Posts Tagged ‘freedom’

 

Freedom, Fate and Fortune

Wednesday, August 31st, 2011

A friend of mine got divorced after giving up the booze and told me he only realized how boring his marriage was once he was sober. It was funny … in a tragic kind of way. More so when I realized the same thing quite possibly happened to me. Sure, the problems were already finding the cracks … like dust and water, they search them out … and once a crack is found, its permanence is solidified. I cleansed my life through the Art of Living, a course in breathing and meditation that partners of my friends steered them away from on suspicions that some of the lesser-known side-effects included a freezer devoid of meat products, a liquor cabinet full of sparkling water, way too much energy at 4am and … well, in my case … separation. I sobered up, scraped out the cracks, and my marriage was over in less than a year.

“You’re staying in a dysfunctional relationship, so you can use the problems you have with your husband as a layer to prevent you from dealing with the real issues within yourself that you are too afraid to confront.” I was talking yesterday to my ‘twin’ … my spirit friend and soul mate. I see her visibly cloud over when her husband enters the room and she shrinks from catwalk model to hobbit. “You can only truly unmask the magnificence of the person you’re meant to be once you’re free of him.” But no sooner were the words out of my mouth than I realized that perhaps this was purely a very valid projection of something I had come out of and that, due to our uncanny synchronicity, she was just entering into. One can also not completely overlook my new obsession with freedom.

It took me thirteen years of marriage to figure out that marriage was quite possibly the worst thing for me … a sentiment condemned in couples counselling, yet confirmed last week by a palm reading (yes, yes, ok, I also take guidance from the planets and my cycle is linked to the moon …). Apparently, I’ll Do Anything For Love. It’s written in the way my thumb bends right back. My little finger stands out from the others, claiming I push attachment away. But my love (index) finger stands stuck to my middle finger, defiantly standing up for the fact that I am just better with a mate. “Sigh.” I’m apparently incredibly creative, see beauty in everything, and am ruled by fate … But I digress.

The interesting part – and where I’m really going with this – is that, according to a little padded area, I have a sense that I will never get all I want from just one man. “You need several at one time?” an astonished friend proclaimed. Oh yeah! Apparently … and interesting considering I have recently been marketing the idea that every woman needs to find her own Holy Trinity – Three Men who jointly satisfy all her Needs, Dreams and Desires. I kinda had it figured out at the beginning of the year when I was embracing my freedom, satisfied that I had made no commitments to any one person and I was, therefore, free to play. I had found my pretty young thing who made me feel like a teenager … having a Sandra Dee holiday romance. I had an intellectual attraction to an awesome mind who also inspired in me a kind of spiritual awakening. And I had this magnificent big man who sent electric shocks through my body just by sending me an sms … and fifteen a day was something like electric shock therapy.

When I get a picture of my husband in my mind, what I see is hundreds of hands trying to box me in, constrain me and gag me … and not in a good way. But my pathology at the time demanded it be that way … for reasons that are only now becoming clear. So, unlike my ‘twin’, I bailed out of the marriage that was hindering the path to my own recovery and I am still now unwrapping the layers of my pathology. With unveiled beauty, I continue to embrace the freedom from my marriage. But another Holy Trinity? Not so sure … as tempting as it sounds, it kinda goes against the Single and unComplicated bliss that somehow sounds even more so.

Perhaps, if I concentrate really hard, I can get the swelling on my palm to go down and prise my love finger and my middle fingers apart. And then maybe – just maybe – my thumb will even stand up straight.

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Round and round I go … where I stop, nobody knows …

Sunday, August 28th, 2011

“Be careful not to embrace your freedom at all costs,” I was told by a new friend when walking on the mountain a year ago. I was discussing my divorce as though it was a round-the-world trip or a year at an ashram … simply because the tape had been ripped from my mouth and I was finally allowing my voice to be heard – by him, the whole of Cape Town and seemingly half of the western world. His instruction was brought on by my fighting talk about shrugging off responsibility, playing the field and changing my life … I may have even thrown in something about changing the world while I was about it. I never did get to figure out exactly what he meant … I didn’t really care at the time. Freedom for me – right then – was priceless.

I spoke recently of the full circle … like the full moon cycle … and the shape of Zen. My Unavailable Rebound Guy took me full circle from embracing my freedom from my husband to embracing my freedom from him. I gave up my freedom in a heartbeat to be with him – and him alone – when I should have, in fact, continued to be free. Embracing my freedom cost me nothing; giving it up cost me everything. He left and took with him my heart, my soul, my hopes and the glue that kept me together. I’m wonderfully free again now and, although freedom from Him doesn’t taste so good, I’m learning to embrace it again at all costs.

