Blowing up the facade of family life 💣

I’m interested in blowing up the facade of family life.

That singular image of family life and values we all get sold as the road to ultimate fulfillment and bliss, but that actually rarely feels that way.

Behind every smiley family picture there are untold stories of trauma, secrets and pain.

This image – it was a fragment of life.
It’s easy to love those moments.
​They come so close to what it was all “supposed” to feel like.

We know how fleeting they are.
Family life consists of the full range of experiences.
Faces with smiles can in the next moment become faces with frowns, because underneath our poses for a family photo there’s life boiling and sputtering, and there’s pain…

I am learning to love.

This man.
These children. Each so different.
These people came to me to teach me how to love by being consistently themselves, and not the playthings of my imagination or deliverers of my bliss.
I am learning to love real people.
Learning to love humans with all of their perfect imperfections.

Learning to love for me means learning to stay in the present moment.

Being here for what is, in the Now.
Showing up for the people who are actually here – in my life, not in my fantasy.
Learning to love not my image of them, nor my wishes for who they should be or should have been, but who they actually are.

I am learning to hold and love all the feelings in relationships.

I find that the only way to live this life fully lies in our capacity to hold beauty and ugliness, connection and loneliness, love and pain, life and death: the full range of human experience.

There are no good or bad people, no black or white experiences. Each of us is whole, containing shadow and light, capable of anything.

I am learning to keep my heart open, while I accept the endless merry-go-round of life. Treasuring those fleeting but precious moments when we are together and happy. Knowing that the next moment may bring something else.

It’s humbling, this process of learning to love.
​I see how difficult it is to move the heavy frozen gates of woundedness around my heart.
How edgy it still is to open up to life in all of its diversity: the good, the bad and the ugly.
To learn to love people just as they are, not as I wish they were.

But when I do – manage to move the protective layers around my heart – love gushes right out! Often spilling out through tears.
Emotion is liquid, we just need to let if flow.
Happy tears, sad tears – it does not matter.
Let the feelings flow.
They are what make this life worth living.

How about you? What do you feel makes your life worth living?