Woman | LOVE IN BLOOM BLOG

Have you ever felt that you walked the path of your life alone? That you were the only woman who has ever made a painful, stupid mistake? That you settled for less than you deserved? Did you desperately desire love above all else? Did you yearn for a real partner so much it hurt: Have you ever thought “Why is every woman but me in a great relationship? “Why can’t I be that happy?” Or found yourself rejected by the person you loved and it left you feeling that something was wrong with you?

When a devastating breakdown of a relationship ends it can feel like a wild boar‘s tusk ripping through your heart. You can become convinced that you are the only woman who has ever made a complete mess of your life. You feel alone, rejected, and furious that you had deceived yourself for so long. That you had given up on “yourself” to keep the love of another for years, only to be left with a heart torn to shreds.

What women learn shortly after the initial blow of their relationship’s end is that, they failed to understand above all else, is that they needed to honor the most important relationship of all “the one with themselves.” The ending of a relationship becomes the beginning of a journey for women to learn many things about themselves and how to love and honor themselves.

The journey of being a woman can seem crazy and confusing but for better or worse, women have many of the same stories, heartbreak, obstacles, and expectations. The good news is that women don’t have to remain captive to the limiting beliefs swirling in their psyches and in society, which keeps them far from their dreams. We always have a choice. Along life’s path, we all have the opportunity to gain wisdom from our mistakes, the self-awareness that comes from healing our wounds, and clarity by claiming our needs.

If we are lucky enough to wake up to the immense power that is available to heal our hearts and teach us how to love ourselves, we have a responsibility to share our stories and insights with others. Otherwise, the true power of our realizations will be lost. Sharing allows us to see ourselves in the words of others, gain witnesses to our personal journey, and broaden the possibilities that lie before us.

I, too relied on the wisdom and support of many women, some of them total strangers, to progress through my journey to wholeness. By watching others and listening, I learned that to fully and wholeheartedly love another I first needed to fully and wholeheartedly embrace ” myself.” This realization is a major source of inspiration in my decision to share my knowledge and experiences with other women. Women need to share the wisdom gained on their personal path as they went from being a person they thought they had to be to be loved to being the one they actually are.

In them I gained wisdom while on my personal path as I went from being a person I thought I knew and loved to being one I actually do know and love. We shared our stories about living ordinary lives, raising children, creating a safe home life, the ups and downs of stay at home moms to the working moms. Some of us were married and some single. We talked about many issues like paying bills, being young, and getting older and the list goes on and on and lets not forget divorce as well. We also talked about trying to find sources of love and happiness but often looking in the wrong places. When we stopped and took a careful look at the life we had created and honesty answered this question “Am I honoring the most important relationship in my life first? The one with my self and God.

We discovered reclaiming our lives meant giving up the fairy tale that we had created about ourselves and instead finding out what reality was. The new path may did not seem clear at the beginning to us and we felt like we were fumbling in the dark grabbing for something to hold to, then one of my dear friends said, remember this is a normal feeling and keep moving forward and don’t go back. During this time we discovered within ourselves the spirit of survivor and a deeper faith we never knew existed.

We also learned that loving ourselves is knowing ourselves, enjoying and valuing the women that we are, and understanding that getting to know ourselves and God is a lifelong personal enterprise. It meant that we needed to appreciate ourselves as much as we appreciate the ones we love. Loving ourselves is recognizing our gifts and talents and then putting them to good use, acknowledging our flaws and forgiving ourselves for them. We learned that loving ourselves was reaching for more, it was reaching for the best, in ourselves. We discovered that our hearts can only hold as much love as we believe it can. So often women put up with shabby treatment in love because they don’t believe they deserve better or they are still stuck in fairy tale thinking. So treat yourself better, believe you deserve to be treated well, and you will get treated even more wonderfully in love than any fairy tale woman has ever been.

Carol. M.

If you want to be listened to, you should put in time listening. When I was in my twenties I belonged to a writers group. We would meet every other Wednesday and share our short stories, plays, mysteries and memoirs. Needless to say we did a lot of talking and listening. As with any group of women, our conversations ranged from what our children were doing to what was going on in the White House.

Every word spoken was important to us. One day, the conversation centered on their litany of complaints over getting older. One woman described her hot flashes in great detail and told us how in the middle of night she got out of bed and took a cold shower to calm her night sweats.

I was a new mother and all I could think about was how many dirty diapers I had changed and was suffering from all those sleepless nights. Needless to say, I remained silent, while sipping a cup of tea as the rest of the women shared their complaints about aging. I started to wonder if I was in a writers group or having lunch with my mother and her girlfriends.

Finally the group returned to the business at hand which was to decide if we should start to critique each others writings. A few of us decided that it would be helpful to have someone critique our latest writings. After that there were frequent red marks all over our pages. To make the process easier to take, we started each critique with what was good about the piece. Then with the writer basking in the glow of hearing how skillful her writing was, the not so positive stuff could be discussed. Many of the women went on to become succesful published authors.

The good stuff doesn’t just apply to critiquing writers it also applies to aging. Now many years later most of my friends are helping take care of their parents. They are dealing with problems about aging, fading memories, fatal illnesses, scams to cheat the trusting. At times they become overwhelmed.

It’s time to start thinking about what we gain from getting older, not what we lose. When we start to appreciate all the good stuff that we have and can do, we become happier people. Like a new sense of time. Like times when we were perusing an education or a career or raising our kids, we always looked ahead to each new stage.

It may have been when our babies would crawl, talk, walk, feed themselves, get out of diapers, get into school. Maybe it was when you finished collage and received your collage degree or when you were in pursuit of fulfilling your career goals.

All of those situations require looking ahead to the good stuff. Getting older doesn’t have to mean that you can’t look forward to having good stuff in your life. It means you have to think out of the box and move out of a few comfort zones. You can do it!

Now we know how fast the chipmunk-cheeked face of the nursing baby sharpens into the schoolgirls’ studious look. Don’t we? And we realize that, with each change, how special our time is and how fast it all disappears, too. Writing, like life, is not a goal but a process. And, as in life, it is easy to give up.

The excuses are legion. It’s too difficult to write; the storyline isn’t working; I don’t know where it’s taking me. But if we don’t trust the possibility that it will all work out, we’ll never get it written. And if those who read our work don’t look for possibilities, their doubts can discourage us from finishing it. So, we look for the possibilities of each idea, each piece of work.

Growing older in our society isn’t easy. The emphasis on staying young no matter what it takes or costs is strong. It’s sometimes hard to find the up side of getting old. But as mature women we have endless possibilities, from the sublime to the silly: never wearing panty hose again; wearing big, dangling rhinestone earings with jeans; eating dessert first or eating dessert only; going back to graduate school for the sheer joy of learning; taking up glass blowing or skydiving.

We can do what we want. It’s all possible. The process of writing is like aging they are both full of possibilities. The longer we live, the more we know about hurts and sadness in our own lives and in the world. But we know more too, with a recounting of what went right in our lives. As we have aged we have learned that each time we leave those we care about, we can leave them a positive word, a gift of good stuff, until we see them again. Life and writing are full of possibilities aren’t they?