Thawing Out

I am good.  I have not melted, nor imploded, nor run off to some exotic island in the South Pacific where life is absolutely perfect and there are handsome, young, sun-kissed natives fulfilling my every frivolous desire.  And although for the past three or so weeks, I have spent most of my time in what I call my "mom cave"(our air-conditioned bedroom which has been the only tolerable space in our home because people in San Clemente do not believe in installing central air) yesterday and today have been much nicer days with much less heat and humidity.  Yes friends, global warming has finally made its way to the west coast which means that no place is safe from the clutches of intolerable heat anymore.  We are all doomed to a life filled with cases of deodorant, indoor activities and whining.  Build a bunker that has air conditioning and stock it with lots of canned goods.

As I sit here thinking about where the summer has gone and how I am actually very glad that it is almost gone, I am also a bit sad about how quickly the time just whizzes by.  My girls are no longer children.  Our pets are getting older, especially my beloved dog Becca who is now living with kidney failure at the age of nearly fourteen.  My parents are both in their seventies.  I just turned 50.  Life happens whether we decide to participate in it or not and quite honestly, for the past four years since my brother died, I have felt as if time stood frozen solid in too many aspects.  The clock kept ticking but I somehow became ensconced in the shock and the pain and the grief of losing someone who was such an important presence in my life since the time that I was four years old.  And then, so many people betrayed me....so many people.  People who I truly believed cared about me and loved me.  And the bite from those betrayals, the bone-crushing throb that occurs after the jaws clamp down on an unsuspecting heart, it can come up at times when I am least expecting it.  A word, a smell, a story, a picture and my heart begins aching again...thumping, thumping, thumping.  Betrayal is one of the few things in life that we cannot do anything to prevent.  We go into relationships trusting that others are not going to use those relationships to bring pain and sadness into our lives.  It happens, though.  And along with the death of my brother, my only sibling, these people turned on me as if I was somehow to blame for the loss or as if I was only the sister, which somehow meant that the loss should have been less for me? My mother, my "step-father", my "step-brother" Marc, his wife Sheri, their son my "nephew" Eric and his now wife, Rachel.  And almost worst of all in such a deeply hurtful way that makes me feel nothing but sorrow when I think of what my brother must have had to live with, my sister-in-law Allyson.  Naming names and taking numbers now but I am not exactly sure why I have reached this point at this particular time.  I suppose all things come with time.

I am at a point in my life in which I want to heal.  I am craving healing.  My brother would want me to.  My husband and my daughters and my father want me to.  My friends want me to.  My therapist who is really just a friend who I pay by the hour, wants me to.  And although I am not really sure where to begin, this unrelenting heat that we have been experiencing is beginning to thaw my soul.  I am taking small steps towards reaching out to the world again.  Small, little baby steps toward not believing that anyone I allow in will someday betray me.  I know that that is not true, that people will inevitably betray me, I just need to begin to believe it again.  The wound runs so terribly deep.  I have to remind myself that the individuals who thought little of betraying me were individuals who were presented into my life by other people.  My mother's marital family of choice, not mine.  My brother's wife of choice, never mine.  I accepted these people as my own.  I did not have to.  I could have kept a polite distance.  They became my childrens' people, too.  Maybe that is part of what hurts so much.  Hurt me, but stay away from my children.  I must always remember that they were someone else's people.  So, as another autumn comes into view, I am thinking about what is next.  I am actually calling the people who say, "Give me a call, sometime!", and I am opening myself up to the possibilities.  I am feeling restless which I think might be a very good sign.  I am no longer comfortable just cocooning into a place that feels safe, a place where they cannot hurt me.  I want my heart to thaw.

If you are still reading at this point and you do not think that I am seriously broken, thank you.  Would you mind saying a prayer, or, if you are not the praying type, sending a bit of good energy out into the Universe for me?  And I will do the same for you because when it comes down to it, we are all really just souls journeying through this world in order to find our way to love.  It is as simple as that.

I am good.  Truly, I am.