To Touch…

There are times when I yearn to be able to curl up in a ball, like a cat, on someone’s lap and have my back or hair stroked. There are days when I just want a hug, to feel someone’s arms around me to know that they care. Someone to hold me tight and tell me that everything will work out and that if doesn’t then they will still be there.

To let someone touch me is difficult, it requires trust on my part and understanding on theirs that when I pull away it is not because I dislike them or do not want them to touch me but because I fear the intimacy that touch brings. For many people it is second nature to touch someone on the arm while talking to them, to embrace in greeting and on parting but touch has never been a part of my life. I have always kept my distance more out of habit these days than fear.

All through my childhood you told me I did not like to be touched, no one hugged me, picked me up or cuddled me when I was hurt or upset, or put a comforting hand on my shoulder. I began to believe the myth and shrank away from physical contact and so the myth became reality.

But this fear of being touched is not natural to me, I know that now but believed it for many years and let it rule my life. I now believe I understand the reasons for it too. You never bonded with me as a baby, you made that clear throughout my childhood and even into adulthood whenever babies entered the conversation you would always say that you couldn’t bond with me, the only one of your children you had this problem with.

Things were hard for you, you had two babies when you expected one, and you were only able to bring one home, with whom you bonded and enjoyed a loving mother baby relationship. The perfect baby, she slept and fed and gurgled and smiled and you loved her. Then I entered the equation, an angry screaming mess, having spent six weeks in an incubator attached to tubes fighting for my life.  I continued to fight, to scream when I arrived home, no longer fighting for my life but for attention and love. But you could not cope with my demands, the constant crying, I was an intrusion on your perfect relationship with my sister. So you refused to give in to my demands, telling yourself that picking me up only made matters worse, that I cried harder when you tried to comfort me. You would wheel me into a darkened room and leave me to cry. My father was the one who fed me, comforted me, when he was around he did as much as he could.

As I grew older, you grew more impatient with me, easily angered when I got things wrong, when I cried you would tell me off. And you wonder why I turned into a shrinking violet, a quiet, nervous child, who would not look at let alone speak to anyone outside the immediate family.A child who so afraid of doing something wrong that she shook with nerves and could not be trusted to carry or lift anything breakable.  A child who immersed herself in a world of fantasy, of books , of imagined adventures.

A child, whom you convinced, did not like to be touched, who believed what you said, who took in the anger, the bitterness, the sadness to her heart and soul and allowed it to fester there. Who allowed herself to believe she was as useless as you told her she was. All along it was your inability to show her love, your guilt at that, and your fear that she would some day take you to task. I know you could not love me as you loved my siblings, I know you do not understand why any more than I do. I just wish things could have been different, that somehow you could have found the strength to at least hide how you felt, to pretend that I was as good as them. And perhaps I would not have become someone who when others reached out in love or compassion felt she could not trust them to do right by her.

When touch became not a comfort but a reminder of the smouldering remains of who she could have become…

 

Human Touch

How I am feeling today is expressed far more eloquently than I ever could in the words of a song, written by Bruce Springsteen. As I do want to breach copyright rules etc. by typing the lyrics on here I am merely putting  some links. Read,  watch, listen and enjoy.

Human Touch

I hope today brings you all you need.

 

Reiki 1

The morning of the course loomed and I nearly didn’t go. Anxious about going somewhere new, walking into a  room full of strangers, I was shaking on the journey there.

As always, I arrived miles too early, however this worked to my advantage as they were still setting up the room and I offered to help, I am always better when I have something to do physically to distract my mind from the endless loop of thoughts. I set about putting the teas, coffee, mugs and biscuits out, and got chatting to a couple of other early birds while doing so.

I chose a seat that faced the window, I like to be able to see outside, the trees and the birds bring me comfort and help to ground me when my brain threatens to drive me crazy. The room began to fill up and soon rang with the sound of people chatting as we  talked about our journeys there and the weather; typical British small talk.

And so it began, we started off by introducing ourselves and saying what had brought us here. For the first time ever I heard my own voice telling my story, my marriage, my escape, the suicide attempt and the vision I’d had that led me to Reiki. A story I’d been too scared to tell anyone else in case they thought I was insane and here I was telling a room full of strangers. It didn’t feel like me speaking that day, for years I have hidden the truth from friends, from family and on many occasions from myself.

