Claiming My Voice: From the darkness, the light emerges.

I’ve always loved kissing. It’s fun. It can be sweet. It can be passionate. It can be quick or long or deep. Sometimes they are big, wet, squishy kisses. All the kisses are good!

Some years ago, I noticed myself shifting from Mother to Crone. I could feel this shift to becoming the old one, the wise one. I didn’t love it. I wasn’t ready (I’m still not). I still had too many things on my list that I wanted to do, or do again (like visit Ireland). I realized that there were also things that I wanted to do that weren’t particularly in the front of my mind but they rattled around in the background. And, sure, there are still many things I can do but there is a long list of things I just don’t see as possible in this body, with these resources.

Sometime in that first year as I felt myself transitioning, I was camping with a bunch of gals and we were talking about how we were all feeling the shift. One proclaimed that she was never going to get old! Another talked about aging gracefully. All I could think of was all the things I wouldn’t get to do. Some of them because I’m not in a 20 year old body, some because I am not making the money I used to, and some because I had an old idea about what it meant to age. For example, I kind of always wanted to go back to college and I had always wanted to be part of a sorority – the full university experience. Sure, I could go back to college but it wouldn’t be as a young person forging bonds to last a lifetime while launching on a grand career (which is really what I wanted).

As I shared my thoughts with my friends, I also started to weep. Who am I kidding? I had a full on sob going on. My biggest regret/fear was that I was never going to have another first kiss. First kisses are the best! They are filled with hope and tenderness. I lamented to my friends how I would never have a first kiss like the ones when we were young and I was grieving that. You know, that first kiss with the boy you like and that maybe, just maybe, he’s the one and this is just the first kiss of many in a long life together.

Once that thought set in my mind, I ruminated on it periodically. I would sit around feeling sorry for myself thinking I was too fat, too old and too bitchy to have anyone ever want to kiss me again. Some days it was a fleeting thought backed by acceptance of my lot. Some days I would curl into a ball because I felt powerless to change in any kind of way that would make someone want to kiss me.

But I was wrong.

Recently I have got to spend time with a wonderful man. Dare I hope? Of course I dared. And one evening after hanging out for a while sharing honest feelings and experiences and a wee bit of physical touch, we kissed as he left. It was a very small set of tentative kisses. It was one of the sweetest most tender kisses I have ever given and received. And while it lacked the hope of a long life together, it was filled with wisdom and humility and respect. In some ways, this kiss was better than those of my youth: Those kisses filled with arrogance and delusion.

So I was wrong. Sometimes it is so great to be wrong. And if I was wrong about that, what else am I wrong about? I can’t wait to see!