Love?!

 

Post one



This is my first blog entry... ever.

I am currently therefore a 'work experience', 'P-plate driving' blogger - so please forgive my many mistakes as social media ignorance.  I hope that I can  improve from here.


PLEASE NOTE:  My original blog title was 'How to find love' - I explain below in my original blog why I chose this title.

However  I subsequently found that so many sites on the internet started with this title - I felt my blog would get lost in all the 'noise' - so I realised that as I love people's stories about their lives - I have heard so many in my life - especially from my patients over the last 25 years and in my own life over almost 50 years - I would write blog exploring the stories we all have - unique and shared in our lives.


So my new blog title "Our multi-story lives" does not relate to the text below.  However  I thought it was nice to discuss issues of the original title - Love - and keep my original blog beginning.

The original blog I wrote therefore continues below:



I have named my blog site 'How to find love...' as now in my late forties - after 27 years with my lovely husband David,  25 years as a medical doctor, 16 years as a mother - now with four beautiful children, and a life filled with many mistakes and many difficult times and many beautiful and wonderful and funny times as well ... I think that I have finally found some wisdom about life and people and most importantly  love.  And I hope that through my blog I can share with other people some of the things I have learned and experienced in my life which may inspire and help them to better understand and find love in their lives.

One of the things that I have learned with maturity is that I think the meaning of life - is love.

Over the last 25 years as a medical doctor,  treating and supporting patients through some of their most difficult and tragic  times as well as some of their most wonderful times ... I have found that love is the thing that matters most to people when crises occur.

How much money people have, how big their car and house is or how much status they have achieved in their lives seems to evaporates into insignificance as people look to loved ones for support and help and comfort, or to share their joy with.  It is also at these  times  people can sometimes realise with regret  the words of love that they never got to express or the love that had waited patiently for them for so long - but they had been too busy to see it or to appreciate how important it was.


So ... I chose my blog topic to be about 'love' and how to find it as I think love is the most important thing in our lives.


When I say love - I do mean love in all of it's forms.
The love of a partner - a husband,wife, girlfriend or boyfriend is often what people first think of when we talk about love.  And I agree that this form of love is wonderful and beautiful.  However love comes in many other forms that are equally  important and wonderful.
The love for our children or even children in general, for our patients, customers, clients, colleagues, neighbours and friends are also important.  Soul mates can be found not only a life partner - but also in our friends and other people in our lives.  The love we can have for our pets is also valuable and beautiful.

We can also enjoy love in the beautiful things we find in the world - a beautiful sunset, a glorious view, a lovely rose, art, music, food, coffee, a good book, a glass of wine and so many other things we find joy in.  These things help us to love our lives and have fun and find joy.

Finally and I think most importantly there is love ... for ourselves.  Unconditional, forgiving and  kind love for ourselves and for  our mistakes and for the goals we couldn't achieve and for the things that we regret and for our imperfections.  We are all imperfect but we all deserve to be loved - especially by ourselves.
 I have read that our souls are all like a perfect diamond - all beautiful and precious at their core - but all of us in our lives are polishing that diamond soul through the lessons we learn.  Lessons we learn through the hard times we all endure and through the mistakes we make.

Lessons learned are about love, but also about forgiveness - including forgiving ourselves, compassion for others, patience - including patience that we will find love - in the time that we are meant to - which is not necessarily right now, tolerance of other people and ourselves, helping ourselves but also helping others in their life journeys and also allowing others to love and help us.  Accepting help from others can be, for some people, difficult as can be allowing others to love us.


Earlier this week when I decided to start to write a blog - I  was wondering what to call it.  I was googling for fun between patients at work, a habit I have to pass the time - an alternative to playing the computer card game Solitaire, and by chance  I happened to google 'Topics most often googled'.
What I found fascinating and prompted the name for my blog site was that the most frequently googled topic for the USA was not topics related to finance and wealth or material possessions or even, as for other countries, how to draw or how to make a cake.  The most frequently googled topic for the USA was 'How to find love'.  I was initially surprised that so many people would be looking for love to make it the most googled topic.  I found the idea that love was so sought after both lovely - that in all the things to desire and google - people in the US most wanted to find love.  But it was also possibly  a bit sad.  Do these people feel lonely and lacking in love?  Also can they see all the people around them who probably already love them - if not as a life partner but as a valuable and beautiful soul and friend.  Furthermore what about loving themselves?  Do they?


