365 Days of Fun and Chillaxation – 360 – The First and Last Love Blog
So here we sit on blog 360. 360 days of finding the best part of each day to ponder, appreciate, and share with you. There’s one aspect of my life I haven’t written about too much, I guess because for most of the year I’ve been totally confused, and mystified by it. I was working at it too, during the 360 days of this past year, because I couldn’t help but hope, against all odds, that things might improve …
I once read that the more in love you feel with your partner, the happier and stronger in your own life you needed to become. The point being that otherwise you’d lean just a little too much upon your partner and confuse their love with the main source of love and happiness in your life – which was supposed to come from within. I never quite figured out how to put that theory 100% into practice …
I kept hearing and agreeing with the fact that our inside world’s reflected out outer, but I couldn’t quite make the link between that wisdom and my life. Until now.
Way back in April last year I wrote “I’ve separated from the father of my child (I would like to announce at this point that Kahu has the most loving, doting, adoring, wonderful father. Kahu’s father and I are spell bound by our son).” That last part of the sentence was the reason I could never quite give up on Marty. We shared a common bond, a strong mutual love for the most important little person in our lives.
One unexpected outcome of moving back to this green, creative little community has been gaining access to some amazing, wise counselors. Marty and I sought out the support of a man named Simon Parker-Jones who had been working in his field over over twenty years. We saw him together, initially to work out how we were going to co-parent Kahu. We also saw him individually. And as time passed, and it became increasingly apparent that Marty and I felt a deep longing to make our partnership work, to bring out little family back together. So we began to work on a relationship strategy with Simon, who I will now dub Simon the Great.
Amazingly enough, it started to work.
I’m not sure that I ever believed people could really change. Well, I did and I didn’t. For my entire adult life when I’ve hit my ‘road-blocks’ with people, unless they’ve been deeply embedded in my life via blood or time, I’ve simply moved on. I’ve left them behind in the ‘too hard’ category, deeming it all to much work to be worth the work, or the pain, of resolving our differences. OR, I’ve blamed it all on them, deciding those people weren’t good enough for me, and still had more work to do within their own lives before they could ‘meet me’. But something happened while I continued to see Simon the Great.
I changed.
I stepped into a new kind of love. Simon the Great calls it Agape Love.
And before we get into that subject, with equal importance, I stepped completely and utterly into something else – total self-responsibility. Total self-love. Now I’m not just using these terms loosely, what I’m saying to you is that I finally learned how to do something I’d previously written off as a romantic notion. I learned how to totally meet my own needs.
Simon the Great, who used some psychotherapy techniques with me, taught me how to parent myself when I was in need, rather than look outwards for support. He reminded me that it was possible to be there for myself at all times, no matter how scary or hard, whilst remaining open to love from where ever else it might come from. He assured me that it was possible to be there so completely for myself, to be so completely clear about my own needs and how I would meet them, that I wasn’t reliant upon any body, not even my nearest and dearest, for anything … though if they wanted to offer love, that was ok too.
And getting back to this ‘agape love’ concept (which I’m very smitten with and have painted abstract works of art about), it was a whole new way of looking at partnership for me. I think I’d always been more an ‘eros’ kind of girl – looking for instant gratification, adoration and rather a lot of reassurance, often, or else
So Simon the Great pointed out some thing that now seems very obvious to me. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it earlier! He said that ideally we love each other unconditionally, no matter what, we don’t with-draw when they do stuff we don’t like. We love them through it all. I thought that love was only reserved for our children. But I began to understand how, given the fact that there was no question about the fact that I loved Marty, and given the fact that I valued his parenting and his role as the father of my child, and given the fact that actually, there was plenty I found attractive about him, it was worth shining some unconditional love and acceptance upon the man.
The rest is good history.
Things drastically improved between us.
I have a new relationship with myself and with the father of my child. I’m now able to check in with myself about how I feel and what my needs are. I’m also better at using my bodily response to other people as a mirror of my own needs, so that I can be there for myself. Now I’m not saying I’m perfect at this, sometimes it takes me a while to remember to use this technique, but this new knowing has formed a long yearned for bridge between the Charlotte who could maintain a trusting, secure relationship with herself and subsequently with others, and the Charlotte who could not. I really, really needed to bridge that gap. I prayed, yearned for it, visualized it, for years, without knowing that’s what I was really asking for.
I was praying for that ideal relationship, one where my partner was totally, unconditionally there for me. But the part I didn’t realise was that it was with myself.
Marty and I still don’t live together, and even if we one day live on the same property again, we still plan to claim our own separate bedrooms and ideally living spaces. This is because one unexpected outcome of a year of living away from him was that I discovered I really enjoy my own company and need quite a lot of space for myself. Marty feels the same. So we now have the nice together times, and the nice apart times. And we’re a family again.
And so here we are at the happy … middle of the story of our lives. The rest will take mindful self-care, open hearted loving, patience, persistence and trust. This spells some effort on my part, but the results are worth it.
Today’s rating: 10/10
365 Days of Fun and Chillaxation (as I raise my gorgeous son and grow my good news website to a subscription base of 100,000 people). The Low Down on this Blog.
Check out yesterday’s blog.
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Charlotte,
I was happy to read about your commitment to finding a solution to your conundrum of the heart. I am delighted that you have found a path that leads in the direction you desire.
Love is such an “easy” emotion to express in many trivial ways. Mass media would suggest that fairy tale endings are easy to achieve.
Reality is profoundly different. Love and relationships are things we all have to work at. We take different routes, and we have different experiences on the way.
Congratulations on finding a stepping stone to continue the journey.
All the best, and with love,
David
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thanks David, for making a girl cry. And thanks for your very real, kind, understanding response to my great discovery
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Yeeha! xxx Tess
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fantastic .. great 2 hear.. love and blessings on your family.. vesta
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well done Charlotte for being brave and sharing.more power to you and many blessings for the future.
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I want to ask you more about this in person…
LOVE xoxo
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