Posts Tagged ‘relationships’
Tuesday, October 11th, 2011
Paulo Coelho wrote: “Words are tears that have been written down. Tears are words that need to be shed. Without them, joy loses all its brilliance and sadness has no end.”
Shakespeare wrote: “Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.”
And A.A. Milne wrote: “A quotation is a handy thing to have about, saving one the trouble of thinking for oneself.”
So I meander here through a maze of other people’s wisdom and try to find my feet in tear-formed pools of grief where others have already trod. The eyot has sent me back to the garden where I turn my reflection to the spring sun and dive into Judith Anodea’s river of words, in Eastern Body, Western Mind, which I use to irrigate the weeds that are learning to grow amongst the flowers. “Those who are idealistic about love sometimes find the greatest pain. Wide-eyed they fall, giving their utmost to the beloved. Great is their dismay, when giving all they could and valuing this love above all things, they see their lover casually mistreat what they had regarded as sacred.” Just when I thought the gardening was all done, “… a painful situation triggers wounds from previous hurts that were never healed and we feel like we are re-experiencing every hurt that has ever happened to us.” Like driving a garden fork through your foot … and not just once!
“The emptiness of abandonment may be re-experienced every time it happens in adulthood, where the loss of a loved one leaves us feeling like we’re falling apart. The body itself may reflect this collapse, with the muscles chronically undercharged, the legs weak, and the upper back hunched over as if the spine cannot quite hold itself upright.” I don’t collapse and feel like dying anymore – well, not as frequently anyway – but my body has shut down. It’s had enough and no longer even heeds the call of my inner Forrest Gump. I can no longer fight it so I dose myself up with Tryptophan and I lie on the grass and find farm animals in the clouds, wondering if perhaps the dose is too high.
“When we fall in love, we strip ourselves of defences. We open to another and to the world. We expand and grow. When we are hurt in matters of love, we are hurt in our most vulnerable, trusting aspects. The purest form of self is wounded. It no longer feels safe to be authentic. Our system – wounded at the very core – shuts down and we lose not only our lover but ourselves as well. This is the deepest loss.” Each of our friends reflects a certain aspect of ourselves; they allow the different aspects of our personalities to breathe. When we lose a friend we lose that aspect of ourselves too. “The point of grief work is to regain connection with the self inside rather than increase our attachment to what was lost.” With a lover who you connect with on a cellular level, all those things he awakens in you are lost when he leaves and this is the part we truly grieve. “If the object of our worship should leave, fall from grace, or reject us, we are devastated. To heal, we must then reconnect responsibly to the self within, seeing it as an aspect of divinity in its own right, and much in need of love and understanding.” Ultimately we can get over anyone who leaves – even when it feels like an impossible goal – but we can’t get over the missing pieces of ourselves. My deficient heart has responded to the wounds by withdrawing and I find“… distance from others and defend against closeness and the risk of getting hurt again.”
I am reminded of a quote by Rumi: “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that have been built against it.” He also wrote, “Lovers do not finally meet somewhere, they are in each other all along.” When my heart was broken I didn’t search for love. He was already in me. But I still had to put in the time, seeking out the barriers I had built against loving him, gradually breaking them down. And opening myself up. And allowing myself to love him. But as my heart opened like a lotus flower out of the cesspool, it was plucked by the knife of abandonment.
Rollo May wrote, “To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive – to grief, sorrow and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfilment and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before.” And in this heady mix of uppers and downers, and waking up in Vegas where the broken down barriers lead to love and the love leads to barriers, which get broken down to expose the love … and on and on, I suddenly sober up and see that all I’m left with is “… the hangover and the memory of love.”
But when I feel like stopping there, Brandi Carlisle’s voice strains down the headphones cord, “But these stories don’t mean anything if you’ve got no one to tell them to. It’s true, I was made for you.” and the barriers stand tall with the reminder of what an irrelevant sentiment that is when love pierced my abdomen and stuck me in a frame to display my beautiful wings; preserving me when I would far rather have died.
But, hey, “Relationship furthers the evolution of individual souls and the collective soul of our planet.” So I slurp down bowlfuls of bittersweet soup for the soul, take one for the planet, and trust that the cycle will continue, just as it should.
