Searching for my missed parent, looking for the attention of love I have never known. Not because I haven’t had it; but because the deep sense of fear existed within. What does love mean to me; I hadn’t allowed myself to recognize warmth and love from others. This became an alarm system of love, retreating in the essence of whomever my focus was. This had was hard wired in me. I have been graced with more than I could have ever imagined in attention, still I struggle. I now face the waning of my beauty. I have just recognized I was beautiful, feeling myself now owning my beauty. I had pushed it away like love, living into a denial of just knowing I liked men to look at me. Men were never allowed into my thoughts more than anything but in my imagination or durning what I thought was friendly play. My inner voice was one of self-criticism. It echoed that it can’t be true that I am beautiful; a proclamation of a continual mind whispers and even sometimes shouted at me. Am I beautiful? Am I still beautiful?
Do I now grab once again in perhaps some ill begotten effort to capture my departing youth or should I accept what is handed to me in my aging life. The universe showed me in my new belief that I could own my beauty. Was this not a superficial need to get attention; wanting some face work? My inner need could come from lack of self-acceptance. This may or may not be what I can or can’t live with as I searched for an answer. I had to stay open to where I am led and the consequences of whatever might come forth. The voice of I can’t be beautiful kept calling me as it announces itself. So I kept looking and making excuses. Even when a man I had known when I was young and now is an Oscar winner looked at me. I had gone to see him locally speak about his life. Bob Forester looked at me when we had been talking about a friend of ours and someone I had a relationship with. He said “You are a beautiful woman.” I had been sitting behind him till his autograph seekers stopped. A few years later he passed away and I particularly have to believe him.
He and I had once sat in a coffee shop near where I worked in Rochester NY. I probably asked him for coffee as well. When I was on a mission I just filled my time where I could, as he was a rising star who traveled between Rochester and LA. I really wanted to know more about our mutual friend but having fun than in the late 60’s was what I did and anyway I could have fun seemed to be part of me. I believe he asked me for coffee but of course it doesn’t matter and he couldn’t remember. Little did I know that he would tell me “I was a beautiful woman?” I was going to have help to live with just a few more years to live with who I was becoming.
