To my future Husband - Letter13

Hello my husband,
Wouldn’t it be nice if you were here with me now?  Yes, it would indeed! It’s a rainy Sunday night before a public holiday so chillaxing is in the air. I know it’s been a while since I’ve connected with you and so there is much to reveal as it has not been times of idleness. Oh no, by now you must know that when I go quiet it is because I’m captivated by the journey I’m on.
It’s obviously been a little rough at times, hence my silence. You’ll realise this about me, when I feel unsure of myself I go into overdrive, only to come out of t realising that overdrive was completely unnecessary and unhelpful.  Mind you, you’re taking your sweet time in coming into my life, so maybe I would have mastered it by then and you’ll just have this perfectly well-lessoned wife at your side...ha!ha!
I love to notice the divine synchronicity in life.  Sometimes it is in the actual moment and sometimes in hindsight.  The more painful lessons to go through are the ones where revelation come after the fact.  But the challenge is nonetheless invigorating because I suppose a part of me always knows that eventually I will see the perfection of the process.  The last couple of weeks I’ve held out for that moment and it was so sweet when it arrived I was moved to tears by the beauty in the way things unfold.
So The Baby House continues to grow step by step.  C & I obviously are witnesses and players in every tasty step of this project because it gives us the energy and sustenance to keep on going.  I realise that we will never quite be able to express to other just how incredible this journey is, but I guess it is for us, to feed us so that we can be who we are and who we will need to be in future.  We already marvel at the divine sequence of events as if we’ve been let into some of the secrets of the world, shown to those who dare to act on their dreams.
We opened our donation lines for financial contributions a week ago, and almost instantly I felt the fear pour into my veins in the chilling, icy way fear takes up residence in one’s whole body.  My anxiety was surrounding the issue of marketing.  We have the vision, we have a house promised to us, we have most of the goods we’ll need to furnish and equip the house, but what we don’t have is the connection and communication with our community. The cunning thing about fear, once again in hind sight, is that it blinds you to any progress or positive input that is actually occurring and holds you ransoms until you have solid evidence that you are once again in safe territory, for me, that is overwhelming confirmation that I am on the right track.  For some reason, when in the grip of fear my default page is perfectionism, which damnit how hard do I need to make life for myself.  I’m grappling with an area of my life that is unfamiliar and I opt for perfection as a source of security??!!? So if I had’ve asked you a week ago “Wouldn’t it be nice if you were here with me now?”  Your response, forgivably would have been “Hell no!” I was a nightmare unto myself.
One of the self help guru’s says that the most intimate relationship you have is with your own thoughts.  This is where my nightmare lay, deep inside of me.  I was trying to reconcile my vision with the reality and the perfectionist voice was translating this into personal lack.  Stubbornness to many voices telling us to just get corporate and international sponsorship, when my vision was that this is a community project and everything we need lies in our community.  Impatience, with my lack of just knowing the language of marketing.   Frustrated, that I didn’t do some formal training in marketing...I mean who tries to even do business without ‘branding’ and ‘marketing’ behind them in this Jo’burg day and age?And the pressure of an imagined time limit.  Despite the fact that between C& I we had accumulated a Public Service announcement from a nation television station; offer to produce from a reputable producer; advice from a marketing director of one of the biggest media companies in our country; and a connection with our local paper to do an advert.  My focus couldn’t see what we were doing was nothing short of amazing and insightful for two people who have never really played the marketing game.  I just felt nauseas and inadequate.  Well the universe had a plan to slap me back into the beautiful truth of our reality, because as sensitive as I can be to the ethers...I was way off track!
So honey, a couple of months ago I felt inspired to paint a picture.  As I do not have a degree in painting, I don’t really consider it anything I’d give up my day job for, but anyway for my own pleasure I painted a picture of an angel looking down and watching.  When I paint I go into a beautiful space and the picture seems to paint itself.  Another reason I don’t take credit for my painting.  This particular painting fills me with a peaceful feeling when I look at it.  I want to hang it above the babies changing compactum in The Baby House when we open. This past Thursday morning when I was getting dressed this picture caught my attention and the overwhelming feeling that the angels are indeed watching, filled me. I took a photo of it with my phone and changed the picture of the incredible orchids that E & I were given on New Years in Thailand with my angel painting. Even thought the nausea from my unconscious, subconscious and very conscious fear had prevented me from feeling any kind of peace or reprieve for the past few days, this picture added an air of willingness to allow the day to unfold as it needed.
Which, I clearly needed.  My schedule was renegotiated at every opportunity!  When I found myself passing time in a book shop (bookshops always have an awesome effect on my state of mind) I got a fleeting but clear message that there is no such thing as a waste of time.  Everything is just happening in time, as it needs to. The appointment I was waiting in the bookshop for was at four.  I got there on time, centred in the moment, and yes, I do believe I already knew that my client would not show.  I read the book I’d bought for thirty minutes, making intermittent calls to let my client know I was waiting and then started the traffic infused journey home.  Because of the traffic I thought I’d optimise my time by checking some emails on my phone, maybe send some text messages, so that when I got home, work for the day would be over. I pursued my thoughts and began resolving administrative peace while driving a bit, stopping and then driving some more, stopping.  At one point I had received a response from the client who’d just missed here session and as I completed my text to her, I saw my screen saver.  Once again I was filled with this wonderful feeling that we are tenderly being watched and I decided to stop multitasking and just drive.  For a moment I allowed the knowing that we are cared for and protected to fill my driving experience, I even wondered if the angels laugh or sometimes cringe at the way we behave on the road and then I returned to just driving.  It reminds me of the Japanese saying “When drinking tea, drink tea.” Just be present in what you doing basically.  Let that be enough.
