Undone

I only had one serious relationship before my husband, and what I remember most was not knowing how to handle him. He was like no man I had met before. He wanted to talk to me, take me out to restaurants and to movies. He was interested in more than just the physical, and I was unsure that I would be able to maintain his affection in this way. At that time no one else had ever looked at me like that, never treated me that way. He demonstrated that I was worthy, and even though our relationship was short-lived his treatment left such an imprint on me that for all the years that followed I held the memory of it close. It was important for me to recall it; it was important that I not lose the knowing of what that felt like.

The last time we spoke was a few months after I’d become pregnant and moved back in with my mother. He called to check on me, to see how I was. He told me he’d started dating someone that he had a couple of classes with and that they had the same major. As he spoke I pictured them walking across the campus of our local technical college, and I reviewed my own self, on the phone in my childhood room at 17 years old, my abdomen growing. My life would have been different if only a few months before I became pregnant I hadn’t decided that he deserved better. I had compared his ambitions to my lost state, and as it was it felt easy to let him go.

I don’t know why I chose to allow so few of the experiences of my childhood and adolescence shape the overarching view that I had of myself, but somewhere between elementary and middle school I started to see myself as unimportant. The vigor and excitement that had once been so naturally mine were dulled by classmates that were malicious and a home life that was slowly phasing away from me and towards a new husband and a half sister. The substance in life that used to interest me was gone and the gap was filled with habits and personalities that were stagnant and cheap. As a child I was a mustard seed, yet in a blink I had conformed.

The task of undoing this is killing me. When did I start to believe the lie that I couldn’t have it all; when did my psyche succumb to an acceptance that life was never going to be what I wished it could be? When am I going to settle in the moment that is now, for good, and live and breathe in all the beauty that surrounds me and not wake up the next morning with a sadness that weighs on my heart that must get pushed out with mantras and hopes and a willingness to give my best yet another day. It was such a short time ago when I lived so naturally as a child. I need to know, when did the grief of the want start to outweigh the joy of the present. For my life to go on, it must be undone.

I know that there is nothing absent from my life except for my perception of what is absent. But cycles of perceptions persist, and highs for the bliss of the moment and the realization of all that is beautiful are balanced with lows that overtake me with heavy feelings of solidarity and an absence of the feeling of being loved. Wise teachers speaking from their own experiences are clear that it is the moment that I must settle in and that I must allow time to flow like the champion of a river that it is; that I must let go and trust.

As I sit in my neutral state I admit that there is not a thing in my life that I have wished for or been hurt from that has not been responded to by the universe with a love and an intuition far sweeter and in better time than I could have ever planned. In truth, the fortunate nature that my life has turned out to be is one that brings me to the brink of tears and ensures a sense of gratitude. And still, still, I hold onto the feeling of a sense of lack. I do not know how to let it go, and I have tried.

There is a spirit inside me that is so strong, and so capable. But so much of what formed me was from outside of me. My pores remained willingly open for so long, saturated by the indoctrination that there will always be something outside that is better, or more, than what is already within. And yet by gifts of intuition and stubbornness, over the last two years in the water and the writing, in the allowance of receiving love and in once again realizing worth, I was all along gracing myself with a growth of spirit that continued to seek life even when I rejected it, and this began to fill in the gaps.

It has been long and hard to get to this point and I tell you here and now, I am done. I will sit in the silence, and I will move inside. I will watch the clouds in my oversized chair and I will cook with cream and butter in seasoned cast-iron skillets and Dutch ovens. I will write and it will be for me, and I will listen to all of the words that come. Because it is during these times that the vibrancy settles in my body and finds resonance in my chest. Palpitations dance and I am happy. Eyes close and I smile. I feel my purpose, and I can no longer be scared to reach inside for it. The fear of never doing is the sin that keeps me awake. I must know what my life is capable of.

I can step back now without judgment. I see decisions that seem as if they would have allowed me to live a less tumultuous existence up until this point. I don’t have the answers for the broken existence of my younger self and I will not waste my time in tearing apart my life, piece by piece, to find some sort of closure that was never necessary in the first place. The details never mattered, any of it. I was inside, all along. Paying attention to the softness of my husband’s grandmother’s smile. Driving with the sunroof back and the windows down, my daughter and I singing at the top of our lungs. Caring for patients, who gave me a million times more than I gave them. There has been so much love in my life.

I know that the future is a wide open space that is blatantly in front of me and bright white. I have hopes for the future, and I have wants, and it is all becoming more and more tangible. There is a decision to trust that must be made. It may be the hardest thing I ever do, but I cannot lower my expectations. When I reach, I get a sense that I know something. And that is what I am moving towards.