dating

Still me, still standing

It's life Jim, but not as we know it, , , , , , , Leave a comment

Sometimes, being a single mother is gut-wrenchingly lonely.

I sit here, alone of course,  with face dripping as I finally release and let the tears flow.

Mostly, I just don’t find the space in which I can allow myself to fall into sadness, I have a baby to take care of and her needs come first and I don’t have the time to indulge in my own emotions.  But today, today has been different.  Today I realised that I was developing feelings for a man who has been messaging me daily for a matter of months.  Real feelings, real hopes, real me, real future.

So, the question that I have been avoiding because I didn’t want to pop the bubble, ‘how is tinder life going?’ I asked and he replied ‘Well, I went on a date last night and she’s still messaging me so I must have done ok’, I nearly threw up on the floor in Waitrose.  Spontaneous physical response to emotion is not a sensation I have experienced for a long time.  And despite the sensation of my insides heaving, even then, I found gratitude for experiencing such a real feeling that was just mine to breathe through.

Thing is, having a baby rips down all your barriers.  You are so in love with this little person that everywhere you go and in everything you do there is love emanating from you and you are free.  Free in the oddest sense really as on a daily basis my routine completely revolves around my child.  But free in the sense that there is a little person who needs you so completely and whose needs you fulfil so completely, that there is no need for the sort of barriers and walls that we all tend to create around ourselves when it comes to fully experiencing love.

And yes, obviously, the love one has for their child is of a different sort to the kind that one might experience with a significant other but there is a commonality.  And I found that I let this man in, which is not something I do as a general rule, in my entire adult life I can only think of one relationship in which I ever allowed myself to need.  It ended horribly.  Anyway, the point being is that I’m finding myself to be more open than ever before, because of the depth and nuance of the relationship with my child.  And what that means is that my barriers seem to be gone.

And so I’m hurt, a little deflated and lonely again.  But actually, I’m still happy, I still have an amazing child and somehow, I’m still able to experience all the joys and all the heartache involved in letting someone in.  I’m so unbelievably grateful for that.

I am grateful that I met this amazing guy who ticks so many of my boxes and I am grateful that he has let me down somewhat and I am grateful that I still miss him and I am grateful that this journey has led me to crying in my meditation practise on the living room floor.

I know that I’m alive.  I’m fucking buzzing with life.  And I’m excited to know which sensations this new me can experience next.

It’s now the next night and yes, I’m still fucking grateful for this experience.  I do, however, feel as if I’ve experienced a break up and so duly got round one of my oldest friends and drank two and a half beers and smoked three whole cigarettes.  Which was also fucking amazing.

I guess what’s really happened is that I’ve realised that I do still have feelings that are just mine and that don’t relate to my child.  I’m still me.

And that’s just the best revelation I could have asked for.

Fantasy land is not like fantasia…

It's life Jim, but not as we know it, , Leave a comment

I sit here in silence having conversations with people in my head.  I imagine scenarios and then run with them until they become too silly, too dark or too involved and I actually start talking out loud and gesticulating.  I’ve always done this.  I’ve never been sure if it’s normal or not.  I think it’s just something I do to process situations and to try to prepare myself for certain possible (usually slightly odd) eventualities.

Eventualities like;

One day my baby daddy will marry a teenager and have a baby who he will love properly and I will get old and lonely and be single forever yet somehow have to rise above it all and be sagacious and benevolent.  Which, given the levels of malevolence I currently seem to be harbouring, may be a little difficult.

and

At this wedding I have to go, my ex from a long time ago will be there and will ask me if I have wizard sleeves for labia after birthing my baby and I will tell him he owes me more respect because we used to love each other and I terminated his child so actually, we could have been parents but I chose differently.  This ex is prone to inappropriate statements so this is actually semi-plausible.

and

Also at the wedding, an old friend, the one who got away, will sit next to me and tell me he thinks I’m beautiful and he always liked me and wants to see if we can have a future.  To give you an idea of the life fantasy levels, I first met this guy when I was 19 and the second I saw him, a little voice in my head said ‘that’s the man I’m going to marry’.  Bonkers. Unless we do get married of course…

When you say things like ‘I have an active fantasy life’ people tend to get a bit excited imagining some scenario where Snow White meets 50 shades of grey.  I rarely have sexual fantasies.  I have a certain couple of men who I do have sex dreams about but only as an afterthought to a usually protracted and puzzling, intellectually stimulating adventure. Sapiosexual?

