What if I want to stay?

On eldest daughter healing and being free at home.

This is another unedited, raw piece that I sat to write on this rainy, but now sunny autumn day.

I am sharing it now, unpolished, because I received SO many beautiful emails (yet to get to most of them!), about how seen they felt in reading my last entry. I know that you will want it this raw— I know that because every time you comment, or write to me, I get to know you more. Also if I sit and comb through this and over think it, you won’t get it. I’ll be onto the next thing and over this one.

My books are polished. My Body Luxury book was just combed through by a reader and editor. But here? It’s rough like I am.

Please comment. Please email. These pieces are fuelled by our exchange. X

This week has been a week of healing.

You know how some weeks bring decades of healing all at once? It’s not like it’s spontaneous healing— but long, sought after healing. It’s all the bits you’ve been plugging away at for years, decades, and then finally, all the pieces line up and your homeopathy gives it a nudge and then your chiro says something and then you read exactly the book you need and God is pulling strings for you left right and centre in one big, mighty, holy…. poof. You can see. Oh my gosh you can see. The dots connect and in what feels like one quick snap of a finger, you have a boundary you could never seem to hold before. Now it’s easy. It’s easy now but oh my gosh you fought for it. It felt fast but it happened slow. You don’t quite know what to do. (I write. Every time, I write).

If you’re anything like me, you don’t stop and enjoy this moment enough. You’re straight into the next thing.

My homeopath said to me today “Do you realise how big this all is? How much has happened all at once? I’d really encourage you slow down and be with it.” She asked if I wanted to slow down the treatment and I (half jokingly) told her ‘no thanks, I love the thrill. I birth fast, I was born fast, I like to move fast. Keep it coming’. Look, we get to be honest alright? No point sounding like I enjoy swanning around in sunflowers on a meadow when really I enjoy a certain tempo.

I do realise how big it is. I also love her for reflecting it back to me after I told her all about it. I love our sessions so much. And yes, slowing down sounds lovely and I slow down when I need to. I have baths. I take walks. I get off social media. I eat chippies and watch shows when I need to. I read a lot. I know my inner threshold.

But I have a book to write and I am chomping to write it, you know?

I won’t get into all of the details of my process because they are many and deep. I’ll save it for the book— I’m still deciding whether it will be fiction or non fiction. I feel really excited by the idea of writing a fiction. It feels freeing. I could tell the stories I want to tell and make the points I want to make and invite the reflection I want to invite, but could do so in a more impersonal way. I could say the funny things I want to say about things like ungrounded fluffy spirituality and my time in network marketing but have another character say it so that people can’t say ‘PETA SAID THIS!’. I could change the names and tell the truth but let it be cryptic. Oh the freedom. I could expand the truth, add more humour, become so observationally accurate like I am in real life.

But then fiction feels intimidating. I’ve never done it. I mean, I tell my kids long stories every night and we’ve been running with the same story, ongoing for 6 years. The family in our story now have 7 kids, new neighbours, and each kid in the family has taken a turn at being the cheekiest over the years. My kids remember back in the day when the story only had one child and she wouldn’t brush her teeth and she her breath stank soooo bad. I have laced in lessons the kids might need to learn, or recap things from the day we had. I have written that fiction book out loud just for my children and not a night goes by that we don’t add to it. Sometimes it’s a 30 minute story because I am so invested myself.

Can I write a fiction?

Would my first go have to suck as a means of entry? Is that imposter syndrome, or just a healthy dose of humility that tells me ‘you’ll need to work VERY hard and it still might suck. Stick to what you know, just tell people what you want to tell ‘em straight.’

I could do that. And I might still. Maybe I do both. No Peta, do not do both— you have three children and limited time to write, are you NUTS? (We already know, yes, I am).

But gosh there is something so exciting about making my points but running wild with imagination, and incorporating all of the seemingly meaningless details I notice about people everyday— how people who wear those kinds of shoes order that kind of coffee… and oh, the mums at the library give me all the material I need by just eavesdropping their convos. I get the kids in the car and then I write notes. I am a professional eaves dropper and I’m not sorry about it.

But this not-really-a-conundrum is not what I came to write about today. I came to write a follow up to my last entry (that so many of you loved, I have many emails to get back to!).

