I just want to live happily-ever-after every now and then. -Jimmy Buffett
When trips to the library & free time were more readily available, I enjoyed the author, she's very fun. (click photo to travel to amazon.com) She wove some words together in this book that I took away with me, and use mentally a LOT:
The protagonist reflects on attending a stress-reduction seminar where they were instructed to imagine a safe and comforting place. She figured everyone else was envisioning warm beaches, and she couldn't find comfort in any of the standard imagery. She writes:
The place that I went, the place that I still go, was the warm hollowed-out center of a Bundt cake. It is usually gingerbread, though sometimes that changes. Sometimes it's gingerbread crowned in a ring of poached pears. The walls that surround me are high and soft, but as they go up they curve back, open up to the light, so I feel protected by the cake but never trapped by it. ...I press my cheek against the cake, which is soft as eiderdown and still warm. This isn't a fantasy about food exactly, at least not insofar as I want to eat my way through a cake that's taller than I am. It's about being inside of cake, being part of something that I find to be profoundly comforting.
She goes on to say
It was a laugh to think I was stressed when I signed up for that workshop. ...I remember it now and hang my head in disbelief. I want to go back to that person I was, take her by the shoulders and shake her. "Look again!" I want to say to myself. "You are standing in the middle of paradise." [emphasis mine]
Or as I nutshelled it, I was in the middle of the cake. But I was so obtuse I lost perspective for all that I had in my hands already. If only I had looked harder at myself, and my relationship(s).
I put my head in the sand, ignored the signs that I was in some poor patterns of behavior as a wife, parent, person. Ignore, ignore, stay busy, put priorities in all kinds of dumbass places (hobbies, busy-work, affirmation for tasks/committees), avoid relational intimacy, la la la.
In the aftermath of my life imploding, I realize almost daily that I was in the middle of the cake. I just want to sit in a corner and eat my hair when I think about it. I had so much, squandered vast potential. I'm trying not to lose hope of finding the cake again, even a cupcake.
Dammit. I crawled out of a very fcuked up childhood/adolescence and managed to knit together a decent human being.
And then, unbelievably, found the person who was my happily ever after. Cheesy as it sounds, it was all that. He was everything I ever wanted - and believeyoume I had kissed, etc my share of frogs to know. People commented that I lit up from the inside out when I saw him.
Then as times got stressful or difficult, as things in all progressing relationships will, I emotionally pulled away and attacked the one person who was on my team. For a long time.
I knew no other example of how to be, but I couldn't help it is of small comfort over here by myself. And I'm paying the price. Even now, when I know what not to do and why, I still grind against my Default settings.
My safe, loving, comforting places are gone, and I struggle with losing my soft spot to fall. To rest my loving gaze. To have it returned.
And lately, the heavens seem as brass. :::tap, tap::: is this thing on?
