Solitary times

We were sitting together on the couch when my husband said to me, 'What would you do if I were to die?'

I thought about it and said, 'I'd probably look to get away for a while on my own. I'd probably travel to a big city, London probably, because I know I can manage London, and I'd walk a lot and go in and out of galleries and take the train to other places, little adventures.'

He listened quietly, which isn't a particular habit of his, so inclined is he to share his opinion.

'What would you do if I died?' I asked.

'I'd travel too but to a remote place, like South America maybe, and I'd go hiking high in the mountains on my own.'

That's the part about him that I missed as a 19 year old girl; that he is quite a solitary man in many ways. What I saw was someone that was able to chat away with so many people in college, who seemed at ease with himself and who could get on his motorbike and take off for an adventure at a moment's notice.

I was the solitary one, scared of my own shadow. I was the one looking to be taken on adventures, to places I didn't know about. He did take me places, in fact. We started our life together in the United States where his career became the centre of our lives. With no visa to work there myself I procured employment in the only legal way possible, to work for another country within the country, and that wasn't exactly a good career move but it was an eye-opener and I don't regret it.

One thing led to another, children were born, and the career never did get going. I have been what is commonly referred to these days as an 'enabler', and I'm aware that this suited me too. The desire to be a wife and mother was my greatest desire, what came before everything else. Until you have babies and pre-schoolers that you can scoop up and kiss and cuddle you can't imagine what a thrill that is; how much love there is in those relationships. Every instinct in my body told me to reach out for that.

I'm very fortunate that the children keep close to me; close to me in their hearts. My eldest son, (and for me the sun shines out of his ass) warmly accepted my invitation to come with me to a couple of talks in town after work soon, and after those we'll walk to a bistro and share an evening meal. I covet that time with him. I'm very lucky to have all that love in my life.

Still, changes are afoot in my life. I can't deny that the breeze that wafts through my door is beckoning, insisting, that I begin to consider the final stage of my life. I spoke to some women older than me about it recently and they nodded, looked very serious and considerate and agreed, this was a transition I was going through. It would take time. I must be gentle with myself, they said.

My husband and I spent a long weekend at the holiday house just gone and we worked together transforming a part of the garden. As usual, I was dog's body, but that was fine because I could see he had got into this project and wanted to call it his own. He did a great job. When I wasn't needed I lay on the bed and read my book, 'The Interestings' by Meg Wolitzer. What a read!

I was dozing when he came into the room and I gathered myself to get him off to the tip (rubbish dump?) but he told me to stay there, to enjoy my nap. I was drifting in and out of sleep, allowing thoughts to come up, noticing them, perhaps trying just a little to sort them into some coherent form.

I could see through the window that a white yacht was slowly making its way down the lake. I was capturing little snippets of it through the pine trees as it meandered along. The breeze was light, the sun mellow and soft, and I luxuriated in the quietness and the gentleness of the afternoon. There was something very tender about the experience, almost 'other world'.

I've noticed that I am constantly seeking alone time right now, happy to walk the dog or go to an exercise class or shop for the food for the meals I make, but not much more. In some way, my mind seems to be asking, should I go quietly into that good night. Is this the way this story plays out? Tender, mellow times? Without a strategic brain, I cannot say. Nor am I in a position to make big decisions right now. I know this assuredly. Some time must pass. There's a little grieving to do. And, then? We'll just have to wait and see.

Luck

If you go back to the time when I began writing in this  journal I talked a lot about love because I believe that, for me, it's the central emotion of my life; the driver.

I've had a few discussions with people of late that make it rather clear that some Dominants are possibly less concerned with feelings of love than they are with a sense of being admired and being obeyed. I take this on advisement.

Since in our 37 years together my husband and I have both spat out rather nasty sentiments to one another about the other and are still here to tell the tale, I continue to think that it is love that has ultimately sustained us.

