It’s the Kissing I Miss the Most.
Photo: Superman Movie I
By Jodie Lauzonis.
If anyone where to ever ask, although I am rarely asked, here’s a tidbit of information about being single.
Most people would rather not address my choice not to date for 12 months, or some continually attempt to fix me up or suggest dating websites — as if “being single” where some horrifying state of being that needs immediate altering. Those are the ones who think of me with sadness and pity, or possibly deep down are fearful of ever having to go down this same road themselves.
I see the fear in those unwilling or afraid of the prospect of being single again.
My decision to cleanse my life of men for a full year did not begin as a conscious choice made of a sound mind and steadfast foundation. It began in a parking lot, with a broken heart and a long farewell to yet another failed relationship. Not so much failed as it was impossible. That’s when it began…
A final amazing kiss, a kiss so full of electricity that it jarred me directly from lips to heart. Our throbbing lips, the mingling of our hot breath against the cold winter air. The smell of the exhaust reminding us both of his wife at home waiting. Reminding us both that he couldn’t allow the engine to cool or he may stay longer then her suspicions allow.
That was the moment I said goodbye. I said goodbye to a married man who transitioned me from a broken hearted divorcee to a broken-hearted single woman.
It was that moment in that parking lot, it was that kiss that shook my foundation and sent an electric charge through my body like the paddles on the crash cart I use to shock my patients into a normal heart rhythm.
My heart had been beating in an abnormal rhythm for most of my adult life. That was the kiss that shocked me back, back to a yearlong journey into the depths of myself.
I spent 20 years caring for an alcoholic. Managing his illness, managing his madness, having his children, becoming dependent on his sickness and neediness in order to feel good about myself. From the age of 16 to 35, I was karmically chained to his life. My heart broke daily.
Every night the empty bed reminded me that years of this man sleeping on the couch and me in this bed had fermented us as strangers. I would lie in bed and hear him snoring on the couch, presumably passed out. I would meditate, pray, read, anything to help develop a plan to get out of this life that I took full responsibility for having gotten into.
Night after night after endless night I was trapped in that cage of regret staring at the popcorn ceiling above my empty bed. Riddled with countless disrhythmias playing like an opera in my chest cavity, annunciating through the high pitched wheeze of my lungs — a trapped, sick heart. Still, as I silently listened to his breath echo in another room, I would think….
It’s the kissing, it’s the kissing that I miss the most.
When we separated I met a man who was going through his own separation, like I was. We found comfort in each other’s stories, but honestly it was the kissing. I fell in love with him because of the kissing. It’s what I’d been missing. It’s the kissing that I dreamed of every night of my marriage when my sad heart rhythm left me breathless and alone in bed.
It wasn’t until a year and a half later that I accepted the reality that he wasn’t really living in his wife’s basement awaiting to leave once his daughter was old enough, as he had told me. I realized I had done it again. I had broken my own heart wide open. And there in the parking lot with our engines running and that kiss that sent electricity up through my knees engorging my mouth with hot blood, I ended it. Like I ended my marriage, I ended my love affair.
My heart had been shocked by that goodbye kiss, shocked into a new type of rhythm. One I had never felt before. This rhythm I did not recognize. This rhythm left me breathless at times, this rhythm was my own. It was me, alone. No man to make me feel one way or another. No thinking, monitoring, planning, worrying.
The time had come and I was determined to feel this new rhythm. I was determined to know it, to own it, to allow it to guide me and live inside me. At first it hurt so bad I thought I might die. It was lonely and slow paced and heavy. What I see now is that it was beginning to heal me. This new rhythm had set my heart on a healing pace.
One day, along the path of my 12 month journey, I stood in my kitchen drenched with the black smoke of a marriage laden in disdain. Black smoke stained cupboards from dinners burned and angry words of my inabilities and unworthiness dripping from every wall. I stood staring at this mess, the suffocating mess of my old life.
Mirrored in this smoke were even darker messes from childhood and deeper pain from the little girl inside me whose innocence was stolen from her at the young age of five. A little girl who began to beg for me to let her go, to let her rise out from inside of me and be set free.
