Desperado #2

Desperado, why don't you come to your senses

You've been out ridin' fences,

for so long - now.

Ohh you're a hard one.

I know that you've got your reasons.

These things that are pleasin'you

Can hurt you somehow.

I remember that when I first heard this song, way back in 1973, I understood it as a plaintive love song.  In my mind, I understood that the lyrical advice was aimed at some distant and aloof  "cowboy" who was guilty of keeping a lover at arms' length.  I never once, in all the years since, ever imagined that I'd hear this tune, and "get" that the aloof and defended one was ME. 

In 1973, I was a wounded and solitary young woman with a deep and growing cynicism about my chances of ever forming a positive and affirming intimate love connection with anyone.  Even then, at the tender age of 18, I bore the emotional scars of my upbringing and lonely childhood.  I knew better than to count on anyone, and I was utterly convinced that there was no one at all that I could really rely on to take care of me.  I was already an expert at protecting myself, and I lived my life inside some pretty formidable emotional walls.

Hard.  That was me.  I might have looked like a wide-eyed, frightened waif of a girl-woman, but I was closed off and prickly.  I trusted no one, expected nothing, believed that the world was a hostile place.  I was more than ready to go to war with anyone at any moment.  I had my reasons.  It all made perfect sense.  It still does.  I absolutely honor and love that young woman.  She survived and made a life.  She made some dreadful mistakes, but she kept her wits and lived to love another day.

That fierce young woman grew up and became an intensely independent and determined woman.  I worked and I scrabbled and I fought my way along in a man's world of work and internal corporate politics, and I was darned good at it.  No one pushed me around, and no one beat me to the punch.  I wasn't a whining, man-hating feminist.  I was a warrior woman understanding the exact nature of the world in which I lived.

I raised my children.  I kept my marriage going by sheer grit and determined stubborness.  I kept my "fences" in very, very good repair. 

In those days, I took my pleasures from my working successes.  I moved through the corporate maze with a sure footedness, and the financial rewards affirmed me in my chosen course.  My children grew up watching me fight the dragons of the business world in which I lived.  They became accustomed to my frequent and lengthy business travel, and they seemed content enough with the small gifts I always brought when I returned "home."  By the time I was 26 years old, my menses had nearly stopped -- I would have perhaps three or four periods a year.  After all, that monthly menstrual thing was for girls, and it left them weak and miserable.  I didn't have time for such nonsense, and my hormones seemed to get the message.  The things that would have fired my senses sexually were completely opaque to me -- there was no time for such frippery. 

I was hugely "successful," and living in deep and silent pain.  The woman that I was becoming was bound and gagged in the basement of my psyche.  You would have thought that the song lyric would have boomed loudly in my mind:  "These things that are pleasin' you can hurt you somehow."

I believe that the patterns we lay down in our early years are very hard to erase.  I'm no longer a young woman, and I don't have any need to fight the battles she found so compelling.  But...  Put me under pressure; introduce enough stress; leave me out in the dark and the cold for long enough -- and I'll dig around in the steamer trunk of my emotions and pull out all her old tricks. 

There have been stressors aplenty in the last year or so.  Master did a really good job of enumerating them in His comment on my "shy" post.  He's been ill and preoccupied with the recoveries from His surgeries.  He's had His hands full caring for His dad.  He's worried about T and her mom.  He's struggled to hold things together for His agency, and He's worried about where His career might go if He can't do that.  He's watched His children transition into adulthood, and experienced the pangs that so many of us encounter at that juncture in our lives.  He has loved me, through all of that with an unwavering constancy and intensity, but His focus has necessarily been elsewhere.  Without His steady hand on me, I wandered further and further and further out into the wilderness -- building and tending the fences that might make me "safe." 

That seems to me to be the lesson here.  I am certain that there will be more times ahead when the focus must waver, and when I will need to care for myself and my family in challenging times.  I have come through this last difficult passage, and I've discovered that I am still safe and secure.  It was never otherwise.  If there was ever anyone who should believe, unshakeably, in the safety and certainty of the love surrounding them, that person is me.  So, going forward, I intend to add the affirmation and reassurance that "I am safe and loved" to the internal chatter that can so influence my thinking and my reactions. 

No more "fences" for this one.

swan