I M Perfect lady

Tag: relationships

  • How they teetered.

    Being in a marriage is like one long teeter-totter ride, where it takes finesse and decorum to keep it going gently up and down and up and down, a balanced movement.

    Do you remember how you can gain control in two ways on the teeter-totter? By moving your weight you can keep a person up in the air, unable to get down or by getting off he will be slammed into the ground.

    It seems that one person can take over control of the teeter-totter and in doing so gains control over the person on the other end and has the power to restore the momentum or stop it.

    We have many teeter-totter games going with all of our relationships, and we can feel or know when the momentum changes, when they have more power over us than we ourselves, and in that moment we have choices to make.

    In my past co-dependent teeter-totter rides, I was always on the end with no power, either waiting to be slammed into the ground or up in the air unable to move, and the person in charge, wasn’t concerned about me, but rather did what they needed to do, while I was along for the bumpy ride. Somehow it never occurred to me to get off to and not go back.

    We truly are in charge of how we feel in relationships, how their actions affect us on the other end, will it plummet us to the ground and hurt us, or will it leave us powerless.

    Learning how to teeter-totter in a relationship is key to having a beautiful friendship, to even know you have the power to slam them down, but don’t.

    As we teeter up and down, as we ride along with a gentle rhythm, every now and then something lands upon our teeter-totter that throws us off balance.

    A new experience has been added to our routine, and how do we balance ourselves back out?

    What I do know for certain is that a marriage or a friendship isn’t a flat line, a secure steady beam, but an up and down living breathing growing life like organism.

    They are all mysteries whose ending we don’t know.

    We can’t know what will happen to make the other leave, or what will make them use their power to manipulate and control or abuse, or what will make them just sit when it is their turn to push off.

    I am all I can be sure of.

    I know when I will stay on and when I get off.

    I have learned what it feels like to be in the air with out power and slammed down in hurt, and I also know what to do to stop those feelings. I get off.

    What is the old line, “Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me”!

    It isn’t so much about knowing who to teeter with but knowing when to get off.

    What is very interesting to me is that they banned the teeter-totters from school play grounds, they were too dangerous, and in fact they were great tools in getting to know someone, you could tell how kind they were by how they teetered.

  • How they teetered.

    Being in a marriage is like one long teeter-totter ride, where it takes finesse and decorum to keep it going gently up and down and up and down, a balanced movement.

    Do you remember how you can gain control in two ways on the teeter-totter? By moving your weight you can keep a person up in the air, unable to get down or by getting off he will be slammed into the ground.

    It seems that one person can take over control of the teeter-totter and in doing so gains control over the person on the other end and has the power to restore the momentum or stop it.

    We have many teeter-totter games going with all of our relationships, and we can feel or know when the momentum changes, when they have more power over us than we ourselves, and in that moment we have choices to make.

    In my past co-dependent teeter-totter rides, I was always on the end with no power, either waiting to be slammed into the ground or up in the air unable to move, and the person in charge, wasn’t concerned about me, but rather did what they needed to do, while I was along for the bumpy ride. Somehow it never occurred to me to get off to and not go back.

    We truly are in charge of how we feel in relationships, how their actions affect us on the other end, will it plummet us to the ground and hurt us, or will it leave us powerless.

    Learning how to teeter-totter in a relationship is key to having a beautiful friendship, to even know you have the power to slam them down, but don’t.

    As we teeter up and down, as we ride along with a gentle rhythm, every now and then something lands upon our teeter-totter that throws us off balance.

    A new experience has been added to our routine, and how do we balance ourselves back out?

    What I do know for certain is that a marriage or a friendship isn’t a flat line, a secure steady beam, but an up and down living breathing growing life like organism.

    They are all mysteries whose ending we don’t know.

    We can’t know what will happen to make the other leave, or what will make them use their power to manipulate and control or abuse, or what will make them just sit when it is their turn to push off.

    I am all I can be sure of.

    I know when I will stay on and when I get off.

    I have learned what it feels like to be in the air with out power and slammed down in hurt, and I also know what to do to stop those feelings. I get off.

