mommymasala

I am not a high school English teacher anymore. But now, I write. I think. I form phrases and pluck words out of the air and turn them into reflections of my inner world. I teach myself to be authentic with my thoughts and actions. I teach myself to be free.

I don’t have a New York State teacher’s license anymore.  But I earned that achievement once and instead, I am teaching my daughter to speak, to listen, to interpret and analyze. I teach her to be. I teach her love.

I’m not reading copy written by freelancers as the editor for an in-flight magazine any longer, but I follow and interact with writers who leave me yearning for their passion and the power in their pens (or keystrokes.) I edit my own life, and cross out the negatives as I slowly work towards a perfected draft of who I am and what I want to be. I continue to revise as I continue to change.

I am not standing in an airport, facilitating travel to beautiful places for hundreds of strangers as the Customer Service Agent they’ll love enough to mention or give a gift of wine and chocolate to, or who got promotion after promotion in a few short months because of it. But I am the one who knows I am capable of such things, and who uses it to smile through diaper changes and potty training, illnesses and tantrums, feeding and disagreeing. I am also the one who knows I will do it all again one day.

I can’t pay only airport taxes and make last-minute plans to fly to a tropical island, but I can pack a diaper bag and strap my baby into her car-seat and head into New York City for a dose of what is like epinephrine for my soul. I can go to museums and movies, parks and playgroups, and make any day a mini-vacation. Or I can order pizza and watch animated movies and clink glasses with my daughter’s milk in our own mother/daughter stay-cation.

I am not surrounded by the friends and family of my former life, but by real connections, people who support me and pray for me and make me laugh and make me grateful. New relationships and old that have proved stronger than the supposedly unbreakable bond of marriage.

I don’t have a husband but I have purer love. For myself. For my baby girl.

I am not someone’s wife, someone’s English teacher, someone’s editor, someone’s ticket agent. I am my own everything. I am Zahara’s everything.

I don’t need to be more.

I am enough.

When I got pregnant with Zahara I developed gestational anemia, which is a scientific way of saying I was knocked flat, sleeping about 20 hours a day, and getting up only to use the bathroom or grab something portable and relatively not messy to bring to my bed and devour. I was dizzy and weak and pale and I thought pregnancy is wayyyy too misrepresented as this glowing, flowing, fresh and happy, shiny phase of life. Then of course, my doctor did bloodwork and came up with this innocent sounding diagnosis and an easy fix: one iron pill a day to balance me out and get some color back in my cheeks!

All this was well and good, until I noticed that my copy of the lab’s results listed my blood type as O positive.

 
“Um, excuse me Doctor, just one question. Does this say I’m O positive?” I asked with a slight shake of my head and a small, somewhat condescending smile. Oh, you silly doctor people, you.

 
“Let me just take a look. Yes, O positive, says so right here.”

 
Confusion, bigger shake of the head. “Uh, no, that’s a mistake. I’m B positive, have been my whole life.”

 
“Who told you that?”

 
“My mother. They told her when she was pregnant with me. She’s rH negative so they did extra tests on me as a fetus and said she had to get special shots because I was B positive,” I explained calmly, so sure of myself, so smug.

 
“Well, we’ll check it again, but there’s really very little chance of this being wrong,” the Doctor said, a bit bemusedly. I’m sure he was wondering how long he’d have to put up with this hormonal, crazy pregnant lady mountain out of a molehill stuff before I’d leave his office.

 
“Yes, please check it again. I mean, I’ve been B positive my whole life and your blood type doesn’t just change, does it?” Mothers can’t be wrong about their kids’ blood types, can they? I mean, come on, that’s like the most basic thing to know about your own child, right? Wait, I don’t even have a clue about Zahara’s blood type…

You’re asking yourself right now why this matters. What’s the big deal, you say, she thought she was a B but she’s an O, who gives a shnizzle? Ha, never used the word shnizzle before, but I like it!

Well, here’s the thing. My mother was wrong, I was wrong, and my doctor and his lab in Puerto Rico were right. I am O positive and since blood doesn’t transform spontaneously from one group into another (unless you’re a character from Twilight) that means that I’d been wrong about that basic building block of my life for my whole life. And when I think about it, that is a really huge thing to not know about yourself. I was out there living the B positive life, taking any shnizzle thrown at me (ha!) and letting it smear all over my face, get in my wide, opened permanently into a fake grin mouth, and letting it choke me on its way down inside where it festered into a putrid pile of, well, redigested shnizzle.