Although I had all by focus on what I was doing, when the car in front of me suddenly started breaking and I consequently started breaking we both swerved an tried our best to avoid the inevitable.  I hit him at sixty kilometres per hour and the hit was so hard I saw all four heads in the car in front of me jolt forward and backwards violently.  My seat belt locked and I heard the disconcerting sound two cars make when they crash into each other. Due to the traffic, we tried to pull over to the side of the road to access the damage and exchange numbers, while drivers pulled past us hooting and swearing for the inconvenience we were causing them.  Suddenly my adrenalin rush stopped immediately and I felt a peculiar wave of peace rush through me. On the side of the road, we got out of our respective cars and there was nothing! Not a scratch, not a hint of the impact that had just shocked us all, nothing! The other driver shook his hands up at the sky and said “Somebody was watching over us!” I drove home on air.
I got out of my car, now in the safety of my own driveway and I looked at my car again.  Still nothing.  I had to phone C and tell her what had just happened.  And this is something I love about her. When I speak to her, I feel like she is right there.  C has the ability to go right into your experience with you.  She suggested that I pull an angel card, a practice I’ve abandoned for months now because I prefer to deny that part of me that sees cards and hears more than what the card is saying.  Two cards were stuck together and so I took both to be significant.  The first one read “A happy move to a new home or place of employment is in the works.  This movement will usher in positive new energy.” And the other message was “Victory! Your desires are coming into fruition.  Keep up the good work.” At that moment I noticed my nausea was gone.  Gone.  I had, as my mother would say, gotten my knickers into such a knot, that I had removed myself from the perfection and completion of the process, that it took a wake-up call, that thankfully didn’t have any serious consequences to make me see that I am enough. I am enough. I have not compromised The Baby House by not having a thousand degrees and that when I follow the guidance I allow into my space, I am enough!
I woke up on Friday still infused in the wonder of our massive lives and I felt a longing to see my folks.  I toyed with the idea the whole week on the periphery of my mind and trying to figure out how I was going to fit a sleep over at mom and dad, a birthday party, a birthday lunch, a wedding and catching up on some documentaries I’ve been dying to watch all into the three day weekend government South Africa have given us in the name of Human Rights day. I started developing a cold through the day on Friday that provided the ‘You Should’ part of my mind with the perfect alibi to take it easy. I had created the house to myself for four days, a massage and recovery time to give me what I actually needed...time away from the perfectionist who had taken up unwelcomed residence over the past couple of weeks.
After my out-of-this-world massage and a rendezvous at a new book shop on Saturday morning I headed to my folks for a sleep over.  Now I said you’d love my folks, and I’ll tell you again why.  There is no pressure essentially.  They do their thing and I can do mine and we give each other the necessary and easy attention.  So sitting on their couch on a Saturday means understanding that my mom is organising what she needs to with the nanny and the gardener and my dad is watching sport with perhaps a brother or three.  Never ever expect that at anytime you will gain more attention that the sport, you will however be brought into conversations that may or may not be relevant to you (this is how I’ve gained all the facts I have regarding sport of many natures).  But it is easy babe, once you stop competing with the telly for attention.  So I maximise this time by surfing the net, checking my emails or just playing some spider solitaire.  I get offered beers that I seldom accept, filled in with sports info and we laugh and chat in between tense times of viewing.  So whilst surfing the net I ‘accidentally’ come across a concept called ‘Citizen based Initiatives’.  As I read through the concept and ‘how to’ my vision for The Baby House as a community project is put into words. This is the point where I wept a couple of tears of wonderment.   My vision wasn’t an act of stubbornness; it is an actual concept, a reality!  C & I are not naive chicks trying to do things the hard way, our vision is rich and reciprocal and rewarding.  The perfectionist packed her bags and left.  She has no place with the fear she brings.  We can trust ourselves even if we don’t have the frikken degree that says we are qualified, we have enough between the two of us to have brought the project thus far.  And we have enough to make it unfold just as we see it every day in our minds’ eye. The website didn’t offer us anything new; we have everything in place they suggest.  In the marketing section the talk about using the voice of your local and national media, we had it before we knew it was exactly what we needed!
So I changed my agreement to be at the one birthday party and the wedding, just so that I can take this all in.  The perfection and beauty of it all!
So would it be nice if you could be with me now...sure.  But I know that you’ll be here when you are.  And in the meantime there is nothing I need to do to make that happen.  Otherwise I would be signed up in ‘The wife degree’.  Trust me!
I love you wherever you are,
Goodnight love!