Oh, place. We love talking about it here. Place. Home. Travel. The wrestle with it all.

The last week, my husband and I have booked a month long trip to Europe and cancelled it. We have again wrestled with going back to the states. We’ve rebooked a trip to Bali to see my brother and his partner (yay!). It’s only 3.5 hours away which feels like a trip to the post office for us. My husband revived a vision he has for a golf project— an in person one— in a region close by here that we love, where we have a home, where we have lived before and were sooo happy, and where we have a solid, salt of the earth community.

We have been speaking about staying in this state, going back to this country region and executing my husbands vision for the last year. We both know that it would mean we’d have to stay put for a good 5 years. I can’t tell you the kind of heebie-jeebies that has brought up in me at different times. I could feel my feet itch as if I had been bitten by bull ants all over. Stay put. 5 years. In my home state. I’m sorry but I am short of breath, my chest is tight, I feel claustrophobic and like I just need to GET-THE-F-OUT.

That’s really how it feels.

This is true, even though I absolutely LOVE this region, the people there, we have happily lived there before. Also, I want to do everything I can to support my husbands vision a) because it is really good and b) because I love him. He does this for me too. He tells me all the time “I want to be wherever you are happiest”, because, when you dig into biology, the woman is the man’s territory. He is honest and sincere in wanting her aliveness. The children are the women’s territory. So, the childrens wellbeing drives the mother like the wife’s wellbeing drives the husband. I better stop here before I derail this whole convo.

But this week as part of my humungous healing, I processed a lot of eldest daughter stuff. I let myself, for the first time, be a little pissed off that my dad left. Not mad at him so much because I know that it really was for the best. But just MAD. For the mental and emotional role I stepped in to fill, and that it was just too much for a 5 year old girl. It was too much when she was 8, when she was 10, when she was 15, and even when she was 36. I have always taken ‘honour thy mother and father’ very seriously and I still do. But I am allowing myself to tell the truth about how heavy it was. It is not ‘nothing’ when a father leaves the home. A father’s role can never be replaced, ever. But by gosh, the eldest daughter will try. That little girl will try with everything she has.

I say this, while loving both of my parents for who they are, everything they gave me, and everything they had to overcome from their own shitty childhoods. I love my mum. I love my dad.

This week I had a big realisation.

I realised that part of my impulse to want to leave, was driven by a desire to escape the burden of being ‘close to home’. I have felt, almost for my survival, a need to escape the responsibility of being around all the messes I feel responsible for cleaning up, the people I feel disproportionately responsible for who. My desire to leave is partly pure and wonderful and truly who I am… but part of it is also, that I need relief. Relief that I have struggled to give myself. I say ‘give myself’ because I know it’s nobody else’s work to do but mine.

I need physical relief from being where it’s heavy. Where I can’t seem to separate myself from ‘everything that is my job but shouldn’t be’, from that cloud of weight that I’ve carried since the age of 5 that I’ve not known how to get off my back, out of my mind, off of my shoulders. I haven’t been able to get there from the inside out, so I’ve just wanted to LEAVE. To try and run from the cloud. But every time I’ve done it, the cloud has always come with me.

This week, when I was reading ‘The Courage To Be Disliked’ (in two days mind you- it’s the second time I’ve picked it up, the first time I didn’t like the dialogue format but this time I devoured it), I came across a bit that spoke about ‘life tasks’, and how we each have them. Work, love and friendship. We can’t live without these three life tasks, we can’t avoid them. Sometimes we will manufacture ‘life lies’ to try and avoid them.

What shook me though was the suggestion that we cannot, and should not, try and take others life tasks from them. Not our parents, not even our kids. We can encourage, we can assist, but we cannot do the life tasks that belong to them.

God tee’d this one up perfectly for me. He knew I was ready to read this exact thing. God knew I had the ears and the heart for it. He knew it was the slam-dunk I’d been seeking. I’d read this kind of thing a million times over but the cloud was too thick to put it into practice. “They ARE my jobs”, is what I told myself.

It seems so sophomoric on the surface, but it dissolved so much for me. The people who I’ve been trying to rescue— I’ve been trying to take on their life tasks for them— and this is such a distorted way to live that it’s been negatively impacting both them and me. I think I’ve been so helpful and heroic in trying to ‘save’ and ‘fix’ but I have been trying to take on someone else’s life task.

