September 11th, 1988 was the day of my fiftieth birthday. Roy took me out to dinner and when we arrived back home the house was filled with friends all dressed in 1950’s costumes. Our house was filled with music and laughter and dancing. What a party it was! Wouldn’t you think I would have this recorded in my journal? You guessed it. Not a word about it. It appears to me now that events that were happening in my daily life, no matter how over-the-top they were, if they were not directly connected to my spiritual learning, they just disappeared from my brain. I find it interesting how one-track my brain was at the time, but then, this is exactly the reason that today I have the understanding of why this had to be. Training the mind to follow a different path, whether it be for a physical reason or a spiritual one, takes its toll on the physical body, both mentally and emotionally. To try and make a drastic change in lifestyle and be successful means something has to go.
I know I have let the cat out of the bag now and everyone knows how old I am, but what you do not know is that the next day I came to the conclusion that reaching the age of fifty was quite old enough and so I decided to celebrate un-birthdays every year instead. I would take a year off my age every year instead of adding one and I have done just that. Seriously, I have! That means that today I am younger than all of my children! How about that? As this memory flitted through my brain it came to me to figure out how old I am today using this formula. Twenty-eight years old! I may not look twenty-eight today, but I feel twenty-eight. However, neither do I look seventy-two either.
What year did I turn twenty-eight? 1966. Ding! Ding! The year my beloved ‘daddy’ died. Remember the psychic Dickie Motherwell’s reading (Wisdom In A Mystery post) and her comment that I went through a ‘shift in consciousness at the age of thirty-one’ and she thought I was a Walk-In? The memory of what was happening in my life at that time (when I divorced my first husband) did cross my mind when Dickie made this comment, but I was more interested in the Walk-In comment and it quickly was forgotten. It would seem I have come full circle and I am back to the moment when my soul first stepped in and took over my life.
In the channeled reading quoted in my post ‘What Can I Say’ Shanon had mentioned that my dad, who had passed on, was very much around me in 1988, but I am thinking he’s been with me a lot longer than that!
I touched briefly on the ending of my first marriage in my post ‘Change Your Mind Change Your Life’, but there is much more to this story. I spent the last week of my dad’s life with him in Winnipeg, Manitoba. As soon as I arrived back home my brother Ken called to say he had died the night I left, so back I went for his funeral. It was the month of March 1966. The first hint I had that I had changed was on Mother’s day that year. I wanted to learn how to play golf and my husband Dave agreed to buy me clubs for Mother’s day. It was an insignificant, little thing, but it hit me like a bolt of lightening. We went shopping for golf clubs for me and we came home with a set for him! Ding! Ding! The first wave had hit. I felt hurt and unappreciated by his actions, but as usual said or did nothing about it. I was a wimp in this marriage, completely controlled by this man since day one. I now wonder, where did I disappear to and how did I allow this to happen to me? He had given me permission to join Beta Sigma Phi, a woman’s sorority and there was a weekend conference coming up in June that meant a stay overnight in a hotel. He did not like this idea, but for the first time in our marriage I did not do as I was told. Ding! Ding! I attended and after the dinner on the Saturday night the husbands were to join us. Afterwards, one of my ‘sisters’ came up to me and said; ‘are you aware you are a different person when your husband is around?’ That one comment from another person was the ‘straw that broke the camel’s back’ and the deed was set in motion. From that day forward I began to take back my life.
Dave and I moved away from Winnipeg when he was transferred to Edmonton, Alta. He had been having an affair with a woman in his office and when the transfer came along I decided to stay in Winnipeg with the children. I was pretty sure the woman was going to move there too. However, after he left he missed the children so much he asked me to come with him. Did I make a mistake moving away from all my family and friends? It might appear so, but then, Caprice would most likely never have been born, so that pretty much answers that question. However, with no support system, alone and far away from home, I was in a very vulnerable position and he took advantage of this. I was miserably unhappy. The only reason I kept some semblance of sanity was the children. He refused to allow me to get a job even though we could have used the extra money. He was the man of the house and he had to be the sole provider. All that changed when I ‘woke’ up. I took a part-time job! My natural hair color was black - I dyed it red! I began to take an interest in how I looked and slowly my self-confidence grew and as all this was happening I went from looking like a frump to – what else can I say - I looked ‘hot’. I was a new person! There was no comparison to the woman I had been.
I will never forget the look of sadness on my dad’s face the night I came home with an engagement ring on my finger. I was eighteen years old. He knew what I did not. That I was, in part at least, marrying to get away from the constant bickering going on between him and my mother. He was correct of course, but I didn’t know that then. In the 1950’s young woman did not go out and live the single life. They got married and had babies. Well, daddy! You saved me eventually. I just wish we could have talked about these things before you died. No matter. The day came when I knew I wanted out of the marriage and I went to a lawyer. Dave was served the divorce papers at his office while we were still living together, albeit in separate bedrooms by this time, and he had no idea this was coming. I still cannot believe I did that! Where did this newly found defiance in me come from? I do remember asking Dave if he would go to a marriage counselor with me because we needed help before any of this happened. His answer? ‘There’s nothing wrong with me; you’re the one with the problem.’ That pretty much sums up why he was so surprised at my actions. Meanwhile, I was having the time of my life. Elizabeth was back and I made a promise to myself that I would never let another man rule me like that again!
“Life and reality are only what we perceive them to be. Life doesn’t happen to us. We make it happen. Reality isn’t separate from us. We are creating our own reality every moment of every day. Whether we like it or not, we are a participant in our own life, we are a co-creator. We cannot separate ourselves from our life.”- Dancing In The Light, Shirley Maclaine
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