Breaking Away...

I feel it.  Just this yearning to be away from my life.  All parts of it.  I am not mad at anyone, or pissed, or hating anything about my life, it is a great life.  But there is this deep need within me to splinter off and break free from all the trappings of the life I love.  I need to disconnect, in order to reconnect with myself. 

In so many ways, I feel like I haven’t quite been myself.  Like I am coming to this crossroads of myself and all the people I have been...I will no longer have minor children, and while the mothering is never, ever done, I will be freer than I have been in almost 20 years.  20 fucking years!  I can’t believe or really even conjure up an image of who I was before all the mothering began.

So I guess I feel this need to break away and just reacquaint myself with who I am currently and where I want to go in this relationship with myself.  There are so many parts of me clamoring for attention and expression, and I feel like I am this mad genie of sorts, holding the pandora’s box of my life and self expression and all I have time for is to allow the loudest, surest voice to get out before I have to slam the lid shut and then sit on top of it to keep all the others in.  Like some sort of crazed banshee leader, holding all the varied and vociferous demands of all the other banshees of myself back, but having to bleed them off daily.

Not a very pretty picture...I know.  Try living it.

I have all these beings that vie for my attention and I feel I have gotten lost in the shuffle.  Like I don’t know how I am or what I want anymore.  I fear the leaving of my parents and children but at the same time, I long to be solo again and on my own and doing it my way.  

I want to work but I also find work to be something I have to do instead of something I love to do anymore.  What I find I crave is to just be in the day - I would like to return to the life I got to enjoy while unemployed...where my days are just days with little structure and a great deal of free time.

I want a relationship but find myself at a crossroads there as well.  I love a man who is not capable of giving me what I want.  Not because he doesn’t want to but he is holding in his own demons (not so well really at the moment) and life with him is filled with ups and downs and it is exhausting really.  I can’t stop loving him, but life with him long term is not a viable option either.

I want to meet someone else, someone who can be a partner and share dreams with me and have the follow through to actually help me make them happen.  But that is not happening either.  Probably because this other man is there occupying space that another man would surely require.  I just don’t know how to let the one go...

I am not expecting any of the above to change while I am away.  No my kids and job and him and life circumstances will all be pretty much the way I left them.  I am not so arrogant to believe that they will not all change in my absence, just that I do not believe they will change drastically, at least I pray they don’t.

The change I am seeking is within.  That fundamental tide shift from the things I do everyday, the person I am, the things that hold me back, the truths I refuse to tell and the lies I spin as truth.  I have felt this pull to Ireland for years.  To return to this motherland and to get lost for awhile.  To leave all the things I know and love and to disappear into myself for a bit. To reacquaint myself with who I really am instead of who I think I am on most days.

And this time away does feel like a break...like I am being pulled away from all that I love and hold dear.  My family, friends, loved ones, pets and routines to toss myself quite literally into the middle of my own life, where there is no one and nothing requiring anything from me.  It is terrifying when I really think about it.  15 days of me, on my own, doing my own thing.  Fuck, I am not sure I am ready for it...except I know I am.

I guess what is more true is that I do not know where it will lead me.  And I will own there is a fair amount of fear surrounding that...sometimes I feel like I run away from myself because I am somewhat terrified of her crazy ideas and things she will demand of me.  Like moving to the middle of the desert alone...for two years.  I can feel that coming again, except the redwoods this time.  It isn’t a matter of if, but when.

I have had breakdowns, breakaways, break fasts and all the other breaking things.  But I see that in every single break I have made in my life, or been given because I have been given many breaks too, there is rebuilding and restructuring that happens long before the break occurs and that is what right now feels like.  I am acutely aware of the breaking that is happening within me.  And I trust, because so far it has always been true, that this odyssey I am about to embark upon will require things of me that I will feel like is too much to ask.  And I know, that I will sit lonesome on a rainy Irish hillside, feeling pain and sorrow and loss and wish that I was not alone, that I felt more connected and intact.

But I know that I must go there.  A respite from the busy and hurried.  To be alone and to sit with myself and my pain and my loss and all of it.  To clear away some space if you will for whatever it is that comes next when my role of daily mothering comes to an end...who will I be then?  And how did I arrive here to this person I am now?  And who will I allow to be my partner moving forward, if I can allow that at all...

It occurs to me that perhaps I have had all the relationships I have and they have gone exactly how I want them to go. I want them to be intense but fleeting.  And then to boomerang back around again, sweeping my feet from beneath me, upending me into some new crazy reality that I do not completely understand but find exciting and life affirming in some completely fucked up and crazy way.

What if everything that has happened has been exactly as I wished it to be?  Can I even dare to wish for something different?  Can I ever be committed and still feel free?  And if I can’t, can I ever live contentedly confined and committed?   How shall I spend my time?  With what will I do with myself as the kids move away, my parents age, my work winds down and all I am left with is too many clothes, and cats and thoughts about who I am?

What do I want to do then?

I don’t know but I think I am about to fuck around and find out.

That is what this breaking away is calling me to do.  To spend some time, disconnected, so that I may reconnect with the only beings that know what I want...me and God. And I can think of no better place on this earth to find myself than on a rain soaked hillside in Ireland with sad Irish music playing in the background.  A place where so many lived and died in abject poverty of worldly pleasures but created and maintained a richness of spirit, always.

And perhaps, I may channel some of the rebellion and loss and mystic majesty while I am there.  I intend to allow Ireland to change me, in whatever ways it might wish.  To trust that who I am now will surely be someone very different when I return.  That is the only result in answering your own soul’s call...to be who I was meant to be, again.  Still.