There’s a powerful feeling growing beneath my skin. It’s been pushing through me and into my consciousness over the past year. It speaks of love, sorrow, adventure, and intensity. It stems from having shared, loved, believed, lost, marrying, giving birth, trying again, trying harder, aching and celebrating. It speaks of gradual surrender and letting go, warrior’ing forward, and living in the moment…
I have become a “Woman With A History.”
As I say that sentence aloud, “with a history” doesn’t drag behind the word “woman” like iron shackles. To my ear, the phrase is sonorous, the tail end of it curling upwards, like a swirl, a swoop of color, highlighting the depth and expanse of my life experiences and soul; for despite the fact that I’ve “failed” many times, and cried and made mistakes, some resilient part of me always rouse to make me question, grapple, fight, and thrust myself forward again. Most importantly, I’ve worked hard to transform my mistakes, recycle them into new tools for the future, instead of allowing them to weigh me down.
In my mind’s eye, I see the timeline of my history stretched behind me and the various hues of light and dark that have beheld me. I see my evolution, my innocence and naivety, my growing pains, my spurts, my times of immense personal trials and tribulations. And even though the woman I’ve become today doesn’t look or feel the same as two, ten or even twenty years ago, I am glad to be Delaine – a grand, colorful, multidimensional Woman …with a History.
Perhaps feeling like a “Woman with a History” is something one only feels as she ages. I don’t know if most women are consciously aware that they’ve become one….
But as I look ahead to my forties, I envision who I want to be in that decade; how I want to feel. And I see her caring less about what others think of her and the mistakes she made “back when,” and caring more about being true to herself. I see her carrying her past mistakes, but not wearing them as a source of shame or burden; they are the necessary splash of black that keep her grounded and wise. She will live and feel with purpose; she sparkles, inspires, dances and uplifts.
And this divorce I’m navigating right now will be but one more hard-earned awakening that makes my skin fuller and more beautiful; a necessary, albeit difficult, part of my “becoming.” It adds to the swirl and puts a sparkle in my eye; a libertine, who embraces, accepts and believes in herself,
Originally posted in 2011
Delaine
Author, The Secret Sex Life of a Single Mom