Let me be clear. You don't live 37 years with a person putting them on a pedestal and pretending that they are something incredibly special. We are all human and we all make mistakes. I've made my share of mistakes or missteps and so has he. We've acknowledged them. We've driven on.

Now, what do I prefer? I prefer the state of play where he makes the running. I prefer the state of play where he dominates me as per his whim (and my need) and makes love to me on a regular basis. I prefer him to be engaged and I prefer the mindset wherein I think he's the best thing since sliced bread. Sometimes I do (think he's the best thing since sliced bread) and sometimes I don't. I think he'd have a similar feeling about me, if you asked him. Sometimes, he tells me, he thinks he's got God's gift to men and sometimes he'd happily trade me in. This is life. I accept it for what it is.

You'd not be a reader here of any length if you didn't understand that the past couple of years have been tough. I didn't become a submissive woman in the last shower. I've had this state of mind for a long time, even if it wasn't as overtly expressed as it has been of more recent times. You'd also not have read much of this journal if you didn't understand that I luxuriate in the submissive mindset and that most of all I want to feel owned.

It's hard to feel owned when your owner is completely immersed in various issues separate to you and outside of you. It's hard to feel owned if your owner doesn't claim you. Yes, 37 years later I need to be claimed. I need to know categorically and on a regular basis that I am owned.

The truth is that I almost came to have acceptance of the fact that my husband had changed for good. The love and commitment was still there on some level but there was a definite disconnect. I'd express in words and actions that I felt abandoned and that I thought he was depressed, but it seemed clear he was not available to me or to my words. I simply had to do the best I could on my own. I could feel myself going through the stages of grief, revisiting over and over the state of anger. How could this happen to us?

This morning he came to me early in the day whilst I was seeing the boys off for the day to say that he was coming to the market with me. We used to do this on Tuesdays, but several months ago he stopped making himself available for this and I simply went on doing the weekly ritual on my own. He was slightly bossy about this, encouraging me to get ready quickly.

After months and months of leaving me to my own devises 99% of the time, I was a little resistant. Nonetheless, we were on the road early and as we walked through the open-air market he was making his wise-cracks, threatening this and that and generally pushing me around in his own inimitable style. Yes, I was smiling (I'm that ridiculously happy to be dominated at the worse of times...) but I told him that he couldn't just start doing what he hadn't done for months and think I'd just pick up where we left off. He assured me I was wrong and somehow I sensed within myself some hope; some flickering of the man I once knew.

When we'd bought fish, meat, bread and cheese, we stopped off at our regular Italian cafe for morning tea and we didn't leave until well into the lunch hour. We talked and talked and talked.

There's no doubt that he felt threatened by the nasty men related to a business deal and no doubt also that he refused to be intimated by them or to allow them to entirely have their way. It took precedence over his existence and it sent our marriage into a tail spin. I understand his convictions and I understood that the dilemma had made him, quite literally, sick. And yet, I missed him and the aroused husband I once knew so badly that I simply couldn't endure it indefinitely.

Whilst it isn't exactly over, he made his final decisions in the past 24 hours and it appears that it is the relief of coming to those decisions (not perfect but perfect enough in his mind to be an acceptable outcome) that allows him to get up and fight back for his marriage; to reclaim that softly spoken, sweet and submissive woman he called his own.

The desire to be an owned girl is so great that it takes little more than him expressing his ownership for me to feel a great deal better than I have in a long time. I can't deny that admiration and obedience play a role here. I don't want to just love him. I want him to be my owner. I want him to claim me in any number of ways. I want to belong to him. I want that ownership to be overtly expressed.

I've nothing more to report than this experience today. I don't know what will happen tomorrow. My experience of life is that it does not go forth making straight lines. Alas, I am familiar with the roller coaster ride of life. Yet, I felt today that there was hope that the worst may be over.

