I was meant to be somewhere else today. But because I wasn’t there I was here. And here was a pretty ace place to be.
I made pancakes for breakfast, the girls cleaned up the “cubby house” they made in the lounge room from couches and blankets, we had the house in order by 10.30am and my biggest girl shouted me a coffee. We went to a pre-garage sale “garage sale” and brought heaps of cool, vintage stuff – including a red rubber donkey that Miss 5 has ridden, bathed and carried around all day. The girls 3 spent all afternoon fishing with their Daddy and he brought them Macca’s for dinner before dropping them home. I spent all afternoon at a Yoga workshop, had a bacon and egg burger on rye when I got home, and got to have a bubble bath. Girls 3 are sleeping and biggest girl is having a “quiet party” (yes, this is an oxymoron) out the back.
During the yoga class, when I actually relaxed and stopped “being somewhere else” I realised that all I need to do to feel inspired about my life is to trust that everything is exactly as it’s meant to be. There’s not somewhere else I’m supposed to be. There’s not something else I’m meant to be doing. There’s not anything I could have or should have done that would have made anything be any different to how it is right now. People have been telling me this for yonks, but like anything you really have to get a sense of it yourself to truly believe it. The sense I’ve had since this all began is that I’ve been running away. That if I kept my life full enough and busy enough I wouldn’t have to stop and notice that I still feel hurt or I might be lonely or bitter or gutted. But when I stopped running I realised that everything in front of me is perfect and all the hurt and loneliness is back there in what I’ve been running away from.
I had a dream two nights ago that he came home. He walked in, kind of sheepishly, and started putting his stuff in “our” room. His girls came in and started playing with my girls as they always did, and I liked that, that felt good. But I wasn’t sure how I felt about him. I’ve had all those dreams where I hate him and I’m screaming at him, but it wasn’t like that. I was watching him warily and I remember thinking stuff about whether or not he’d like the way I’d rearranged the house, and where would the girls all sleep because we didn’t have enough beds anymore, and would he mind that I was friends with his ex-wife now? And I wasn’t really prepared to compromise on any of that. And it’s like I could see us (me, my girls, our family, our home, our life) for what it really is and I could see that he had walked away from something really good. Something that many other people would love. Something that many other people do love already. There was a part where he was serenading me on a piano. And I just felt numb about him, as though it was everything I thought I wanted, but it didn’t really seem like him. And then I woke up.
My girls are settling in at home, and I’m here too. I’ve discovered that I actually do have my own sense of style, and it’s not hard to create it, with a little bit of help from my clever friends. I look in the mirror and I see me. I don’t truly think she had a chance to come back at the end of my marriage all those years ago. I think I ran away from the failure of that, and hadn’t really stopped running. Now that I’ve stopped I can see her – calm and steady and ready.
Out in the world tonight there are lots of amazing things happening, and lots of my amazing friends are doing those things, but I’m just meant to be here on the couch in my leopard print dressing gown and ugg boots, writing by the fire. And it doesn’t feel at all like I should be somewhere else.
Thank you for letting me go. I didn’t realise I didn’t know how to just be here when I was with you. Perhaps it‘s because you didn’t know how to do that either.
I’m excited about what happens when you stop running. I’m excited about being here right now, exactly where I’m meant to be.