During the first break, a few people came up to me wanting to hear more about the vision I’d had. Some told me that I was brave and courageous, one for speaking out and secondly for escaping my marriage. I felt a fraud, brave and courageous are not words I would ever have used to describe my actions. Throughout my relationship, I’d stayed silent when I could have spoken up, I allowed my children to see me cowed and timid and they copied my behaviour. I thought I was doing the right thing, not rocking the boat, not provoking rows. I do recognise that it took a huge amount of strength to stay and even more to leave and as time goes by I can see that staying took courage too. Trying to preserve marriage and my children’s family, I put their needs before my own but it takes courage to step out from that and say that I matter too.

During our first attunement, I could feel the energy circling the room, my hair felt as if it was standing on end, and I felt a presence behind me, a warmth that spread across my shoulders and I felt loved and like I truly belonged somewhere for the first time ever. I saw the light I’d seen during the vision and was told that an angel stood behind me, now and always.

The scariest part of the course for me came when we had to give our first treatment. Here I was in a room full of strangers and I was being asked to touch them, to put my hands on their bodies and heal them. Touch was a more or less alien concept for me, I grew up with a mother who hit me and told others I didn’t like to be touched. My ex was not affectionate unless he wanted sex, so my children were the only people I touched on a regular basis. With them I was different, but adults? I wasn’t sure if I could handle that and I certainly did not want any men touching me.

Although Reiki treatments do not necessarily have to be hands on, they work just as well with the hands held away from the body, I took the decision to step outside my comfort zone and allow myself to not only be touched but also to give hands on treatments to others (no men!, I wasn’t ready for that just yet) and discovered the solace to be found in touch.

The weekend came to a close all too soon, and I found myself exchanging hugs and wished a safe journey home. I had learnt not only how to use Reiki to heal others but that actually despite the belief, that my mother had instilled in me and my marriage had perpetuated, that I am not a tactile person to the contrary affection, hugs and touch in general are natural to me and were part of what has been missing from my life for a very long time.

Nowadays, instead of shying away from physical contact I will often initiate hugs as touch itself has the power to heal, and unless a client specifically requests hands off all of my treatments  have some element of hands on.

 

Gratitude…

I sit here exhausted having spent the best part of the day in A&E with my youngest daughter. Yet another acute asthma attack out of the blue, and more steroids pumped into her system followed by four hourly inhalers for the next few days. I thought we had kicked this into touch as she was free from attacks for almost a year and then bam! two huge ones a few months apart. They say it may be the onset of puberty that has exacerbated it, all we can do now is wait and hope that we once more get back on an even keel.

It is frightening to sit and watch your child struggle for breath and know that there is little you can do to help. It puts all the negative thoughts and insomnia bred exhaustion in to perspective. I realise how grateful I am to have these little people to share my life. They can be intensely irritating and emotionally demanding at times, but they wear their hearts on their sleeves. They have not yet learned to tell the little white lies that makes the adult world so confusing, their honesty is refreshing. Their love and joy radiates from them touching all around them.

I am too tired to think, to write so today I will end this in gratitude, for my children, for the love they bring, for the joy they exude, even smiling through the tough times. For their courage, and mostly just for being themselves.

 

Parents…

I don’t understand how my mother can be so cruel and heartless towards my father. He can’t help the way he is and I’m pretty sure it hurts him too. I know she is upset at seeing him like that and angry too, possibly, at the unfairness of it all but to be so rough with him and constantly telling him off. It really got to me. It makes me wonder how she actually dealt with us as children, when we hurt ourselves or were crying. I do remember being hit and I remember being told to stop crying or I’d be given something to really make me cry.

She has no empathy or sympathy for him, I cannot imagine how frustrating it must be to be unable to communicate even your basic needs to others, to be reliant on them asking the right questions and interpreting your head and hand movements and then being unable to explain if they get it wrong.

Seeing him, a man who ten years ago was up mountains on a regular basis and thought nothing of tipping his ride on mower over to check for things caught in the blades, sat in a wheelchair without the strength to haul himself up to standing let alone walk is heart-breaking. He was always very practical and active, he made built-in wardrobes for our childhood home, built boats as a hobby and to make extra money, the reel to reel tape deck, record player and amplifiers we had at home he assembled himself. He worked hard to provide a comfortable life for my mother and us. Now, he sits in a chair and stares into space, struggles to wipe his nose or feed himself, needs help to get dressed and do the normal everyday things we take for granted.

And my mother treats him like a nuisance and actually tries to avoid going to visit him if she can. She says she loves him but can’t bear to see him the way he is. For me that strikes of pure selfishness, he is still him, his sense of humour remains intact, he understands what we say to him and recognises us. Just being there with him, holding his hand, talking to him or around him but so that he is included in the conversation is enough for him. He greets you with such a heart-warming smile and still gives a powerful hug despite not being able to stand.