To My Future Husband- Letter 13

Hello darling,

What an amazing weekend, a time of rich realisations.  C & I spent the entire day on Friday and the better part of Saturday organising and boxing all the goods that have been donated to The Baby House thus far.  It was incredible to see how much we have collected so far, I could barely sleep on Friday night I was so excited for our beautiful vision that is unfolding in front of our very eyes!  This process was not just about a recon, it was about physically touching the produce of our dream and realising the power of compound wealth.  Compound wealth?  You know when you make a little contribution everyday it adds up to something, well, mind blowing!  I am so inspired by the power of community!

A friend was a little anxious to take her girls to a birthday party where she wasn’t sure who she’d know. It turned out that she knew a couple of people she actually hadn’t seen for years and they knew some people in her life and of course they had the party-thrower in common.  This just reminded me that our network is connected to so many networks; and when the day comes that we through huge fundraisers, our guests will realise that they know the same people, they will reunite with long-gone friends and make new ones.  At the centre of this will be The Baby House, the generation that is our focus and responsibility. Together we are very powerful!

We all need other people in our lives, no matter who we are or what we are trying to achieve.  The theme going around and around in my mind and experience lately is how everything we need, want and desire is right here.  It requires courage to see it, forgoing the fear that it’s going to be mundane or not what we want. Or worse, that we daren’t think of ourselves as fabulous enough to realise what we dream.  I went out on a limb today and told a friend something that is obvious to me, but somehow manages to elude him, and I’ve witnessed him search for his genius for years now.  My fear of telling him was so silly, I thought that if I was generous of spirit with him that he’d think I wanted something from him and that I was attempting to flatter him in exchange for a higher opinion of me.  This, as I said was silly, because I was withholding something great that I could see in him due to my own fears around what other people think my motivations might be.  I am a great teacher of a very wise saying: “What you think of me is none of my business.”  And it is so true that what you teach is what you must learn.  This is a good example of fearing one’s power hey?  So we don’t only need other people in our lives, but we need people who are courageous enough to give us back to ourselves.  I would not be where I am in my life if I didn’t have so many people courageously acknowledge what is powerful and true in me enough times for me to start trusting what is powerful and true about me.  By the time we are adults, we have so many shitty beliefs about ourselves and the gift of new and deep relationships is they undo all the shitty things we’ve come to believe. 

I didn’t grow up with a family that gush compliments and encouragement.  Flattery was present but never helpful.  I’m gaining more and more confidence in being generous with my own spirit and trusting myself enough to know that it will be received as flattery by some and life changing to others, but my responsibility is just to say what feels true to me.  I can’t say that I always know exactly what it is that I do or say that has an effect on some one’s life, what I do know is that when I show up honestly and follow that which I feel compelled to be, it has brought more healing than hurt.

I trust that you are exactly where you need to be and that we are journeying toward each other every day that my heart remains open to you.

Sleep tight!

Your wife.

