My early years as a little girl started with crisis. Crisis means to sift and I was sifting through the sand of loneliness, despair and abandonment.
When the sand all falls away from the tidal waves on the shore line you'll be left with what matters and as a small girl, what mattered to me was feeling love. What matters most cannot be taken away or so I thought back then and so the notion of ‘happily ever after’ felt like something I would work towards to find my happiness in this world.
I didn’t live in the four walls of happily ever after, nor did I ever witness what a ‘healthy’ marriage was but I was born with an over sized heart. This bouncing heart led me to dream of white silky dresses, glitter, pink, rainbows and happily ever afters for the rest of my early days.
I dreamed of being rescued by a man just like rapunzel in her big bell tower. He would protect me in all of the ways a man protects his soul mate, he would make all my troubles go away, he would have my back for all of the days of our lives. Death do us part was my mantra. A child with a dream. This really set the foundations for most of my life, if a man loves me then I am complete. Doesn’t matter if I have no self love for myself, his love would be enough for the two of us.
How incredibly immature and naive!
I am certain my mother dreamed of the same. Just like me, my mother had a very wounded inner child from a childhood much the same as my own. Abandonment was also her achilles heal. Passed on to the next generation with no wrong intent from her heart, circumstances she wish she could of changed.
Life as mum knew it was gone. It's a pretty big deal when the train wreck called your life causes you to hide from the wreck, the pain so immense it might just spit you out and kill you. Sifting once again. How do you live day by day when grief is in your home? how do you do the next best thing? Dad was gone. Greif was her new partner in crime. There she was raw like an onion, pealing back the layers of hurt and heaviness left behind in her wake.
What had just happened? Shock is brutal. Grief is love's token gesture. It's our token sitting on the dusty shelf of our hearts and living proof that we once loved. Grief is the proof of purchase that we wave in the thick-black-smug like air and it declares to the world: I didn’t feel love as a child but I looked to love to save me and for a short and fleeting time, love was once mine. I loved hard and I loved with loyalty. Here is my sales receipt that I paid the price. And right now I feel like I over paid. I feel ripped off. I want my money back. Grief is ‘over paying’ on love.
After mums second marriage ended, I still dreamed of that happily ever after. If mum couldn’t have it, I would make her proud and find it for both of us. What if mum’s pain would be my lesson to finding someone to love me the way she never could. I wanted to turn our past around. I thought that finding that special someone would scream to the world that I mattered and would reveal once and for all that I was desired, even if I never desired myself.
The revelations of my hope would take years to catch up with me. And so I reveal this to you, my reader and hope that one of you will understand and I hope you value my revelation just like it’s your own.
When I was looking for my happy ever after to sign the dotted line of forever I hadn’t yet looked within myself. I was insecure, lost and wanting him to save m from myself. I was so scared of being alone late into my thirties that I loved only with my heart, ignoring the red flags within my head. I settled for things no woman of self worth would settle for and this back-and-forth of toxic waste has been repeated again year after year. I tried with all my soul to form a stronger connection, I tried to travel deeper into his heart, his mind and learn his past. I tried to reach dreams together as one, I tried to love with all my soul without ever really feeling it in return. Eventually you get knocked down too many times so you slowly wither away into self preservation and self protection. I stopped looking for shelter and answers in the arms of another and started to build a safe sheltering structure around myself.
There has been too much pain that I have climbed deep into, too many tears and so much confusion . Suddenly the safe space you thought was forever is now just ‘space’ between you both. There is him and then there is me. What once felt like home and a safe place to land now feels strange and wide and there is a bridge between our hearts.
That little girl who longed for resolution of her past in the arms of a boy did the precise thing that many told her not to do. Don’t accept less than you deserve. Don’t go back, go forward. No one would ever understand. It’s always an incredibly personal journey and often makes no sense to anyone else but you.
God speaks to all of us in whispers and one at a time, he is careful with his messages but if you don’t take action sometimes he might have to yell. Once upon a time I would run away but now I just listen and follow his recommendations in my own time. That voice within is god.
I have had a painful existence in this lifetime and I have always longed for a painless love affair but maybe our job as humans is not to keep clear of pain or keep our babies from pain our job is to walk into the flames and smoke and grow from each campfire of our life. Where there is love there is pain and we all love so we will always find pain and maybe the world has been given the wrong message about both.
My past perception of ‘to death do us part has changed’ as living in the wilderness for so long has shown me that animals don’t lie. A leopard rarely changes their spots. Me included. I am sensitive and intense. I was born that way and I will never change. I don’t want to. The other person can’t change either. This is their reality in this world. You kind of wish you knew what you know now but often the initial attraction over rules rhyme or reason.
The space between us grows. I choose life being real and vulnerable and he chooses life being perfect to the outside so he is admired. We cant be both and so we must decide.
Every woman must decide if she wants to compromise herself and loose the essence of who she really is. She needs to decide if she wants to play small in the pain of her reality or if she plans to show up to the world and be her own life partner. She needs to decide if she wants to marry another at the compromise of her own values or marry herself. The choice is hers. It’s never easy and often takes a lifetime to realise.
Death do us part seems old fashioned and so old world in a world where we are constantly evolving and sifting becomes redundant to my old beliefs and the dreams of many.
