August 28, 2022
So last Monday I did something I thought would never happen, I went to a Duran Duran concert. Not because I’m a fan, I’m not. But because of the Nanny, she wanted to, and had since she was 14 years old and her Mother, had said you’re not going, something to do with school and exams. And of course there were appearances by them in the intervening years that she missed because of the asshole control freak that she had been married to. I had not intended to play white knight in this, I had always thought that the band was very over rated, an opinion since seeing them live, I maintain. My motivations for going to the show were purely selfish, as I have alluded to in earlier essays, the Nanny and I should have spent our lives together, but the universe had other plans for us. This was the type of thing that we should have done as teenagers who were very much in love. So it was an opportunity to do something that time took from us.
Of course in all honesty, as a teenager, I would not have been caught dead at a Duran Duran concert,
I was very much in to hard rock, and new wave sounds were, well they sucked. However I was fortunately in a position where I would have at least bought her tickets, payed her cab fair to and from the show, and, I would have insisted that she called me when she got home to let me know she was safe, and had had a great time. I was no hero as a kid, in too many ways I was really fucked up, but I tried to be good to and protect the people that were closest to me. This was where I wanted the Nanny, inside that warm safe circle. And it totally buggered me that I could not make it happen. It would be many lonely years later that it would begin to make sense.
As I have said, we met in high school where she was an extremely pretty girl who was kind, funny, sweet, smart, and you just knew that inside her was this wonderful loving gooeyness that my heart told me was completely safe. Everyday I would go to school and spend the day with her, lost in her, desiring her more as the days passed, both sexually and emotionally. And yet the relationship did not develop beyond the environs of the school. The only time we spent together was at school, we did not see each other on weekends, nor could I even walk her home, both of which I wanted to do. This I found to be unbelievably frustrating and led to far too many misunderstandings.
From what little I knew of her life, I saw that she had a Mother who loved her and doted on her, and was perhaps a little too protective of her. To my mind I thought that was awesome considering that I had recently learned that my mother had not wanted me. Here was the thing though, we were both trapped by what was taking place at home, she by a family that was suffocating her with love and protection, and was as it turns out, an environment more dangerous than any child should have to face. For myself, I had spent the previous 15 years being programmed to not feel anything, being made to not acknowledge my own emotional needs, and god help me if I got angry about anything at all, I was not allowed to have or experience my emotions. I was made to believe that I was unworthy of my own needs, so as such, I had no reason to believe that anyone would care about or acknowledge my needs. So we were two kids who were in extremes of survival mode. See our article “Incremental Change” for a better understanding of what survival mode is. So there it was, she was a little younger than I was, she was in a heap of trouble, and just did not have room for me, and in all honesty, nor I her.
This was the unfortunate reality of where we were, what was taking place internally was something very different. I had fallen in love with her at school, it had not scared me even though I did not have a clue as to what it was having never experienced it. We ended up separated for the next seven years and when we met next, things had begun to change for me. I was now in a loveless marriage, yes the whore who gave caving expeditions, and I was ashamed of where my life had gone. When the Nanny appeared back in my life, I was astonished at the changes in her, she had become even more beautiful than she ever had been, and seemingly just as kind, sweet and loving. The emotional bond that had existed between us in school but had never been able to flourish, grew quickly into love, and the time we spent together was happy. The sad part about it was this, the only way we could express it was through these mind blowing incredible sexual collisions, where we could together ask no more or less of each other than we gave or took, and the universe shrank down to only each other. Never before or since had I ever had a woman give herself so completely with such need, nor have I ever felt such complete need of a woman.
Here though we failed each other again, in those incredible tender moments it should have been so easy for both of us to say I love you, yet despite the proofs of our love staring us in the face, and bashing us over the head the words would not come. The problem being of course was that we were both still deep in survival mode, and, our sacred selves needed to learn some very important and incredibly harsh lessons yet. The universe had asked her a question about her pride, and she got the answer wrong, the universe asked me a question as well, about my ego, this I got fantastically wrong.
The next part of this story needs to be told in all of it’s incredibly ugly detail, however, in order to protect the Nanny and her emotional, physical, and spiritual integrity at least for now, we will skip those details. What those details were resulted in our separation for the next 26 years, and to my horror, in too many ways they involved myself. She had placed me on a pedestal that in my opinion I no where near deserved, the result of this was that she both sacrificed her needs in a desperate attempt to protect me, and by doing so, ended up throwing both of us out of the frying pan into the fire. In some ways it’s an example of a romance novel out of classic Grail legend, in others, it reeks of a real Greek tragedy.
The sad part of all of it is, we were two young people who for too long had lived in survival mode, in doing so, when we both saw the love and security we offered the other, neither of us knew what to do with it. Safety and security was only in the now, survival mode was familiar and therefore safe. Real safety and security was only a wish, as such there was no time or place for it because it was not familiar, and therefore seemed unsafe. And yes you are right, it is a terrible paradox.
As pleased as I am that the Nanny came home, and has made great strides in her recovery, and I naturally am incredibly happy with her, there are parts of my own that will never be complete, at least in this realm. This of course is due to the deaths of both my mother and father. Dad after getting out of rehab, had attempted to make his amends to me, as a 16 year old boy who was beyond fucked at the time could not accept them. It was only after more than a decade and my own experience with the processes of a 12 step program that enabled me to. My mother on the other hand, had continued to attack me right up to the moment of machine death (see our article The Mansion and Her Twenty One Grams) for more on that. With her death, it leaves no possibility of her making amends, and takes away my ability to confront her and demand both an explanation, and an apology.
Almost twenty years ago, the last time I visited their grave site, I came up the idea of pouring a cheap bottle of wine on them. At the time it had no immediate effect on me, but over time it came to symbolize my complete and utter contempt for them. As of the last year or so, I have begun to consider a return trip with another cheap bottle, I mean hell, after twenty years they must be thirsty by now. I do not know if this is fair or not, but I very much want the Nanny to help me pour this next bottle and tell them that they were complete ass-holes for fucking me up so badly that I could not express my emotions or needs. And how their actions had contributed to decades of unnecessary misery.
The Nanny and I were there first, we were meant to be together from day one, in previous incarnations we have been together for hundreds of millions if not billions of years.
So all of this being said, it is all on a very human level, but what about our sacred selves, what does all of this have to do with our spiritual selves? The bottom line is this, there is a continual battle between light and darkness, not evil because that is a created condition – darkness can not be exposed for what it is except through exposure to light. There are individuals who come from realms of such darkness that I could not begin to describe, these are not places of hell fire and damnation, they are souls and places of negative energy, instead of being green and lush, they are likely to be barren and desecrated. The Nanny and I together I believe were being trained to deal with two of these dark souls, and then each one more individually. Sure yes when we reunited we were both wounded and battered to bits, but what soldier returns home from conflict completely whole? When we were each withdrawn from our last conflict, the universe could not have made it more clear that our time in arena was done, and our efforts had been successful.
Serving the Grail 