To My Future Husband- Letter 12

Now Husband,

Please don’t judge me for having a life changing realisation learned from watching a completely engrossing and somewhat overly-dramatic tv series.  I believe in giving credit where credit is due, so I’m not going to pretend that an intentionally scripted line didn’t cement something that has seemed a little elusive to my understanding of what I seek in a life partner.

I know why I’d marry you.

Yesterday Dibs and I had lunch, and as always we discussed (debated would be more accurate as we often seem to come from such different perspectives) love.  Well we didn’t really talk about love directly, we spoke about how we each thought our relationships would need to be to keep us interested and committed for years. And although I have the capacity to know that Dibs is a separate person from me, after leaving lunch with him I argued in my mind with his vision of a love relationship.  I wasn’t thrown by his connection to his own needs and fantasies as much as I was thrown my mine.  I suddenly couldn’t put into words an argument for what or even why I would want a relationship to be a certain way, what my life partner would need to be like or allow me to be because everything that came out of either of our mouths was so obviously hypothetical to me.  I didn’t argue for love, for consistency, for freedom, individuality or commitment.  And I couldn’t take a stance against his theory that there will be a level of hate and resentment where there is love.  Which in itself is miraculous because I can give a five minute monolog without taking a breathe on how peaks and troughs of apparent love and hate has nothing to do with actual love but is co-dependency and the need for drama coupled with projection and the misplacement of need dressed up as love.  No, I didn’t.  I wasn’t even disappointed that someone who I have much love for wasn’t necessarily seeking happiness for himself in a long term relationship.

I have been very busy lately, so I continued my busy day, and the conversation with Dibs, even though he wasn’t actually a fellow converser or even physically present, for the rest of yesterday and even returned to it for split moments through today.  My perplection (sorry, for making up my own word, but the dictionary or at least my spell check should consider some expansion) had nothing to do with my good mates view on love, it had to do with all the theories we have on relationships, which is completely useless when looking back honestly on past times of love.  None of mine has been check-list relationships and they’ve been satisfying, loving, fun and well, perfect for that time.  None of them happened because I knew what I wanted and was ready for a relationship.  And none of them ended because my partner stifled or disappointed my vision of love.  So, very untrue to my character, I found myself at a loss for words discussing one of my favourite topics...love.

I had a great day, in fact I’ve had a great week because I am realising a dream as it is unfolding and every moment is delicious, every moment is allowed to be celebrated because it is the most thrilling journey to be in!  I have been sleeping less than I think I’ve ever slept, because I’ve never felt this alive, or this connected with my life.  The more in life I am, the harder I am finding it to talk about life because words fall short, thoughts are laboursome because you can only express one at a time and keeping quiet and feeling each minute unfold into exponential power is something I don’t mind not having to describe to anyone else.  I just smile a lot.  So when talking on a beautiful level is what I love best, it was a little strange to find the thought of contemplating how love would need to be in future to keep our attention, pointless.  Not to be confused with useless thought, because our lunchtime ‘relationship’ conversation added a fascinating dimension to my client session after lunch. I didn’t sit with a fantasy or opinion on love, which ironically helped my client clarify so much in her relationship, and I still have no idea how she got there from our chat...but she did.  Thank you Providence!

After a day of pretty hard physical labour, I copped out of a social arrangement for a night of mind-numbing American drama, only to get an answer to the question running around backstage for the past 30 hours.  I’m not going to marry you because you are financially stable, well-read, fit, non-addicted etcetera, etcetera.  I’m not going to love you for being romantic and genius at being completely in sync with me.  In fact my decision to couple with you is going to come from a place that has little to do with me, though I can’t deny that I will benefit greatly from it.

I will marry you, because you like who you are.

X

To My Future Husband- Letter 11

To My Future Husband- Letter 10

Morning Baby!

You don’t need to feel any pressure to complete me, I come to you fairly intact and with a deep sense of purpose and belonging already.  I bring with me the ability to be in love with life, independent of our relationship.  Today I can feel life running through me, and my vision for this life is shining through me.  You know why I’m here babe?  I’m here to inspire greatness!  Greatness in everyday life is overlooked way too much, which leaves a lingering pain of lack and struggle.  I am a committed searcher, guiding other searchers to find fulfilment.  However the word ‘searcher’ is very misleading in that it implies one end result, one sense of completion at the end of the longest journey.  I see my searching differently.  It is searching that allows me to collect pieces to a picture that is always complete, it just gets bigger and added to with every new realisation.