Tags: abandonment, Brandi Carlisle, chakras, grief, healing, heart, Judith Anodea, loss, love, Paulo Coelho, quotes, relationships, Rumi, soul, trust
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Sunday, October 2nd, 2011
I had a flashback to a scene from When Harry met Sally … Carrie Fischer’s character was divorcing her husband and they were sitting in the living room sorting through who gets what and I seem to remember a fight over … uh … was it really a wagon wheel table? My memory may be playing tricks on me for the purpose of this blog post but … at the end of the day it all boils down to Stuff. You want it even if you don’t want it. I’m not terribly sentimental about stuff but there are certain things that belong to me; they are part of me and part of my story. If they went up in smoke I probably wouldn’t miss them but the idea of them being in someone else’s house out of spite is not a place I care to go. I’m used to my buttons being pushed but it feels like they’re being pushed with an electric probe these days. I’ve felt a fair amount of spittle fly into my face lately, but since learning a new use for my word, Trust, I can let the hostility slide over me. I can Trust that I will be bombarded with verbal, email and sms abuse about anything from the state of the garden to the friends I hang out with but I can now also Trust that an apology isn’t far behind. For most things…
“I think what I am doing is very different from what you did.” The sms glared at me from my Nokia screen and I glared back until the screensaver came on. Like so many things these days, the ‘conversations’ tend to end right there, requests for elaboration futile.
“I hate to generalise,” a male friend of mine said, “but it’s weird; it’s just a guy thing. Ego maybe.” I was telling him about my husband’s big Secret about having a Girlfriend. I knew of course – small world that it is, my people know her people – but it was still just a rumour until he told me himself months later … and only because I inadvertently prompted it. I had, after all, told him the moment I met My Guy even though we were already separated. I was relieved by the news and felt smug about how he can no longer be self-righteous about my ‘affair’ and I threw my head back and laughed at his hypocrisy about not being able to move on until the divorce was final. None of it really matters you see – it is such a tiny blip on an antiquated radar – our relationship has been over for years and I want him to be happy in the same way I found life after death … albeit temporarily. But playing the guilt and blame card still? … trying to absolve himself by comparing? … hmm, it just doesn’t sit right.
Is that really just a guy thing? Does Ego really excuse hostility, hypocrisy and self-righteousness? I hope it’s just a phase. Like my great-grandmother, Dottie, used to say, through her cracked lips and crooked teeth, “This too shall pass.”
Tags: affair, communication, divorce, Ego, hostility, phase, relationships, trust
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Friday, September 23rd, 2011
As far as watersheds go, today was a biggie. I closed the doors on both the men in my life … for good.
I went on a silent retreat at the beginning of the year and was told – not for the first time! – that I need to walk away from both my (soon-to-be-ex-) husband and my (then) lover and be true to myself so I could lead the life I’m meant to. Today, after a traumatic year of having listened neither to outside advise nor inner wisdom, I finally presented a divorce agreement to my husband and I broke off all contact with the man I subsequently fell in love with … the timing of these two cataclysmic events falling on the same day, a total coincidence.
Still waiting for the thunderbolt response to the first event, I concluded the second in a fittingly rushed Skype call to the other side of the world. But as soon as the guillotine came down with the click of the red button, I fell in a heap with a spike of adrenalin coursing through my veins … it felt like my heart was the only organ in my body and it was about to blow a hole in my chest. It wanted out! and who can blame it in such a hostile environment. But I lacked inertia for either fight or flight. Although tears finally failed me, it felt like I might be stuck in that position until someone found me there days later.
And then I smiled … like only I can when it looks like the sky might fall down. I saw in an instant that all is exactly as it is meant to be. I remembered something I vowed many months ago … to myself and to whoever was listening at the time. I swore that I would not stay with my married lover once I was divorced, not even knowing then why I had said it … whether I had hoped he would leave his wife or whether I was afraid of ‘officially’ becoming the mistress, thinking that perhaps I couldn’t take that label while I was ‘officially’ still married. So in terms of fate, the day went rather well.
Perhaps it’s because he has broken my heart and made me cry so many times in one year that the end of our final contact caused neither breakage nor spillage … not even the ‘I love you’ penetrated my new shell now that I know the love was never real and a true depth of feeling simply non-existent. I turned off my projector and I was met with a blank screen. I have fallen out of love with someone I thought would make me whole and, ironically, it is the first time I have begun to feel complete.
