April 1, 2005. The Future Husband walked into my life wearing a crisp pale yellow button-down shirt, rocking a pair of incredibly studly-do-right blue jeans and eyes that pierced my soul. I still love when he wears that shirt. Yum. But here ye, here ye, let it be known, said shirt must be tossed out the day after I die, cut up into pieces and made into cat suits or cut up and scattered off the coast of Laguna Beach. Any of those options will work because I’ll definitely haunt him if he tries wearing it to lure any woman into “the lair” after I’m gone. Any other shirt but that one, Dude. That was your lucky charm for me…okay, there was more to it. But cat suits or cut up equals no haunting, my love.
So when we were dating, 10 years ago, I bought non-sexy jammies (yes, he saw me in my jammies before we were married – hand to mouth! aghast!) that were as “girlie” as “girlie” could get. The jammies were super pink with little girl Pebbles (from the Flinstones) on the front and it read “You’re Not The Boss Of Me.” Subtle, right? To this day, It’s one of our many mantras.
The beauty of the jammies is that they weren’t needed – that is, he didn’t need Pebbles to remind him about my spirit. This intuitive man, this human being, this person in the Universe… “got me.” He got me. He understood me. My thorns and horns and all – he was “of the same clay” as me and he just f*@#ng got me. He had me at the yellow shirt. But here I was a 30-something woman wearing pink Pebbles jammies – as if that would make a statement <insert hands on my hips> about the kind of spirit I was. Free, and yet, not so free. Here’s why.
The Pebbles statement was coming from a free-spirited yet fearful woman. When I was least expecting it, this man walked into my life. Yikes! Shit, shit, shit! Run away! And guess what? I did. Ran far away. And then I came back after our “week of darkness.” We’ve since renamed it our “week of enlightenment.” (Whole other story.)
In tying all of this together. He isn’t the boss of me. He never wanted to be. He never thought he could be. He wanted to be the love of me. I write of fear in a playful way, but it’s because fear is so dark. It puts us in some dark places and sometimes it’s the light of someone else’s light that “gets us” and can make all the difference. Make sense?
Zenitude for today (for life): Whatever or whoever in life that represents your “yellow shirt” – perhaps run away for a time, but maybe, just maybe, allow it to work some magic in your life.