In my younger days I spent many weeks in a hospital attached to tubes and when I left a very dear nurse said to me that I'd paid my dues. I'd had my share of bad luck with my health, she said, and wouldn't see the inside of a hospital again for a very long time. It turns out she was right.

Perhaps, my luck has turned again.

A little break

I'm sorry to be such a mixed up kid at the moment but I think I have to officially take a little break from writing in this journal. I could, of course, just not write here and not make that announcement but it helps me to make this official and thus put a line under this period of time.

I'm sure I'll be back. I just need some time to myself away from this space at this time.

Things happen for a reason. This too shall pass. Life is good.

Be well. Be happy. Enjoy your days.

Courage

As I learn more and grow, progress and alter, I feel I know quite clearly what I would want to have. This, in fact, makes for far more challenge than I have ever had before because I know better than ever before that there is a big gap between what I would like to have and what I can have.

I see my husband trying to give me what I want and in his efforts to do so I also see that it is an effort he puts in for me. His focus isn't in it. He does (and probably must) maintain his focus on getting better. Ideally, he'd prefer that I look after myself and demonstrate empathy; be strong and stoic; patient and understanding; just that. This is not a time for a wanting and needy submissive but a time for a wife to exhibit strength.

I do wonder if it is time I 'let go' of what I want and focus more on what is. There is this sense that the writing here and the tendency to want something too much is causing me too much angst; far too much distress. It doesn't mean that my desires have changed but the relentless beating of my reality is so at odds with my dreams and fantasies that it has simply begun to hurt.

It is one thing to know that you heart beats faster and there is a lighter spring in your step when you feel your nature and can express that nature -  that you can live as you were meant to live - and another to understand that this part of your nature has no real current place to exist. To know that nature and what the expression of that nature can do and to not be able to express that nature is too incongruous for my mind to handle right now.

We have briefly discussed this and there is no easily identifiable answer except to say that first of all, he needs to get well. In his own mind the solution lies in his insisting that I become more involved. He very much wants me to come to him and tell me when I am in need; when I need him. I see his point of view and it may well work but I feel the hugest reluctance to do this and I have told him this. Still he insists. He says it is what he wants but I register this thought with heavy heart. I have only ever wanted what people have wanted to give to me. This directive goes against the grain of everything I know about myself - to go away and bleed alone when I am hurt.

Perhaps what I am experiencing is what all women experience when their husbands alter or grow unwell. As much as you want to aid them and empathize with them, your heart is in mourning for the life you once had and the man you once had and abject fear controls your responses and the thoughts in your mind.

In my mind, one must always have hope that things will turn around. I have always woken up feeling hopeful. Yet, in the past weeks I have woken only half aware that my mouth is forming the word hopeless. Is this now hopeless? Is it time to give up?

Well, I'm better than that and stronger than that but there are some days when I do wonder where this journey has taken me and whether the price I have had to pay is too high. But then we're in the final days of a three week  school holiday vacation where I have had precious little time to get on with my own work and maybe you are reading the words of someone who is desperate for some privacy and a little peace.

Faith

I can rarely catch my dreams. Sometimes, I can catch a feeling; perhaps fright or concern or confusion. If I am really lucky I can capture a scene, but on the whole I don’t know what I dream, other than I feel sure that I do dream.

This morning I woke up feeling quite rested but again: nothing. No dream was remembered. However, Psalm 23 was running through my head: 

“Though I walk through the shadow of the valley of death I will fear no evil for thou art with me.”

I lay there on my side with the words of the psalm running through my head over and over and the words conjured a memory.

It was rather a long time ago. My children were little; one of them not yet born. I was living in the United States but I had returned to Australia to spend some time with my family: a little holiday for me and the children over the American summer. I’d put the children to bed and my very sick father was asleep. My mother and I were sitting by the fire and the night was very still. Out of nowhere she said to me that she knew that something was wrong. She could feel it, she said and she wanted to know what was troubling me.