Being stronger and wiser this time around the circle won’t by any means ensure my heart stays intact for always, but it will make my choices wiser and my intuition more fine-tuned to act according to my best interests and my greater good. The next time I turn on the projector, I’ll choose a different plot and a happier ending and characters that are more compatible with the roles they need to play. For now, I will listen to one of the songs that didn’t make it onto any of his mixed CDs; something I have kept just for me … a little something by Gloria Gaynor because, just like she says, “At first I was afraid, I was petrified, kept thinking I could never live without you by my side, but then I spent so many nights thinking how you did me wrong and I grew strong and I learnt how to get along … ”, I (too) Will Survive!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBR2G-iI3-I
Tags: divorce, fate, heart, intuition, love, marriage, relationships, Zen
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Monday, September 5th, 2011
I’m not sure if it was the title, Keeping the Love you Find, or the cover picture of a single blue egg in a heart-shaped nest that taunted me until I had no choice but to hand it back to its owner, my soul sister. She promptly replaced it with another, Women who Love too Much. “Just read the back cover and tell me it’s not the book for you”, she said. The sight of me confirmed the accuracy of her choice. Hand clamped over my mouth, wide-eyed and dumbstruck, I delved right in … recognizing in an instant how emotionally unwell I was when I came out of my 18-year relationship, now becoming all too aware of where I went wrong in that relationship, the ones before, and the one way too soon afterwards … grateful now for the sheltering of such a long relationship but equally irked that it deprived me of the opportunity for the discovery sooner.
As a Woman Who Loves Too Much, I don’t understand love that comes without a knot in my stomach, a low self-esteem and a need to try really hard to gain the love of something unattainable; attempting to control the outcome and blaming myself when things go bad or people leave. I am a Love Addict and just because the affliction contains a beautiful word doesn’t, unfortunately, make it any better than your common or garden variety substance addiction.
Reeling from the end of my marriage, I jumped headfirst into a relationship with a man I thought would nurture and love me while allowing me to be me. I pushed him away at first – I didn’t want to get attached – and then I let him help me heal. He held my hand through my fears around letting go, being vulnerable and allowing myself to be loved for who I am, inadvertently feeding my addiction and, therefore, masking my true pathology. Attracted at first to his unavailability and later confused by the paradox that required my exclusivity – but willing to give anything to get his love – he left anyway and I was unable to prevent my emotional well-being from spiralling out of control. I had bonded; I had become obsessed … I had formed an addiction. And the withdrawals from love for a Love Addict are as hard as withdrawals from drugs for a drug addict.
I keep threatening myself with solitude – a state where I hope to gain all I need from the love I have within. I thought at first it was my psychological whip to get me out there to find an Adonis to ravish me … but knowing now how destructive my pathology can be, I’m terrified of jumping into another relationship that distorts my reality and blinds me to the damage I’m doing to myself. I need solitude to research and recover and I need solitude to gain self-acceptance and I need solitude to figure out how I can define love in a way that doesn’t require me to feel like I need to be medicated … because let’s face it, when you’re so addicted to someone that you’ll medicate yourself rather than give him up, it’s not the kind of relationship you should be in.
But of course, without rehab, the touching, smelling and tasting will always lead to indulging even when aware of the damage it’s causing. So I’m going into rehab for love … not to learn how to abstain from love, but from the triggers that turn it into a drug. Romeo and Juliet was a story of love addiction … and look how that turned out. Too much love certainly can kill you.
Tags: addiction, drugs, healing, Love addiction, marriage, medication, pathology, rehab, relationships, solitude
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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.
Tags: Art of Living, fate, fortune, freedom, husband, love, marriage, pathology, relationships, romance, separation
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Tuesday, August 16th, 2011
It’s been twenty-one days. I had to start counting when the first week felt like a few months and I was forcing myself to recover ahead of the prescribed grieving period. Twenty-one days! And in the name of emotional alchemy, I have condensed all the emotion from those twenty-one days onto twenty-one pieces of shimmering cardboard, in an attempt to define all the positive aspects of the relationship in terms of the negatives.
I have a little blue bag with a colourful button heart and a beaded drawstring. It was given to me by my healer. I had to get creative, she said. Grieve fully because it is necessary for cellular memory, but use it constructively. So each day for twenty-one days after He left, I have had to write a negative aspect of our relationship on a card, to ultimately use as flash cards or in meditation to work through a particular issue … the point, I think, being that I chose the man who contained all these aspects in order to take me on a very important journey.