There was a guy my friend dated for a while and I developed this crazed life fantasy around him.  I couldn’t even talk to him because I was so in love with this guy that I had never had any contact with other than passing a spliff at an after party.  He was really skinny, had some dodgy tattoos and may have had more than a passing whiff of a heroin habit.  Did I mention my taste in men is notoriously bad?!

My baby daddy is someone who I had a whole crazy life fantasy attached to without even meeting him.  I was lonely a few summers ago and he posted something on facebook that made me think we were meant to meet.  I knew my life would change when we met.  I spent a week or so walking the hills and imagining conversations, where we would live, where we would travel to and the friends we would make.

Needless to say, the reality is turning out to be somewhat different.

And therein lies the crux of the problem of blurring the lines between fantasy and reality.

I guess it’s akin to putting someone up on a pedestal except for it’s putting a whole relationship on a pedestal.  A whole relationship with someone you’ve never had a real conversation with.

Bonkers.

All the guys I have life fantasies about have songs attached to them.

The one who got away: Arctic Monkeys and Do I Wanna Know

My friends ex who I never spoke to : Madonna and Beautiful Stranger

I’ve actually forgotten the song my baby daddy had attached to him.  Maybe that’s what happens when you blow a fantasy out of the water.

I have also experienced the other side of things with my lovely ex.

When two people buy into a fantasy it becomes a reality and it’s so amazing that you keep searching for things that are wrong with it and in so doing you jeopardise the best thing that’s ever happened to you.  To be fair, I think he was as guilty as I was about projecting the life fantasy, he certainly held me on a pedestal that I did not deserve to be on.  But, who’s to say, we at least still love each other and perhaps, just perhaps, despite, or in fact because  of the other man’s child, we will still get to live out our life fantasy’s together.  Or maybe we’ll figure out how to live and love in reality.

To be present in our own lives.

I’ll keep you posted.

Where is he?

It's life Jim, but not as we know it, , , , , , , View all 4 comments

So, after all the dramas of the previous week, last weekend I finally went on my date.  We went for a walk along a beautiful beach and then went for lunch in a village pub.  Sounds good right?  It was.  Mostly.  I mean, from the second I saw him walking towards my car in the passenger side mirror, I knew he was a slightly broken shadow of his former self. Something in the walk gave it away.  Like someone who was trying to remember how to swagger when once it would have come without thought.  But, I still felt a wee bit excited, was still intrigued to know more and was just looking forward to a lovely afternoon with a man who wasn’t my Dad.

We got on fine, he’s good company, conversation was easy but it became really clear that he’s just lost his mojo since his wife left him for a woman.  I don’t know if any of you have ever had to embark on the mojo hunt for yourselves but it is an intensely personal journey and one that to some extent no one can help you along.  Once you have been on that journey yourself, you can always see when others are going through it.  I hunted out my mojo a few years ago, it took me several years of intense therapy, facing myself and going on adventures to get where I am.  He’s at the start of that mojo hunt, having self-medicated with drink for a while, he’s starting to realise that booze isn’t the answer, or so he said. And so before we had even walked back along the beach I knew we could never be more than friends.

And then to lunch.  He drank three pints over lunch.  The first he met like an absent lover. Like he had been longing for it, like there was no other taste that could satisfy.  He had drunk half the second pint before food even arrived.  Now, I may well have drunk three pints over lunch before but certainly not with a date who wasn’t drinking. In those circumstances, one is perfectly acceptable but any more than that seems a little rude at best.  And he changed, as the alcohol caressed his brain, flashes of the cocksure man he used to be re-emerged.  And I remembered why I had first liked him.  And I realised that I liked him much more now when he was sober and vulnerable and honest and a little bit broken.  But now, I didn’t fancy him at all.

Anyway, I figured we could be friends.  We kept messaging.  And then we broached politics.  I told him I would be voting Green.  He told me IN SHOUTY CAPITALS that I had to vote Scottish National Party.  I told him shouting like a crazed nationalist and refusing to discuss anything only made me surer.  He unfriended me!!  And that’s where we still are.  I’m sure we’ll meet again sometime and I hope that he will be further down the road of his mojo hunt.

Anyway, that all aside, it was really lovely to spend an afternoon with a man who is definitely a man’s man.  He was chivalrous, he bought me lunch, he helped me fasten the baby carrier, he held doors open, he held the baby while I went to the loo.  I’m so accustomed to single parenting at this stage and so ferociously independent that allowing anyone to be ‘the man’ was both a surprise and a treat.  It made me yearn for a partner in crime.  For someone to lean on.  For someone with a big hand to hold.  For someone to mock me.  For someone to help me even when I don’t need it.  For someone else to take charge for a change.

