Having love in your heart for yourself

On S-day last week (my “dark day”), I took a good look at why that day is so hard for me. I’ve been carrying around three years of fears about

a) can I be a single mom? A good mom? and support Grace?  Yes!  I am doing just fine at that!  

b) will Grace carry the scars of an only child of divorce?  No - she is perfectly well adjusted, her situation is so different from my own parents’ divorce.

c) did the affair mean that I would never be loved? Was I truly unloveable?

That last question was really my only one remaining pain. And a wise person pointed out to me that I can choose to have love for myself in my heart. The only person that exists is who I am today, in this present moment. I can go back and tell past versions of me that they are loved.  But every day I can make the decision to say “I love me”.

The wise person said that what comes into our lives is a reflection of how we view ourselves. I asked if that means I brought on the affair. She said, “Do I think you drove him to the affair? No, that was his choice. But answer this honestly: if you had love for yourself in your heart, would you have married him?”  I said “No”, and she said “In that way, you allowed someone who was capable of acting that way close to you. And when you love yourself, you will not allow those people close.”

So instead of viewing it as a dark day, I realized it is really a great day of change. For so long I’ve thought “poor me, this bad situation happened and now life is so hard”. Instead, it is really “a bad situation happened and now I have the opportunity to change me to bring in more good things”.  From that day (which was just on Friday), I’ve been telling myself all sorts of things that I love about myself.

It was also during this shift in thinking that I stopped defending myself against Chap’s groundless accusations and started standing my ground, when he started apologizing.  It was also during this shift over the weekend that things with Chap ended. Is it possible that with love for myself in my heart, I knew the loving thing to do was to let this relationship go? That as the wise person said - would I allow someone close to me to treat me poorly? Because the relationship was not loving to me. It was undermining all of the work I was doing on myself - by allowing someone close to me who would make me feel badly about myself.

For my part in the Chap situation, I placed so much hope on this because it was filling a void that I have. I knew after that first week that I was taking a huge risk on someone who had already accused me of untrue things once. Someone who had deep seated issues and needed to do his own work. I stuck with it because I wanted someone to fill that void.  If I had love in my heart for myself from that first week, I would have said “Thanks, but no thanks” and left it where it was.