Balance

It took until this morning - just a few moments ago - for me to fully realize the great gift John's given me over the past 25 years.  A sense of healthy balance.

That gift is my here & now starting point.  It would be impossible to accomplish all that stretches out before me - most unseen, yet already real in my heart & spirit - without a basic sense of balance. 

Which isn't to say that it will be easy.  My sense of balance is new, while my expectation & familiar pattern of the opposite feels as old as the hills.  

It is hard for people to understand that someone who is raised to expect things to be off kilter, even blatantly messed up, feels ill at ease with what works almost effortlessly, suspects the whole & doubts the healthy.

For 25 years, loving John has been effortless - it just always has been.  We've had our bumps & glitches along the way, but the sense of imbalance, of discord & unhappiness its brought have been >< much compared to all the <<<<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>>>>> gifts & graces its made possible. 

For 25 years, John Richard Murphy has modeled, simply by being, what is whole.  I am very influenced by what I see in front of me.  From the time I came home from the hospital to 02/03/89, when the two of us shut down th The Academy, all I saw mirrored was far from whole - and what was whole, I experienced as foreign, not for me & mine.  Not John.  He is the most whole person I know, although it's impossible to describe what that means.  it just is.  

For 25 years, John has embodied health.  In every way.  It's John who gets on my case about getting prescriptions filled & taken every day, who can seem what behaviors are helpful & which aren't.  It's John who can see others in their completeness, taking irksome habits & difficult behaviors in stride - acknowledging them without judging - while celebrating everything else.  

It was John who said after stress-filled preparations for our second major party, "We won't do this again."  Said it as a matter of fact, not as condemning comment.  And we didn't - together, we figured out better ways to put on the big bashes that were dear to my heart (long gone, post-kitties).

It was John who said after our second tear-filled Christmas Eve, "This isn't fun."  That stopped me in my tracks.  Didn't everyone stress out & cry on Christmas Eve?  No, he gently explained to me, they didn't.  And let me see, on my own, a connect to the party overload & my chronic Christmas angst.

It would take many more years for me to realize that such stress & unhappiness tied back to a home life where that was the norm, at least for me.  It was my norm to know that my oldest brother & adored older sister wanted to somewhere else rather that with the family, with me.  Peter's heart was always with the Harolds & later with his kids out in Berwyn.  Mim's was with the Lachs.  That had to take a toll on a youngster, especially one who deeply loved connection.  And my typical preparation for any size party was to leave everything until the last moment.  

The place John loves best is with me, although he makes plenty of room for others.  He was always a good son to Mom M. & devoted s-i-l to Mom, but he never pretended that his favorite role was anything other than as my hubster, my Keet, Budgie of my heart.  Wow!

My brother, Michael, once said that Mom & I had John wrapped right around our fingers.  How wrong he was.  Not that we were wrapped around John's.  John wouldn't have liked that.  His tendency is to wrap fingers together, hand in hand.  

My husband hasn't a clue what a healthy influence he is, just by being loving, caring, supportive.  He just is who he is.  The man who gave me the best present anyone can give another - balance, which speaks of the countless other gifts that makes it so.

Twenty-five years as John's wife, his Keet, his Budgerina.  We ended up giving each other a new toilet & much needed home repairs as our major presents, which necessitated cancelling plans for a romantic overnight at Porches and any other extravagant surprises might have been up our sleeves.  Still, if I'm open & honest with myself, nothing could possibly top the one he gives every day - a healthy, whole sense of balance, a starting place for all that is to come.