Abigail Carter's Blog, page 10

Allergic to Teenagers: So Much For Tough Love

[image error]Chirp. Yeah, I know. It’s been a while. Dare I say I have nothing to say? Maybe it’s that. Or it’s summer. School being over for the summer has been a relief. A difficult year for my little Junior. I think she has a crumpled list of crappy teenaged behavior that drives a parent crazy/mad/worried tucked away in her Gucci knock-off purse and has been checking each item off the list. Little bee stings that built up over time become an allergy. Yes, that’s it. I think I’m allergic to teenagers.

And so I breathe, fork over more money, breathe again, drink a glass of wine like all the parents of teenagers who have gone before me. I keep telling myself I’m doing the best job I can, even when I know there are logical decisions I could be making that I’m not.

This week has been a good example. We decided that a good cure for the toxic year might be some time away from home. We found an art school in the Dominican Republic that looked to fit the bill. It would enhance her Spanish, introduce her to different kids and potentially help her discover a new talent and start a portfolio.

It could be the salve for a difficult year, one that seemed to compound her ongoing notion of herself as an “unlucky person.” Even before she left though, she was having trepidations which I found frustrating. How do you tell a teenager to have an open mind? It is the very antithesis of a teenager to have an open mind.

“If you can relax, you may have a really great time,” I insisted. “You’ll challenge yourself, meet people you would never normally meet, discover things about yourself that you wouldn’t have discovered. See it as an adventure.”

But the texts started the moment she arrived. And the sobbing phone calls (I’m too scared to look at the bill).  No one her age. Everyone spoke Spanish. Her class was in Spanish and was way too advanced. It’s difficult to talk about embracing life over a text, though I tried. She would have none of it. Insisted on coming home early. I held out for a week, hoping that time would appease the situation. It did not. And so she is coming home early.

I was beating myself up for giving in. It would have been easy to say no. But I realized that she doesn’t need challenge right now. She needs her mom. She needs to be home to lick the wounds of her hellish year and regroup.

Well, that’s my justification anyway. There is no right way. All I can do is follow my gut, even when my head screams at me to make her tough it out. Like all parents, I’m justing winging here. And trust me, I am my own worst judge.

The silver lining in all of this is how happy I know she will be when she sees me at the airport. How happy she will be to be home. It won’t last, but I will savor that few minutes of seeing my little girl who’s been hiding in big girl clothes.

 

Happy Father’s Day, Mom

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Is there an App for that?

Over the years, Father’s Day has diminished in importance for me. No longer do I feel the crushing absence of a father in my kid’s lives, but every year I wonder if they do. A Spanish class had Carter creating a Father’s Day card. Ugh. Those still happen. He took it in stride and gave it to his favorite science teacher. I can only imagine how that guy must have felt getting that card.

The only acknowledgement of the day has been a shout up from the basement of “Happy Father’s Day, Mom!” I thought that would be the last of it, but then I had a request for a very specific photo of Arron, one of him in his business suit taken from a rooftop with a view in the background of the Empire State Building. I can see its appeal. He looks very regal and important in it. His Mr. Big Pants shot. It wasn’t a persona of his that any of us knew very well, so I’m curious as to why that picture would be chosen as a Tweet-worthy representation of her dad. Of course I couldn’t find it and after digging through several boxes in the basement, I gave up.

There has been much teenaged angst in the house of late, some I would love to detail here, but don’t out of respect for my kids’ privacy, but I can’t help wonder if perhaps the behavior is tied to some deep-down longing for a male authority figure. Someone with a stricter hand than mine. A Mr. Big Pants.

Or perhaps it’s just typical teenaged stuff.

You’d think I’d quit circling this dead carcass already, but I seem to keep bumping into it every time I try to psychoanalyze my kids’ behavior. To this day, I still go straight to behavior being grief-based rather than normal kid/teen behavior.