So here is my first blog ... about love, in its many forms, and finding it.

I hope that with my stories - both true and creative , and through inspirational things I experience and I have experienced that I can share with my readers, I might help them to find love in their lives from others and also love and forgiveness and acceptance for themselves.


For my first blog I have a short true story about my own life:




The First Time I Realised That I Loved My Husband.


It all sounds ridiculous now. Now that I'm older and I've realised how superficial and unimportant appearances are.  However back then in the 1980's I was acutely aware of the old saying "Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses".  So for most of the first four years of my university life I refused to wear my glasses outside of the lecture rooms.  Unfortunately I couldn't wear contact lenses as my eyes were dry and the lenses hurt like brocken glass when I tried to wear them.

I was legally blind which means I couldn't even read the top letter on those reading charts - 1 in 60 vision - without my glasses.  Objects further from me than about one metre were a blur of colour and light with no distinct form.

I managed to get around the university campus by mostly ignoring people if they called out to me.  I'd been embarrassed too many times by waving and responding to people who didn't know me and who had been waving at someone else that I had  decided  it was safer to ignore everyone and look at the ground feigning deafness or deep thought or both.  

At a pinch I worked out that if I memorised what people were wearing - the colours of their clothes - when I was close enough to see who they were, along with remembering the sound of their voices and their general body shape and height - I could mostly work out who people were and where they were when they were further away from me and once again only a blur of colour.

It wasn't all vanity.  My self esteem had taken a pummelling during my childhood and youth in my abusive family.  I was sure that I was ugly enough even without the dreaded glasses.  The words of my abusive father were still loud and clear in my mind then.

My father frequently told me what a 'nothing' I was, how stupid I was and of course how ugly I was.  My father would comment how pretty other girls in my high school classes were.  The girls who would occasionally call at my house so that I could help them with their homework.  The fact that I did well at school - in fact I was top of the entire highschool of more than 2000 students - meant nothing to my father.  He would tell me every day how much he hated me.  At other times he would kick me across the room, chase me up the street to hit me or punch me and bash my head into a wall.  I would tell friends at school that I had another accident with a cupboard door when they saw my cut lip or bruises.


My clever ploys used to avoid wearing glasses fell apart within three days of starting my fifth year of medicine.  I was 21 years of age and that was the year that I started work as a student doctor on the hospital wards.  It was also the time I met David who was to become my first and only boyfriend and later my dear husband.  David was then the  intern on the ward.  He was 24 years old, tall, dark, handsome, smart, funny and, as I was soon to find out, really kind.

My first hospital rotation was on a surgical unit at a large tertiary hospital in Adelaide, South Australia.  The hated spectacles had been shoved deep into my new white coat's pocket and I wandered the wards in a hazy blur for the first two days - squinting at bed charts and trying to work out who was who from the different  voices and clothes and body shapes of the staff on the wards.

Day three came and it was my first day assisting in the operating theatres.  The student doctors all changed into our green surgical scrubs with white papery hats to cover our hair and white papery boots for our feet.  The operating theatres were a large white labyrinth of corridors with a multitude of operating theatres stemming off them.  It was all a confusing maze even for people with good vision.  However with my poor sight it was a shiny blur of dazzling white with green blobs of colour scurrying here and there  and I quickly realised that I was hopelessly lost... and blind.  My usual system of working out who people were by their clothes and hair colour no longer worked at all  as everyone was wearing surgical scrubs and hats to cover their hair.  One white corridor looked like the next.  I looked at my watch.  The time was 8.55am. I was due in theatre with my surgical registrar, Brendon, and my fellow student doctor, Carolyn, at 9am.