And all this time, I’d been O positive. O, the universal donor, the universal giver. O, the illusive, mysterious, stand-alone type who will only accept something like itself, but who can, and will, give to anyone and everyone else as much as possible. I was trying to B positive and feeling like the octagonal puzzle piece shoved into a circular space. I could sort of fit, I could make it work, but it just didn’t feel right. But to find out I am an O, well, that’s something else entirely, isn’t it?

O gives happily, easily, without having to be anything other than itself. In fact, O is perfect for everyone just as it is and actually, it was born ready to help, to empathetically serve the greater good. (Is empathetically even a word?) But O does not do it unwillingly or by force like the unfollowable mantra of the B positives. No, O cares for all while demanding care for itself by those just like it. O needs O, like attracts like in this case, and O is open to receiving from those who were also born to sacrifice of themselves more than metaphorically, literally doling out pints of itself for strangers and renewing itself with ease to give again another day.

O is rare and O is valued. O is called by blood registries to schedule donations to help with national and local shortages. And O responds. O replenishes itself and is strong, and brave, and adaptable enough to emerge often to aid in saving 5 lives with every pint, as the old saying goes. O is a unique and powerful gem of blood groups, like a superpower in a cartoon, well-hidden and yet so incredibly important.

I was wrong and my mother was wrong and an OB-GYN in Puerto Rico let me in on the biggest secret of my life. I am O positive, not B positive. I am quietly strong, distinct and important. I am all this and more from my blood through my core to every inch of me and I don’t need to force a thing.

I am who I am and when I was trying to be something else I didn’t fit. But now, I’m the goddess of blood types, the All-Powerful and All-Giving and All-Loving of blood types. I’m O positive and I am sure of it.

And if you need me I’ll be there in a heartbeat and a needle-stick, but if I need anything or anyone I will be selective. I will confirm that at your core you are like me so I don’t die from receiving an ill-matched transfusion of feelings and blood and time and love and instead, I will see to it that the only one who gets past my skin is someone who’s going to fit right in. So my mother was wrong about me and that began a lifelong journey mistakenly believing myself to be something I’m not. I know now that I’m an O positive. I’m living it and I’m loving it.

And I have to thank my daughter for saving my life. Because without her poking around in there and existing and forcing me to take a look at myself, I never would have known who I truly am. I would never have learned how special and valuable I am and I would never have embraced my beautiful, quirky, and generous O positive self. My mother and I messed up, but Zahara showed me reality. And so what if I don’t know her blood type yet? When the time comes we’ll find out together, but I’ll never make the mistake of convincing her she’s something she’s not.

And if you’re still reading and you’re wondering, my ammi is also an O and I love her rarified self more than I can say. She’s even rarer than me, an O negative, with qualities and strengths for me to admire and mirror, just not identically. And that’s okay, because she is who she is and I am who I am and us laid-back Os are all about live and let live, man. We’re both Os, anyway, so there’s more of my mother in me than meets the eye. And there’s more of me in her, too. We’ll just let time tell us what runs through Zahara’s veins, and take it from there.

My last post was a cathartic, therapeutic experience. Over the past 26 months, I’ve gone through all of the stages of grief I think, and that post was finally one of acceptance. It was everything I want to say about my marriage, the good, the bad, the way we loved and the way it ended. I can explain until I have no words left, but the questions will never be fully answered, the loss can never truly be understood. And the emotions, the anger, the bitterness, the desperation, the shame, and the guilt, it’s all too big to ever really put into words. So I choose now to stop talking about that marriage itself. It happened, it was whatever it was, and it doesn’t make a bit of difference now to even attempt to analyze where it went wrong.

That doesn’t mean I can’t learn from it. There’s plenty about who I was, what my life was like, and how I allowed myself to be treated and how I responded that was wrong for me. There’s so much I needed to finally see and change and I can do that now because I finally let myself face it. I accept that I will never know if that man became someone I didn’t like or if that was who he always was and I just didn’t see it. I accept that I was young and foolish and naive when I fell in love and that I wasn’t proud enough of myself to set limits to my patience. I didn’t respect and honor myself enough to be clear about what lines could not be crossed. I made myself weak and unhappy by not caring enough about my own wants and needs. And that’s just not a way to live OR love.