    What is the old line, “Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me”!

    It isn’t so much about knowing who to teeter with but knowing when to get off.

    What is very interesting to me is that they banned the teeter-totters from school play grounds, they were too dangerous, and in fact they were great tools in getting to know someone, you could tell how kind they were by how they teetered.

  • A place for me to stand.

    The stressful thought is if my husband does nothing or if my husband supports friends of this cheating husband, my daughter will not be able to find her integrity, that he is a sign post of ambivalence.

    I looked up the meaning of ambivalence.

    1. conflict of ideas or attitudes: the presence of two opposing ideas, attitudes, or emotions at the same time
    2. uncertainty: a feeling of uncertainty about something due to a mental conflict
    The coexistence of opposing attitudes or feelings, such as love and hate, toward a person …

    Do you know, I did not know that ambivalence was uncertainty or the coexistence of opposing attitudes.

    I thought ambivalence was more like indifference or a knowing and not caring.

    Ambivalence is exactly what my husband shows, conflicting ideas or attitudes.

    And his ambivalence has me feeling uneasy and even my viewing him in a new light has put me in my own place of ambivalence towards him.

    I no longer am sure of my feelings towards him.

    My ambivalence is showing.

    It seems we feel ambivalent when there are conflicting positions both within him as well as between him and I or visa versa, ambivalence abounds.

    We can’t know how this all ends, for it all depends on what we pick and what we have to compromise on and what is being asked in front of our integrity.

    I believe it is easier to sit with ambivalence, undecided, unknowing, than it is to sit with knowing and not caring.

    I understand the wrestling match that can go on for a long while, for we continually compromise small things in order to get along, but there does seem to come a time when all bets are off, when the relationship is asking too much or we lose too much to maintain that relationship.

    My husband’s experiences in life hasn’t required him to divorce folks who were asking him to chose his innocence over the man who abused him.

    And in fact my learning how to walk away from an abusive family has strengthened my knowing that relationships can cost you your self. And sometimes in order to save yourself, you have to walk away.

    We have lived with much ambivalence in the past 6 years for sure, in fact we learned to not promise love, but I love you today, for we understood that love is an individual and personal thing, and there does come a time, when we part to save ourselves.

    I can’t predict the outcome, but I can see the ambivalence line waving in front of us, the line is there and which side will we pick?

    While my husband sits in ambivalence, I have already chosen my side, and I am not sure what or if I will be asked to compromise or if I will know it is time to go.

    Interesting to know that I am not anxious or wanting to control, but that I am feeling the feelings of ambivalence.

    The feelings of unknowing which way this will go.

    And if our relationship can handle the outcome, but what I do know is that so far I have always been further ahead leaving and maintaining my sense of integrity.

    My ambivalence is he being ambivalent and not choosing sides, but you know, this is his greatest feature, to slide and not chose sides.

    Is that possible to not have to pick?

    To live in ambivalence?

    I used to live there, so I guess it is, until the Universe asks you to choose, you can live in both places, get along with both sides, float over the line unless there are repercussions, no harm is done.

    Maybe he never has to pick.
    Maybe that isn’t his way, but it appears to be mine.

    I am grateful I am no longer lost in ambivalence, I am happy I found a place for me to stand.

  • My mind now knows it.

    My feelings are like energy magnets and they seem to either be drawn to someone or pushed back, I am unable to steer my feelings, they have a life of their own.

    I can be friends with someone, and then they do something that changes who they are, and I don’t even have to wonder what to do, inside of me the desire to be with them changes and I move away.

    Some will say the friendship or love began to cool, and what I believe happens is new information comes in and it changes the ingredients of their energy system. And then we act differently, it isn’t a conscious thought, but unconsciously our body is leading us.

    I am now very astute as far as my body’s signals are, even a slight change sends a ripple across the water inside of me.

    In the past I believe my insides were very choppy waters so I couldn’t tell if an outside stress was stressing me, for the insides were already such a mess, it is like looking for ripples on 8ft waves.

    Each time a new ripple comes in I stay with it, I discern where it is coming from, what is going on in my world, and who is carrying it?