Perhaps it’s because, as my mom loves to point out, it’s behavior that I’m unaccustomed to because I was such a nerd/dork teenager who obviously missed getting a copy of the “crappy teen behavior” guidebook. My worst crime as a teenager was being half an hour late for my curfew and not calling. From a pay phone. In the subway station.

Teens have it so easy now. They can call from wherever they are.

Of course, there was no Facebook to bully each other on, or cell phones to Twitter our every move and incriminating photo or that shattered the moment you dropped them costing your parents hundreds of dollars, or international texting charges…

It’s a different world, one that makes parenting teens far more challenging than it’s probably ever been. At least I make myself feel better by telling myself that.

And still, I look at my kids and think, what if things had been different? How would they be different with their father in their lives. Weird to think about, but I have to remember that we’d be going through exactly the same insanity. Of that I have no doubt.

I guess the difference is we’d be doing it together. Hmm. There’s a concept.

Here’s to all you dads out there and moms being dads and men who aren’t biological dads who are being dads anyway. In whatever form your dad-ism takes, hats off to you. Being a parent is no easy feat and being a single one is, well like trying to summit a high mountain in a snowstorm with no whiskey.

But the sun rise at the top is what makes it all worthwhile.

Until the next shattered cell phone.

Happy Mr. Big Pants Day!

 

VORTEXT: A Meandering Magical Garden of Writing

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Whidbey Island Institute Drive

Whidbey Island seems rife with secret gardens whose long winding driveways meander into thickets of wooded groves. That day, a woman directed me to a parking lot – a gravel shoulder bordered by nothing but trees. I got out of the car, bewildered, not sure where to go to reach VORTEXT, the weekend-long writing conference hosted by Hedgebrook, the Whidbey Island writer’s retreat for women, whose board I recently joined.

Another woman parked as I was returning to the car, certain I had messed up. She got out and seemed to know where to go. We walked together, learning that we were both from Seattle, here to write, excited. I was already disappointed that I would only be attending for the morning, teenaged birthdays and events filling this particular weekend, preventing a longer stay.

We arrived at what I can only describe as a lodge-like building – a great room with soaring ceilings, a hallway lined with Hedgebrook’s resident gourmand, Denise’s delicious homemade organic food, an intimate windowed dining area filled with groups of women chatting. I ate breakfast enjoying the meadow and garden view, made enchanting by the misty rain. I recognized Elizabeth George, the Whidbey Island celebrity crime writer, but was less familiar with the other five writers who would be our workshop leaders.

A familiar woman approached me as I finished by breakfast. I realized she was Debi Goodwin, the woman who had produced the CBC television piece about the kids and I for the 5th anniversary of 9/11, the piece that ultimately led to my book being published. I owed so much to this woman, including my presence at this conference, and there she was, no longer a TV documentarian, but a published author as well. She had written a book about the year she spent recording the journey of eleven Kenyan students on their journey to Canada after they received scholarships to Canadian Universities. Meeting Debi again, something came full circle somehow, as if I was in the very place I was meant to be.

After breakfast, we gathered in the great room, where I inadvertently sat next to Jane Hamilton, an Oprah lauded author, sporting, what we soon learned was a new short hairdo – a writerly makeover of sorts, instigated by Elizabeth George and her band of merry writers/make-over artists. I had been hoping to take her workshop on plot, hoping it might help to beef up my own novel’s plot, but since I was only going for the first morning, her workshop was full. I wished I’d had time to chat with her.

Our first keynote was Ruth Ozeki, a film maker, writer and Zen Buddhist who spoke about coming to Hedgebrook and her disorientation at having to write “unplugged,” with no access to Internet, which coming from a Zen Buddhist seemed both funny and reassuring. Who knew that even Zen Buddhists were hooked on Facebook?! Her voice was lyrical and soothing and we were lulled into the realization that as writers we were all grappling with similar issues of distractedness.