Back at the start of the circle, I followed all the same patterns to begin with. But I’ve got the experience of the journey now; I’ve got all the lessons learnt. I have come out of the initial Screaming Single madness this time round, full of courage to walk away from one love affair and not feel the fear of being alone … determined that no one again will convince me to give up what’s rightfully mine.

Single and unComplicated – it’s my new kind of bliss.

 

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Humph!

Friday, August 19th, 2011

Someone asked me the other day what it was like being someone’s mistress … she said ‘mistress’ in the same way some suburban folk say ‘black’ or ‘gay’, with a furtive glance around to check if anyone had overheard. The question shocked me into my new reality of having lived something with someone who was living something else. So I told her a little joke my ex-lover recited off his phone, clearly from someone in the same position he was in … someone who got the kind of humour … like it was some kind of inside joke.

“What’s a mistress?”
“It’s something between a mister and a mattress.”

Haha, funny fat lip! I didn’t laugh.

I tried judging but that didn’t work for me. I unravelled a bit … that always feels good. Hey, you can’t choose when you take a fall and who it’s with, and when you do land in a complicated love affair, you just have to make the best of it and hope all those impossible promises that are made don’t take root … And never forget to trust … and never hope – in these cases it’s the hope that always stuffs it up … the hope that there’ll be more and the hope that you won’t be grabbing at ankles again.

It’s just branding after all. And I don’t do branding. The branding of marriage didn’t work for me and the branding of mistress didn’t work for me either. Live free and love free, that’s what I say! Nice theory if you can find someone who can handle the practicalities of being free with you.

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Bloodletting

Thursday, August 18th, 2011

The blood service contacted me – they want my blood. They were in my area today so, in honour of the one-year watershed and his birthday, I bled once more for my ex-lover. I referred to him recently as my oxpecker. Why? Because he attended my wound with dedication and vigilance and helped it heal. But he also kept the wound open so he could get what he wanted.

That magnificent little bird has flown away now. I had always tried to shake it off, wanting to be strong enough to heal on my own, knowing that I couldn’t rely on this little bird to always be there for me. But I enjoyed the healing it was causing, as well as the pain. As is to be expected, the wound went septic when he left … but, just as it should have been in the beginning, my body took over and has started healing itself.

So again I wake in the mornings with a smile on my face. I sleep on the side both my husband and lover once slept … and I embrace the beauty of my solitude. I am back to where I left off in my post, Same, same … but different, where I get to go through the rehabilitation process patching pieces of myself together in ways I prefer and preparing myself for the next part of my journey. And when I lose my way, I’ve got those flash cards.

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Untethered

Sunday, August 14th, 2011

“I wanted to go to him, but I felt like I was tied to the chair. Some part of me was holding me back, knew I’d reached my limit. And just like that, I united myself from Mr. Big. I was free, but there was nothing exquisite about it.”
- Carrie (Sex & the City)

No, nothing remotely exquisite about it! It still feels raw, like an entire layer of skin has been peeled off my body. But, just like recovery from that sweet pain of addiction, I have been through the cold turkey, felt like dying … and now my head is clear. The cravings have become easier and my resolve gets stronger each day. I went from one hard drug to the next and ended up living my life in limbo … angsty, unsettled, unfocused, not knowing where the next fix would take me. Entirely at its mercy. And totally blindsided.

Carrie eventually got her Mr. Big when she was forty … after waiting ten years. Now that kind of drug abuse could kill anyone, and it’s just like Hollywood to turn it into a marriage instead of rehab.

I have two camps of friends: the one that supports my romance – you’re destined to be together so of course he’ll come back for you – and the one that supports my reality – if he lied to his wife, he was lying to you too. And there comes a time when romance always gives way to reality.

I am breaking my addiction to Romance. I am totally aware that Once an Addict, Always an Addict. But I am equally aware that a Habit is not a Need. What’s Needed is a firm grip on Reality.

But that won’t stop me from continuing to walk through life with my palms facing the sky.

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Sleepover – all three and a half years of him

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

I sent him for his very first sleepover when my husband was also away so I could have a night of total freedom from responsibility. But the following morning, after waking up to meditate and then climbing back into bed with a cup of tea and a meringue-frosted cupcake, I found myself pacing the house with nothing I would rather do but go and fetch him so we could have a bit of fun together. I actually missed him. It was quite a shock.

After all those evenings out and days when I went to work … when I would leave the house, gripping the steering wheel until my knuckles turned white and, with racing heart and quickened breath, round the corner out of Hout Bay on two wheels, shrieking and hollering about being free … I’ve reached a point of freedom that doesn’t require being away from my child. Maybe it’s because he became more of a human, or maybe it’s because I did, but I actually love being around him. When I go out, I look forward to getting back home to cuddle his sleeping form and feel his warm breath on my cheek when I kiss him goodnight and, when I go to work, I look forward to the light relief of rolling on the lawn with him when I get home.