I underlined it. I exclamation pointed it. I probably tore a hole in the paper I stabbed it so hard with my blue pen because I was so ecstatic. It pierced the cloud. Guys, it popped the cloud, and the rain poured out over me. I felt free. I felt clear. I cannot rescue others from their life tasks. I can encourage. But I cannot do them for them. By trying to take on others life tasks, I am sometimes avoiding my own. (This topic needs way more, another time).

It felt like God was behind a DJ deck and he dropped a BANGER the moment this realisation went off in my heart. Confetti fell from the sky in my mind. The cloud that had been in me, over me, making everything I’ve done feel heavy… was burst.

I can’t underestimate the bigness of this. As eldest daughters, we start to pedestal the ways we are selfless and generous. We can’t escape it so we make it so that its the highest virtue their is. We start to judge anyone who is carefree in ways we are not. We start to judge others for not being like we are… until we tell the God’s honest truth about it all, and the cloud bursts open.

When I go to bed at night (early with my kids, mind you), I have a stack of books beside me. Some non fiction, some fiction. I choose whatever I’m in the mood for. Sometimes I’m fanging through a book at lightning speed, other times I want a little of this and a little of that. Sometimes I tell myself that I should read The Bible every single night but I know that God speaks through other texts also. The Bible has popped me open but so has classical literature, so has old school personal development books, so has children’s books. Sometimes even contemporary fiction does it.

My daily prayer is for God to help me see how He sees, and He does that in many ways. He meets me in every book I pick up. He meets me in every audio I listen to. Whether it’s His kind of content or not, He’s there— either helping it soak into me, or helping me discern it’s falseness. I’m not afraid to admit that I don’t read the Bible everyday, but I do seek God in every thing I do, in every text I read.

Gosh I still haven’t made it to the point I wanted to share.

This week, as I felt myself become a little more free of the cloud, I felt a little differently about my home state. I say my home state because my home town, is a city but the place we LOVE, is a regional area in the country.

I have always felt that being ‘home’, meant that I was doing it for someone else. I was doing it for my mum, or for my kids. This created a ‘tear’ in me that was like well, sacrifice has me here, but desire has me THERE. The two were not lining up.

One day this last week I took my littlest two kids on the back of our snazzy electric bike through some streets I’d never ridden before. They were more classic, old, leafy. We rode past a little old writers house— a cottage in the park that had been preserved to honour the states writers. I had a moment of ‘oh, there are people like me here’. That sounds so dumb because DUH there are people like me here, but I’ve never been able to really SEE that, you know?

This wasn’t my place. It couldn’t be my place because if this were my place it would mean that my whole life was about sacrifice, burden, over-responsibility. That’s what ‘this place’ symbolised for me. Leaving, symbolised owning my life.

In riding through these streets I’d never ridden, I saw ‘this place’ differently. I saw it through the lens of a woman free of the cloud, a woman who could determine her own relationship with ‘this place’ separate from the little girl who took way too much on, way too young, felt like ‘I just need to leave. I need to be free.’

What if I actually… gulp… like it here?

What if the weather suits me perfectly?

What if it is truly the best place for my children?

What if I don’t mind that it’s a little far away from the world but super close to Asia, closer to Europe?

What if I have the best community I could ever wish for down in that special regional area? People who don’t give a shit what i’ve done, my social media, or what I can do for them?

This came up in my GNM session this week hugely—I need to write about in the next book, it’s huge. But this sense that, I can only have community if I am OVER-giving. People only want to be around me if I am OVER-giving, if I am paying for everything. This is something I have developed over the years. My community, my real people, they don’t care if I live in a tent. This matters to me, because this is how I love them too.

What if my husbands vision is good and right (I already know it is) and I can follow him there and breathe because, I don’t have to run. I don’t have to leave to be free.

What If I want to be here.

What if I can be free here.

I mean, we can travel too, when we can be bothered because yikes, we don’t actually want to do it as often. I can’t believe I’m saying that out loud. Blasphemy!

What if this is my place, but I had to decide that for myself, not from a place of “I’m here because I have to be. Because it’s right for everyone but me.”

What if I get to start over with this place. This country. Where my family have been for seven generations.

What if I could stay…

Love PK XX