In contrast, Dorothy Allison has us laughing and mesmerized, and sad and laughing again. She was a master story-teller and her childhood spent eschewing the Baptist church was ingrained in her speech patterns. She slammed her fist down on the lectern to “give us permission!” to write our stories. In writing our stories, she extolled, we gave voice to others. We were implored to look around us and “borrow” the people we met to use as characters in our stories, that it was OK to use other people’s stories within our own since each of our voices is unique. You could almost hear the shackles of excuses for not writing clatter to the floor. Heads bobbed with understanding and relief. We had permission to write our stories! A revelation!

My first and only workshop for the weekend was with Gail Tsukiyama who spoke about finding voice. The other women in the workshop seemed quiet, reverent. We went around the room and introduced ourselves. A woman from Hawaii hoped to write of her recent divorce; a stuntwoman from Vancouver was brand new to writing; another wrote from her grandfather’s journals. The room and the people in it was, in itself a short story. In first impressions, Gail seemed quiet and demure so she surprised us with her gregariousness, her laughter. Her voice was clear as she told us how the voices in her stories came to be. Each different – a young girl, and old woman, and old man that took over her entire book.

She spoke of writing as being like a Japanese garden: never a straight line from the garden gate to the front door. There must be winding paths, places to stop and contemplate, diversions to discover before finally finding your destination. You must allow the reader to linger in these places, allow them to take refuge in the beauty. In that one analogy, I had a clearer picture of where the first draft of my novel needed to go. I’m determined to linger in places that I’ve raced over in my effort to reach the destination of an ending.

On a 4 x 6 card, we wrote imagined postcards from an imagined place from an imagined character to an imagined recipient. The words were limited in space, but each postcard said so much. Voices clear.

Lunch was impassioned, rushed conversation, as I tried to cram an entire afternoon of new acquaintances into an hour. I longed to linger, to savor, to walk those magical Japanese garden paths for an entire weekend, to be among those with whom I felt certain I belonged.

 

Random Gun Violence in the Hood: Reliving Grief

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An Amazing site on gun control: http://consideringharm.com/

It’s been a disconcerting week of gun violence in Seattle. Last Thursday a man driving in his car with his kids and parents was caught in the crossfire of a shooting and died in his father’s arms. It happened at an intersection that my kids and I drive past all the time. The man and his family live two blocks from my house.

Every time I hear of these incidences my mind wanders to the victim’s last moments. The confusion, the panic, the pain. It brings me to a place I keep thinking I’ve left behind – thoughts of Arron’s last moments that played over and over in my head for years. It wasn’t until I took my memoir class and had an assignment to write about something not actually experienced, something imagined. I used the exercise to imagine Arron’s last moments. I thought that by writing through my own trauma about the event, it might expunge the film loop in my head.

The words came pouring out. Some of it was horrific, but it ended so peacefully that my symptoms of PTSD began to dissipate as soon as the words landed on the screen. Only two or three people read that piece because I chose not to include it in the book. It seemed like it would be too painful for people to read. It felt like a secret I needed to keep between Arron and I, as if that was the only way to ensure the magic cure of writing those moments down would actually work.

And then another person finds themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Another family is torn apart. As well as imagining the victim’s experience, I find myself reliving the survivor’s tale – those moments after witnessing the event or receiving the news. The shock, the numbness, the amazement that the sun still shines, flowers still bloom and people still laugh when life will never be the same again.

Perhaps that wife will hear of me, or I will drop my book off on her doorstep. I will tell her about The Healing Center which can help both her and her children. Perhaps I will sit in her living room and listen to her story, and I will offer her my words of experience, show her that life will go on despite her grief. Or perhaps she will find her own way, as we all do, eventually.

Just as we were all coming to terms with that random death, there was yet another shooting rampage yesterday in Seattle. A crazed man with a gun, killing four and then himself. More last moments, more ravaged families. More fear. A school nearby was shut down when kids saw a man jogging with his gun, out of fear for his own safety. A gun, that I suspect statistics will show is more likely kill him than any criminal who might be threatening him.

