Love

Such a wonderful thing, love is.

I love love.  I love my life, my family, my friends, my critters, my job, that I have a beautiful home and days doing the thing I love most - publishing.  I love that I have enough money in my bank account to live comfortably, food in my refrigerator and a great place to sleep at night.  I love that I have a garage to keep my car in so I am not cold in the morning driving to work.  And that I get to wake up every day knowing that each day is a new day.

I used to love the men in my life.  I loved my husbands - Bruce and Michael - when they were lovable.  And they were for a time.  Bruce I fell in love with in 1986 because he was fun.  He had been an outstanding musician in the band Oscar and I remember how great they were.  He had two beautiful daughters and he so doted on them.  During the year we dated,  he treated me extremely well, and he seemed to want a better life for himself as I did.  So I married him.  But then he wasn't fun.  He preferred drinking alcohol and doing drugs to socializing with the great new neighbors we met when we moved to a fabulous up-and-coming neighborhood.  Then he started siphoning the money out of our bank account and then left me on the interstate five miles from home one cold, December night.  He beat the tooty out of me for 17 minutes and burned me with his cigarettes and kicked me and tried to make me feel small.  He was sick, and I was sick and tired of being maltreated.  It was extremely unpleasant for several months.  It took almost two years to undo that marriage, but I got to keep the house.  That was my reward for that love affair.

Michael.  OMG, how I loved him.  He came into my life like a whirlwind.  Just when I was ready to give up on love, he swept me off my feet and reminded me of how it feels to be loved unconditionally.  We danced, we laughed, we sang, we camped, we travelled, we watched tv together and shared our fears and our failures.  He won my mom's heart.  We joked about commercials and saved dogs on the highway.  But then he obsessed about physique.  I was was thinner and more fit than I had ever been in my life, and he told me I was fat.  He never knew the 190-pound me.  I weighed 119 the day we married, and that wasn't good enough.  I worked my ass off, literally, for him.  And then, if that wasn't enough, I quit my job to be self-employed, he offended my neighbors, and he abused my credit cards when I was not paying attention.  The clincher was Hurricane Isabel.  My parents had a 10-ton tree land on their house, no power and enormous devastation to their home, and he refused to come help them.  My brothers and I went to NN and when I returned five days later, Michael asked me to bring him ice - which I did.  Then he told me I looked like hell.  I hadn't had a hot shower in six days and he needed ice.  I dumped the ice on the driveway, retrieved my dog and went home alone.

I don't regret loving these men.  I learned a lot from them.  Mostly, I became a stronger woman because of them - and for that, I can never thank them enough.  I became self-reliant because of them - not despite them.  I learned to love myself and my life unconditionally.  Both of them taught me how conditional love is, and that conditions are unacceptable terms in a relationship.  I hated that about them - and I think they know that now.  But I can't say for sure. 

Both of them have tried to reconnect with me since those days of long ago.   I can't go back to unacceptable terms.   I won't.   They taught me how to love, but they also taught me how not to.  For that, I am thankful, and I choose to love unconditionally anyway.

My terms?  Love me because I am who I am.  Don't tell me your terms.  I don't want to hear them.  Been there, done that. 

What I love now is friends who accept me "warts and all"... and family members who don't put conditions on my love.  There are only three of those:  my mom, my dad, and my sister.  And I have other family members who have stated conditions - well, you all can "bioya" because I don't accept the terms.  There are no saints in this life.  You can believe if you want to, but I don't - because I know you, I know who you are, what you've done, and you ain't no saints.  And I am not one either - and I don't pretend to be.

What I want to be, and what I love the most about myself, is that I am true to who I am and what I am capable of.  I love getting up every day and pushing myself to my limits.  And God gives me the strength to be this person that I am. 

I love that.  So, Happy Valentine's Day, everybody.  I love being me.  So there.