This April I will be 75 years old. Years OLD, even though I don’t feel old (most of the time).
It’s been an interesting journey getting here and one I couldn’t even imagine as a kid. I remember having a conversation with a playmate and discussing how long we’d each like to live. I settled on something like the mid-fifties because I figured that I would still be able to be active and presumably in fairly good health. I didn’t have grandparents or other older role models in my life, so I had no concept of what it would be like to be older than my parents.
Now that I am well past fifty, I’m in the mood to reflect.
I was in my mid-thirties the first time my mother told me she loved me. I think she finally said those words as the result of the exercise I detail in the article below. My mother came from a non-demonstrative family, and the maternal modeling was not positive. In fact, my father died when I was twelve, and Mom asked her stepfather, rather than her mother, to come to California from the mid-West for support. My paternal grandparents died before I was born, and I only saw my maternal grandparents a half dozen times until I was an adult. I don’t have memories of a grandma’s hugs or favorite recipe or stories from her childhood. Until I was an adult there was no extended family to share memories with, and even then, we were on different paths.
When I got married and had children, I decided to change the future of my family story. I couldn’t change the past, but I hoped that I could change the patterns from the past, the wounds from the past, and as an extension, my family. I realized that Mom could feel and demonstrate love because she did so with my children. I was so curious to know if she was capable of loving me, or if I was just not a person she could ever embrace. I had begun my spiritual journey and was learning about the power of working with my angels and guides through my higher self. I decided to write her a letter, enlisting the aid of my angels and guides through my higher self to her higher self (her angels and guides). [See article below.]
Ten days after writing that letter, I got a call from her saying that she loved me and wanted me to know how much she appreciated me. I was stunned. My husband was stunned. Over the next 25 years we built a much more loving and trusting relationship. As she was nearing the end of her life, she told me that she didn’t understand my spiritual beliefs, but she saw how I expressed love for her and how she had never had that. She looked at the love and respect in my family and said that I must be doing something right. Mom feared death, but she asked me to support her when her time came to transition, which I did, some years later.
There are two lessons in this experience. One, you don’t have to carry on your family patterns. My parents were headed towards divorce when Dad died. My grandmother and even great grandmother were both divorced (that was in the late 1800’s!). I wanted to change that for my story. Two, when you work with your angels and guides, you can call in a great deal of support to create the change to make your life as you want it, and as it deserves to be.
Over the years I’ve offered this letter exercise to resolve many relationship issues regarding work, family, and neighbor issues. What I love about the solutions is that they were often unexpected, as mine was.
There is one caveat. If nothing changes in the relationship after you write the letter, it may mean that it is time for you to move away from it, be it family, work, or friendship.
So, I’m calling on my angels and guides to celebrate the 75 years we’ve been together and to trust that we will continue to work for our highest and best good.
