Our true Self is a weak, fragile and tender thing….prone to easy injuries….scared that daylight might burn us.
And so, as early as we can, we find our safe places, dig our most comforting caves, store up in our various ways for the long winters ahead and move on with our lives.
Susan’s father Phillip died young of a sudden senseless coronary occlusion…young for him at 49, and even younger for her at 16. That ludicrous snap of Fate’s fingers molded her life forever, and she spent the ensuing years looking for tall dark men named Phillip, stumbled her way through dozens of them, then settled on the one she thought would bring her to warmest place of safety. She didn’t really know what she was doing. But she went ahead and did it anyway. Her fear, her pain, her thirst for safety led her.
Like a blind mole, she sniffed her way to safety, scratched her place into the soil beneath and put down the roots she needed to be nourished. Decades passed, and even though that one-time husband was not named Philip , like her father, he died anyway, having endured every possible twist and turn of a married couple’s life with Susan and their three kids . All seemed to thrive, whether in the fast-paced environment of the large city they “familied” in or in the hazy days of the summers spent in their large and generous country home outside that city’s walls.
Susan and her husband not named Phillip and their three children never wanted for anything they could not obtain, because they were blessed with the good fortune of money well-earned by both parents, and a
family life cleverly budgeted by Susan, who had vowed early on that she would never want for anything.
Because she did not come from money, Susan cultivated a fine instinct for saving it.
So by the time the husband was dead, and the kids had moved on with their lives (had their lives ever really been her life, she now wondered), Susan was perhaps braver than she had ever been in her life before ,
because she knew the ways the world worked. Or at least she thought she did. She thought nothing could harm her now, and after decades of fortress dwelling with her husband and children, Susan felt nothing could touch her anymore, that nothing could scare her. If she had gotten through all those years of child-rearing with no one dying of sudden infant death syndrome or the random teenage car wreck, if she had managed to earn and keep the love of a good enough man, Susan felt she could breathe deep and let go
of any parts of her body or being that had been holding her back. She remembered that exact moment in her comfortable country home living room when she realized she could absolute do anything she wanted to do, and that somehow she would be safe through it all.
SHe’d never travelled alone, but she decided that now she would.
She’d never even had a meal in a restaurant alone that she could easily recall, but she went right out and bought herself a long, winey huge lunch and never looked at her phone the entire time. All she did was look at people, taking all the time in the world to converse with the waiter, the busboy, the restaurant hostess who came over to check on her…..she realized how she had put up fences all her life, and the fences were her husband and her kids…they were the walls she had hidden behind.
Now, on this particular April day, she felt as if some heavy iron armor had dropped away and she could feel the skin on her legs again, as if they were freshly shaven. She remembered that freshly peeled feeling of her slender teenage legs discovering what the absence of hair felt like and it made her feel alive…it made her smell the Springtime she had yet to live.
Or maybe that was the small vase of fresh flowers in her lunch table?
No, they were fake.
It was her life inviting her to dance and it had the fragrance of freedom.
Right then and there, she decided to accept the invitation.
And she ordered two desserts.