I used to wonder why I always chose guys who want to wrap me up in cottonwool and put me on a pedestal where they don’t have to deal with the real me but only the parts that are fragile and make them want to take care of me. Through experience, reading, connections and disconnecting, I am learning to identify the wounded parts of my Inner Child and I can’t help but wonder if it’s perhaps those wounded parts in me that seek out the nurturing … or if I am seeking out the wounded parts in others who need to satisfy in themselves some unresolved need to nurture. Do they feel I am satisfied by empty promises or are they simply satisfying some need within themselves, trying to appease me by making them.
Anyway … what I now have is twenty-one flash cards. And each time I feel I can’t walk through the fire of loss, I can hold onto all the positives and at the same time see with incredible clarity just how much personal good can come from all the negatives. After all, why does one have to get over such beautiful love? Surely, if we learn from the negative aspects we don’t ever have to get over the rest. We can just carry it all with us through every glorious love affair because we are awakened. I can keep loving him and when I meet my next great love (yes, I trust I am not done with love), I can use the flashcards to help discover the patterns in my pathology when it comes to attraction. I need to begin with Available (duh!), move on to Less Complicated, followed closely by Open and Honest … and go from there. Although, right now it’s way more tempting to just stay single! What you see is what you get. I am not special, I am unique. Authentic me is just gonna have to be enough for now.
Tags: cellular memory, dating, flash cards, grieve, inner child, journey, love, meditation, pathology, process, relationships
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Wednesday, August 10th, 2011
I met a woman at a bar – The Bombay Bicycle Club in Cape Town. I was wearing a big red bow on my head – I found it weaving my way back from the bathroom; a friend was speaking Swedish to anyone who would listen; her boyfriend was inhaling his Fettucini Fantasia, and this new friend and I were playing a divorce ditty on the bell above the bar.
Somehow surrounded by people who have all been going through divorce – one guy as young as twenty-eight! – it was polled that the grief and heartbreak you experience when getting divorced or splitting from your significant long-term partner is nowhere near the broken-hearted mess you become after the person directly afterwards leaves you. And my new friend decided, after talking to me, that she just might want to avoid falling in love again altogether … and with my manic grieving process who the hell can blame her!
It ultimately all boils down to those choices. I had choices when breaking up my marriage. I could have let go immediately but I chose to fight for years before realizing I was never going to be chosen and my stubborn side refused to believe it for so long that I delayed the inevitable and caused myself (and probably my whole family) a hell of a lot of unnecessary trauma in the process. We’d been together since god was a child; he was my best friend, and I kinda thought it would look bad if I had a failed marriage on top of having recently thrown in my career towel when I couldn’t come to grips with how depressed I was being a mother. I was attached and, yes, maybe the attachment was to several too many of the wrong things. The relationship had, after all, been fizzling out for a few years when it became all too clear that the power had shifted and I was not as significant an Other as I desired.
In an attempt to let him go, I wrote, I partied, I ran (and then some), I rang the bell and I slept out at friends more often than at home.
I have come full circle, except this time the heartache is more acute, having broken up at the explosion of love rather than in the smoky aftermath. It took a friend of mine recently to point out that I just don’t do things in half measures – all or nothing – and a little retrospective look revealed how I had been trying to squeeze myself into little spaces he had created for me in his life. My life, in contrast, was wide open to him and he chose not to fill any of the space.
So I have just repeated the pattern: I chose a new man to love who had tiny spaces in his life which I just never fit into … You think maybe it’s because my wings just got too big? 
Maybe I just want to be picked for the team or maybe the reason I run is because I don’t want to not be picked.
And, having come full circle, I repeat my process with the exact same coping mechanisms: again I write, I party, I run (and then some), I ring the bell and I sleep out at friends as often as possible in an attempt to wrap myself in the love I am perhaps recognizing finally as the more sustainable and worthwhile reflection of love there is. My coping mechanisms may have stayed the same but the grieving process is happening far quicker … no doubt because my lover is halfway across the world with his family and Absence does not, in my case, make the Heart Fonder … especially under the circumstances.
A friend said it was time to fall in love with myself and the rest would follow. It’s all about practice. You learn what you can handle, you learn what’s in your best interests and you just ‘lite’n up. Am I learning to let go easier or am I simply recognizing that when others let go, I need to accept defeat and walk away. It hurts to walk away from bliss … but when the split happens, it’s time to acknowledge that the bliss is now simply living in yesterdays that no longer exist. There is a time when all romance has to make way for reality.
The journey is all I have now to remember … it’s all I have and it will have to be enough. The destination may not be the one I chose but it’s the place I’m meant to be.
