Just a Peace of Me...

I always try and wait to post until I have pictures up and ready. But then I realized that this blog is really for me as much (or more maybe) as it is for you. I don't even know how many people read this, but that isn't the point. It's about weeding through the fog in my brain, finding what makes me tick, and saying "here I am, finally...so love me or leave me".

I grew up afraid. Physically afraid, for more reasons than I'll ever go into here, but more emotionally and spiritually afraid. If our parents model what we, as children, deem as appropriate behavior, then it's no wonder that I was afraid. I think my father's real emotions would scare him; actually, I think anyone's real emotions scare him. My father can deal with facts, with logic. Emotions may be facts (after all, when you are happy, that is a FACT), but so many times they are so NOT logical. My mother certainly has emotions and expresses them, but only if it's socially acceptable. I used to take care of my mother and her emotions, hiding my own from her to protect her fragile being. I love both my parents; I accept them as they are. But in the life I want for my present and future, I cannot continue to enable them in their fear. I understand the fear, certainly I lived my life like that for so long, too. But with the fear that comes with facing anger, grief, and all those other darker emotions comes strength....and even better, the room in your heart, your soul, and your spirit for pure, unadulterated happiness.

I understand that my family may disagree with what they view as my OPINIONS (or as my mother has said, "my perspective") on the events of the past. For ME, they are the facts of my life as I lived it. And it matters not if they agree or not. For now, for every moment I can have it, I have peace. And it took so very long for me to find. It slowly crawled into the corners of the airplane as I left my childhood home for Norway at 17. Over that year, it flooded me, filling me with a lightness of being, of my spirit that honestly I had never felt. It was okay, better than okay, to just be me, flaws and all. I went to Davis for college soon after, and the light became a fixture, and I never wanted to turn that light off. His name was, and is, Bob. At first a friend, then my boyfriend, my husband, my partner, the father of our children.....And in his eyes, and the eyes of my sons, I see that light. I finally realized that as much as they give to me, I give to them. I realized that the more I embrace myself and everything that means, the more I have to give. The more I love, the more I see, the more I create, and feel......the more I want from this life.

And at the end of the day.....it's this peace that pulls me through the still dark moments I have. It's the knowledge that every day, every moment is a new beginning for me to create any kind of life I want. Finally.