the main thing was that during the 2 weeks that he lived with us he magically managed to change my relationship to development as a couple, pregnancy, motherhood and the concept of ‘woman’.
One day Juan called me over to his room and asked what turned out to be a tricky question: ‘”Do you want a child?” His magic eyes blazed up once again with piercing sparks. My eyes became shifty, my mouth turned to stone, my neck and shoulders stiffened up. I felt for the first time that I couldn’t give the answer I always gave in such cases.
Juan looked into my centre and nodded his head: “Yes, you want it…I can see you”. This was a revelation. I panicked because I couldn’t struggle any longer and lie to myself and pretend that everything was alright.
That moment was the start of my return to myself, my heart and what I really want in this life.
Choosing a man
Women, how easily seduced we are by men who hide their indecisiveness and irresponsibility behind quotes from ‘clever’ books. We are led down the garden path by their stories, which rob us of our feminine happiness, power, and make us suffer day in day out and busy ourselves with exhausting soul searching.
My ex-boyfriend put it into my head that children are an unnecessary burden, that we have other, ‘higher’ aims in life and that children are the lot of ‘normal’ people. These kind of men want to take all a woman’s maternal energy and are not prepared to share it with anyone else.
***
I asked myself whether I was happy with this person. Whether I was happy, not anyone else happy for me! I realized that during our 3 years together I was in a constant state of war and had depleted my resources. I’d got much thinner, my face had become drawn and my breasts had got smaller as if they were hiding in my chest. There are men who smoke their woman like a cigarette. They dry her out, pumping out all her resources. And when the cigarette finishes they just put out the butt in the ash tray. We women are resilient and recover as soon as some extra energy appears. But with such a man it becomes much more difficult to keep afloat when he is trying to drown you all the time.
There are other men who make a lot of effort and care for their woman like for a wonderful flower. And then she blossoms and her breast-buds bloom and give out an aroma that brings joy to the gardener. More about this in A Woman’s breast section.
Woman is the earth and man is the seeds which he sows on her. What he fills her with will flourish. The qualities that he puts into her will be those that define her. What seeds do you want to sow in your ‘earth’? What do you want to grow in her?
Respect between partners
Respect is the stumbling block in all relationships. It is impossible to create harmonious projects without it, never mind creating a baby.
My mentor don Margarito used to say: “Respeto a todos!” – (I respect everyone!)
When two people live in mutual respect, respect continues to multiply on both sides.
When you respect yourself, you respect your partner and people around you also respect you both. And when people respect you, all your projects grow as do you yourselves. By raising up your loved one, you raise yourselves up. And vice versa.
A relationship can be built over many years and completely destroyed in a second when respect is lost. Juan told me that one evening he was eating in a restaurant with his girlfriend when he suddenly caught her look of disgust directed at him. At that very moment he realized that the relationship had come to an end. One glance was enough to end everything.
If you catch yourselves looking at other men or women as potential partners while walking outside with your loved one, this can be called the beginning of the end. It means that you haven’t yet chosen decisively and are still on the lookout. And this process can be long-drawn-out.
***
Unfortunately the main principle of happiness in a couple – devotion towards each other – has almost been lost in our modern society. This is the feeling that, every time you meet your chosen one, you are meeting as if for the first time — la primera vez. And every time you are amazed by the huge mystery before you.
Many people having lived side by side for many years do not even know each other. A couple came on one of our expeditions to Mexico and there they discovered things about each other which they hadn’t been able to discover during all their years spent together. Nature untouched by civilization and the holy mountains of Oaxaca Madre de Sur helped them finally to get to know each other and openly look into each other’s hearts.
***
There are unions in which partners feed and strengthen each other like wind and fire, and there are those for which the opposite is true – they suppress and weaken each other like fire and water.
What happened between my ex and I one day was the turning point in our relationship.
45 days had gone by since the start of my last period. My ex started panicking. He said that we urgently need to buy a pregnancy test. I asked him uneasily what the panic was for. He answered that the faster we find out, the faster we can get rid of the undesirable consequences. Everything inside me tightened up. Something collapsed. I felt how two halves in my stomach – Yin and Yang – which were getting ready to fuse inside me any moment now, split into two that very second. I used my willpower to split them apart because I was only open to a mutual decision. There was no fusion and my period started the next day.
I didn’t want my child to feel unwanted. I didn’t want my child to feel lack of love and negation from their parent already in the womb.
No trickery. Either all or nothing.
I knew that I would only conceive a child with a man who truly loved me, who would want children from me, who would be able to give me and the baby tons of love and care, who would be able to deal with the whims of pregnancy, who would melt my heart with boundless gentleness. And this would be mutual.
***
Do not allow anyone to destroy your woman’s essence – to be a mother, conceive, be loved… However hard it is psychologically, materially and emotionally sometimes it’s better to leave everything and just go. Don’t leave it for later; the more a woman lives with a man the more attached she becomes to him. But attachment is cured with time.
Diary entries
Voices came to life right in my empty room, which had not been visited by anyone for a long time. I pulled the covers around me abruptly; I couldn’t warm myself one little bit after sunny Mexico and it was a bit frightening to be conscious of the person I really was.
I had managed to escape from the memories of lost feelings, a lost fairytale for some time. But everything came back with double strength in Moscow, accompanied by the fresh force of cool autumn which I met in complete solitude. And only one thing made me happy; that I was no longer a falling leaf buffeted about by the wind but I was supported by the wind of my promises and oaths, which, if I had any worth, I would fulfill. I would be able to stop living for others at last and start living for myself.
To stop living for the sweet vampires who loved me so much, who were ready to drink me to the very bottom without even leaving a drop of blood for me. And not a trace of sympathy, compassion or gentleness in return.
It would all start with adventures, surprises, sex. Then a cold settling of accounts at the end, greed, jealously, scandals. The tension of a pulled bow string, the arrow pointing right at the heart ready to fly into it at any moment so lightly and easily, as if it were as mundane as washing one’s hands. To tear everything apart and burn all bridges as if we had never known each other. Maybe we hadn’t?
I’m a woman and it’s not easy for me to accept that he’s not there anymore …
“I love you!” So easy to say, so difficult to fulfill …
***
“People