I remember feeling that the issue was so buried inside me that no words would rise to the surface that  would enable me to share my sorrow with anyone, but as we sat in silence I heard words coming from my mouth; not my voice in the slightest, but my words emanating from somewhere very deep within me.

She listened and she said to me that I had been through something that must have nearly torn me in two but she was glad that she knew; that she could understand my failure to engage with her completely now. She told me that I was very strong and that she knew that I would be all right.

Although nothing had really changed and my situation was still exactly as it had been half an hour before, I felt much better. Perhaps it was the sharing that made a difference; that I had “unburdened myself”, as they say.

When I was back in my home in the United States, I received a letter from my mother and in the letter was a cutting from the newspaper. It was this poem:

I Had a Dream

One night I had a dream
I was walking along the beach with my Lord.
Across the sky flashed scenes from my life.
For each scene I noticed two sets
of footprints in the sand,
one belonging to me
and the other to my Lord.
When the last scene of my life shot before me
I looked back at the footprints in the sand.
There was only one set of footprints.
I realized that this was at the lowest
and saddest times in my life.
This always bothered me
and I questioned the Lord
about my dilemma.
"Lord, you told me when I decided to follow You,
You would walk and talk with me all the way.
But I'm aware that during the most troublesome
times of my life there is only one set of footprints.
I don't understand why, when I needed You most,
you leave me."
He whispered,”My precious, precious child,
I love you and will never leave you
never, ever during your times of trial and testings.
When you saw only one set of footprints
It was then that I carried you."

Margaret Fishback Powers.

The gesture meant a great deal to me; not only that she had thought of me and felt the words would help but because the words were exactly right. I had been to the beaches close to where she lived all my life and the image of there being only one set of footprints because I had been carried by ‘the Lord’ in my hour of need, truly resonated with me. I kept the cutting close; referred to it often. (I think to myself at this moment, that I never told her...never told her how much the little gift meant to me...)

When it was time to pack and return to my homeland, the cutting came with me. And, when something happened where I again needed a great deal of strength and faith that this too shall pass, that I was again walking through the shadow of the valley of death, I retrieved my cutting, taped it all over for fear it would disintegrate and kept it beside me on my desk.

One day, my husband saw the little cutting and asked about it and I simply said without fanfare that my mother had sent it to me years ago. My relationship with the poem was just too private to say any more.

This morning I realized that I have not only walked through the shadow of the valley of death but I have come out the other side intact. Perhaps, this is what I had dreamt...

I would not say that I am a particularly religious person. I don’t attend church regularly although I love it when I do; get a great deal from it. I was brought up Church of England even though my mother was Catholic because when my father heard the stories of how terrified the priests had made my mother during confessions, he said he didn’t want his children going through that.

That I am not particularly religious in any organized way makes my sense of faith all the more intriguing, I think. For it is faith that has sustained me in my hour of need; faith that I am not alone and that I have the inner reserves to walk through as many shadows of the valley of death that I may need to traverse.

A few years ago, I received a call that my aunt was dying and my mother and my sister were on their way to the hospital. I dropped everything to go to be with them but I was too late and when I arrived at the hospital they told me she had passed away.

We went for coffee. To be honest, my mother and aunt were not close to their sister but I had always found she touched me in some way. On the other end of politics, a trade union person through and through, she signified for me “the battler”; that person who doesn’t have an easy life but keeps on going. My mother and aunt told me that in her final moments on this earth she had sat up from a deep sleep, thrust her arms into the air and said, “Take me”. I have thought of her often since and what her inner world must have been like.

I cannot put into words; this sense of things that one is not alone; that there is someone walking beside me. I feel it; feel it sustaining me.

It is said often, on tumblr sites and the like that if someone chooses not to be in your life, you should forget him or her. I get the point but I am not prepared to be so rigid about absence. The spirit lives on sometimes; connections are felt; nothing is over until it is over, unless you choose to end it in your heart.