I won’t even begin to talk about the absurdity of gun laws in this country. That would take another bunch of posts. Our lenient laws need to change. I’ll just leave it at that. Well, OK, here’s an interesting chart I found:

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Just Sayin'

So much senseless death and violence ensures we must endure the tiny ripple effects that each incidence generates, over and over, opening old wounds, perhaps creating new ones. Secretly, we’re relieved that tragedy didn’t strike us again. We push away those old, ugly thoughts trying to hide from the fact that in many ways it has.

 

A Single Parent’s Dating Dilemma: The Sleepover

[image error]A late night scramble onto the balcony outside my bedroom, a stealth tiptoe up stairs, an early morning getaway. It was fun to sneak around, like teenagers, stealing kisses. But there comes a point when it feels deceitful. It’s a sticky place to be. You want to make sure its right before you announce the occurrence of a sleepover. That the relationship is on solid ground – something that can feel both certain and elusive at the same time. It’s the uncertainty that makes definite proclamations difficult, but after talking it over with several friends, I realized it was time to come clean.

By now my kids are old enough to get it. There is no pulling the “we’re just good friends” wool over their eyes. I don’t want to teach them that sneaking around is the proper way to conduct a relationship because I don’t want them doing it (!). It was time to model what relationships can be, the wonderful, the scary, the awesome, the difficult.

I wondered over the years since Arron’s death, what I could possibly have taught my kids about relationships. There have been so few, and the early ones they don’t remember. I never considered that I might be teaching them about love in the way I grieved. But this year, I got am amazing mother’s day letter, where this was addressed:

“I knew what love was supposed to feel like because I not only felt it after losing him (daddy), but I primarily saw it within you.”

I was overwhelmed. Despite myself and the fact that I was only one person, I managed to show my children what love between two people looked like.

All very nice and ethereal, until there is the reality of a strange person’s shoes in the entry. Folding a new person into the mix comes with loss. Loss of old routines, old patterns, old habits, the kind that are sometimes difficult to let go of.

“How will I talk to you if he’s here?” I am asked. “The same as always,” I say. “and if it’s private then we will find a private place to talk.”

“I will never stop loving you, the same as I always did,” I say. “But its important for all of us that I am able to live my life too, just I as I allow you to live yours. I may not always agree with your choices, but I will respect them, just as I hope you will do for me.”

They are old enough to hear this now. Can understand it. And I’m finally in a place where I am strong enough to say it. A key piece of this puzzle is the leeway he gives me to do and say what I need to in order to pave the way for him, so that he can come into our lives in whatever way he chooses. And he gives me time. Because in the end, I realize, it’s always time that makes the difference. With time, the tiny adjustments can get made, little-by-little, step-by-step until one day you look back and you realize you are right where you need to be.

A new basketball net has arrived in our yard, the workings of a pellet gun explained and there is talk of jet-ski paint balling. Whole new worlds are opening up before our eyes.

The Ghost of Mother’s Days Past

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Mother's Day Breakfast 2009

There was a time when I rolled my eyes at Mother’s Day. Another guilt inducing dash around for flowers or some “perfect” thing to show appreciation. Father’s Day was no exception. My dad was the Scrooge of Father’s Day and to this day, whenever I call him on Father’s Day, he always says “Hmmmph. Father’s Day. I didn’t even know it was Father’s Day. Show’s you what I know. Just a dumb holiday invented by Hallmark to make us buy stuff we don’t need.”

I came by my disdain honestly.

When I got married and had kids, Mother’s Day was an event that forced me to experience severe cuteness overload as burned pancakes and tea made their way to my bedroom, Arron following behind sheepishly holding a droopy flower he picked out of the garden.

It wasn’t until after he died that Mother’s Day suddenly took on some sort of magical new importance that I didn’t quite understand. That first Mother’s Day after, I was reminded of the day I was hoping to forget by all the bouquets left anonymously on my porch. The kids presented me with handmade cards and a soggy bowl of cereal. It was poignant, but something was missing and the missing thing took over the entire space in the room. I felt suffocated. I tried not to cry and when I did and the kids looked at me alarmed. I told them they were tears of happiness. And in some way I suppose they were, its just that I didn’t know it at the time.

