a reflection.

when i was in therapy, for a long time, after the whole oh-my-sack-my-brain-fell-apart-and-i-cant-deal-with-it episode of 2006, that included a one year old kid, a mad time, aeroplane rides and a best friend who just wanted to feed me…

my therapist and i covered alot of ground.

she made me look at my life expectations and desires. and that what I, in my brain that was so tired, wanted for Cameron was something that seems so simple…(and i quote, by the way, verbatim – please be gentle, i wasn’t very sane at the time):

I said “a clean kitchen counter and a house that smells of cookies. white walls and being able to wake up every morning thinking of possibilities, not probabilities”.

So, her challenge to me was to make that happen as best I could.

And I did, and I have. And I will every day.

But, the proviso on that was, quite simply, to remember that it’s actually an illusion. That the cookies baking could get burnt, and the kitchen counter shouldn’t always be clean because then that’s not a home. And that possibilities, whilst they are the stars, it is me who will have to let her believe, and help her believe that they are attainable. That the details didn’t matter, and that what mattered was the reality.

Cam said it best a while ago, actually, when she said

So, I do. And, whilst we’re prancing around the garden looking for fairies and eating ice-cream with our fingers, we’re still real. We’re still messy and we’re still real.

Reality. The reality is that family is messy, and lovely, and loving, and passionate. But, it’s real. It’s intertwined and mangled sometimes, but it is real.

Every day, I wake up and I hope that I give my daughter a real life. One with passion and meaning. Not one fettered by opinion or demand to be brave and live up to societal standards that really work out quite boring anyway.

I realised, during those sometimes torturous therapy sessions, that Cameron deserved better than the average.

That mediocre, whilst easy, was not for me.

That chaos is sometimes beautiful.

But, that in the quiet of a moonlit night, I can look into her room, watch her sleep and know that I have done the best I can to love her and make sure that she knows that I love her.