There is one last piece to my grief that I have yet to write about. Once I let that out, I will no longer write about those events because I choose to move on in my life now. I have to get this out, though, because it’s the last big thing that happened between us and it defined everything I’ve done since then and how I’ve chosen to be happy instead of being a martyr.

*****

I have always been so hyper-aware of what others expect and that has taken precedence over what I feel. I was happiest making others happy, but sacrificing my own joy was the wrong way to go about it. I’m worth the same amount of effort I put into others’ lives. Why not voice my own desires and, (gasp) MAKE IT HAPPEN?? I know I’m a good person. I know I don’t like to hurt people, to lie, to cheat or steal. I am kind and generous, sympathetic and empathetic. But I have no reason to fear that listening to myself and doing what I want will ever be the wrong choice. If I know I’m that good person, than no choice I make will ever be one that is truly hurtful to someone else.

And as a mom, I want to set the example for my little girl that taking care of herself is a priority. I want her to value other people’s opinions and feelings, but honor her own heart first. I teach her right from wrong, and I teach her to care about the community, her family, the world around her. I can also teach her how to be strong within herself, a lesson I think is the most important one a desi woman today can learn.

The generation before mine was conservative. The generation after will probably be comfortable in a settled balance between the traditions and the new ways of life. But my generation is one of turbulence, extremes of rebellion and obedience.

I’m a first-born American pioneer in my family, the guinea pig that tested out the strange and awkward thing that is growing up Muslim in America… a bit like straddling a spiked fence. The experience is painful and embarrassing at times. I felt like an outsider in both the “American” circles and my family’s. I was different. And I tried to be silent about it, to pass by unnoticed while I satisfied everyone else and attempted not to feel like I wanted something else. But countless times I wished I was one of the little blond girls, the ones who didn’t know where in the world their families were from, whose religion wasn’t a stamp on their foreheads labeling them one way or the other. I wanted so badly to blend in, not to be so pointedly unique while I felt invisible.

That silence was suffocating. My relationship with Zahara’s father was similar, not in such negative ways, but in the way that I quieted my discomfort for the sake of maintaining peace. I was silent, and I was sad. Like I said in my last post, there were some amazing times. But I needed more. I needed to go through the hell of the end of that relationship to truly be set free. I needed to learn how to love myself.

*****

The five stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. When I found out about his cheating 2 years ago, I went through periods of the first 2 stages rather quickly. He made it easy for me to get to stage 3, bargaining, by asking for forgiveness and expressing his love and desire to prove himself. I tried to remain objective, but really I was denying that his actions could be as bad as they felt to me, I was angry at myself for not being able to get past it, and I was ready to do all kinds of heavy lifting to make it work. I let him back into my heart and my arms too many times to count that first year.

I thought I was being strong, when in reality I was just trying to ignore my own instincts in order to get us back together. But becoming a mother had given me some new confidence, making me push against my own resistance to care about ME. I was confused and conflicted. I knew something had to change and (or because?) I knew that my daughter deserved a better example. On New Year’s Eve I realized it had been a year since I’d discovered the cheating and I was still just waiting for him to go through with his promises to make it up to me.

This is when he told me he had a week off and asked me to come to Thailand where he’d be for that week so he could finally win my trust back fully. He wanted to explore this random foreign place together while we explored a new kind of relationship with each other, one in which we would be wiser than before and stronger together because of it. So I did it. That was the moment my life really changed.

Sometime during my LONG flight from New York to Japan, his girlfriend got suspicious and made plans to see him and his parents called mine to tell them to tell me to turn around and come home because I was “pressuring” him. Meanwhile, I thought about my life and decided that I was tired of waiting for people to live up to my expectations while I inevitably let them get away with doing the opposite. This was going to be the end of this relationship or the beginning of a new understanding between us (with plenty of marriage counseling along the way, of course!)

I landed in Japan for a short layover and called him to say I was almost in Thailand. When he’d asked for the visit and convinced me it was necessary, I’d asked him three times if he was sure before I finally clicked the enter button to charge my credit card for the ticket. My parents were understandably worried but wanted me to make the decision that felt right to me. I think I was a little desperate at that point, too. I just wanted things to go back to how they had been, with the adjustments that I felt were necessary for Zahara to see in our relationship.

He had started describing the adventures we would have, the hotel and car arrangements he’d make, the tours we could go on. He sounded so excited and enthusiastic and romantic, it was infectious. But when I called from Tokyo after hours wide awake in a cramped airplane seat, he sounded different, abrupt and angry. He told me he wasn’t sure about all this and I told him the decision I’d reached about the visit and its implications. Now that I was almost there and so sick of waiting around and getting hurt, it was in his hands. He could do whatever he wanted, but I was done letting things happen to me. Whatever came next, I’d do what was right for me.