As the years progressed, the kids and I settled into a sweet routine. Breakfast in bed for me (with copious dishes to clean up later). Pancakes morphed into fried eggs and bacon with a dish beautifully decorated with orange slices (the cooking channel years) and once they could read and write, heartfelt letters telling me how appreciated I was were added to the tray, decorated with artistic swirls on the envelopes saying “MeeMoo” their nickname for me. Oh did those letters make me cry! Arron’s presence diminished over the years and I realized the day didn’t actually involve him anymore. It was our day, the kids’ and mine.

They haven’t all been perfect. The early ones made me sad because Arron wasn’t there to appreciate me. I felt like a disgruntled child. Where was my droopy garden-picked flower? I felt the same way I might if he had forgotten Mother’s Day altogether, irrational as that is. I’m glad that faded away with time. Now he shows up for a moment perhaps, a fleeting memory of him that will make me smile.

These days I’m lucky to get tea in bed, but one tradition lingers – the letters. They are amazing and sweet and funny as hell and always make me laugh tears.

In those moments, I remember to appreciate what I have rather than remember what I don’t.

Happy Mother’s Day to all of you moms and dads being moms out there. You are all appreciated.

Teaching Kids Work Ethics by Having a Temper Tantrum. Lessons in Effective Parenting.

[image error]I walked in the door and he was slumped in his seat watching a Khan Academy video. The tutor looked exasperated and took me aside to tell me so. Later there was a temper tantrum where phrases like “I hate my life!” and “I’s so stupid!” were flung at me in an accusatory way. The day before had been a similar episode with a different kid. And so I lost it. I had to walk out. I grabbed the dog and drove to the lake. I was a failure. I hadn’t pushed hard enough, I was too lax on screen time, I hadn’t set clear enough consequences, or expectations, or… I didn’t know what. “He” should be here to deal with this. “He” would know how to do Algebra and Pre-Calc. I had a good sob. And then I got a text.

“I’m hungry”

And I got mad. I was incredulous. The gall.

“Can you go shopping. We have no food.”

I sobbed some more. Until I calmed down. I went and got food for dinner.

I talked to them both separately, but the message was the same.

“I have done everything in my power to help you. I have nagged you about homework, hired tutors, written 504 plans, gotten you tested, paid for therapists, psychiatrists, meds, whatever it took. I did it. And now it’s your turn. You have two choices: If you want to get into (college/higher level math/fill in the blank), you are going to have to work for it. And work really hard. It will be hard and frustrating but you can do it because you are smart and you have everything you could possibly need to succeed. I have made sure of that. The only thing standing in your way now is yourself. So you need to get to work. If you don’t want a tutor, then fine. That’s your choice too. The consequence of that choice is that you may not get what you want. If you are OK with that, then so am I.”

I’m sure I blathered on for quite a bit longer but a while later I got another text: ”I want to stay with the tutor.”

The tears stopped. The books were cracked. The tension dissipated and I had angelic kids on my hands.

A few days later I met another single mom who had raised her kids alone from an early age. She told me about her daughter’s failure to get into college. “She just kind of lost her way in Junior and Senior year and now I think she’s going to have to go to community college or something to get her marks up. But really I want her to get a job, so she can learn to have a work ethic. I’m hoping that through working she will learn about working hard to get what she wants.”

I told her about my temper tantrum and subsequent speech and she commiserated. “I’ve made that same speech many times!”

It felt good to know I wasn’t alone. The pressure on our kids is so intense, I think many wind up feeling hopeless and simply give up. I’ve seen it first hand and so I am learning to be a motivator. State things bluntly, get to the point, give the tough choices. I felt stronger somehow, more confident that we were headed in the right direction, that I was teaching my kids to cope with the hardships that life constantly throws our way and that my kids might not wind up as homeless people.

We had gotten through my temper tantrum a little wiser.