Sure, I still enjoy my times away from him, but I am now confident that I will always return.

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Dreaming again

Sunday, April 26th, 2009

I had a dream last night. It involved India … which a lot of my dreams do at the moment. To put this in context, I have always lived in tiny homes and, although content, I would have recurring dreams about discovering one day that there was a secret basement or attic or just a whole lot of extra room. Now that I have a bigger home, I no longer have this dream. Now that I have a child and a dog, I have the freedom dreams – the ones that involve international travel to exotic destinations … the ones I wouldn’t know how to travel in with a child in tow because I only really know backpacker travel to these destinations and doubt I would even enjoy it any other way.

Anyway, about the dream. I was in India (obviously) and there was a cricket game due to start on the weekend after me and husband (note, no child) were due to leave. I was talking to my husband about the possibility of staying on and couldn’t he negotiate it with his boss (I had grown up in this dream and there was employment involved). He sat there looking at me but every time he tried to speak, all he could do was snore. Of course, I woke up moments later to a loudly snoring husband, a child who had climbed into our bed and a dog crying to be let out for the fourth time because he had eaten something dodgy out of the compost heap again.

Freedom? What’s that?

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Galleries in Paris

Monday, February 18th, 2008

If you have a baby and you don’t want that to get in the way of a good holiday, go to Europe where they are tolerated in even the trendiest restaurants and even woken up by friendly restaurant staff and fellow patrons … usually when you have just got them to sleep in their prams … people want them around. And if you are into a cultural trip to see great art, Paris is the place to be on even the busiest long weekend with the most popular masterpieces on show.

It seemed too easy – taking a 7-month-old baby on holiday to London and Paris had images of crying in queues, restaurants, planes and trains. People still claim I’m just one of those lucky mums with an easy child. I can’t claim to not have had luck, as I can’t claim to know what it would be like any other way. What I can claim is that, even if there had been an element of luck involved, it also had a lot to do with dedication, perseverance and tenacity (and that’s baby and me).

To digress slightly, there was an issue with dummy sucking as opposed to thumb sucking. My baby started sucking his thumb as soon as he could get it to his mouth (around 6 weeks) and I switched his thumb for a dummy every time due to the nattering of concerned friends and relatives. Once I realised that dummy sucking involved getting up in the night to replace the dummy every time it fell out (spiral staircase one unfortunate obstacle), I withheld the dummy until my baby learnt to either go to sleep without it or use his thumb or blanket (this involved only two sleep times worth of crying to sort out). But, back to the story …

I booked a flight to coincide as closely as possible with my baby’s sleep routine. Because he had a blanket (several actually but all pretty similar) that he was attached to at sleep time and because he sucked his thumb, he knew it was sleep time as soon as I gave him his blanket and promptly started sucking his thumb … to coincide with take off (and middle ear neutralising!) He then slept all night until the lights went on in the cabin, by which time he (as well as all passengers in close proximity) was well rested.

To digress again, we ordered a TwinArc Travel Cot by LittleLife online, which we had posted to where we were staying in London. This is the most lightweight travel cot you can buy and, therefore, does not reduce your luggage allowance by too much. And, while I’m on the topic of luggage, the pram does not get counted towards your allowance because you push your baby in it all the way to the plane where it gets put in the hold last minute (and not weighed in).

Because baby was following The Routine, there was no issue with putting the cot in our room as he was used to going to sleep at certain times and was not even unsettled by the different environment because we prepared him (never underestimate how much a non-speaking baby can understand) and never made a fuss about putting him in his travel cot to sleep. This gave us free reign to go out when we wanted to and because we were shopping and sightseeing every day, all we had to do was put the pram in recline mode, throw a blanket over the top to block out some light and, hey presto, baby would fall asleep effortlessly … because he was used to The Routine. There are certainly pros and cons to The Routine and I would never be able to convince someone to follow one unless they were that way inclined from the start … but being free to wander the streets of London and Paris with a perfectly rested baby is certainly one of the pros.

Where the luck came in was visiting galleries and exhibitions in Paris where the queues wrapped around buildings and stretched down streets for what seemed like miles. There was always a kindly guard wandering around, ushering all parents with small children to a special queue, which was immensely shorter. At the Picasso museum we even got a personal guide to show us the easiest route and help us into the private elevators.

If you are more geared for rave holidays in Goa and Ibiza, The Routine probably isn’t for you because what parent wants their baby to go to sleep at 7 p.m. and wake up at 7 a.m. when they only get to bed around 7 a.m. themselves?

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