The Third Act: My Life My Way
Living from your true nature
***If you prefer to listen, the link is at the top of the page.
Hello Lovely You,
don’t ever reject yourself. You are fabulous. You are worthy. You are love.
You have stuff you want and need to express. Yes, even us introverts.
Perhaps the biggest issue I have found with my clients (and myself) is that we rejected parts of ourselves as children, forgot about those parts, and suffered the consequences of abandonment in the vein hope of being liked, loved and accepted.
Most of my clients are deeply caring people. One of their biggest fears is hurting others. They bend over backwards in an effort not to squash someone else’s desire while denying their own.
Why?
To serve. To be useful, helpful, reliable and needed. They become martyrs. Or tomatoes as we say in our house.
My son would have been thirty-nine today.
He was a passionate, crazy kid when he died in a car crash at the age of twenty. Now he would have been thirty-nine. Only a year off the age I was when he died. I sometimes wonder what kind of man he would have become. But I’ll never know.
I was going to write that I think of him often. But that would be a lie. A lie that would satisfy my mind and need to be liked but not my conscience.
I would be wanting people to think that, as a mother who lost a child, I must think about him every day. I don’t.
To have people think I must want to connect with him. Long for him. Feel guilty still. Wish I had done something different. Be campaigning for more education for young people on the roads. But I knew right from the start that wouldn’t be healthy. I got interviewed by local journalists when it happened. Fodder for hungry humans who feed off tragic stories.
I played the game. Dare I say I even enjoyed it. One of them told me about a mother who was campaigning to educate young people about road deaths and after years of doing so was struggling with serious health issues. Evidence! Evidence it was not a healthy thing to do. ‘But it shows you care!” my mind beseeched. Fuck that! But I felt I had to play the game.
To pretend.
In order to do that I shut down. I didn’t feel. I didn’t express. I just carried on. Like a robot.
But my life is much bigger than the relationship I had with Luke.
I have three other beautiful sons. Three step children across two marriages. I have parents and step parents who care deeply about me. I have a large extended family who also love me and not one of them has ever judged me for being who I was, a grieving mother.
But what do I really want to say here?
Life is not about right and wrong.
Life is about going with the flow and dealing with what happens as well as we can.
Life is a game.
If we feel crap that shit needs be felt and expressed. Emotions need to move. We need to move.
If I could see Luke again what would I say to him?
The same as I say to my other boys. How are you? What have you been up to?
But what would be the point in that? He’s dead. Has been for almost nineteen years. His time came and went.
Let’s Start again…
Yesterday we went to the Hay Festival. A big cultural event in the UK and just up the road from where we live. A day out! I don’t remember the last time we did that. The last three years has been all about illness and hospital appointments.
It’s my dead son’s birthday today. There was an ought floating about to write about him. The profound impact his death had on my life. Blah, Blah Blah... But that’s boring. I’ve already written about it. That’s done now. If you want to read about it you can HERE.
But my life is so much richer now. So vibrant and more alive than it’s been for years. I don’t want to dwell on that time any more. I don’t want to give you lessons about grief.
He was a mixed up crazy kid and I loved him. We all did. He did a silly thing getting in a car with an idiot. But I love him and forgive him. It was his time to go. I don’t miss him so much now. We’ve moved on. He will forever be enshrouded in a mist of youth. I only occasionally think of him. My focus these days is on my family and friends. But most of all my Third Act.
Playing The Third Act
Lets go out with a BANG!
Let’s do things older people are not supposed to do.
Let’s have new experiences and learn new things.
Who I’ve been is irrelevant.
Every day a new day. A new beginning.
Who I am and who I am becoming is much more exhilarating, motivating and interesting.
Every day, I ask myself, who I want to be. Well not everyday. Well, to be honest, I forget. But it’s a good question to keep in mind. And I am consciously stepping into the energy of who I want to be. I don’t achieve that everyday but I do most days and it shows.
Things are shifting.
I know that my tendency to hark back to the past (albeit quietly and mostly in my own head) was not a good predictor of what my life could be.
Life is here.
Life is now.
Life is creation.
And I get to create it.
I always have but now I do it consciously.
It’s time to engage in it fully and see who wants to come along with me for the ride.
So far, as I am shifting and changing, my husband still loves me and, in fact, has become even more loving and attentive.
And I’m having fun with my kids, family and friends as I become more myself.
Leaning into my own desires, wants and needs is nourishing my Soul like nothing ever has before.
Embodying my True Nature as a playful, fun and caring woman.
Seeing a feminist author speak at the Hay Festival yesterday and feeling like a girl again from her outragiously funny comments, I felt myself filling up. There were women and men in the audience and I found myself asking a question. Is she like this in real life? Playful, fun, funny or is it all a performance on stage? Well into her sixties she claimed to be seeing a thirty-nine year old toy boy and having a fabulous sex life.
Feeling playful myself, I had really wanted to ask her what lube she used but I couldn’t quite summon up the courage. Later I spotted her walking out of the show. Glamorous. Proud. Something inside me snapped like I had been held back by an invisible rope. I ran up to her and asked my question about the lube.
‘Oh, I’m on HRT!’ she announced to everyone around her. She looked my husband up and down and made a seductive comment and left.
Playful.
But what stayed with me more was her answer to my previous question. Are you like this in real life? Her answer to staying connected to herself was to spend time with your girlfriends.
I knew this of course. We all need people we can be totally at ease with. With whom we can be our messiest, saddest, wickedest, most mischievous and playful selves. Our wild selves that know life is a game and want to throw out the prescribed rule book that we’re fed and reconnect with the juiciness of life.
So yes Luke died. It was very sad. I wish it hadn’t happened. I love him. I will always love him.
And...
My life is my life.
I get to choose how I live it.
I am surrounded by people who love me and they deserve my attention and my love too.
But most of all, so do I.
I love myself enough that my Third Act is better, brighter, more vibrant, satisfying, more nourishing and, most of all, more playful than any other stage of my life.
Care to join me?
With Love
xx Karen xx
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