    My body doesn’t lie; it knows when something in my world is off kilter, when peace has been disturbed, when an untruth has walked into my space.

    Hints to my dis-ease float to me, unannounced and land like odd objects in an otherwise normal world, beckoning me to notice. If I miss one, a second one appears like messengers relentlessly waking me up.

    Once you notice these mess enders, the mess in my understanding clears up, and I see clearly.

    What I see isn’t always what I want, but what I need to see.

    I used to dismiss these signals and over sedate my body so I didn’t feel their uncomfortable truths, now I know if I don’t get the first message the problem doesn’t go away, I am just wanting to play in denial.

    The land of denial is only a temporary home, a respite on a journey towards the truth, and it seems the longer you put it off, the more you have to face in the end.

    I now prefer to face things one at time and as they happen, and to see the nuances and changes in people’s personalities and stay recent with the affects of their behaviors, so that we are not familiar strangers.

    My daughter’s face is familiar but everything else is getting stranger and stranger, my body no longer is comfortable with the ‘truth’ that she presents, it seems to be a token or crumb tossed my way to chew on, and bit by bit I am being fed a book full of lies to deflect me away from who she really is.

    To be honest, I wish my body believed what my ears are hearing, it would be so much easier, but they disagree and there is dis ease inside of me.

    My body is a lie detector and my mind now knows it…

  • Fully Engrossed in Her Life.

    “There are three kinds of business in this world, Yours, Mine and God’s. If I am in your business, it leaves no one is in mine…” Byron Kate.

    When you have children it seems that our business is their business at least until they are capable of doing it for themselves and actually that is the greatest sense of freedom we will get when we can see our children flying well in their own business; their lives.

    When they fly way off course it seems that we do have to leave our lives to help them navigate back and at the same time be present in our lives.

    My fear and challenge is to return to my life and allow them to make corrections needed to get theirs back on track.

    And the most important thing to learn is not what knocked you off course, but also how to get your wheels spinning in the right direction again, and the only way to do this is to do this.

    To do the walking, to make the changes, to gather your life back.

    I just didn’t think that we both had to do our parts and return to our separated worlds, somehow I got stuck in my child’s life and my meddling there was actually slowing down the progress of healing.

    I am grateful that she told me what it felt like to have me crowding her world.

    I am also grateful I could hear that and can rejoin my life that has been somewhat neglected. Okay pretty neglected.

    What a gift to return to my business, to relax and give her back business.

    There is finesse to this mothering thing, to help but not takeover, like a hostile takeover I bet it feels similar to.

    Where at a weakened point another entity comes in takes over.

    I don’t want to be a corporate raider, but a loving mom and when I overstay or overstep my bounds, it is like taking over a company, or my daughter’s world. I have the image now, and I can see that I was lurking on the sidelines waiting to snap it up, instead of giving her space to shore up the weak spots.

    I love that I know this now.

    I love that I am not in the business of taking over other people’s business, I love that I can be very content with one business, mine.

    I guess the best mother is there for consulting services and will be asked when needed…until then, she carries on in her world, doing what she loves to do, growing where she needs to grow, learning how to navigate into being a mom in the ever changing landscape of our children’s lives.

    We must remember to keep the woman in the mother healthy, happy and fully engrossed in her life.

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  • A Liar too.

    There seems to come a time in each relationship where the titles and names do not matter, where instead lies the meat of the relationship, the giving and the taking, the feelings we feel in the wake of their actions, the way we are treated or the lack thereof, it is like we can finally see what it is we are tasting.

    I asked myself if lies was an ingredient in love and could not find one recipe of Love that included lies.

    Not the love of parents, friends, lovers or self. Lies and Love don’t match.

    I also know that all relationships no matter what kind are subject to renegotiations if and when the ingredients change of one party.

    There isn’t a relationship out there, as far as I can see, that holds this sacred space of no negotiation.

    To me, all relationships are fluid and are living breathing exchanges between two people, that will change as the individuals in them change, and in fact the relationship is only as good as the weakest one.