From this perspective, there are no ‘holes’ or ‘missing pieces’ and most importantly...there is no waiting!  For many years I have felt a you-shaped hole in my heart.  In fact anyone who has left my life seemed to take their little shape in my heart with them....apparently.  Today I set that record straight because to walk around with holes in ones heart makes for patchy-living and painful waiting.

I didn’t necessarily wake up feeling this way this morning.  I woke up feeling a little bleak in fact.  There was however, a little gap between feeling bleak and an opportunity to feel different.  I wrote down my vision for different aspects of my life.  I looked at how I saw my life in 5 years time.  I wrote about what I do want because the little bit of bleakness I felt this morning, I’ve felt before and it tends to natter on about what I don’t  want...not helpful!  There was no actual reason to feel bleak except for an empty space in my day due to a client postponing.  From experience I have learned that just keeping myself busy to avoid feelings of boredom and fear of not contributing enough to my projects, is not productive or inspiring in any way!  I contemplated in our beautiful garden how many people feel stuck or bored because there is a sense of being trapped in life as we know it.  And then I thought...what a load of bullshit!!  This is not my truth!  This is not what I have spent the last 15 years studying, living and researching.  I don’t even like thinking this thought! This is not the truth at all!

I know how we got here though.  I know how I take myself there with thoughts of bleakness being in charge, by the mere fact that I’m in a habit of thinking them!  But what about the evidence in my life of moments of greatness?  Why don’t I count them and hold them in a more prestigious place by focussing on them?  I chatted to you last week about feeling like something wasn’t in my life, I think it was intimacy that I was lamenting about on that particular day.  And my words weren’t even chilled by the air yet when one phone call from a friend brought my attention to the reality that I have incredibly deep and intimate relationships with many, many people in my life.  In fact I don’t do any other way of relating to people, or myself.  I had spun a web of lies around me about being fearful of intimacy, not being able to be in a committed relationship, until...and you could have blown me over with a feather, I realised that there is no other way for me to be with another.    I had relegated myself to the “Incapable of connecting” team without opening my eyes to the obvious!  So my point is that often we are so busy regurgitating a sad, sad story that the delightful presence of our deepest desires goes unseen.  This does not equate to the absence of our dreams and hence our unworthiness to have them.

So yes, this morning the opportunity to slip into the possibility of connecting with the beautiful experience of life we crave all day while listening to our habitual crap about how difficult it is to have the life we want, I looked up to the sky and I was jolted into a reality that was so perfect, so rich with life, so incredibly beautiful and my heart cracked open into a feeling of being in love and life poured in.  Without any words or visions a knowing exploded in me that reminded me of the completion of my life.  It reminded me of talents and gifts that I have sitting in my heart’s storeroom waiting to be used and developed.  One of which is my understanding of the possibility of each of us to dance to the rhythm of our greatness.  Although I have years of reading and experience behind me, none of this is of any value with my heart shut and my thoughts left to their own devices.  Because left unattended, my thoughts are going to take the easy road, they going to repeat the thoughts they’ve thought the most and ignore the glaring opposite thoughts because new thoughts might conjure up new thoughts and  new experiences that require unfamiliarity to come for tea. 

I’m not sure why it is almost an organic experience to live in familiarity. It certainly isn’t a pleasurable ride!  And uncertainty is not the worst house guest to have around.  Within seconds of inviting this unattractive guest in a new world opens up that brings not only relief but reassurance that our biggest dreams and desires are not only possible but inevitable if we just stay tuned into this station a little longer and tune in again tomorrow and the next day!

So I come to you whole babe.  I don’t have a list of activities I have to carve out of our time together so that I can feel filled-up enough to give on the level that feels inspiring to me.  I just have to remember to keep my heart open and to let life in.

In the moment everything I need shows up

I love you,

Me. x

To My Future Husband- Letter9

Hi Hon,

So I survived Valentine’s day, it wasn’t too bad once I resolved not to listen to the radio for the day so I wasn’t privy to strangers publically describing their romantic lives.  I know it’s a bit pathetic for a woman of my calibre to be jealous of strangers, it should be beyond me right?  I got wished happy Valentine’s day though by three little boys, in fact they made me a book mark, which really warmed my heart that they know how much I love reading.  It’s one of those wooded sticks the doctor uses to check out your red tonsils, with a heart stuck to the top.  It’s very sweet and it will last longer than a card they might have made for me, that I’d probably use as a book mark which would probably fall in the bath when I was reading and get thrown away a lot sooner than my designer hand-made book mark.  Our gardener was the first to wish me happy Valentine’s day, and then our local coffee shop owner, who C, the other founder of the Baby House and I frequent for the great coffee and free wi-fi.  So it was a nice day, just because it was a nice day.

