Happy New Year to one and all and I am continually sending out positive thoughts to help make 2011 the happiest one that all those I know, have ever known. A tall order, you may say, but I believe that the more positive I can make those around me, the more positive they can make people around them and so it will go on and on and on......
As usual, gifts for my girls inevitably includes some "romcom" dvds. They are after all, girls, with the whole romantic world in front of them and so why wouldn't they want to watch love story after love story? I love to watch them too. The difference between them and me is that they have yet to experience the reality of an intimate relationship and so their ideas of what that relationship will be like may be a bit rosy, due to the constant happy endings that they view in their movies. Don't get me wrong, I love a happy ending as much as the next girl but I do remember my unrealistic notions of love being born from watching "The Sound of Music" and "Anne of Green Gables" and expecting that I would feel wonderful as soon as I found someone who loved me in the same way that Captain Von Trapp loved Maria and Gilbert Blyth loved Anne Shirley.
As Anne tells Gilbert, after she finally realises that she loves him (although that love was very different from what she thought she should feel)
"I went looking for my ideals outside myself and discovered that it's not what the world holds for you that's important, it's what you bring to it." and my eyes well up, just writing that down because I recognise that I did exactly that same thing, when I was younger.
I thought that something or someone would make me happy but I found out that the only person who could make me happy was me. If you are unhappy inside then you have to change that, not someone else. It's your responsibility and it may take you many years to see that. I constantly blamed others for my unhappiness but finally accepted that if I wanted to enjoy my life, with my beautiful baby boy, I had to make the commitment to be the best mummy I could be and that would involve hard work, lots of tears and heartache and a belief that it was possible.
18 years later and all the hard work has been worth it. That baby boy is now a wonderful young man, strong in his knowledge of who he is and ready to experience the adventure of life. Not that he's unafraid of the future but courage is best described as "feeling fear and doing it anyway."
And he does go forward, knowing that his father and I will be here should he need some encouragement to grasp what he feels is right for him. He's never taken the easy route, preferring to sail his own ship rather than be one of the crew, even when it may have felt uncomfortable and alien. I only have a tiny job left to do as his mother and that is to help him to believe that anything is possible. Anything.
Back to the "romcom" theme and combining it with my desire to help teenagers navigate the path to adulthood. If I look back to my first experience of a kiss I am glad that I didn't just give up kissing altogether. It was a disaster and terrifying-not sure which adjective applies most. The only reason I even did it was through peer pressure and the idea that I had to have a boyfriend. Everyone else did-or so I thought. Even the Disney movies and tv shows have very young teens in serious relationships or finding true love with the foot-popping kiss.
I'm not sure about you but my recollections from my early teenage years (and in fact earlier than that) all seem to include the feelings of being much older than I actually was. Pre high-school I had already taken very little people out to the movies via bus and felt responsible enough to do that. I remember at 12 years old going uptown for coffee and shopping with a friend and we were just so grown up. Going off on holiday with another friend and her parents at 13 signalled the fact that I was seriously mature but was I? Do all young people feel the same?
The thing is, I'm no different inside to that 13 year old girl. I am and always was me. My early teenage years saw me watching other teenagers pairing up with each other or indeed working their way through the opposite-sex population of the school. I was terrified of what it all entailed and when I finally had my first romance, I was 15 (the first kiss, at the age of 12, wasn't a romance, merely an experiment which lasted an uncomfortable 2 weeks)
And he broke my heart. After him, I decided that nobody would ever have that power over me again and I closed off a chunk of myself to everyone. That chunk was added to the chunk that had been closed off to protect me after I was bullied at primary school and I became a pretty hard person for many years.................and then came Andrew.
Romance is all good and well but there is no defence against the feelings that your newborn son evokes in you and I pretty soon acknowledged that fact. I knew that I had to get some instruction on how to allow myself to be loved by him, which would involve risking heartbreak if anything should happen to him (I was rather more negative in those days)
Through much counselling, self-work and through the help of my Bach and Reiki (and I can't discount all the love and support from my wonderfully understanding, often put-upon husband) I now have the open heart that allows me to love and be loved in a way that I once thought impossible. I know that it allows me to feel pain (as it did when my mum died and when Andrew turned to go through the security at the airport) but the pain is worth it because I am now also able to feel joy, which was an emotion that escaped me for so many years.
I've digressed from the "romcom" again but seem to have covered things that are relevant to love and romance, in a different way.
When I started to write, my intension had been to try to convey how the reality of my relationships has differed from the typical romcom movie. How my experience of relationships has affected me and how I now see what my idea of a great relationship is.
I used to think that I had to make people fall in love with me by being the kind of person that they were looking for. Have you ever seen the movie "The runaway bride" where Julia Roberts never makes it down the aisle because she doesn't really love the person she's to marry because she's only been pretending to like all the same things as him? That was kinda like me. As soon as my partner saw the real me (because I couldn't be perfect all the time) I'd cut and run or just be plain horrible to them so that they would leave.
I believe that I am not alone in the way I went into relationships. I think that lots of people, like I was, are looking for someone to make them happy and so they pretend to be exactly what their partners are looking for to receive the love that they desire, to make them feel worthwhile.
Wouldn't it be so much easier if we could love ourselves first and then, because we felt secure in our self-worth, we would let people see the real us. We would then pair up with someone who knew the real us and, with no pretence involved, we would be much more likely to have a happy, longterm, loving relationship. Honest communication has to go down as the single most important ingredient of a successful relationship-romantic or otherwise. Honesty may be scary but it may save much heartache later.
So back to my helping teenagers and that involves helping them to feel worthwhile. To help them to know that they are the most important person to themselves. To help them be unafraid to show others who they really are and to be proud of that. In empowering them to be true to themselves, they will be much less likely to rush out to find someone else who will make them happy.
Walnut is perhaps my most favourite remedy as it is both the protector and the remedy for change. I would give the whole world population Walnut, as it helps a person to walk their own path without being interfered with by others or interfering with them. It helps a person adapt to any and all changes and can serve to cut links with things that are not serving them well.
We all experience change. From conception to death and everything in between, Walnut would serve the world population well, to adapt to its changes and to perhaps even allow a few more people to experience love in a more "romcommish" way because they are sure of their choice.
With Walnut in the worlds water-supply, people would be walking their path as they want to walk it, rather than walking anothers path because they think that they should.
And on that note, I'll close. My writing never goes where I expect it to and that's one of the reasons that I LOVE TO WRITE. cap-lock jumped on and it seems that it worked on the right words. I plan to do tons more writing in 2011 although this may not transfer to my blog.
New Years Resolutions? A couple and one of them is to write more and more and more. I also hope to be better organised and to look after my physical self with a bit more tlc.
As I look forward to the adventure that is 2011 I see so many possibilities and I know that if I am to accomplish all that I can, it's up to me, myself and I.
Sending out an abundance of wonderful positive thoughts to all of you who are reading this and to the world at large. It's your turn, now, to do the same :-)
Have a wonderful week,
Lxxxxx
Posted on Wed, January 5, 2011
by Linsey Denham