And then that evening, my travel husband came to visit.  I loved this man from the moment I met him in Johannesburg bus station.  I loved him all through our crazy Mozambique adventure.  And I love him now.  I told him to leave his girlfriend and come and play baby daddy and I was only half joking.  He told me it was beautiful to see me as a mother which still makes me well up just to type it.  And he told me he was proud of me. We played backgammon as we always did.  And I won as I always did (that bit might not be strictly true, he claims he won more, but perspective is an odd thing).  But mostly, why I fell in a heap and cried my little eyes out when he left was because he walked into my house, picked up my baby and other than one feed I gave her, he held her all night and she fell asleep in his arms.

I want for my baby girl to grow up knowing a man with arms that she can feel safe enough in to just fall asleep.  I want that for me as well.  It’s not that I need him.  I don’t.  We’re doing just fine without this man figure.  And women do it all the time.  And women cope. Because that’s what you have to do.  But oh, I would love for these circumstances to be different.  I would love for my baby daddy to have tried to at least be a friend to me and a father figure to her.  I would love to have someone to talk to in these long evenings after my baby has gone to bed.  I want to feel desirable.

And so, a date with a broken man and a reunion with an old lover, all in the same day, made me face these things and realise certain inalienable truths.

I want a husband.

Where is he?

Tinder?!

I guess anything is worth a shot…

Always forward, never straight.

It's life Jim, but not as we know it, , , , , Leave a comment

I read something this week that really resonated.

‘You can’t force someone to fall in love with you’

That is, I think, what I have been trying to do with my baby daddy.  Because, without sounding arrogant, I just couldn’t figure out why he wouldn’t want to at least try to make a go of a relationship with me.  But maybe, just maybe, in this instance he is wiser than me because he knows he could never love me.

I feel like this realisation has set me free.

I will always have a kind of love for him, despite his failings, simply because we have made the most beautiful little person together and it is far easier and healthier to just accept that than it is to keep trying to hate him.

So onwards. Upwards. Forward and twirling in the springtime.

I am slowly getting back to my yoga routines.  As my stomach muscles have rejoined, I am able to lift into Bakasana (crow) for a few seconds and I can almost chaturanga (plank) all the way to the floor.  My head is a long way from resting on my knees in paschimottanasana (seated forward fold) and somehow, despite pushing a baby out through my pelvis, my hips are as tight as ever! Kapotasana (pigeon pose) is still a long way off being a pretty bird and the full expression into mermaid even further away. But, just breathing through my whole body, saying my mantra and feeling an awareness return to my muscles is bringing life back into that corner of my soul.

And I have a date! An actual date. To be fair it is with someone I slept with about a decade ago, so not a complete leap into the unknown. He is still my only ever one night stand. I mean, I’ve had naked cuddles with a few guys for one night only but I never usually fucked them.  Anyway, thanks to the joys of tinder (more on that another time!), we have arranged to meet up this week. And I’m excited about it. I’m trying to not do the usual projecting my life fantasy land onto him before we’ve even met…is it normal to still imagine how your last names would work together when you’re this old?! Anyway, I’m putting that down to being a girl. At least I’m not scrawling it on my notebooks, or a bus stop for that matter!

I’ve told him I’m not just looking for a fuck, he says he isn’t either, although some would say he’s sort of duty bound to say that in response. I’m not that cynical. We’ve spoken on the phone a couple of times and it’s easy, he’s good company, funny and engaging so at the very least we’ll have a good time. It will take a wee while for me to feel physically ready to have sex again though. I’m doing my pelvic floor exercises as I type!

The attention of a man makes you feel a certain kind of beautiful. I feel so beautiful on the inside at the moment. And when I see myself in the mirror holding my baby girl, I have the glow of love radiating from me and I feel beautiful in a very grounded, earth mother way. But to feel desirable is a different thing altogether. And to feel desired by someone that you have an attraction towards makes you feel beautiful in a more existential way. The ideal, I guess, is to have all three kinds at once. Love for yourself, love for your child and love from another. I’m using the words love and beauty somewhat interchangeably because at the very least, in their truest senses, they are two sides to the same coin.

There is an interview in the Guardian magazine this weekend with a woman who had acid thrown in her face by her partner.  She suffered horribly. But at the end of the piece, she writes;

‘But the one thing he was trying to destroy – my beauty – had nothing to do with my face. You can’t burn integrity, character or courage. What he thought he would destroy, he never even touched.’

Isn’t that beautiful? Isn’t that love?

I’m typing this in bed next to my daughter who is farting loudly in her sleep and making me giggle a lot.

Isn’t that beautiful? Isn’t that love?