What came next was unexpected. I arrived in Thailand after he angrily ensured that he’d still be there to pick me up. I walked out, looked around, walked outside, walked inside, walked through that whole airport I don’t know how many times. I called to let my family know I’d arrived safely and to calm their fears. I called him and I called him and I walked and walked. I charged my phone by a nice security guard’s chair and I tried to shake off the numbness. And then somehow I did.

I got up, asked the airline about a return flight and found out I was stuck there for the weekend. I got a reservation at the airport hotel and I went there, ate dinner, and got in bed. I flipped through my IPhone pictures and videos of my daughter, of the reason I wanted to go on, of the one person that made me want to be strong. And I laughed at her silly infant dancing style and I cried at my lost love and I tossed and turned and slept.

That sleep only lasted a few hours and then I was awake and still in disbelief. I was struggling to understand how I was where I was, and then I chose not to even try. I had to get home to my little girl. I couldn’t fall apart in a hotel in Thailand with hardly any money and not a soul to rely on but myself. I got myself up.

    I swam in the pool.

I ate AMAZING food.

I got dressed up and I got information and I got on a train and I went to the main city. I met a kind older man who talked to a taxi driver for me to get him to give me a tour of the temples and monuments. I took pictures and I soaked in the beauty. And I ate some more. And somehow, I was happy. I was excited. I felt FREE.

On the way to the airport for my flight, my taxi got stuck in horrible, sit still for hours traffic. Turned out there was some sort of a Communist procession protesting the current government in Thailand. I negotiated and got my taxi driver to stop a motorcycle taxi and tell him to take me to a nearby train station. I grabbed my bags, hitched up the skirt of my maxi dress, climbed on the back of that motorcycle and put my arms around the first man since my husband. And then we flew.

I was flying.

It was the most invigorating, liberating, exhilarating feeling ever.

I laughed like a maniac and the wind cooled every last bit of heat from my stages of grief: the denial, anger, bargaining, and depression. Because I hadn’t realized but I had been depressed, functioning and smiling because I HAD to for my baby girl, but internally destroyed. I found my sexiness on the back of that motorcycle. I found my adventurous, fabulous, life-loving, self-loving self in those few moments. God, I felt lighter than I had in years and I liked it! And I wasn’t about to let that feeling go.

*****

When I got back from that trip I filed for divorce. Zahara’s father has spent this past year alternately trying to convince me to forgive him and trust him and then disappearing with his girlfriend for weeks at a time. I’ve never let our problems get in the way of his relationship with our daughter, but his sporadic presence in her life through phone calls and skype has remained sporadic. He’s barely visited, and is often out of touch for long periods. That’s his issue. I only want to make sure our daughter is happy and safe and healthy.

My trip to Thailand brought on the process of acceptance. And now, a year later, I wrote my last post about our marriage, accepting that there’s more to it than can ever be explained, and accepting that it is truly over. And now, I’ve written about the experience that finally changed my life.

I am no longer a little girl wishing I was someone else. I am no longer silently suffocating. But I will not argue the details of that relationship anymore. I won’t blame or defend. I won’t focus on that time. Because I am finally done grieving and I can truly say that I am free. And there’s nothing more that needs to be said about it. I am free.

“My hands, they’re strong / But my knees were far too weak / To stand in your arms / Without falling to your feet. / But there’s a side to you that I never knew, never knew / All the things you’d say they were never true, never true / And the games you play you would always win, always win….. But I set fire to the rain” – Adele Set Fire to the Rain

When you go through a breakup, friends take sides, your supporters rally around you to compliment your strength and badmouth your ex, and you use anger as a fuel to get through it with your head held high. It’s even more pronounced in a divorce, this bravado that comes from trying to convince yourself and the world around you that you are better off and everything will be perfect now. But eventually, the time comes when you have to look back with an unbiased eye and try to see the truth of the marriage, its failings, yes, but also, you have to be willing to see the moments that you tried to forget when you first began the process of ending things.

Those moments, when it seemed as if your life truly was perfect. Those moments, when love really did seem like the most powerful force in the world. Those moments, when you were undeniably, irrepressibly, irrevocably over-the-moon, as big as the universe, as deep as the oceans happy.

