Un-understandables

You can all relax now, I've officially identified the most ridiculous part of being a parent: comforting your precious babies through the voluntary absence of the other parent.

I've probably said this in the past, and I used to see my Dad once per year, for a month in the summer.  I'd miss him fiercely all year, then feel trepidacious leaving the comfort zone of my mom.  I'd love being there, a state away, with my Dad.  I was so grown up.  I did things I'd never do in California, mostly that meant being by myself for stretches of time unheard of in my Mom's care.  I could go anywhere, do anything, plan my day and then do something else. No one was there to say no, or yes.  If I rode my bike allllll the way across town, then there I'd be, with the consequence of now needing to pedal all the way back.  When it was time to load me back onto a California bound plane I would be stressed outright.  We'd be late, my luggage barely being tossed into the plane's belly, the front desk person throwing annoyed looks.  I'd be stressed because if I was late my Mom might decide that this was the last unacceptable flaw to my summer visits and I'd not be allowed to see my Dad again.  I'd be stressed because my Dad's roommates and friends would be standing there in the airport in their river shorts and ripped/no shirts, scraggly and tanned, to say goodbye to me too and I didn't want them to see how sad I was.  How near I was to bawling.  I was so very sad to be leaving my Dad for nearly a year and I hated missing him.  That feeling, it's a very specific one, and it's impact hadn't punched me in the face in long while. 

A year and a half ago this very feeling showed up on my child's face when her Daddy told her he'd be no longer living here.  You should know that this feeling is the worst feeling I had as a kid- complete helplessness.  It is wanting something that is vital to your life force, something that you are incomplete without, and having people you love take it away.  It's incomprehensible.  There is a tight squeeze around my heart- it pumps harder, my throat closes up, painfully and I sweat.  My feet chatter on the ground and I can't stop chewing the insides of my cheeks.  I talk about random things.  Nothing makes me feel better.  Suddenly here it was again, this time on the face I love the most.  I was looking at myself, losing my dad and feeling like this couldn't be so.  Then all of the reasonings and thoughts to make the situation be less devastating pour out of her, because there must be a mistake.  We adults must have overlooked the obvious solution, if we could just let her fix/mend/behave these wrenching consequences away.  I'm not sure I've ever been so angry.  Besides knowing that divorce was not going to be a part of her life, I'd never imagined needing to defend my daughter from this old feeling.  I was in a panic, enraged, desperate to get her past the moment where the world changed.  I later wrapped my whole body around her, having coached her into some measured breathing, still feeling the tremors of a meltdown move through her, and I imagined all the yuck of the world trying to get past my cocoon, trying to stain her loving heart.  In my mind I succeeded in all the right ways, but the worst offender wasn't outside, he was in.  And I have no say in that.

She is having these attacks of reality more often lately.  She lays in bed, holding back scathing accusations at the world about not seeing her Daddy enough, and eventually they spit out of her bright red, crumpled face.  Two or three words at a time I get the story.  I agree with all of it: the unfairness, the un-understandables, the inquiry as to why.  She told me last night that she felt like she was going to explode.  She told me tonight that it felt like, "I cracked my head open again, only my heart feels cracked not my head".  I see it in her eyes and in her defensive body language.  She is in it.  She's there, where I was, and she is feeling so helpless and out of control and longing.  I squeeze her and she wraps her legs in knots around mine.  Maybe if I squeeze her just so, it will wring all of this ick out of her tender heart.  I keep her there until she is asleep.  Heavy.  Twitching.  At peace.