    The weaker one is the sum total of the relationship, for if the stronger one settles, so goes the relationship down to the lowest denominator.

    My experiences with dysfunction is the strong lower themselves to be okay with dropping down to the low level, it is seen as kind and loving and accepting, and to forgive all actions, and call it unconditional love.

    Unconditional love to some is allowing all types of negative behaviors to messy up a relationship and you are to love no matter what.

    The ingredients of dysfunctional love is that anything goes and all must be forgiven, and relationships are made of steel there is no renegotiation, and you and I are locked behind the wall of our relationship.

    The relationship between sister and sister in some is non negotiable.

    Between parent and child…

    That what started out has to remain, we are locked in forever, like a steel cage within there is no way out, we must forever and a day be held together, withstanding bad behavior for the cause of Relationship.

    Two victims behind the relationship cage.

    I say, that if one in the cage changes, the other gets to leave if the changes can’t be reversed.

    When one changes, the whole relationship changes. It isn’t a cage, but rather the dance within the cage.

    Some put high regard on the titles, Mom, sister, daughter, father, and I see the individual behind the title, and I believe that the sister is only as good as her actions in the cage.

    Lies are lies no matter whose mouth utters them.
    Abuse is abuse no matter whose bodies are delivering it. It is convenient only for the one who is doing the bad behavior to use the trump card sister, to put that out in front of the poor behavior.

    Well, in my world I have taken down the cages that held me in and I am free.

    I no longer will be victimized or blinded by a title.

    Actions are actions, lies are lies, and deceit is deceit.

    Setting aside the relationship and seeing you as you, lies are not becoming.

    No good can be grown from a lie.
    No self worth can be gained from a lie.
    No love can be sown from a lie.

    In my childhood family they live among the lies and are not even aware that who they are playing with isn’t so, raised in the darkness full of lies, it is their normal. They don’t even know they live a lie for they never lived outside of it. Lies is all they ever knew. They have said and do say, that my parents did the best they could, and they did. But their best is to present one thing to the front while doing something else behind the scenes.

    A lie I call it.

    Most will not deal with the ‘thing’ behind the scenes; they would rather just play with what is in front, the pretend relationship label. Father, Mother instead of really looking at the actions within the cage.

    What happens in the cage is what you have a relationship with.

    Action to action is how we dance and relate to each other.
    If one says a lie and the other does not see it, the lie still happens, one is just denying it.

    It changes the dance from love to love and trust to trust… to lie to love and what they want is for us to continue to trust them while they lie.

    How?

    What is the point?

    Who trusts someone who lies?

    I can trust that I will not trust you when you lie.

    I trust that I will tell you I don’t believe you.

    I will say love doesn’t lie.

    I wonder why you lie?

    I wonder if you know that our relationship can’t hold what you do?

    It almost seems that if you have to lie, you know that if you spoke the truth, that it would change what we have.

    Yet sadly the lie does the same thing.

    Whether you do something that would jeopardize our relationship or you lie about doing it, it matters not.

    You have breeched its integrity, you have changed its value.

    As a child, my relationship with both my parents changed at a very young age, the seed of mistrust, conditional love was planted. In order to remain in the relationship, I had to keep their lies.

    Keeping lies changes who you are.
    Keeping lies of another doesn’t make them better, brighter, loving, happy, kind and compassionate.

    Holding a bag full of lies makes you a liar too.

  • Until she can find her own.

    The hardest part of being a mom is when your child takes an exit that you didn’t see coming and they seem to disappear from the usual landscape and it leaves you separated.

    And I am not even sure what exit she took, where she is or what her intentions are, just that she has left the lane of what was and is now heading down a road that neither of us are familiar with.

    As I continue to travel down my regular road, off to the side is this other lane of unfamiliar nagging at me, this road from my view is full of potholes and hairpin curves with disappearing drop-offs and my daughter seems blind to all its hazards.

    I am not certain if she is at a wayside unsure or if she is going forward with a full head of steam.

    I am not even sure what is making me uneasier, her being on that road or not knowing if she is sitting down in wonder or going further into its complicated bends.

