Happy Home

All I ever wanted in this life was a happy home.

I remember my angsty teen years, listening to The Goo Goo Dolls, just wishing I could be where I was loved.

Naturally, I projected this out in the only way I saw how: I believed it would come from the just-right romantic love story.

And, oh, my love! It DID. In the end it did.

And it was the end. It blew up in my face.

Thus she lived, Happily Ever After.

Truly. That delusion HAD TO die for me to understand what love is, what it looks like as it moves through my life.

That delusion had to die for me to learn to show up for love where it IS, where love is asking to be met, recognized, adored, poured-into.

When I felt that happy home in partnership, it was everything I'd ever dreamed and more. It was flawless, so it was crystal clear to me—it was not enough, it could never be enough.

There was no problem with the connection or the relationship. There was a problem with my ideas that a dyad was all the love I would need in my life, could take all the love I can give in this world.

I pieced myself together from that devastation with the ancient technology I learned from my family of origin, my parents, in those crucial first five years.

It was latent within me. I found it in that love, the part of me that had known love, the part that had been relentlessly adored, found faultless. That was the part that had been arguing back all along! That was the part that suffered in mistreatment because she did know better. She knew, she had an embodied sense, of what it was to be loved and adored and nurtured and cared for.

Even as I was distracted by mistreatment, trying to solve that and solve my experience of it, trying it out for myself, mistreating others, I was learning love.

I was raised in a village. I was raised in a small town with lots of love and not-lots of money. Our vacations were car trips to visit family, or crowding into a hotel room in a nearby state, or camping.

I was raised by a lake and I walked there often, angsty, but still feeling the awe at the beauty, the singular privilege afforded to me. I walked on the ice and listened to it sing the song an irregular strobe light would sing. I pressed my body to the tree by the bench, the one I would climb with my father close by, on the walks we took together.

At the state park by my house we luxuriated on summer days, our mothers packing lunches, chatting while we wandered.

Eventually we got a pool. Our house was always full of kids of various ages. I had many mothers and brilliant friends whose parents knew my mother from high school or from kindergarten ballet.

My mother was in possession of a Timeless Technology. The weaver, the oracle, the universal-mother. She was warm, she was frank, she held high standards, she was goofy as all getout.

She was not the only one. My aunts and the ladies in their neighborhoods, the friends-since high school whose parents were also friends since high-school, really all the mothers, seemed possessed of some element of this technology. It was understood that we respect the mothers and that the mothers reported to each other. I got away with literally nothing; my mother had spies all about town reporting on my activity, and she would know if I had strayed before I got home.

I didn't stray often, but the results when I did were apocalyptic. So dramatic. So unnecessary.

I wanted the nuances of love, and wanted for them in service of seeing both the nuances and the wholes.

I wanted peace when things were left unfinished. I wanted standards that made sense and corrections that didn't ruin the moment.

I knew that life was fleeting, and I mourned for the moments at odds with my mother, knowing they were counting down, wishing we could just have understanding.

This is how I came to understand that I was tuning a Timeless Technology in a way that is just right for me. I share how it looks in my life that you might understand the totally different way it could look in your life. This is a Way with many forms, and as you see it, you might find, as I found, that its roots are latent within you, already governing your social structures and your network.

There are human laws of relationship, studies continu

e to prove it. There is a sense of fairness and reciprocity which varies in its standards but not in its presence in human society.

Much has been quantified about how humans come to conflict, how scarce resources create grabs for power and security—but what do we know about tuning ongoing harmony, stewarding plenty, living in peace?

In truth, many of us deeply know it. It is the part that is setting off all those alarm bells recently, the part that knows it can be another way. We all have a part which knows how to love, a part which knows how love and wellbeing can feel.

We all have access to allow that part to live right here and now.