New day, new male cow excrement

Remember those weeks where you just wanted to bury yourself in bed and let the throbbing tragedy be muffled by your heavy, depressed slumber?  Yeah, that.  I just watched my entire paycheck be gulped down by a bill that I spent the previous hour frantically making phone calls to avoid.  The ding of my phone notifying me that my account is now hundreds of dollars overdrawn brought me back into the comforting arms of my bed.  Children still needed through my tears.  So and so looked at me this way.  I can't find my fairy house.  Look at this octopus I made with bendy straws.  Why are you crying.
I lie to my children a lot.  I carefully picked over the real reasons I was crying, an exercise that dove me deeper into the sadness.  The final response- after it was weighed for the possible level of inquiry it would illicit and the amount of life altering thought processes it could set off, was that, "I'm sad about the way I wish things could be." My eldest accepted that answer, responded, "I love you Momma" and left the room.
A friend told me that these challenges are being given to me in this life because I am being called to "level up".  On the path to enlightenment there are obstacles and navigating them is the test.  I don't like it.  I am very, very attached to the way I want things to be. I've let go of the physical manifestations- the house, the yard, the marriage.  Now I just want the peace.  I want a break from defending my children's growing up against the chaos that disguises itself as faithful, truest love.
On that note, I also want to say: faithful truest love doesn't ask you to be someone you're not.  It doesn't fight for you to have angry relationships with other people.  It doesn't leave you in lurches of sadness while it goes off and shares it's body with another before coming back to you.  It doesn't require you to tippy toe about, just in case it is having an insecure moment.

I'm not delusional about what love looks like.  I think it allows for all parts of oneself to be perfectly present, even the yucky parts.  I think the results can't be that you are left questioning and stressed and turned upside down and wondering what essential parts of yourself need to be remedied.  No.  That is not it at all.

Imagined Life (written mid-May)

What makes a particular day hard?  I don't get it.  Why is it that tonight I am sitting here with the tightness in my throat and a burning ebbing in my eyeballs.  Nothing has changed.  And then why do I fire up the Adele Pandora station, letting the musical mood draw my tears to spilling over?

It's a weird thing to think about him as once my partner and lover.  I cannot imagine being naked with him.  Yet I did it all the time, for years.  Where did that feeling disappear to?  Was I really a part of that story?  Maybe it was just a novel that I read voraciously over and over.  I read it so that it became a part of who I was.  But since I wasn't really there, it makes sense that I don't have that specific experience to call on.

He is here sometimes and he hugs me like he is coming home from so far away.  His body feels like a place I want to stay forever.  I feel loved, held, cherished, appreciated.  He smells like home.  He feels like home.  He is still the man who left us.  How can I possibly feel so much peace in his arms.  It makes no logical sense.  And then he leaves again.

Saving Myself a Little

I am trying to be in a relationship.  Ha- "trying" to be, maybe that's the problem. Anyhow, I am noticing things.  Noticing the places where I begin to feel uncomfortable.  Noticing that these places are revealing a pattern.  I often visualize the needing person, pulling, pulling, pulling.  How unattractive that is.  How it leaves no other option but to resist.  This reminder gives me relief for a bit.  Pulling is hard work.  Then I settle back into the pulling.  However, the awareness is growing and I am confident that standing upright will win out the more I practice.

Tonight I was noticing.  I noticed how few texts I received from this new possibility of mine. I noticed how our chance meeting at the grocery store, his sweet interaction with the kids, resulted in no further reaching out tonight.  I sat here and figured out all the reasons why: I was too pushy for sex and now everything's fucked.  The sight of me flopped into a camping chair by the lake all day in my bathing suit was enough to send him packing.  My awkward conversation starters, an attempt to break into him further, were off-putting and lame.  My skin is too damaged, the up close make-out sesh was too gross- I'm better off being seen from a distance.  As you can see, I have all the answers.

Then there's the me that isn't willing to listen to all that bullshit, she's my best girlfriend.  She's the part of me that isn't going to let all that bullying settle in, make itself comfortable and sabotage what could very well be a good thing.  She points out that he has, more than once, mentioned how captivating my eyes are.  He has also made at least three future (we're talking a few months out) dates with me that I now have on my calendar.  He has mentioned that our age difference is something I should think about, because in 20 years it will be much more noticeable.  He has driven me the 30 seconds home to my mom's house every time I've come over, even though I've pointed out how easy it'd be for me to walk.  He has treated me on every outing.  He has defended my honor in a parking lot shenanigan.  He talks to me endlessly.  I mean, really.  It would seem that the guy likes me.