Tags: Bombay Bicycle, career, choices, divorce, friendship, love, marriage, relationships, running, spaces
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Friday, August 5th, 2011
“After we made love I knew it was over. Did I ever really love Big or was I addicted to the pain? The exquisite pain of wanting someone so unattainable?” – Carrie (Sex & the City)
So, in the interests of having a new blog post, I put myself on the couch yesterday to find this ‘Pain Body’ Eckhart Tolle and a friend of mine speak of … trying to figure out if indeed it has something to do with my attachments and my reluctance to let go.
The astrologer who last year predicted not only the demise of my marriage but also the end of my romance, suggested I document my grieving process photographically. But my rawness seems more appropriately exposed in my words rather than my image which, as my life takes a new shape, manages to conjure the joys of life even as those closest to me throw me safety ropes and pull me out of the gaping holes in the earth beneath my feet.
It took three years, a separation and a love affair before I could make a tiny bit of sense of why my marriage failed. It is only now, during this current grieving process over my Mr Big, that I have come remotely close to gaining clarity and a path back to the knowledge I was nowhere near ready to harness previously. It was only once I managed to disengage from my husband that I could access the parts of me that could grow from the experience … and it wasn’t so much the disengagement from the man that was so difficult as the disengagement from all the stuff that eighteen years naturally brings to a relationship.
As I now try and let go of my One, I see that there was nothing outside of the intense connection; the very core of knowing I was Destined to be with him. The purity of this attachment to only the Man somehow makes it feel harder. But I let go of him in the knowledge that there was nothing in the relationship other than a hope of a future that was never real and the fear of losing someone who was never mine. I have learned that being Destined to be Together does not automatically make it so, but comes with Choices that Enable it to happen. I fell in love with the unattainable. But, like Carrie, I was probably just addicted to the pain of not having the One thing I truly wanted. After all, I get to keep the love and just let go of the man.
But there’s something inside of me that just doesn’t want to. And this is perhaps the ‘Pain Body‘ I have been trying to figure out … that part of me that aches to feel the pain just a little bit more; that part that doesn’t want to forget how it felt to rest my head in that perfect place on his chest; the part that wants to remember the feeling of safety when wrapped in his arms; the part that hoped unrealistically that I would be his One too. As I torture myself over photos, emails and text messages, the pain speaks to me and feeds off the agony of not being chosen.
Would it be too easy to let go and move one? Or would moving on and letting go of the pain, also liberate me from the joy of having known such intense bliss? Can we even have the one without the other? Like the pendulum, the left is countered by the right … back and forth with moments of balance at the centre point. Grief and joy need not necessarily be opposites but conspirators to a fulfilled and balanced life.
I’m deleting photos and emails one by one. The journals and notes get gradually burned on the fire and I again sit down with Archangel Michael in his skimpy shorts, and seek the assistance of his big sword to sever those ties that connect my heart so steadily to that of my One. Once I have disengaged I will be in a better position to assess what this is all about. Who says you have to stay friends with ex-husbands and ex-lovers anyway?
Penelope van Maasdyk, you need to lie down on the couch again …
Tags: addiction, Archangel Michael, attachment, balance, choices, disengagement, divorce, Eckhart Tolle, grief, hope, joy, love, marriage, Mr Big, pain, Pain Body, relationships, Sex & the City, the One
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Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011
You simply have to look at my feet to find out how I’m coping emotionally. After several months of pretty toes and sling-back shoes, the skin on the soles of my feet are starting to crack, the tips of a few of my toes are opaque with blisters and a couple of my toenails are lifting ever so noticeably. And, as I reawaken the Forrest Gump within me, my emotional state is most likely going to turn all of my toenails black. When that happens, go easy on me – I may have a huge smile on my face but somewhere on a deeper level I am falling apart and through widening cracks that are simply reappearing due to bad workmanship. And if I’m wearing black nail varnish on my toenails best thing to do is approach cautiously … preferably with a bottle of bubbly and the promise of an all night party.
But as for the confession … I have been protecting the identity of my lover, so I thought, because of the many complications involved with the relationships I choose to pursue. But, as I disengage (or try to), I can’t help but wonder if perhaps it is simply myself I have been protecting. The cryptic ways I refer to love in my blog and the even more cryptic Facebook status updates … and, of course, the delicious pseudonym he has on my phone … are possibly my way of shielding myself from the judgement I am not meant to even be afraid of anymore. So, in the name of testing that theory and in the name of testing (again) who my true friends and followers are … I’m going extreme on confessions.
