Come on, you know you want it

I walk through this life like a battlefield water-bearer, insisting to each person I meet that they need some of my light and life:  “You can’t get along without it!  Look how thirsty you are, needy, barren, bereft.  I can help, I have the magic secret sauce, and I’m the only one on earth healthy and able enough to give it to you!  I am your answer, savior, and absolute finite resource.”

Running around the world attempting to feed all those Sally Struthers children and Sarah McLachlan puppies is horribly exhausting, besides being awfully narcissistic.  But when you don’t trust other people to get their own needs met without you, you become the Giving Tree.  Here, have an apple, a limb, a torso.  I’m fiiiine without it.

This is where the pain arrives, and I finally become aware that something is terribly out of balance.  I am not fine without my torso, and guess what?  You do actually have your own.

I have assumed for so long that you’re inept (subconsciously, you know!) that I don’t allow you time to prove you’re not before I shove an apple in your mouth and run away before you demand more.

But the thing is, I don’t actually need for you to prove it.  Are you missing things?  Love, affection, validation?  Wow, that sounds like a pretty shitty place to be; I hope you get help with that … you know, from your own Source.

Because when I trust that you have your own well or tree or metaphor, I am free to tend to my own and to sit with you in gracious companionship.  Relieved of my self-imposed burden to watch for all your signals of need I am open to watch for my own.

Not gone grocery shopping this week, Moll?  Sleeping with a pile of clean laundry again?  Hey, lady, what’s going on, what do you need?

Oh, shit.

I’m going to have to answer that.