    Our voices have been silenced. But all that seems to be happening now is a silent movie, where the drama continues, but I can’t hear the words.

    The not knowing is far worse, I believe than knowing.

    In the knowing, I know and can deal.

    It is like her life has slipped from my view.

    This almost seems like the far end of a spectrum, one being you are doing too much in a child’s life, overtaking it and this is the complete opposite, where you are completely taken out.

    In the middle of the spectrum are two people who allow the other their lives, we share and explore and understand their individual journeys.

    I am wondering how to hook our roads back up, how to join them together in a way that honors and gives space, in a way that respects our differences, but allows us to trust each other.

    Is there a way two people can be together on two different roads?

    As women we have lots in common and I am sure it is harder when I have more experience and I have been her superior as her mother for all these years, but is there a bridge that we can stand upon and share our views?

    I will have to let go of my fears and my ‘know it all’ attitude and let her show me the landscape of her new world, I will have to be a visitor to a foreign land.

    It truly feels like two distinct worlds.

    Yet I believe and feel that I have traveled the world she is going into, so it isn’t that foreign to me, perhaps it is only new and exciting to her, she is the foreigner not I.

    What is so perplexing is that you never leave reality, this is an inward journey, you are traveling away from your essential self.

    Away from your morals, your values, your worth, your self esteem, your dreams, your passions, your soul. Into a world of secrets, lies and deceit…heading towards a self that is unfamiliar, foreign.

    It is the road to no you.

    You are being lured down this road by a friendly face that is the façade of negative energies, manipulating you with false promises and pretty lies.

    If she were to travel this road alone, He would be her only guide.

    What I want is to walk with the two of them and give the real story, like Paul Harvey’s ‘the rest of the story’.

    Yet he knows and perhaps she knows too, that I will be the story wrecker, I will unveil the pretty lies and unravel the promises and make them as they are empty.

    So what scares me the most is that my familiar voice will be drowned out by his, that she will tune me out and turn a deaf ear to my words and cling to his.

    Her life in its innocence doesn’t have a voice of her own.

    I am sure she feels the pull between him and I, both of us wanting her. And what I want the most is for her to have a separate voice from both of us, but I don’t feel she has one for her self as yet. I see her as a girl who confused and twisted and wants to have love and attention but it comes with such a price tag, her self worth.

    I can almost understand the twist between what he says and how she feels.

    His promise land is a secret place and it can’t reach the light of day.

    In order for her to travel down his road, she lies to me.

    What I want most is for the lies to stop.

    Lies to herself and lies to me, both are taking a toll on her.

    It is so telling to see what lies can do to your spirit, you can literally see her growing darker.

    The truth will set your Spirit free!

    The two roads I see in my minds eye is the road of lies and the road of truth. One road darkens and leads you away from self and the other will support and Lighten who you are.

    You wonder what makes some travel into the darkness and what makes others travel towards the Light. What decides this and can they make a U-Turn?

    I will do as any good mother or women who see another descending into the darkness will do. I will give her my voice until she can find her own.

  • Bathed in the Light.

    “A chick pecks its way out of its eggshell and is born into the world when a toxic gas fills up the interior of the egg. At that point, it is literally dying to be born.
    Is there a toxic situation in your life that it’s time to break free of in order to born to the next level of your existence? Is there a symbolic eggshell surrounding you that is time to peck away at, freeing yourself to live more fully?”
    Marianne Williamson

    I love this question and I love the visual it portrays, how we can literally feel like we are suffocating in life and need to start pecking holes in what we are doing.

    And I love “dying to be born”.

    Most changes, at least life altering changes, require a dying in order for there to be a birth, a letting go in order to grab on to something new, a giving up one way before gaining something new.

    Change is a one two step.

    “You have to be willing to let go of who you are, to become who you want to be.” I can’t remember the author of that quote, but Wayne Dyer uses this often.

    The little chick can’t stay in the egg and be born, she has to be willing to get out of her toxic life in order to thrive.

    And the greatest news is that we will know intuitively when the time has come, when we can no longer remain in a relationship, when its toxic energies simply overwhelm and threaten to kill the essence of who we are IF we are to remain inside the shell of that old relationship.