The man I chose to fall in love with; the man who held up that mirror to the butterfly in me; the man who inadvertently became my One shortly before leaving the country – and my life – forever, with his world in tact; the one who helped me heal from a broken marriage and brought me full circle to the broken-hearted pain I was in a year ago is … well, he’s Married! There, it’s out. I’ll be very clear here, I’m no victim in this. I knew everything. All I can say is that the part inside me that was seeking the attachment (my ‘Pain Body’ perhaps) only heard what it wanted to hear. Being played for the fool in love has gone around in my head over and over, so whatever all this makes you think of me is really none of my business.
So, now I move beyond the unmentionable and return to the love that causes the attachment that ultimately causes the grief that turns me into Forrest Gump with black toes that reflect the deepening cynicism in my soul.
But the process is like unravelling the silk from my cocoon to make a scarf. So that’s enough for one day. More tomorrow … after my next consultation with Mr Gump.
For now I end with Paulo Coelho’s 1-minute reading:
http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2010/08/11/manual-for-climbing-mountains-3/
I’m not going to tell you which mountains to climb but I will try and give you the courage to climb the ones you can’t avoid. So put on your Big Boots and get ready for an Adventure. There’s a lot of stuff that goes on between A and B.
Tags: attachment, butterfly, challenges, cocoon, Eckhart Tolle, Forest Gump, grief, judgement, love, marriage, Pain Body, Paulo Coelho, relationships, running, transformation
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Friday, July 8th, 2011
‘Lying on the kitchen floor, grabbing at ankles’, is the way a friend of mine puts it. It’s why she no longer wants to love again. And, as I simultaneously close the doors on my two greatest loves, I am getting a glimpse of what she means. I don’t want to do this again; I never again want to be blinded by love … no matter how sweet it sometimes tastes.
Some people believe that reaching 21 marks your rights of passage into adulthood. I disagree. It is only at 40 that one can claim to be all grown up. It is only at 40 that you truly shift gears. And my gears have been grinding their resistance to learning how to drive vintage. I haven’t come close to learning what I need to know … I have, however, come close to learning what I need to learn.
For starters, if I can’t live an ideal life without attachment, I need to learn to let go a little easier. It took me three years of agony before I could let go of my husband and if my new love wasn’t moving country, I might have made the same mistakes all over again. My life with my husband wasn’t a bad life; it just wasn’t my life. And through this torrid love affair, I have learnt how easy it is for me to slip out of my self. I love too much. I feel too much. I emote too much and, lately, I have been grabbing at ankles.
As I teeter on the edge of my emotional abyss, I try to be mindful of where I stand, of how far I look into the spiralling darkness, and of how I truly feel. I stand firmly in my present, assess my past and, with as little unrealistic hope as possible, plan for a future that brings a new me. And I fight it out with trust! … learning to take responsibility for the things I choose and the things I choose to believe. I have shed my cloaks but, as I stand here naked with just a gossamer overlay of cynicism, I recognise that I love with an often-frightening intensity and it’s not something easily matched. I no longer want to lie on the kitchen floor, feeding on scraps. I want the full meal. And I now want to cook it alone.
I know and I learn and, in doing so, I learn how little I know.
As Paulo Coelho says, “Live fully, love deeply and let go without bitterness.” Once the bitter bile stops rising, I may be able to master the art of letting go … if my heart doesn’t kill me first.
40 and all grown up? I doubt it. But I’m still growing.
Tags: 40, bittersweet, grown up, learning, lessons, love, Paulo Coelho, relationships, responsibility, rights of passage
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Monday, May 23rd, 2011
Out with the old and … so it seems … out with the new too.
And as I emotionally prepare for the coming void, I sit with the unstable feeling that always emerges when I recite my age-old mantra. ‘I am not enough.’ With each new heartbreak, it plays in a loop, reminding me that I am responsible for my own disappointments.
But the more I sit with it, the more I wonder. And the more I wonder, the more I talk.
And, talking yesterday to my fellow emotionally unstable friend, who is going through the same thing, and joking about our previous fighting talk about being airlifted and doing things differently … and never, ever getting emotionally attached to rebound guy … I vocalised something from deep within my consciousness, something that popped up like a bubble from the bottom of a bottle of Oddbins Rose Brut, causing us both to freeze before heading off in opposite directions to process the paradox. I said to her, ‘You know, Trace, I think I’m just too much!’
