly wonderful. My Mother, of course, was just happy to find me alive.

At six, I was already styling my hair in true Diva-fashion… self-mutilating my bangs with a pair of dull scissors I scavenged from a bathroom drawer. My new look was truly edgy: jagged, artistic, and completely ahead of my time. At ten, I began winning awards on my artwork. Feeling empowered by my newly discovered talent, I opened my first for-profit business. Within days, "The Son-Shine Scoop" newspaper had several regular subscribers and was garnering rave reviews. I wanted to create, invent, but above all - I wanted to push at the outer limits of my tiny world's boundaries, to show the world that I, for one, had never embraced "can't". I was ever the little Freedom Child.

At age thirteen, I wrote my first (complete) book and placed in the top line-up for a huge international contest. At fifteen, I felt a need to spread my wings outside the confines of my already fiercely independent, creative mind, so I began working out of the home and attending College classes while still finishing my primary education. With independence came impatience, I confess.

Throughout childhood, the Freedom Child inside me blossomed intensely. I early on began creating my world through my thoughts, without having the slightest clue that I had a hand in it at all. I would write my goals down repeatedly, and then days, months, or even years later, I would find myself mysteriously accomplishing those early goals without ever clearly seeing how they transpired.

Most notably, after affirming at age six that I was going to become an opera singer when I grew up, I recently earned entrance into a School of Music where I studied voice under two brilliant professionals. I became not just an opera singer, but a coloratura soprano - developing a crystalline voice that in the world of sundry fachs is unusually golden, light, bright and beautiful. Mine was the second highest voice in the School, stretching easily into an upper range unexplored by most sopranos, i.e., the "whistle register".

For two years, I maintained a 4.0 GPA, worked part-time and full-time whenever possible around my class schedule, and studied my music relentlessly. By all outward appearances, I was excelling. But the Freedom Child began to wilt under the melting rays of extreme expectation (mostly my own) and my voice began to fade with my spirit. Then I remembered that la voce of my inner child needed no degree to be fully expressed, and I released myself from the fold and raced joyously back to a lifestyle of independence and dream-creation.

Tomorrow, under the light of a waning Pacific moon, I will celebrate the dawn of my 25th year. As I reflect back on my first quarter century in this lifetime, and consider what I would like to create in the next quarter century, I am struck by just how wise the forces were who presided over my birth. Stars in the hands of their Creator conspired with the Moon to assist me in choosing parents, friends, and situations that were the most capable of facilitators in my development.

For as I glance back at the excerpts of my life, I am reminded of the other, less charming stories of my life… darker glimpses into the things many don't speak about, things hidden behind a cloak of silence, unpreserved in willful forgetfulness.

The neighbour with the "clumsy hands, clumsy eyes that were simply misguided", said my Mother, but my sisters and I knew better. The "church" that accepted no new members, condemning outsiders and their prying eyes, and harboured offenders. Running and playing barefoot in the dirt outside a soup kitchen, where my haggard Mother was standing in line for day-old bread and powdered milk. The screaming, the tears, the fear, the guilt, the beating, the friend who died by her own hand, the friend that didn't… The black lies that contaminated the soil of early childhood and seeded separation between parent and sibling, sibling and sibling… The dis-eases that plagued me, the heart ache that pervaded… The rape, the abuse, the loss, the blinding anger…

But the stars never lie, and they destined me to be an overcomer, a dauntless soul who could be born and reborn and reborn again through all manner of life experiences. A true Freedom Child, cast down but not destroyed. The free soul in me continually grows, enveloping and smothering in love all the past, present, and future, encompassing and transforming the memories, from the darkest to the lightest, and finding that through all that occurs, from every small seed, springs only more ultimate good.

I am dauntless, resilient, courageous, and healed. I am whole, gathered up from the fragments of the dark and the light days of my first 25 years. I am Divinely inspired, touched by the Mother Moon, born of Mother Earth's carbon stuffs, kissed by some gods, cursed by others, but powerfully free to choose my new destiny. I transferred my self into this generation through a red-skinned farmer boy and a bleak-eyed farmer's wife, but I am born Me, only Me. I am Freedom Child.


She currently makes her home in Southern California where she is welcoming the next grand adventure: raising her first child while creating her latest career, finishing her higher education, planning more travel, expecting great things and loving three energetic fur babies and one patient man!

Learn more about Martine at http://www.dauntlessdiva.com or contact Martine via email.

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