At least until yesterday when I discovered three charges on my credit card statement for a tanning salon that weren’t mine and a computer screen was smashed for the second time in three weeks.

Two steps forward, one step back.

The 50K Dash

[image error]He’s an endurance runner. Not just measly 26-mile marathons, but 50K marathons. A “quick” run is 16 miles. It is way beyond my comprehension. He doesn’t just run long distances, but he enjoys the scenery as he runs, takes his time, feels each moment as he puts one foot in front of the other. He doesn’t worry too much about the time it takes to finish the race.

I am learning that this is also how he lives his life. Slow and steady. Enjoying the journey, taking the time to notice the little things, maybe even veering off in a new direction if the spirit moves him. As much as I try and say that I live this way too, I am too much the hare – always in a hurry to get to the end point, to see what’s around the next corner, to take the prescribed path, to dash ahead before I may be quite ready. I exhaust myself.

My mind speeds ahead wondering where all this may wind up. Will I be flat on my butt in the middle of the desert somewhere? Will I turn around only to discover that I am running along all by myself, slowing to a stop to wait.

“There’s no rush,” he says. “I’m not going anywhere.”

And so I slow to his pace, and I can breathe easier, and for the first time, I’m able to look around and marvel at all that I have missed by always racing ahead so fast.

And when I turn, he’s still there, running right along beside me.

Single Mother vs. Surgery: No contest

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Ab, Pre-Op, April 2, 2012

A call came that my surgery was bumped up by an hour, so I scrambled to find a different ride to the hospital since my previously scheduled ride couldn't make the earlier time. The usual single mother dilemma. Another friend sweetly picked me up and dropped me off. I was ushered in, changed and climbed into a bed covered by a blanket of paper and dry-cleaning bag cellophane, filled with warm air. Weirdly comforting and uncomfortable at the same time.

I still wasn't sure of the pick-up arrangement. Friend? daughter? Whomever was most available. And then he texted that his flight would land in time to pick me up. A weight lifted with a smile and an SMH (Liv speak for "shake my head") marveling at how things just fall into place when you most need them to. When you let go and don't try too hard to force them.

Maybe it was the Theta Healing that I did around the surgery that made it so easy, calm, relaxed, allowing things to fall into place as they did. Or else it was the incredible surgical team who have their procedures whittled down to a fine-tuned machine, right down to tiny tubes of Blistex so my lips wouldn't become dry, handed to me by the anesthesiologist with instructions to "apply liberally."

I awoke to a delicious abandon, a state between sleep and awake. Pain was minimal until it wasn't. My IV was injected once more and the pain was minimal again.

And then he was there. He sat patiently beside me, holding my hand, listening to the incessant litany of instructions from the nurse. I looked at him and he smiled and I knew that he too was equally bemused by the barrage of words. He helped me to hobble home, made dinner, tucked me into bed and I felt well-cared for for the first time in a very long time.

Life doesn't get any sweeter than that.

Four days post-op I am back to being a single mom, albeit with kids who begrudgingly fetch for me and drive to the grocery store and put out the recycling. But a single mom who still has to make dinner and clean up and make waffles for a sick child and go to school-dictated evening meetings hobbling all the while.

Pieces have been removed, tendons snipped, skin stitched and now the mending begins. The long slow arduous climb back to what I once was. I've been here before. Piece of cake.

 

Knee Surgery, Theta Style

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Image borrowed from www.wizardnow.com. Listen your way into a theta state.

A friend told me about "Theta Healing" and the incredible experiences she has had with it, and so me being me, I had to check it out. Googling it, I learned that Theta healing is, in essence, a tapping into one's theta (or subconscious) brain waves, receiving messages from the subconscious and then applying a process of "removing" old, useless, negative beliefs and "replacing" them with positive ones.

The crazy part that my friend was so excited about was that this healer was able to tap into the theta waves of not just her, but her children as well and take a read on what they were going through and update their thoughts similarly. I do wonder about the ethics of having someone messing around in your theta waves without your knowledge, but if it was for good and not evil, then I guess I couldn't see the harm.

