I have heard this 12-step slogan at various meetings throughout my life, but it’s never really worked for me.  My answer is always “very, it’s very important”; everything is very important – can’t you tell by my intensity and investment in it?  But the other day I heard it again at an ACoA (Adult Child of Alcoholics, yes that’s me) meeting and the results the person sharing got from it, I wanted.  So when the opportunity arose from that desire in the form of Vic using the Gorilla Glue to repair  the piece of bedside table that was separating from itself while I was at work and when I came home to the glue and the problem still in the same place as when I left I asked myself, “how important is it?” and the answer was once again, “very.”  For better or for worse, almost everything is important to me.  But because I so wanted the gift of the person I heard, my mind opened and I heard another question, “what difference would it make?”  If I had come home and it was fixed, what would be different?  I had immediate answers.  It would mean that he loved me, that he listened to me, that he cared – about me and the camper, that we were partners in this, that he was a good boyfriend.  Ohhhhh, and that’s all the meaning that I’ve given it.  Hmmm, interesting.  I could feel my mind turn.  And that’s where all your pain is, I thought to myself, in that meaning.  And, so you’re a person that sets up tests; we need to deal with that.

The freedom that this revelation afforded me was priceless.  It’s like a new key was in my hand and this one turned the lock.  First of all, it did not mean all these things and it didn’t mean that he didn’t love me and didn’t care because he didn’t do them.  And if I needed hoops to be jumped through to prove that I’d made a good choice in a mate, then maybe I had a trust issue – with myself.  And most of all, worst of all, I was acting like my mother.  And I hated when I did that.

Let me feel love freely, without demands or limitations or premises, but because it’s what Is and it’s what I Am.  It needs no tests nor hoops and it certainly doesn’t need to head my demands.  That’s just not how Love rolls; not real Love anyway.  Everyday in so many ways, I learn that a little bit more.  The difference between what I think is love and what Love really is is constantly being cleared up.

In the end he fixed it, or at least started to, and when I looked over and saw it wasn’t holding, I grabbed the hammer from the toolbox and whacked it a few times so it grabbed and sealed.  What a partnership.