Too much. Yeah. Weird.
So, I figure, in my attempt to always try harder, be better and never fail, I have set myself up for the ultimate failure. In my eternal enthusiasm and optimism I appear invincible, I give too much and end up vomiting my vulnerability all over the place and haemorrhaging my heart. I am porous. I am too much and it is no surprise then that people retreat and expect me to carry the spaces. I am told to ask for help, to be more needy, to show that I need more than I am willing to take. But that would make me a person I’m not and, well, I kinda like the person I am.
So, now as I prepare for more heartache, I recite a new mantra, ‘I am too much.’ It’s only temporary but, with a little practice, it will swing the balance and help me live to love another day.
Tags: balance, emotions, heart, mantra, rebound, relationships, unstable
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Sunday, May 8th, 2011
I will begin by stating that I love my child since this is a detail that tends to get lost at moments during the reading of this blog. There were times when I wished him away … well there were times, once the morphine wore off, that I wished everything away … but that was pre all the adrenalin-junky leaps of faith that I have subsequently taken. I have lost him a couple of times … ok, not really lost him, but rather misplaced him … and it felt like my soul was being violently ripped from my body. And, you know something, I’m glad it happened. Sure, I wouldn’t wish to feel that agony and trauma ever again but I am thankful for the feeling that my world would end without him. That feeling made me acknowledge that I would cut off my right arm with a blunt saw to keep him safe … that feeling made me acknowledge that I am a person who has custody of a child … that feeling made me feel like a mother … finally.
I had a friend once who, when people asked her what she does, always began with, “I’m a mother”, before stating profession etc. For me my job came first, my hobbies next and the label, Mother, was tagged on the end as an after-thought, along with Wife … a possible explanation for my current relationship status.
Unprompted, this morning, my child climbed into my bed and gave me his interpretation of a bear hug. “I love you because you are my mum. Happy Mothers’ Day!” he said, and I wanted to cry for all the crappy days I’ve had as the difficult mother I am to my child … guilt creeping in more and more as he tidied his bedroom, cleaned up the TV room and threw his arms around me every chance he got.
I suppose my point is that although being a mother is not something I would have chosen and although I bitch about it constantly, it’s purely a branding issue and it has nothing to do with my son and the incredible person he is. Just because motherhood isn’t for me, doesn’t mean having this person in my life isn’t exactly how I want it to be. I needn’t slot into convention and I needn’t adopt the branding but today I acknowledge my role.
And on that note, as a single mum, I have to take the opportunity to wish all those hot mamas out there a Happy MILF Day.
Tags: baby, branding, love, MILF, mother, Mother's day, motherhood, relationships, role, wife
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Thursday, May 5th, 2011
fall |fôl|
verb (past fell |fel|; past part. fall-en |fôlen|) [intrans.]
1 move downward, typically rapidly and freely without control, from a higher to a lower level
A friend of mine, recently, challenged me on my definition of being in love. I love, fall in love, wrap people in love … all with effortless abandon. But what if the good is purely for the other and there just isn’t enough for myself? And what if, in falling in love, I am missing my own seemingly hidden agenda?
“It’s a delicious feeling learning to live with an open heart”, I enthused between sips of warming post-Atlantic Ocean swim tea. I don’t want to question something that feels so good. “Is it a heart thing or some other part of you?” he quizzed me. I automatically jumped to the obvious conclusion: he was asking about the sex. But, no, he meant something that highlights a fair amount of emotional instability. Somewhere hidden below the surface, I am allegedly blind to the fact that I am purely seeking those things in the other person that I lack in myself; I am giving love in exchange for affirmation … and I am giving it not from an open heart but from a depleted one. It’s a Band Aid patchwork.
Well, that’s the left-brain perspective.
The simple truth is that you can’t choose when you fall in love and who the falling’s with. It’s called falling for a reason and, like a girlfriend once said, “Falling in love; I wouldn’t wish it on anyone!” “Why?” I wanted to know. “Well,” she said, “hiking on the mountain, you lose your footing and you fall. Not only is it painful, it is also embarrassing, inconvenient and the recovery time can be long, frustrating and can really screw with your routine.” There’s really not that much lovely about it.
You can’t – and wouldn’t want to – plan a fall but, when it happens, the best you can do is relax, minimize the impact and make sure you don’t lie there bleeding for too long before you call for help … or before you slide even further down the mountainside. And the recovery? Well, I reckon you just have to sit it out and be patient because falling again sure isn’t gonna help.