I spoke with Theta Healer, Donna who told me over the phone how negative thoughts and beliefs can lead to illness and fear and how it is possible to become stuck in these negative beliefs until they begin to shape our entire reality. This is a notion that I have already come to believe is true, so she was preaching to the choir.

The idea I struggled with was that it would be easy to eradicate these deeply rooted negative thoughts. It seemed too good to be true. Could it really be this simple? I was willing (for the sake of being able to pass on my knowledge to all of you) to be the guinea pig and give it a whirl.

The first session began with a reading of my "womb beliefs," a look back into my consciousness at the moment of my birth. Apparently, I was a smug little thing, somewhat skeptical of my parents, not quite trusting of them. I seemed to have the knowledge that I was there to test them and knew I would prove to be a challenge. Gee, I must have been a joy of a child!

The session continued with a look at each of the kid's present states of mind, ultimately focusing on their thoughts around the loss of their dad and their differing forms of grief. Some of their negative thoughts and fears were eradicated and replaced with positive ones. I listened and typed away as Donna spoke, clearly, and matter-of-factly, amazed how easily she was able to state a belief, pull it and then replace it with another more life affirming, positive one. Could this really work? She told me to expect a breakdown, a release of some kind from Olivia in particular, and a few days later it came in the form of a text while I was at a writing group: "I just woke up and am crying for no reason. Can you come home?"

I went home. We talked. I told her about the healing and am pretty certain she thinks I'm insane at this point. And yet there was a kernel of truth in what I was reading back to her from the reading. She resisted, as teenagers do, but I don't think the message was lost on her. But who really knows. At this point she is tired of me harping on all the time about "the grief" and who can blame her. I'm tired of it too.

I had another session yesterday that wound up focusing on my upcoming knee surgery. As I mentioned in the last post, knees are considered to be a seat of resistance, ego, stubbornness. Resistance is a form of control. So really, the conversation was not about knees but about relationships.

"I'm getting a belief that you're sad, afraid, scared because big feelings can bring big heartbreak. There were big emotions with Arron and then he died and so those fears were validated. I'm pulling that and replacing it with 'I'm safe to bend, be flexible and go with what's happening rather than resist.'"

She spoke of trust, saying I sometimes push too much to make a relationship happen rather than let it take its own course and find out what I want. It's kind of a feeling of "gotta hunt love down and trap it or it will get away," of not wanting to miss it that can override my feelings of "Is this is right?" She "pulled" this sentiment and replaced it with "I'm safe to know that love is true for me.

And then she asked a question that I hadn't considered, given that I have unwittingly "fallen" for a firefighter."Does it worry you that he does dangerous things, has a dangerous job?" And until that moment, it hadn't. Not really. Not consciously, anyway.

"So the belief I am getting from you is that 'he likes dangerous risky things and has a job that is dangerous so you wonder, am I setting myself up to be with someone else who gets killed? What am I doing with myself?' I'm going to pull that and replace it with 'I'm safe to trust my heart to lead me into love without fearing loss and disaster.'"

"Your past experience has made you cautious about life and his energy comes in and embraces life. He's showing that to you so you can embrace life too. Feels very healing. Helps to enliven you and get out of your dark places and his energy solicits you out into to world and is very positive for you."

She continued to eradicate each tiny fear I had going into surgery – fear for the kids if something were to happen, fear of not being able to cope afterwards, fears of helplessness and abandonment. So many fears that I had not considered and yet as she spoke them, were real and enlarged, until she pulled them and replaced them with a sense of calm.

These tiny niggling fears, like the shards I will be having removed from my knee on Monday are inconsequential and yet debilitating. One by one, she has plucked each one out, leaving me free to heal from past wounds. Such a gift.

 

While looking for the image for this post, I came across this cool site that has music for getting oneself into a theta state: www.wizardnow.com Kind of cool!