With my hand clenching my chest in pain, I felt it, my new heart rhythm. She danced inside my chest. She sang my new rhythm aloud; she no longer let me settle into my rhythm of the past. It was then that I freed those fucking words dripping from the walls. I freed that fucking smoke trapped on my cupboards. I freed that broken little girl hiding from the fondling hands of her sick relative.
I opened my oven, and day by day, week by week, meal by meal, I began to passionately dance to a new beat of my kitchen drum. I felt the meals, I smelled the scents. I started to feel passionate again. When I burned things, and I did still do that from time to time, I danced around the fire and laughed through the smoke until it cleared. Nothing left to linger, nothing to stain this new kitchen drum beat my heart rhythm created.
This clearing out of sorts continued throughout my house as I created a new space for my kids and I to live in. A space attuned to openness and mistakes that were applauded as human and beautiful. A space full of clean air and cupboards drenched in love and understanding, sparkling with honey and peppermint tea. Cupboards twinkling with tiny strings of lights to match the holiday of the season, attached by push pins and IV tape from my scrub pockets, filling our new space with light and color. No longer was there a sick heart rhythm to drain the life from our space.
No longer was I willing to allow sickness and pain to obliterate love, kindness, and human nature. My new rhythm was changing me, healing me, bringing peace into my life.
At times I could hear this new rhythm beating through me like a drum, through my veins, through the pit of my stomach and up into my ears making my head dizzy and light.
One of these drum beat rhythms occurred when I was walking to my flight to attend a seminar in NYC required for my new job. I see now, that drum beat carried me forward. It led me. It was healing me, pushing me forward to be brave, like the drum beat of a warrior heading into battle.
This new rhythm of mine was wild, it lead me with a freedom that sometimes took my breath away. That was a flight of empowerment as I was filled with drum beat heart rhythms of ancestral women leading me to be the warrior and learn this new job for my family. An ancestry of women reminding me that they all live inside me, in my cells and my DNA, and disallowing me to be anything but brave.
Yet still, as I sat alone on the plane I thought… it’s the kissing, it’s the kissing that I miss the most…
As the year moved on, this new heart rhythm of mine, this wild drum beat in my ear, and pounding in my veins of women whose bloodlines paved a way before me, I began twirling in all different directions. Expanding, opening, broadening, feeling, until each day became a new dance.
This new heart rhythm became a musical that my life began to dance about to. I was free. I was finally feeling authentically empowered. I was finally feeling my life. The fear, the anger, the beauty, the love, all of it, nothing was left hidden under smoky disdain drenched kitchen cupboards.
No more hiding in dark parking lots so as not to be seen in the light of day by the suspicious spouse of my lover. No longer was I a silent victim protecting the shameful secret of my molestation. I had become a survivor. It had all broken free. A goodbye kiss in a parking lot had ended a lifetime of heartbreak, broke me open to a new way of feeling, of dancing to this life’s new rhythm that echoed in me, or me in it, or both.
As I come upon the end of my twelve month man cleanse, I naturally reflect upon my year. What has come to be inside of me is a new determination to never again allow a man contain this fierce rhythm that is me. It’s no longer a conscious choice to remain single; it’s no longer about bench marks or staving off offers to meet my goal.
Instead it’s a core belief that I deserve nothing but that which can nourish this new rhythm in my heart. It’s awareness that I can settle for no less than another whose heart beats to such a wild rhythm as mine. But in the end, as I lie alone tonight, all powerful in my bed of roses I think… It’s the kissing… it’s still the fucking kissing that I miss the most…
*****
Jodie Lauzonis is a modern day healer and a veteran life learner. She is a survivor of life’s journey and a transmitter of hope. A mother and a kick boxer. She will beat the pleasantries out of you if you let her so you can reveal yourself to her in the raw. A star gazer and dream weaver, an amateur drum player and lover of adventure. She is a professional Registered Nurse by day, proficient in cardiac dysrhythmias. She can shock your heart awake into a regular heart rhythm; she is certified to do so.
*****
{Life’s going nowhere without you.}
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