A personal wake-up call
We met at the local restaurant/bar for an evening of conversation and enlightenment.
OK, so we were going to male bash - it’s our genetic right!
Allow me to back track a bit here.
A dear woman had informed us that her engagement had been broken off; after six years of
living together, he’d decided he wanted out.
She’d kept this painful secret to herself for a few weeks, even taking a leave from work.
When she did return to work, she told us the engagement was off and me, well ... being me,
immediately announced “ladies night out” to which all agreed.
As the week progressed, I would see her, smile and encourage her as much as I could in the
short time we had during our breaks and lunches.
Friday night would come soon enough.
Carrie and Kelesia were already at the restaurant when Lori and I arrived.
I’d had the usual stressful day, and was bitching about policy and procedures as we entered the
parking lot but put aside my venting to focus on the need at hand.
Kelesia needed support and encouragement and a safe venue to find some way to cope. She
needed to be heard and allowed a voice. She needed to know she had/has value; even without
this man in her life.
We eased into the conversation at her pace. I asked what had happened. No one had asked for
details before, but I felt that we needed to know what had happened to know where to start.
The details aren’t pertinent to this tale so I’ll keep those between the four of us.
Suffice it to say, she was in pain and questioning every facet of her existence.
It still amazes me that we women (okay, some of us) can allow a man to change the very
essence of our being to such a degree that we forget who we are. And then in our denial of the
facts, we blame the man, when we both our culpable.
Some may disagree with that last statement, but get real!
We give away our power.
We think that men are better able to tell us what to do, when to do it, what to think and feel and
believe about ourselves and we subtly encourage them to mold us into what we think they want.
All in the hopes that they will love us and never, ever leave.
But some men do leave.
Some leave without ever leaving home. Some walk out, slamming the door behind them and
some leave that door ajar. Just in case.
Then we are left to pick up the pieces of the life we gave away.
Those shattered shards are strewn about like some jig saw puzzle, unfortunately we have no
clue as to what the picture of that life is suppose to look like. We don’t have the box top to go
by.
So, after a time, we begin to collect the pieces and lay them out on the card table (a childhood
thing for me) and try to fit them into some semblance of a picture perfect life.
We find that the picture that’s slowly beginning to develop is missing some important details.
And seems to resemble the life we had before, with him.
He is the center of our world, our jig saw puzzle - the only difference this time is that it’s some
other man’s face now. But the picture is the same.
We are a small piece of the puzzle. We blend into the background of this huge montage and
we’ve given away our power again.
Hopefully we have learned enough by this time to take the puzzle apart ourselves and begin to
rebuild the picture.
For some of us, it can take a number of attempts until we get each piece to fit perfectly, but
once the puzzle is complete, once we have decided what our life is meant to look like; we see
that our universe, the center of this life puzzle, is our own Self.
An authentic, true view of who we are.
We’ve found that we now know what we want and need from life. We’ve discovered what it is
that we will accept and demand from and for our life, and will settle for nothing less, this time
around.
And if that means that we have learned that our puzzle doesn’t contain the portrait of a man right
now, that doesn’t mean it never will.
Life is an ever changing jig saw puzzle.
Kelesia has a great deal of work ahead of her. She needs to get to know who she is, alone -
separate from being a part of a couple. And that is one tough lesson, because we live in a
society that says without a partner we are less than we really are.
She needs to find her value again - her worth, as a woman, a mother, a human being. She needs
to know that she is in control of her life, and that the choices she makes - good or bad, are her
own.
And she will learn that what she thinks about herself, what she feels about herself, what she
sends out to the Universe is what she will bring back into her life; good or bad. In time she will
discover the good in herself and that is what she will attract.
We ended the evening amidst hugs and kisses and I was left to ponder my own life puzzle.
I am not so far removed from Kelesia.
I still have pieces missing from my life puzzle.
I still have things to discover about my Self.
Yet the greatest thing I have learned from life, is to never force the pieces to fit where they do not
belong.
Life is an ever changing jig saw puzzle and we hold the pieces in our own hands.
Place them well.
J. A. Stroud