The last few days have been stressful. Traveling with my children to Brazil and back required 26 hours of plane and car journeys. While I was there, I was dealing with the negotiations of offers and counter-offers on the sale of my home and the back and forth with my lawyer because my home is still co-owned with my soon-to-be-ex-husband. Then I had to tell the kids that it looked like our home sale was going to go through.
They seemed less disturbed by this then me – but then, perhaps that is because, a) I have lived in 10 homes in 21 years, and this home that I have lived in for the longest – for 8 1/2 years, while they only really have memories of this home and b) perhaps I have done an okay-to-middling job in parenting them, because as my pragmatic 11 year old said “it’s only a house, mum, it’s not people we are leaving,” which was a good reminder.
When we returned from Brazil, fall had landed here in the Northeast – we arrived home to 33F (0.5C). I was somewhat discombobulated having not really slept very well overnight on the plane and coming back to what will be my home for less than two months. After my children went over to their Father’s house, I went for a long walk and ended up at my local movie theatre, where I watched Suffragette, which is all about British women’s fight for the vote. It stirred me, partly as a woman, as a mother of a daughter and as the great-grand-daughter of the first female Member of Parliament in Britain.
I am so glad that I live in a time and a place, where as a woman I can divorce my husband and continue to live and work and parent without any problems. I have rights over my children (not just their father). I can own property. I can live and work and function in my own right. After the movie I experienced another stressful event, which again reminded me that:
“Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging,” Joseph Campbell
So, after another night of disturbed sleep, I am here. I am daring to keep putting one foot in front of the other. I am daring to find a new house and create a new home for me and my children, and most of all I am daring to do all this alone, because if there’s one thing that I have learned this year, is that I am complete by myself. I do not need to be another person’s half – I am whole, and as one of my favorite yogis says, in his fabulous new book, Happy is the New Healthy:
“If you have love, especially self-love, you have fullness in your heart. That is the seed of health and wealth and all that is good.” Dave Romanelli.
Copyright, Tamsin Astor YogaBrained LLC, 2015.