oh dear God….

I wish I had time to blog these days.  I really do.

I’m grabbing a few moments while The Dung Bug, now four years old, watches a movie on Apple TV and the other children are otherwise occupied.

Life sure is busy these days – I jam into the weekends what I’d usually spread out during the week.  The week is taken up with working full-time and trying to make it up to my children that I’m no longer so available to them.  Not that I feel guilty – far from it – I just see that they need mothering and try harder to be present for them.

Actually, I’ve found myself experiencing these extraordinary moments of joy with my children lately.  I just appreciate them more, hear their words more clearly, see their little faces vividly and want to shower them with love.  So I’m grateful to my ex husband for being so crap at providing for them that I must do his job for him, to my father for selling the house out from under us (because the day is bound to arrive that I can provide my family with a permanent home), to that other one for leaving me in peace to raise the Dung Bug as I see fit.  My life with my children is my own, and I’m enjoying it more than ever.

In my ‘spare’ time I’m working through A Course In Miracles and Marianne Williamson’s A Course In Weight Loss.  I’m not an overweight person, but I reached a point a few months back at which I realised I could no longer function under the weight of so much responsibility, so much anger at the injustices I perceived and all the ‘shoulds’ that circulate in my life.  So the Course in Weight Loss has been about shedding emotional and mental weight.

I started to pray again.

I never thought I’d do that.  I can meditate, have various rituals and practices – but prayer, to my mind, seemed like  a step backwards into believing in outside forces of salvation.  I never liked the idea of a God that is ‘out there’ watching and judging and keeping track of my wrong doings.  But having said that, I can remember being a small child and feeling safe and happy in church – far safer than I ever felt at home with my volatile and uncontrolled mother, or with my charming but vanishing father and his controlling wife (if you’ll pardon the hypocrisy of my own judgments).

Carl Jung said that in troubled times one must return to the religion of one’s childhood.  I draw the line at attending church (I am just not a joiner) but I’m finding great comfort in prayer and rekindling a relationship with my original understanding of the Divine.

Forgiveness has enlightened me – an I mean literally en-lightened.  I feel lighter.  I have shed a burden of anger that has been a stone in my heart for too long.  In doing so, I’ve shed a stone off my body and feel renewed.

My ‘mojo’ or appetite for sex/relationships etc hasn’t yet returned but I feel like I’m finally healing.  I’ve come to terms with so much that I’ve struggled against about this life that I’ve made for myself.  I’ve come to realise that my fears have created the troubles I have and that I can recreate my life out of Love.  I’ve started working on my relationship to life itself – making friends with it first, courting it – I’m looking for characteristics that I enjoy and for something I can truly commit to.

Another outcome of this new outlook is that I no longer tolerate the presence of negativity.  I’m not rejecting  it, I just feel myself moving away from it.  I can’t be around the ‘friend’ who carelessly tells me he ‘couldn’t ever be with a woman who has five children’ or anyone unable to look past their own ideas of me.  Likewise people who express anger, who swear, who gossip or complain – I compassionately (toward myself!) move away from this energy.

I promise not to become a zealot – but I feel like I’m in love again.

Amen