Fear..Love..Loss

Today is a happy day for me. You would not guess that from the title, but it is. Have come to the understanding (finally) that all souls are not meant to travel with you throughout your life, whether you need them to or not, whether they are family or not, whether you gave birth to them or not. After grieving for months, I am okay with this. For today. Tomorrow is a crapshoot. But it always is.

I always thought, naively, that if you were family, you would stay together, you would love each other, and if you treated each other with respect, things would always come through in the end. I was wrong.

My husband and I raised our children with love and respect, valued their opinions, protected them, loved them beyond belief, and, I thought, created some strong familial values. Then, with peer pressure, strangers became more important. And nothing we said, nothing we did made any sense. We fell into a rabbit hole and we were at a loss. For years we tried everything in our power to undo the damage that society was doing, to no avail.

As a Dutch women with a strong sense of loyalty to family, and needing tight family connections, this was truly devastating. The one thing I yearned for, beyond all else, when I came to this foreign country, was the intimate connection with family that The Netherlands has and Canada has not.

So I fought, and begged, and conjoled, and cried, and gave in, and walked on egg shells, and sold myself, and finally fought back. The battle is lost, but the war may not be over. Or it might.

Then I thought about souls and the way we connect. Maybe there is a bigger reason for this. Maybe there is a lesson in this that I have not stumbled upon...yet. One day I shall wake up and I shall know why this happened and the why it played out the way it did. Until then, I can only ponder the wisdom of the universe and move on without hanging on.

I still check up, but do not expect anything different. And for now, this gives me some solace in a mad world.

I still love madly, deeply, and forever, because blood bounds are sacred to me. If it isn't the same for the other person, I need to understand and send them on their way and hope for the best for them, as well as myself. But I no longer will sell pieces of myself to get love back. Not at this stage of my life. And not after coming so close to dying.

So I wonder. And I contemplate. And I smile, because once, I had the greatest love of all for a brief, fleeting moment, when we truly were one person, with the same sense of humour, love of laughter and twisted sense of world view.

Goodbye my love. You still hold a space in my heart. But for now, the door cannot be opened for a while so I can heal.