Heartache

Last week therapy was on heartache. A Queenpin doesn’t really feel like she has the right to heartache. What Queenpin has the time to wallow in her broken heart? She has to move on and take care of her brood. She has children to raise, children to teach, a house to clean, classes to study for, plus how the hell do you actually mend a broken heart? Al Green didn’t know either, “how do you stop the rain from coming down?” You got it Al, that’s how impossible it seems for me too.

You know what this Queenpin has done to mend her heart (See 12/11/10 post Opening a Can of Worms, or My Heart……Whatever). She has shut down and built an amazing fortress around her heart. My fortress is heavy stone and beautiful sea glass, it is meanacing yet beautiful and I have such a hard time both loving it and hating it at the same time.

When the music started this week in therapy I was to descend down a staircase. Mine was a spiral, grey stone staircase with walls of grey stone on either side (I am really into this grey stone thing right now). At the bottom was my heart. It was HUGE and by huge I mean the size of a cruise ship huge. A ginormous red, purple, glistening, real heart. As soon as I got down at the bottom of the stairs I stomped on that heart. Really. I kicked it. I had a tantrum on it. Fucking heart. Fucking sensitive, make me feel pain, piece of friggin’ meat. Who needs you? and then I jumped off ready to move on, but of course my therapist was having none of that.

As a gansta mama I should have gotten up and shot that therapist right between the eyes, but since that is illegal, I think he’s a good therapist, and I am a Buddhist I let it slide and I let him guide me inward to the heart that lives in my chest. Jeez what a cold, dark piece of coal that is. Not even worms would want to live there. I can’t pinpoint the time when I began to close up shop. Maybe even before the wusband left. All I know is that it has been a slow and steady process of piling black tar over my heart until what I have left is this black stone. That’s what it looked like in my therapy session. A black stone, but I knew inside there was this beautiful diamond. With xray vision I saw the facets, the sparkle, and the shine. Queenpin could really use a diamond like that. That many karats would pay the bills for years. So the trick is how to get to it.

I miss loving without fear. I miss the way I used to love with abandon. I loved loving everyone, friends, family, people I just met. When I meet someone new these days or see someone I think could hurt me even a little my fortress comes down. I can physically feel lock down coming and it makes me sad. When I do that it shuts me off from the light of the spirit of others and it is a joy killer. It separates me from others, but I can't stop it. Its become an ingrained habit, and in my deepest place I'm not sure I'm ready to give it up. Though each time I shut down it dampens my own flame, it has been such a good protection for me and my heart. My beaten, battered, scared of its own shadow heart.

We moved on in therapy. My hands began to gently massage my cold, black heart and slowly it softened into clay. A buddha sat in meditation on it as I worked. A crack appeared in it and the diamond showed through, but then I stopped. I'm not ready I said, and of course because this is friggin' therapy, I cried. I am afraid. More than I want the old loving me back, I am afraid of throwing her to the wolves again.

The music changed in the session and I moved onto a new place in my mind and I stood with my fortress covering me, I shrugged it off and there was nothing underneath. I was naked and exposed so I hid from the world. That is what heartache has done to me. I feel like there is no me anymore. Who is this Queenpin? Where is this Queenpin? I am not the strong woman I thought I was. I am not the light and joy and laughter I thought I was. I am just a woman, a lost soul. The foundation of me was knocked down and now I am built of sand, forever shifting.

What would the Don say to this? I can see his disgusted face now. How can you run an organization when you are saying you are sand? What is that crazy shit? Put your damn fortress back on and get out there, but there might be a glint of recognition there. A part of him that relates, because who doesn't relate to heartache?

I wish I could sit down with him and say, "Don, how'd you do it? Wear the fortress yet still love those kids?" but of course he can't answer, he let his fortress down and died of a heart attack in the garden playing with his grandson. Maybe thats what happens when you bury love behind a fortress for too many years. You let the walls down, even for a minute, and all that pent up love floods out leaving the heart behind to shrivel up and die.