The Tango

Mami loved Daddy with fierce exhaustion,gripping and manipulating her wayinto his heart and life.I watched, young and naïve,expecting to love the same waywithout clawing my way into anyone’s heart.Her end result was always similar:He would vanish while we slept,appeared years later when in trouble,and played the same role again and againuntil the lights went out and he exited off stageinto parallel dimension.I was left to soothe her, remind her of life,as I walked around with a perfect halo of lightthat would make her proud and forgetthe hole she had inside. I watched discovering love,witnessing its complexitiesnot as easy and fearless as I felt in my core,emulating it to look healthy when it wasn’t.For a long timeI didn't fall far from her examplesreliving a love that never was....She never remarried.  Never gave another her heart.And, when she looked at me,my easy-going ways,she was reminded of Daddy and his carefree attitudethat opened doors everywhere he went.It could not have been easy....Now with my own children I witness love:the allowing, accepting, and awarenessthat one cannot magically instill onto another,often times the remains of being pushed,shoved and discarded as they grow and learn.Loving hard doesn’t mean enforcing yourselfwhile possessing their rights to be freeor to be imprisoned by the likes of a human beingas they will turn to reject the reason for this “love.”Love isn’t Mami and Daddy’s way,lost in translation of expectations,words, gestures, and storieswhile implementing rules, lies and excusesfor social opinions. It is conceived from universal freedom,two souls meeting again and again,in a tango of beauty, compassion and respectwhere nothing is expectedbut everything is easily promised througha contract of Divine light, wisdom,and tenderness.