Chasing Ghosts

Sometimes I try to remember what it was like to drift off to sleep in someone's arms. It's been a long time. 

Not that I want that. I just want to be able to remember how it felt. 

Transient images filter across my brain. But nothing sticks. 

I'm reading a book on my Kindle right now that reminds me of myself in some ways. It's about a young woman who is a nanny in an opulent but loveless home. 

The boy she tends to seems to have dangerous tendencies. His mother is a cold, aloof TV broadcaster. 

And his father, a successful attorney, is about as good-looking as they come. And that's all she sees.

The nanny has stars in her eyes for him. She is Catholic and knows that this is against all she has been taught and believes in. 

But her heart, swinging like a pendulum, tells her different. 

***

Be careful what you wish for. 

I've told myself that many times.

I reached for the prize and somehow, despite all the obstacles involved, a man who said he'd love me forever stole my heart. 

He was the last man I slept with. The last man whose arms ever wrapped me in slumber. 

For awhile there I felt like a princess.

I never should have allowed myself to love him in the first place. But no one, no one, had ever fawned over me the way he did. 

There were times that he told me that there was no one in the world who loved me the way he did. (We had a long and complicated history)

And then there came a time when he looked right at me and told me that I was unlovable. "No wonder your parents left you," he said in such a matter-of-fact way.

That hurt the most of anything he ever said to me. 

Through all the painful barbs that went back and forth between us, I can't think of any that ripped me open like that one sentence. 

Because, you see, deep down, I believed it to be true. 

Sometimes I wonder, when a girl doesn't have a father to love and help shape her, if she ever truly learns how to choose a proper man to love and marry.

I've always looked at girls with doting fathers and felt such envy it almost physically pained me.

I think there is a hole in your psyche if that father was never there.
  
And I don't believe there is a man in the world that can fill it.

Around holiday time, I often have these feelings and memories rush back to me. I wonder why that is? Why these ghosts rear their ugly heads?

You can't go back and have a second childhood. 

I know you want to see pretty photos of holiday decorating, and I promise you that will come. But first, I have to herd the ghosts out of my mind and send them packing. 

And sometimes they are slow to leave and close the door behind them.

Did you have a loving father? Do you think that helped you in choosing a mate? 

Or was your experience more like mine?