My Relational World

Madonna may have been the Material Girl living in her material world, but I am definitely living in the relational world....and I am taking those comments seriously that nobody is sick of hearing about love from me just yet. Sometimes in the middle of the night for one horrifying second between sleep and wakefulness there is a space where I think this whole thing is a dream. And then I come to full consciousness and memory and sense returns and I know it is not. And I begin to wonder where I have been all my life. And what I have been doing. Because surely I have never been loved like this by anyone before. And it is not like I have not been in long attached relationships....sixteen and twelve years respectively. With people I loved at that time with deep attachment and care. They were people who needed my love, I knew that. My love mattered to them, it helped them in some way to feel better, to heal some wound, to come to some better place than they had been. I knew that they cared for me, and, yes, I guess, loved me in return....I "knew" this in a kind of intellectual way like you know the times tables or the formula for calculating percentages. But it wasn't something I ever thought about much, their love of me. For one thing, I know now that the perp rap of the nun who spiritually abused me was still acting as a barrier at that point to my really letting anyone love me, because I could not believe at a soul level that anyone really could. But once I had worked through that and finally at long last eradicated her voice from my head, I think I was free to allow myself, perhaps for the first time in my life to let it matter that I be loved in a relationship.

So this time it does matter that it is mutual. And I have to say, I am finding it quite wonderful. To not have that sense that I am working without a human net (although R pointed out to me that I really wasn't....I had friends who were loving me all along, I just wasn't quite up to acknowledging how much they were there for me) is so soothing. I feel a sense of safe solid ground in my life that I have never before experienced. I am not where the buck stops. For the first time in my life in my primary relationship I know if I fell, I would have somebody to catch me in arms strong enough to make a difference, and that if preventing the fall by fixing the step were possible, he'd have it done before I asked.

I am also learning that there was a payoff for being the one who did the loving of the needy ones, the wounded birds, the strays. It kept me safe in a strange sort of way. It kept me in my little bubble of control, in charge and secure. I did not have to give my heart away as long as I was the caretaker and not the taken. This new place requires a radical trust, a letting go....a backward plunge into the pool. It's a good thing I had the chance to practice this in my faith life. I learned that I can let go and live through it in my relationship with God. Now I get to practice it in my human life. Letting go, allowing, receiving, letting into my heart and mind and life the sure and certain knowledge that I am loved and....truly, all is well.