Like when you watched the sunset together from the cockpit of a 4-seater Piper and he gave you control of the airplane and a confident smile.

Like when you held him and cried with him as he tried to understand the huge fight he’d just had with his dad and he looked at you and promised you that he would never be that kind of man and, even though your chest hurt with the weight of his pain, there was a sense of peace in you thinking about the future you’d have with him.

Like when you walked towards him, a terrified, heart-clamped, breath-stalled bride, and you looked up to see his waiting hand, his eyes searching for yours, his lips parted in anticipation, and you shed your fears and doubts like an ill-fitting coat, stepped forward, and placed your hand in his…..

Like when you hid a pang of regret that he hadn’t planned ahead and instead told him it wasn’t his fault that he had very little money and couldn’t take you on the cruise he had promised, you would have an amazing honeymoon anyway because you were together and you rode a motorcycle around Puerto Rico and jumped off a cliff into a cool river and rode horses and ate sushi for the first time and felt freer than you ever had in your whole life…..

Like when you told him you were pregnant, your arms around his neck as his eyes grew big and just a little scared. Like when you shared the heartbreak of a miscarriage, and he held you night after night as you sobbed uncontrollably, asking the questions he couldn’t answer, the ones you didn’t dare ask in the daylight, and his nightly silence, his strength seeping from his arms to your soul, were the only things that helped you not to cry during the day… and eventually not to cry at all…..

Like when he lost his job and you told him, with not a doubt in your voice or in the most secret part of yourself, that you trusted him and that it would be okay because he would find a new door to open and you would walk through it together.

Like when you crossed state lines so he could succeed in a new place and you entered your first real home together just the two of you, and you watched him go from a self-doubting novice to a smooth professional and you were so proud of him you ignored any hardships and sacrifices involved with constantly moving because nothing else mattered as long as he was satisfied.

Like when the big break came, and you crossed an ocean and started a new adventure with his airline back where you had honeymooned two years earlier, and you hiked down to the bottom of a waterfall, had picnic dinners on the beach, took your first and so very overdue vacations, and explored and imagined and created memories that should have lasted a lifetime…..

Like when you started two jobs that you loved, editing an in-flight magazine from home and simultaneously rising quickly in the customer service department of the airline, and he looked at you again like he used to all those years ago, as if you were proving your own worth and strength to him, a look that had somehow been lost over time but you hadn’t really noticed.

Like when you had lunch breaks together and kissed in between flights and took turns making each other dinner and filled your one day off together with as many meals out, beach or pool afternoons, laughs with friends, and nights to remember as possible and after all that, how he hated being home without you and he came and sat and watched you work and held you and you thought, how odd, that he can’t stand to be alone when you had done it for so long for him, and yet, how sweet…..

Like when you could barely get through a shift without repeatedly sitting down, and you got so sick you couldn’t get out of bed, and even though you’d waited a year and then tried for another year and it wasn’t expected at all and you’d secretly given up hope, you found out you were finally, blessedly pregnant, and then you called and told him and he came home from work with a huge smile and flowers in a Valentine’s Day coffee cup left over from the holiday two weeks earlier.

Like when he planned an elaborate birthday for you, with all the friends you’d made a kind of family in this home away from home, and you were both grinning and glowing with the hopes and expectations dancing like something alive in your eyes.

Like when you moved away from that place for better doctors and you cried because this had been the best time of your life and he had been at his best there, confident and strong, loving and respectful, generous and caring, and you realized that despite all the good times before you two had been missing this, this connection, this balance between you that made your life together beautiful…..

*****

All of those moments and more, forgotten when you return to the Northeast, to the states you grew up in and moved to together. All of the warmth between you two simply overpowered by the sharp winds of a Boston autumn and then a New York winter. All of the pieces of your soul that you handed him so trustingly, so easily long ago and over those years, all of it scattered when he reveals parts of himself you didn’t know existed.

Like when you start catching him lying about spending money on his family and you’re hurt, not because he spent the money but because he pretends you wouldn’t want him to even though you’ve spent almost all of the 300 dollars a month he gave you the last few years on your in-laws, trying to make them love you like you love them.

Like when he starts blaming you for his long commute since it’s your proximity to the OB-GYN that helped you two pick an apartment and you’re hurt again, because you wanted him to take the flight line offered in Boston, only 15 minutes away, but he chose to take a schedule that meant he had to drive an hour and a half each way.

