Innocence

The title of my blog has smacked me with irony for months and months, if not years. The return to innocence. Is there such a thing? Can it ever really happen? No, it can't. You never can return to the space of life before bad things happen to you. But i'm realizing that if you did you also lose the ability to be the person you grew into from those times. I wouldn't change who I have become for all the bad. I never thought I'd say that, but it is the truth.

It's not about the return to that space of ignorance, it's about being able to come back to that space of being able to be loving, open, joyous and willing to accept the innocence of life and that no one really does have a say in what goes on in this crazy world. Not a one of us can control or make our destiny exactly as we wish it. We can make requests and God and the Universe can either say "Yay" or "Nay" and then it is about how we deal with the outcome that defines us.

It has been a slow and steady, at times painful, process for me. But as each day unfurls before me and new experiences and moments come to me I realize how thankful I am. It could have been much worse for me. I have read the horror stories of women abused within inches of their lives weekly, or spouses who maimed them forever disfiguring their bodies and souls. The exes who killed their children, and these women were forced to live with the reality that their children had been taken from them, harmed, abused, and killed. Those are the women who I look at and think, "How are you still standing and how are you  not consumed with anger, grief and revenge?" And yet they aren't. And if they can put one step in front of the other, slowly put back together the pieces of their souls and lives and fight on to help others, surely someone who went through not even an iota of what they did can carry on and live happily and carry the memory of those on her soul so as to honor them.

There is no perfect innocence in life once you hit a certain age or withstand certain things. But it doesn't ruin the ability of your soul to love innocently, completely and with all that you have. That is the greatest blessing God and the Universe have given to me. The gift of BK and seeing that nothing has damaged either of us enough to taint what we have or to cause us to be unable to love as innocently and completely as we always have. We haven't let the past make us see through different colored lenses and we won't let the past take away our future. Both of us have had our own battles of innocence taken from us, and yet they don't define either of us. Instead I think they make us realize how you don't get to waste the present day on the past because if you do, what's the point of it all? No, we take each and every moment we are given and gratefully live it. We haven't returned to innocence, we've accepted and appreciated that who we are today is better than the innocent person of years past and are grateful that we can be who we are now, with each other.