    Like a very brave little chick, we have to go out into a very big and strange land…leaving behind a relationship we have outgrown.

    As the little chick, once we peck our way free of this toxicity, we are free to live a life we can’t even imagine it can be.

    From a small confined limiting space to the wide-open field of pure potential that Rumi speaks about.

    The visual is striking, a dark small space of an eggshell or the expanse that surrounds it.

    Held in the darkness or bathed in the Light.

  • Find Their Own Way…

    The battle of the wills end when you allow the other to have free will, it is pretty hard to fight with freedom.

    The tighter you hold and the more you force, the less the other person can feel and find their own sense of what it is they want to do.

    When I was in the beginning stages of my mental breakdown, my husband and I found a place to stand that left us both in total freedom, a place called “I love you today.”

    In this spot, it allowed each of us to change our minds and to gauge our own feelings about whether we wanted to stay together. This free space to be yourself, to feel that which you feel and to express it daily allowed us the time to re-configure a new normal in our relationship.

    We fell into this spot after weeks and months of feeling the instability each of us had during the most stressful event in our marriage, Me not knowing who I was.

    Pretty hard to promise tomorrow, when today is unknown.

    It felt so much easier to breathe when we embraced the unknown and lived presently with each day and even each moment.

    “I love you today” is an honest and alive relationship and we both promised the other that if and when we didn’t want to be here we would tell the other.

    It isn’t a piece of paper, the ‘happiness’ of our children, or a million other reasons that folks stay together, but instead we individually get to choose if we fit together, if we are happy here, if we enjoy this place, if we are at peace here, if it is a spot for us to grow and change….

    It is like a free-range relationship, where each has the freedom to be who we are, and when who we are no longer works together, we will be brave enough and honest enough to let the other know.

    I just don’t feel then, that we can blame the other; we will always hold the power within us.

    I love you today, and if it changes I will let you know.

    I am thinking this same idea can be used upon our children. Instead of raising children who must remain in our pen (religion, mind set, pathway, etc), where we tell them how to be and grow, that we instead open the gate and let them roam free.

    Let their will be done.

    Let them decide which way to go and how to be.

    It releases both of us to be who it is we were meant to be.

    This reminds me of the paragraph from one of Bryon Katie’s books,

    “I don’t know what is best for me, or you, or the world. I don’t try to impose my will on you or anyone else. I don’t want to change you or improve you of convert you or help you or heal you. I just welcome things as they come and go. That’s true love. The best way of leading people is to let them find their own way.”

  • Our Door in the Future…

    I believe the future is only the past again, entered through another gate. ~ Arthur Wing Pinero

    I read this quote a few times and now I believe I understand it, that our karma or our lessons continue until we change how we greet them, they enter back into our lives perhaps in another body or similar relationship.

    Is it possible that how we act today will bring to us this in another gate?

    That if we act in love and awareness, we will greet love and awareness in our future?

    What we sow we reap.

    When we allow others to mistreat us, we will get more folks who want to mistreat.

    It seems the wonderful Universe gives back to us that which we sow without fail.

    The old saying, “God helps those who help themselves…” He waits for us to help ourselves.

    Many will beseech God to help them, to fix them, to do this and that for them, while they are the ones who hold the power.

    I was waiting for people to learn how to treat me better when it was I who had to learn this lesson. And in another gate flowed volumes of folks to teach me how to treat me better.

    They were not different folks, but the same ones coming in as they usually did and it was up to me to stand up and put a stop to the way they were treating me.

    I had to stop using myself to please them.

    I had to start using myself to please me.

    Most of who entered into my gate of now were surprised at this new response, this new me, this new voice and most turned around and left no longer interested in playing this new game with me.

    The new game of fair trade, this equal partnership or freedom to be a sovereign nation co-existing with them, where the boundaries don’t overlap, where we are not holding each other up, but rather supporting each other to be one strong individual unit, was not a game for co-dependents.

    What we do, what we say, how we treat ourselves today will come a knocking on our door in the future.