Month: August 2022

A Road Trip, 2020

by Ashley filed under Travel

It’s funny looking back on this season of life and motherhood; in the throws of Covid, one year post divorce, one year before losing my dad.

Sometimes motherhood can feel so permanent, like the phase you’re in is never going to end. Some phases are rough and you’re practically willing them along and others are sweet and you long for them to linger longer than they do.

I could never have seen Covid as the blessing then that I know it to be now. Not, of course, on a global scale, but instead in terms of the forced closeness — navigating school from the dining room table, then school on the road, and – mostly – learning what to do with a whole lot of nothing to do.

We had hit the road just weeks prior to this and visited Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. We came home only to escape again, this time visiting Northern California, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and Utah.

The seasons are changing and I feel the sand sliding through my fingers. I welcome it in a sense — getting to watch them grow and become more independent is a true honor. Looking back on these memories, before their wings seemed so vast, carries a new appreciation. A greater value. Doing this all on my own is the hardest and the most fulfilling; a true testament to how so many things in life coexist. An integration of opposites, not a separation of parts.

Cities visited: Lake Tahoe, Briggs, Yellowstone, Livingston, The Grand Tetons, and Salt Lake City.

Imaginationships

by Ashley filed under Relationships

I want to share more of my dating life because the opportunity for self-expansion (and just pure entertainment) is vast. Also because I think relationships are the best mirrors and therefore wonderful opportunities for observation, which can lead to acceptance and then to growth, if we let it.

I read about the concept of an “imaginationship” in Becoming the One by by Sheleana Aiyana and it’s stuck in my mind ever since. In a lot of ways, I think this is the crux of one of my issues in relationships. Imaginationships are just that, relationships that are imagined; potential paired with projected hopes onto a being that may or may not be any of the things I want them to be. It’s essentially me pushing my will onto someone else. There’s a lot of ways I’ve looked back and have come to terms with ways I’ve bent, shifted, and shaped to make myself a good fit for someone else. But the flipside is also true; there’s a lot of ways I’ve ignored, denied, and/or dismissed parts of another to sell myself on them being a good fit for me.

As life happens and circumstances present themselves and this other person doesn’t act in accordance with the role I’ve assigned to them, I often feel anxious. The root of my anxiety is the discrepancy between the reality I’ve created and the reality of what actually is. In the past, I would react to this anxiety which usually presented itself in me trying to control other people, places, or things in subtle ways.

The more layers I peel back, the more I come to realize that the answers are all within each of us and so the work is getting more in touch with oneself. Today, I can label the anxiety as anxiety. I don’t react to it. Instead, I invite it and acknowledge it as my body sending me a message. When I fall into an imaginationship, for example, my anxiety serves as a reminder that I may be fooling myself. It’s an opportunity to ask myself if I am ignoring what’s before me in an effort to hold onto an image of another that I’ve created. When I can make this differentiation, I’m provided this wonderful freedom to choose: do I want to see this person for who they are or who I want them to be?

I came across these three rules: 1. When people show you who they are, believe them the first time, 2. Don’t talk yourself into unseeing what they showed you, and 3. What we allow is what will continue.

I try to live by these. When I know better, I do better.