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Chameleons, healing, travel, but mostly love

This post, I warn you now, may feel a little sentimental. So leave if you're just not in the mood. Oh, and I'm going to talk about an upcoming trip, too, so if you're into travel plans, just skip over the sentimental stuff. Unless I'm too clever and mix 'em up.

Which I might, because it's that kind of a day.

Chameleons...adapt. They protect themselves by blending into whatever background they happen to be against at any moment in time. What a fabulous evolutionary trait, and one that serves them very well. I mean, they're still around, right? That alone speaks to the effectiveness of blending and adapting to current environments.

I believe we as humans do the same, only emotionally. At least I know I have, and I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing but it just seems to be how I manage my life.

There was a time, in a former life (literally, I was married, briefly, before, at a very early age and have still not forgiven my parents for not stepping up and abso.lutely prohibiting the entire thing), that I played a flashy, borderline arm candy role. I say borderline because I am fundamentally salt of the earth so the real flash only penetrated a cell layer or two, and no amount of gold earrings and flashy watches and German cars could change my essence. Thank goodness.

During the flashy time there were airplanes and trips to Mexico and lots of time with affluent professionals and the LA lifestyle of the early 80's, and I consider myself lucky to have escaped that without a child who had to continue to bridge that life and what mine became, or in fact that I managed to get away with my own life not much worse for wear. Hey, it was the 80's, and we drove fast, slept little, and abandoned common sense when it served our purposes. Which was more often than we should have, of this I'm certain.

But I left it. I knew it wasn't really me, it had been fun and exciting and exhausting and left me feeling incredibly empty and lost at a time when I needed to plant my feet on the ground and figure out what the future needed to look like. And my ex, well, I'm not going to say too much to disparage him other than to say he is at heart a good human being, but he grew up with intensely capitalistic needs, ie he went through money faster than we both could make it, and showed no sign of slowing that tendency nor did he express what I began to understand was sorely missing in our marriage, which was an appreciation for me as a sentient human being with deeper emotional needs than he was able to meet. On just about any level.

To my point about chameleonism, though..is that I wore that life like a second skin. I acted the way I was expected to, I dressed the part, and I fell into the role. With tremendous enthusiasm. But it wasn't a role I'd created, only one I filled.

Fast forward a bit to the most frightening yet arguably the most important phase in my personal development to that point, aka the alone time.

This period saw me learn to love myself for who I was (cliche as it sounds, it's true) without someone in my life distracting me from figuring out who I was.  I allowed occasional distraction, but not deep or real at that point. This was an intensely selfish period in my life, and even now I'm grateful for having done the work/suffering through my own whiny protests to get to the core of me.

Thankfully, what I found at my gooey center wasn't all bad. I had a ton of maturing to do, much to accomplish in terms of gaining skills and improving communication and such, but the center was ok. Not too tarnished from the early marriage, which was in itself a minor miracle.

I embraced this transitional role with power suits, high heels, sassy chat, and a veneer of competence and confidence, and hoped that nobody but nobody would see through it all and blow my cover. The key to this role, though, was it was my own. I'd created it, was swimming in it, and intended to remain there until I deemed myself ready.

I hadn't recognized this phase as nearly over until I ended up at an opening event at new bar in town and was saved from the advances of a very drunk and fairly aggressive man at the bar when a sparkly blue-eyed hunk o' gorgeous man threw his sweater over my shoulders, kissed me on the cheek, and said, 'Thanks for waiting for me sweetie. I got held up at the restaurant.'

Said rescue was followed by a dance, then a glass of wine on a settee during which gorgeous man noted that he thought I had pretty feet (I'd kicked off my super sassy Bandolino stilettos and curled my feet up under me at that point) and asked if I wanted a foot rub. And then he did it. And some hours later, as we discovered that though we'd worked together and basically continually snubbed each other at a local restaurant, we'd both been wrong. There was more to each of us, and we discovered it that night.

He walked me to my car, and in a cool, misty February rain, he planted a soft and lovely kiss on my lips and promised he'd keep in touch.

My alone time was unexpectedly and undeniably OVER. And I was in huge trouble. Huge. Because I had dreamed of this man, and I don't mean generic dream this was specific, I had seen his face, and he felt in my dream like he'd been part of me/my life for a very very long time.

Ahem.

We ended up together. And we've raised a family together.

This role for me has been the most astonishing, exhausting, enjoyable, remarkable, at some times comical, that I ever thought I'd play. And the beauty of it all? In partnership with another person I created it. We together have carved out a life of our own, and we've worn the different outfits required to do that.

To date, with this man, I've worn sexy flirty, career, maternity, athletic, soccer mom, track mom, basketball mom, midlife wife, and now college mom and empty nest attire.

Today we celebrate 24 years of marriage. We've navigated the sometimes placid, sometimes choppy, occasionally tumultuous waters of almost two and half decades and we're still afloat.

Of this I'm proud. Of this I'm aghast, because there have been moments when we've both doubted whether we had the strength, will or drive to continue. It's been mutual. But we've always chosen to fight for us because at our very core is a deep love that feels like it's transcended lifetimes and which manages to grow and strengthen in spite of our foibles, our idiocy or selfishness or just cluelessness from time to time.

(In case you hadn't keyed in yet, this is the sentimental part. And I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to get to the travel part another day because this has gone way long.)

Happy Anniversary, G.G. Thank you for sharing yourself with me, and for allowing me to share myself with you in all of my multitude of iterations over these past years. It's a pleasure sharing life with you.

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