This morning as I was awakening a got a whisper in my ear.  I’m not sure what else to call the insights I get at that time of day, a message from a part of me that isn’t my mind, but that I hear anyway?  Call it what you like, but the quality of these whispers are different to ‘an idea’ or ‘a plan’.  They normally have a sense of being quite profound mixed with a ‘use it don’t use it’ kind of a vibe. I’m not explaining it well, which doesn’t reduce any relevance, so I’ll get on with my point.  The whisper was that if I saw myself as divine, I’d be able to accept another loving me with all their being.  Like I said, profound!  Because I was still awakening my monkey mind didn’t even argue, my planner didn’t exalt with satisfaction for receiving the answer, I merely continued waking up.

Then in the shower I asked the ethers to illuminate the invisible cloak around me.  Oh wait a sec, before I got out of bed I pondered the thought that I’m not inherently undesirable, but that I have many thoughts that make me believe I’m undesirable.  In some way this settled my ‘waiting for you’ feeling because I knew in that moment that essentially I am ok, and I’ll get to you some day.  So back to the shower, I asked the ethers for guidance.  That’s the way I roll.  When I’m seeking something, anything, I ask for it to come my way.  Most of the guidance comes to me, and in many cases it is people or through people that I am granted the answers I seek.  Like with setting up the Baby House, everything we’ve realised we need access to like a lawyer, an accountant, information around a thousand details have come to us once we’ve said...”This is what we need”.  It really is fun love and this is a large part of what adds to my aliveness and mover-shaker energy.  The unanswered requests are the ones that I think I have an opinion about their level of difficulty in manifesting.  Like you and money for my personal life.  Both of which we have introduced and will get back to many times in this conversation, but I digress.

So I asked for insight into all the thoughts that hold me back from a loving relationship.  Whilst washing my hair I thought of how painful it will be when my folks died.  I’m not scared of my own death, I think.  But I’m fearful of other’s leaving.  In that moment a massive fear came up.  I’m scared of you dying, I’m scared of being left...before I’ve even met you!  Now I know I’ve had this thought before, but a different perspective came through this very morning.  Accompanying that thought was a memory of something I’d read recently, that our fear of death reveals our fear of life.  The significance of remembering that showed me the fabric of my invisible cloak.  You see, I think my biggest fear came true nearly ten years ago.  Or perhaps it’s become a fear because it was such a massive pain.  You see in high school my focus wasn’t really on boys because I wanted to make sure I gave myself every opportunity to make a good future for myself, one which involved not falling pregnant before I was educated and stable.  So when my best friend Mandy and I made a truce in early high school to keep our virginity till we matriculated it was so aligned with my need to keep my future bright and full of opportunities that it was a promise I found easy to keep.  My relationship focus in high school was with my best friend and our wider circle of friends, which included my brother and his friends.  Mandy and I were very close; we shared our dreams and our day-to-day dramas.  We started working in high school which took us out of our non-working friend’s social life of weekend parties and put us in a different social life that involved waitressing and socialising after work with work friends.  It gave us the edge in a relatively working/middle class community and together we felt like we were carving one hellava bright future.  We had cash saved by the time we finished school to buy out first clap-down set of wheels, we could pay a large portion of our university fees, we could take gap years and backpack all because we started earning money at the age of fifteen.

Nine years and three months ago Mandy committed suicide.  My heart literally broke.  I didn’t even know it had broken or what a broken heart actually entailed.  It wasn’t nights of mellow-dramatically missing an ex-boyfriend.  It became fear.  Fear of being left.  And then it became numb.  I can’t be left if I’m numb, I can’t be left if I don’t make plans with anyone, I can’t be left if I never connect with you and dream a future.  This experience in the context of many other hurts, I think may have created a significant part of my invisible cloak.  Of course my psychologically learned mind would speak differently claiming to have ‘processed’ all that.  But the fact that my chest aches when I write this all to you, tells me a different story.  It was such a shock when Mandy died, I felt like she hadn’t even given me a clue.  How could you share the deepest part of your hearts with each other for more than ten years, through some hectic times, and not know that one of you was planning to die.  Just before she died I had my first psychic experience in that I sat next to a man and I ‘saw’ his whole life.  Well maybe not his whole life, but I saw themes in his life, blocks, pain he hadn’t processed coupled with his desire to move forward, his hidden talents and possible healing to bridge his current situation with his dreams.  This moment was powerful for him and I as I shared with him what I saw. When I walked away I couldn’t feel my feet, I felt as if I was gliding.  Now at that time I was  three years into my psychology course, I had a psychic experience under my belt, so you could understand my anger and frustration for not even having a hint that Mandy had lost all hope in life and didn’t want to be here anymore.  It was easier to go numb.  I was devastated.