Tonight I decided to explore a meditation that is intended to facilitate healing the parting of soul mates.  My ability to descend into gut crushing sobbing at the loss of my marriage is so raw that I figured it couldn't hurt.  Some of my inner commentary is new since he left, much of it is old, but there is some nasty new stuff.  It has a lot to do with staying safe.  I guess most of that crap is designed to keep a person safe, because at some point it made sense to protect myself using these shields.  But over time they have devolved and become diseased and now just serve to keep me down, keep me quiet, keep me small.  One of these barriers shows up like: offering my physical self while keeping my heart tucked away.  It is DEFINITELY NOT SAFE TO SHARE YOUR HEART.  Big ouchies are on the horizon if you do!  Beware!

Surprisingly enough, keeping my heart out of things leads to those things being devoid of feeling and meaning.  Those things that are not nurtured by the heart are the things that die.  I have littered the past year and a half with hardly felt connections.  A few of those men were certain I was the one.  But they just couldn't quite get to me,  They couldn't name what it was that was just out of reach, while I knew fully that I wasn't available for such grand gestures.  I wasn't playing my full hand.  No sir.  Not gonna.

Anyhow, this meditation.  I sat in my bright blue spinning computer chair with the meditation up on my computer screen.  I reread it.  I closed my eyes.  I got grounded.  I felt the heaviness of my body in the blue cushion, I felt the pressure of my feet on the carpet, I felt the chair against my bare back and I exhaled and sank in further.  Then, I called out for her.  She knows me better than anyone.  She's gorgeous.  She comes like a glowing hippy goddess from the edge of the woods and joins me in the meadow.  This time she has a fawn with her.  She is beaming, so happy to see me.  We settle in the bright, new, soft grass.  She looks to me.  It occurs to me I just want to be held.  For the briefest second I resist this- it's not written in the meditation.  Then I figure if it came to me, I must need it, and so I ask her to just hold me for a moment.  She does.  I get small, curled into her lap, head resting on her chest.  And then I lose it.  I am sobbing.  It's so sudden and so complete that I'm in a bit of awe at the shift.  And so I sob, deep and fully.  I feel like I could vomit from the heaving in my belly.  This goes on for a few minutes before I'm finished.  I had no intention of feeling all of that, and because I did I want to ask, "What in the hell was that?!" but I decide to trust in the process and keep moving forward,  I tell her I want her help with some healing.  I tell her I am open to more than just her help, if there are others then please, come help too.  At that a breeze blows in the sweet smell of sugar pine and warmed grasses, the feeling of the sun becomes apparent on my shoulders and I am certain this is a response to my invitation.  An image of my dad even appears, inviting me to be his daughter again and feel my sadness against him, to let him take my burden, to let him take care of me in ways he probably longs to.  This brings on the tears again, but this time I can keep moving forward.  In her lap still, sweet air in my nostrils and warmness covering my body, we explore the etheric cord that Ethan and I share.  The cord is looking pitiful, to be honest.  There is a weak golden light still moving through, connecting us.  However it is badly damaged.  Most of it is dark and decomposing.  It pulses red and angry occasionally and when I have finally followed it to him, he is sitting on his beach, knees to his chest, looking sadly out onto the kelp littered bay.  And so I begin to push bright, golden light from myself through to him.  The light is powerful and strong.  It heals and heals and heals all the way up to him where it is slowed momentarily from actually filling him because of a black plug just before his heart.  But it gets him.

I don't want to say I know how this will manifest in my life.  I do know I want to do this again and again.  I want to heal and exist in a loving space that isn't cluttered with my past upsets and inability to live peacefully in his choices.  I feel tired now.  Lighter and heavier all at once.