You Try To Find A Love

Love.

It’s the one thing I’ve pinned after for so long but also vehemently avoided. I had experienced a love that had lasting potential. A love that awoke within me the idea that fairytales are possible. To give you a little back story the love from which all relationships in my life were measured by was from my former boyfriend, the father of my oldest daughter. We were young. 18, 19 years old when we transitioned from enemies, to friends, to a romantic couple through a stretch of five years. Though the couple aspect of our dynamic lasted only for a couple of months. I was never one of those people who imagined their wedding day. I loved love however. I was what the kids call a lover girl back in the day. I yearned for love in the most fervent ways. I had no type, no idealized vision of what I wanted my person to look like or be. And considering that I started to become attracted to girls in high school, I was open to whatever felt resonant to me. So when V came into my life and wooed me in all the cheesy, romcom ways that I never thought was real, I changed my tune on love and became a devout follower of its credences. But as quickly as we had made the transition from friend to more than friend, he was gone. A car accident took his life and in an instant I was loveless and two weeks pregnant. I believed that this was God’s way of telling me that I didn’t deserve love. That any chance of receiving that wonderful love would be taken from me in a heartbeat. I’ll save you all the details of my journey down the boulevard of broken relationships for the next twenty years but at 42 with two kids and two marriages that ended in heartache I decided to turn my focus inward. 

Any time I had a lull in between relationships I rarely took the time to reflect on how I had gotten into the situation I was in. I did, however, spend a substantial amount of time bashing my exes to my friends who had finally felt free enough to tell me how they REALLY felt about my relationships. After my second marriage was clearly heading down a road of destruction I declared that I wasn’t looking for a new person, I was looking for me. Two decades of rocky relationships and mommy duty left me unable to recognize who I was outside of the roles that I was performing. I thought I had imbued myself into each relationship, making sure to keep the authentic me in tact (and I was to a degree) but when I became a mom at 19 I was no longer afforded the luxury of putting me first. Don’t get me wrong. Having my daughter was the best decision that I have ever made in my entire life. But I was giving up the opportunity to fall, fail and make tons of mistakes to sift through the rubble and find the gem that is me. My little girl was my priority. I still made attempts at love (obviously) but with the looming heartache and fear of actual death of my partner I remained closed off. You can’t build a relationship that way. You can’t build a life that way. But I tried. And I did make mistakes, over and over again. I had given up on the fairytale when twelve years into my second marriage my partner informed me that they were now polyamorous and wanted to explore that dynamic. Honestly I think that was just a way for them to cover what was already going on behind the scenes. I threw my hands up. Fine. I said to Spirit and my former partner. I wasn’t fine but what else was I going to do? 

I often joked that if the last relationship didn’t work that I was going to buy a house in the woods and become a recluse. It was a dream of mine. A tiny cottage nestled amongst the trees (preferably redwoods) with just me and my cat. I was actually looking forward to it. But as I know, Spirit always has other plans for me. And maybe this time my own heart had other plans. I wasn’t looking. I didn’t find him, he found me. It was almost like he was waiting in the wings, just off stage timing his entrance just right. Then the moment when Spirit could see that I was about to erect those impenetrable walls, the universe pulled back the curtain and he walked out. I rejected him at first. There was a multitude of reasons for that but I noticed something during our very first conversation. I felt safe around him. As corny as it sounds to say that I exhaled I did. This was odd because safety was something that I hadn’t felt in along time. So long that my nervous system and my mind were at odds with one another. It’s ok, we can relax with him my body said while my mind was screaming Are you kidding! We never met this guy before! We need to do a series of tests and checks before we can even engage with him. Don’t be ridiculous! This battled waged for months and has only recently subsided. Learning ro love after deep wounds of heartache has showed me how resilient love is and that as much as I may try to say that I am fine living life solo dolo, the truth is that connection and relationship are valuable.

I want to be clear that I’m not upholding romantic relationships over all others. I truly believe that friendships and familial relationships (whether blood or chosen) are just as, if not more, important to romantic ones. Many of my loved ones have been rocking with me for decades and the nature of our relationships have been changing. While the changes are necessary and do give me the chance to love in more expanded ways than I did before, loving someone romantically with my whole heart feels scary. Spirit often brings people into our lives to heal the parts of us that we need to heal in order to clear away old stuff and to become our fuller, more whole selves. And Spirit did its big thing by bringing me a man who loves me in the most complete ways. My masks don’t work. He doesn’t allow me to show up as anyone else other than myself. All the wounds that I was embarrassed to reveal he holds with the utmost care. And he’s patient. Cause let me tell y’all something! Healing what I’ve been through in all these past relationships is taking time. I made that clear to him from the very beginning. We both have scars from past hurts and we’re both scared. But we show up and choose each other every single day. We choose to be vulnerable even when we feel like we’re taking a huge emotional risk. Love isn’t perfect and clean. I’ve been learning to let go of that narrative. But love has showed me that as long as I’m willing to accept myself completely that it will always have my back. Stay tuned for more to come.