So I have remained popular and casual in my relationships.  I have bazaar back-up plans for any relationship ending. And so that is what I create, a lot of relationships ending and the fear of my family members dying.

Wow!  I didn’t expect the conversation to get so deep so quickly.  I didn’t realise this all in the shower.  I’ve been aware of how I get close, but not close. And how when I’m missing someone who is not here I philosophise it all, but I didn’t expect to feel this much pain in my chest now writing about this all.  The thought that triggered this was a frequent thought of what is it that my friends or people in my life feel when they are with me, that makes them want to be with me?  Why would someone love me, even when I hold back?  I can acknowledge that I give a lot, but it feels like I’m missing something.

Don’t go anywhere, I just want to take this call.

It’s almost silly to have just said that because I wouldn’t say I feel that as a truth all day, every day.  True to their make up, the ethers have provided another slant on this all.  A friend, who I’ve walked a long journey with as a therapist and a friend has called to let me be the first to know about a rather miraculous situation which has seemed hopeless for the last few months.  I’m the first to know because it is confidential and because it is the sum total of everything she believes I’ve taught her about faith, about the fairness in the universe and the power of integrity.  I do get close.  I in fact get very close and intimate with everyone who is in my life.  I have rich relationships and I am important in other people’s lives.  I’ve just got to stop telling myself that I’m not and allow myself to burn the plan B for when these people might leave.  Easier said than done, but you are now officially welcome into my life, even if you should decide one day that you need to leave.

I’m humbled by this moment.  I’ve always known that everything I want is right here, I just need to drop a belief and I’ll see it.  Are you right here?  Are you already in my life and I just can’t see you?

Love your wife.

To My Future Husband- Letter8

Morning love,

Happy Valentine’s day darling! You see, I can get into the spirit of things if I don’t feel excluded.  When I was in high school I felt excluded.  We had a fundraiser every Valentines where you could buy roses and chocolates and send them anonymously.  The morning of February fourteenth started with the teacher handing out these private orders and it was for the whole class to see who were the most coveted students, you know...in that way.  Don’t get me wrong, I was popular, and because of the adolescent age a little feared by the socially inept because of my popularity, but my popularity was platonic, not romantic.  And once again, because of the adolescent age, it made me feel like I was good enough for a friend, a leader and a good party, but not as a girl friend.  I suppose some night these days I still feel that when I fill the space next to me in bed with pillows so that my bed doesn’t feel empty.  Or when I sleep next to a guy friend and I say “No funny business” and they actually don’t even try any funny business.  In high school I’d get one or two roses or chocolates from either a guy friend, or a guy who felt so out of my league (you know how hierarchical high school socialising is.) that it had to be anonymous otherwise he’d suffer humiliation for making such a ridiculous gesture from my guy friends or brothers. 

Now at this stage of my life nothing much has changed.  I’m a sort after friend by women and men, and a stalked lover, by well people that would stalk.  I try not to go to that place in my monkey mind that says I have an invisible cloak around me that doesn’t allow someone like you in.  And because I’m at this stage in my life and I have good insight to my monkey mind I can’t blame it on the external factors in my life because I’ve had times when my body was in good shape for years, as was my bank account.  These coincided with happy days and a trendy hair style and I still didn’t attract you to my honey pot.  So I’m left with two options it seems, either you are exactly where you need to be, and it is just a matter of time before we meet and make a happy couple who has a happy family.  Or, there is indeed a big sign on my forehead that says ‘Stay away from this chick’.  Because I’m in a good mood and it’s not bleak-week, I’m going to choose the former and try to celebrate all the tokens of love I’m bound to see today, knowing that one day we’ll be a part of this day that very publically and somewhat ostentatiously celebrates romantic love.

Happy Valentines love!