Tags: affirmation, falling, heart, love, perspective, relationships
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Monday, May 2nd, 2011
I was speaking to a friend about long-term relationships. We got onto routine and how it’s supposedly normal for a couple to settle into something that feels comfortable for both of them and it’s fine to just accept this as it is and allow the boredom to creep in.
We all live within the confines of social boundaries and I can’t help thinking that the branding that comes with marriage, child, house, dogs, car, etc. is what drove me to divorce. Did it have less to do with wanting a divorce and more to do with wanting freedom … freedom from this cramped box of conformity that’s wrapped up in the illusion of this family vibe? Lately I’ve been taking a look at families from a different perspective. I see the way people in a couple fold in upon themselves … they buckle to pressures that require them to be something different for their partners and their children and their friends. They give up little pieces of themselves in order to be accepted by the people in their lives who help define them.
Where I disagreed with my friend was in the breaking of the norms. Sure, couples settle into a routine and sure that is a socially acceptable norm and one that brings so much comfort to so many people. But what if you are the type to doggedly resist that by trying to break the seemingly unbreakable mould of social conformity?
In the same way I backpack (wanting to move as soon as I have settled into a new place), I resist settling as soon as things become too normal. Getting married, having babies, buying houses … these are all milestones people use to settle even deeper into normality and routine, benchmarks around which they measure their movement towards successful human lives.
And then you get people like me. I wrote on my recent travels about not wanting to be defined by the place my roots sink into the ground but rather by the sky my branches are reaching towards. I want to climb mountains, sleep under the stars, swim in the Ganges and never use assets and responsibilities as an excuse to have anything less than an extra-ordinary life. I don’t want to be just another ordinary package holiday; I want to be unchartered territory. And I realise more than anything that I don’t have to be ok for everybody; I just have to be ok for me.
Tags: babies, backpacking, choices, conformity, crossroads, divorce, marriage, normality, relationships, routine, society
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Monday, February 28th, 2011
Since I announced that I was getting divorced, the questions have been … yes, besides relentless … focused predominantly on how our child is handling the situation. I used to dismiss people by saying he’s doing fine, he’s happier now that the conflict is no longer in his face every day and he is learning to develop separate relationships with each of us without the conflict over who is bringing him up more correctly. What I realize now, however, is as much as it matters how he is coping with the situation, it matters oh so much more how we are eliminating the fallout in such a way that all this ultimately becomes is another defining moment in his life
It has come at a time that I finally realize that this is it, that I am finally going to hit one of the biggest defining moments of my own life because, on the anniversary of announcing that I want a divorce, I finally know I am going to get one. I also know the climax came when certain defining moments in my life clashed with an almighty din with those in the life of my husband … defining moments based solely on the marital status of our own parents.
The child psychologist reiterates regularly through the couples counsellor that our child is holding out hope that his parents will get back together again; that we will once more live together as a family under the same roof. Not only does that give me a tremendous amount of hope that he has been relatively untarnished by this – after all what child would want that if his memories included witnessing on more than one occasion the glint on the Global knife as it was brandished, between tomato slicing, in the direction of his father – but it makes me realize that this is one of his first rights of passage, one of many in his life that will define his personality … and, let’s face it, we don’t get strength from the good ones.
The fundamental issue that arose when the divorce came up was, like I mentioned, our defining moments based on how our parents dealt with their respective marriages and the hopes we ourselves had as children … our very own rights of passage journeys that have made us who we are today and defined how we have dealt with what has been happening recently. For my husband, he has been fighting for the very thing he lacked growing up – a traditional family. For me, who had the traditional family, I have been fighting for freedom from the restrictions that creates. My husband has been trying to keep us together to break the pattern that was created in his life and I have been fighting against staying together for the sake of the child … simply because my rights of passage journey – my defining moment – was growing up holding out hope that my parents would split up, desperate for them to not stay together for the sake of the children, desperate for them to take responsibility for their own fucked up relationship and desperate to not feel guilty for keeping them together when it was quite obvious that they should have been apart.
It’s the very thing that will prevent us ever restoring this relationship. A couple can clash on a huge number of issues bringing up a child but when something at the very core clashes so convincingly you know that there’s just no fighting it any more.
Tags: clash, counseling, defining moments, divorce, hope, marital, marriage, motherhood, relationships, rights of passage
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