My heart was racing, perspiration was dripping down  the back of my neck and my forehead under my white hat.  A tight band squeezed in around my skull and my mind screamed at me, My God!  I'm lost and I'm going to be sacked and I'll fail and never become a doctor. I ran down corridors.   This is my first day,  the thoughts raced through my mind,  and they've probably started operating already.

Somehow I found the doctor's tea room - another white space through a door filled with green blobs around the periphery of the room drinking coffee.  Racing into the room, breathless, eyes wild I stopped in front of the first two green blobs sitting nearest to the door and in a shrieking voice that I hardly recognised as my own  I cried, " I'm a fifth year med student and I've lost my registrar and the other  student - Brendon and Carolyn.  Have you seen Brendon and Carolyn?"

I stood there staring at the two figures sitting two meters in front of me.  Panic all over my face.  Limbs tense and anxious to rush away and get to where I was meant to be five minutes ago.

However the figures just sat there in silence watching me.  I  wondered why they didn't answer and whether  they had understood my question.  Finally the larger of the two figures responded in a deep masculine voice he said, "We  are  Brendon and Carolyn".

A stunned silence followed this and then the laughter began.  All the green figures in the room were laughing at me. Fortunately my mind has blanked out whatever happened next.  I'm sure it was all pretty awful and humiliating and I did go and  retrieve my glasses and from that day forward I accepted defeat and became the girl who wore glasses.

I also became the girl who stood two meters in front of her new registrar and fellow student and asked them in a state of panic if they knew where they were.  I was worse than Mr Magoo - the blind cartoon character from my childhood.  I was lucky I hadn't stopped to have a chat with a hat stand on the way through the door.


I realised that day that I would prefer to appear ugly with glasses than to look stupid without them.


The story of my 'blind stupidity' spread throughout the  hospital community and to all of my fellow medical students.  Over the next few months the story became almost a legend in stupidity.  I got used to hearing the story told and retold and the laughter and pointing that followed.

However a few weeks after that embarrassing event  I was examining a patient late one night on the wards with the curtain pulled around the patient's bed.  The ward was silent and then I heard two voices only meters away at the nurses station.  It was my fellow student doctor, Carolyn,  and my new friend, David.

Carolyn was telling David the hilarious story of blind Robyn in the operating theatre's tea room a few weeks earlier.  When the story  ended and Carolyn began to laugh I noticed only silence from David.  I sat listening only meters from them as they were both still oblivious to my presence in the room.
Finally David responded.  "I don't think that's funny", he said.  "Robyn just needed her glasses. That could have happened to anyone".  Carolyn stopped laughing and David continued to say many kind supportive words about me.


Almost thirty years have followed since that night.  David and I have now been married for over 24 years and we have been life partners from soon after that conversation.
I think that was the first time I realised that I loved my new dear friend, David.  He demonstrated  integrity, kindness and loyalty  as I sat listening behind the curtain that night to his lovely words.


I realise now that I learned a few lessons  from my humiliating and stupid mistake in that surgical tea room back in 1987.

I learned that men do make passes at girls who wear glasses.  Glasses can be really cool.
Obviously it is better to wear glasses than to look like an idiot pretending that you don't need them.
Actually it eventuated that my handsome new boyfriend was more myopic than me.  He also wore glasses but when I first met him he had worn contact lenses.

I also  learned  how kind and loving people can be - in this case my dear husband David.  Defying other people who laughed at me and being my champion.

Finally I learned that my father was wrong about me.  I was not ugly or stupid and I did deserve to be loved ... even though he didn't and still doesn't care for me.  I know that  all people deserve to be loved and respected.



We all have bodies - but we also have souls.  I think rather than us being bodies with souls - we are souls with bodies and a  kind soul is where true beauty lies.





Last thing before I go - some words of wisdom:


'Adversity introduces a man to himself.'
Albert Einstein





I hope everyone has a lovely week.

PS: 

If you liked this blog or found it helpful - please let others know - as it may be helpful to them or just a nice read.