Like when he stops looking at you, really looking at you, at first a little and then at all, and you feel so alone and you wonder why people say husbands are more loving when their wives are pregnant and you start watching more and more television to fill the void and to bring some noise back into your silent home.

Like when you start finding out he’s lied to you for years, about big details and small, and even how much money he made and you realize that you’ve come to feel guilty spending any of it on yourself because he’s slowly made you think that would be such a burden on him and now you’re not just hurt, you’re angry.

Like when his temper starts getting worse, and his angry times come quicker and last longer and the moments he disrespects you and curses at you or the ways he allows his family to be rude to you or make fun of you or cause you heartache all come more frequently and without warning and you think about how you don’t want your child to be born into this…..

*****

The memories are there, good and bad, and if you focus you can find endless lists of either one tucked into your history, hidden by the ways you tried to be “strong” to get over it. And they haunt you, these lists that, if looked at separately, paint such a different picture of your time together. Was it all so bad? Was it ever really good? And you think about how it all ended…..

Like when you couldn’t take the sense that nothing was in your control anymore and you felt betrayed when he told you he’d made major career decisions on his own (including where he’d be living!) and lied to you about everything now it seemed and finally told you just two days before your pregnancy was going to be induced that he had not, in fact, told his parents that you would be arriving in New York a week later anyway so nobody should come visit you in the hospital in Boston. And you felt like you didn’t know this person at all and all you wanted was just that one week to bring your baby into the world together and spend as a little family without the distractions and disruptions of people he had been allowing to hurt you anyway and why didn’t he understand that?

And when you think about all this you have to acknowledge how your sadness and desperation and fears and pregnancy hormones led you to react to his personality shifts in ways that must have hurt him, too. Like when you told him you wouldn’t let him into the delivery room if his parents were there and you started crying and screaming at him, and as he screamed back at you it was as if the switch in your brain that had always kept you supportive and smiling for whatever he needed and quiet when he or his family were mean to you, that very important switch had suddenly not just turned off, but disappeared completely. And since your fears were choking you, you told him you didn’t trust that he’d take care of you and that baby or that he’d be the man you needed him to be if his parents were around and you both knew that the only reason you’d been so happy in Puerto Rico was because it was so damn far away from these people that had tried to divide you from the beginning…..

*****

He held your hand and rubbed your back and counted. You saw only him as you did the hardest thing you’ve ever done and went through something indescribable. He has never been more your husband, more of your love and strength, more of a man than that time when it all came down to pushing and exhaling from 1 to 10 and inhaling and counting and pushing again and his voice keeping you going and his eyes looking into yours keeping you hanging on.

And then she was born.

And then

and then

and then when time starts again, even though you had apologized and he had apologized and you had done this amazing thing together something has changed in you both. Even though you had calmed down and agreed to his parents being there and later he held you and his daughter together in the hospital bed, you suddenly knew that you couldn’t be silent anymore when anyone hurt you.

You look at this tiny face, this tiny but powerful presence, and you vow that you will be a stronger woman and finally tell him that you want his Puerto Rico, beautiful love connection, moments that make you undeniably, irrepressibly, irrevocably over-the-moon, as big as the universe, as deep as the oceans happy and you want it for her, so she sees what a man and a woman should be to each other.

And while you’re finding a strength and backbone in yourself you should, but didn’t, always have, he is already somewhere else, someone else. He’s gone even if he’s sitting right next to you. He’s far away from what you want and you’re no longer what he wants and so the holes are there for someone else to fill. And while you gain a new sense of self and learn what you want for you, he finds someone to fill his void.

*****

Whether he’s always been playing games and weakening you without you knowing it, or whether the perfect moments really were perfect, it doesn’t matter anymore. You’re happy being you and when you look back with that unbiased eye you can say that for a while, you were also happy being his. And you can carry yourself forward now, ready to give yourself the chance to make yourself happy, in any way possible. You’re able now, to look with greater clarity at what kind of a person you are and what you expect from a lover. And you know now, too, why it’s not only okay, but necessary for you to demand respect and how you can be kind and generous without losing yourself or letting anyone use you.

As hard as setting fire to the rain, seeing what was and accepting it and moving on without any real answers to the painful WHY.

And like setting fire to the rain, the process of discovering your own strength, your goals, your love of yourself, and the kind of inner peace that will let you stand in love, instead of falling weakly to someone else’s feet.

So I set fire to the rain.

And I survive.