On the outside looking in

Christmas last year, I spent at St Leonards with my children, Mum and Dad and my brothers and their families.  I’d spent twenty years wondering if each Christmas would be the last I would have my Dad.  Last year; he looked good.  I didn’t wonder.  I guess I’d stopped wondering; believing his off handed claims that he would live forever.

But I regress.  This was not a blog about my Dad, even though I still can’t quite believe how it feels not to have him in my life and I wonder how long it will take to get to the part where I smile when I think of him instead of feeling like there is a ragged hole of a wound where someone stabbed my heart.

My focus for this entry is on the photos taken Christmas day; more specifically, a series of me and the ex-squeeze.  I know that they say the camera adds kilos, but I look back at those photos and I see an empty stranger and wonder how the hell I became that person.  We look like a pair of dumplings.  Pudgy faces and bodies… 

As I look back, I see that although we had metamorphosed into something else, the reasons why and what we saw when we looked at each other was completely different.

I still saw the person that I loved; but became the person I felt he saw.  It amazes me the physical impact emotions can have on a person.  I wasn’t valued by the person I loved; therefore, I must not have value.  I was vapid; and as I look at the photos, I see that at least on some conscious level, I was aware that I was becoming invisible.  I wore a bright green and red dress on with red and green streaks in my hair (it was Christmas, after all).

I walked out of that door and have shed nine kilo; I’m writing… I’m saving. Life isn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s good.  Last weekend I spent down the coast with my best friend.  Today I’m off to the other side of town to catch up with another friend.  My kids come and go; work is busy… 

I always thought that my life would run to script.  Meet someone, fall in love, get a home, grow old; but steps one and two would appear to be next to impossible; maybe they just weren’t for me.  Maybe they were never meant to be for me.  Now I see that I need to forget those steps and focus on getting a house and having somewhere to grow old at, on my own.

I need to get back to discovering myself.  I need to write.  Focus on turning my life back to the course it’s supposed to be on – whatever the Hell that is…  Having said that, if the perfect guy lands in my lap, I’m not going to slam the door in his face.