Once upon a time

Love is a complicated concept, but not when you are three. My first experience with love gone wrong was when my parent's friends got a divorce.  The idea that families could be torn asunder terrified me.

I firmly believed that love was an umbrella that sheltered families headed by mothers and fathers and their mothers and fathers and all the children that followed.  Anything else was the stuff of nightmares.

Unfortunately I was totally unprepared for my part in this lengthening line of love and life when I grew up and got married.  My expectations were too narrow.  My skills, for dealing with the bumps and potholes of another human being whose life was so interwoven into mine, not nearly developed enough.  I had no idea they even existed!

In their well-intentioned desire to give me a stable and loving childhood my family chose to keep the realities of living a mysterious secret.  It was like they forgot to initiate me into the cult in time for me to learn the skills necessary for setting out on my own. 

I climbed up on the back of Prince Charming's charger and was shocked to discover we were not immediately melded into one single, totally enmeshed, creature whose every thought, word, and deed fit together perfectly.  I spent the next thirty years looking for the magic spells that would achieve that blissful state I thought my parents had.

Now I realize Camelot was mostly an idea subscribed to by people who were willing to give up an awful lot in order to perpetuate a page turner when, in reality, it was a long difficult dissertation on sacrifice and submission.

I don't know that I could have succeeded even if I had known the rules, but at this point in my life I have chosen another path, one that runs parallel to that mainstream fifties model. 

In order to achieve the peace necessary for my own well-being and sanity, I prefer to ride my own charger.  That way I can ride next to or gallop away from those companions who still fill my life to the brim, but no longer force me to ride pillion into misery.

This is my version of happily ever after.