Trying to comprehend how she cannot see that he is there, he looks at her with such love in his eyes and such pain when she doesn’t respond to his touch or pulls away, does my head in. She lives in her own little bubble where it seems that everything that happens is done to cause her hurt, pain or upset. She acts like my father has purposely gotten Alzheimer’s as a way to punish her or hurt her.

For years, when I have visited my parents I had my children with me so was always distracted by taking care of them and their needs and so spent little time with my parents alone. It is only in the last few years that my children have been old enough for me to leave them to their own devices that I have actually spent long periods of time with my mother. During these periods, I have listened to her talk, to her worries and have realised that she really cannot see beyond her own point of view, she is unable to even countenance the fact that they may be a different way of looking at things. Now in her eighties, I doubt she is going to see the light any time soon and that I am going to have to learn to, hard as it is to accept that.

 

The Light…

In October 2010 I started this blog as outlet for my emotions and a place to practice writing. I called it Searching for the Light as I was in a very dark place and could see no end to my despair and was hoping that it would provide some release. For several years I wrote regularly and gained quite a few followers.  My writing became more sporadic as I embarked on a roller coaster of a journey that brings me to where I am today.

I am happier now than I have ever been and can say that I have indeed found THE LIGHT. I will write more about that soon but for those of you still following me and those joining me on this new phase of my journey I have written a synopsis of what brought me here today.  Throughout my blog you will find many snapshots of my childhood, my relationship and my life which will paint a more complete picture should you need it.

Suffering from severe clinical depression, I left my job in October 2010. This was my dream, to be a teacher and I had failed. I couldn’t cope with the pressures of the job and bringing up a young family. My youngest also had chronic asthma and was being investigated for leukaemia.

My husband was far from supportive, in fact he seemed to derive pleasure from watching me struggle and fail, until of course I was no longer contributing financially to the household. Then he spent hours encouraging me to go back to work.

When I told him, I had been diagnosed with depression his reaction was to tell me he didn’t believe in depression that if I wasn’t so fat and frumpy I would feel better about myself and to go and buy new clothes and have my haircut. I was slimmer at the time than I had been in our entire relationship! I couldn’t afford haircuts or fashionable clothes even when I was earning because once I’d paid my share of household bills, all the child care costs and for everything else the children needed there was nothing left. He contributed to the household bills but maintained that the rest of money he earned was his to spend as he saw fit, meaning drinking with his colleagues, motorbikes and endless boys only weekends away.

I started counselling, but that only made me feel worse as my counsellor kept telling me that the problem was the way in which I communicated with my husband. She was Catholic and to her the sanctity of marriage came first and foremost and her advice did nothing for my self-esteem.

During this period, I discovered yoga, and started going to classes regularly. I am deeply indebted to my teachers and owners of the studio as they saw something in me that I could not and allowed me to pay a reduced rate, so I could attend classes twice a week. In time a job became available at the studio and they offered it to me. It was in this haven that I learnt to recognise and deal with my emotions, in fact I spent many hours on my mat crying. I began to rediscover the person I had lost and to once again read and listen to music.

At home, I mostly hid, the children were old enough to see that I was different with them. We had so much fun together, especially during the school holidays, inventing games, singing, dancing and just being generally silly. Entertaining them while spending as little as possible, I tried to give them a childhood of freedom and independence, to allow them to use their imaginations, to find their own uniqueness. But deep down they knew, as soon as their father came home the atmosphere changed. We never knew what mood he would be in, if he would be happy drunk or angry drunk. If he would be in the mood to play silly games with them or if he was going  to scream and shout about the mess and throw or kick toys etc that got in his way.

He hated the fact that I was changing, that I had made a few friends and was making arrangements to go out socially. I could rely on him to interfere with any plans I had by either not coming home in time for me to go out or by deliberately upsetting or annoying the children, so they came to dread being left alone with him. On the rare occasions he did look after his own children for any length of time I knew I could expect punishment for weeks to follow in the form of either silent treatment or him going out every evening after work and disappearing at weekends without letting anyone know where he was gong or how long he would be.

I struggled with his behaviour and tried again and again to have reasonable discussions about it and to request that I had the same freedom and privileges as he did but each time I was told that because he worked and was the main earner evenings and weekends were his to spend as he pleased. I worked too and took care of the house and the children with no input from him but that apparently didn’t count. His drinking and socialising took priority over anything the kids or I might need.

My marriage was miserable, we didn’t have a relationship as such, he wasn’t prepared to listen to me, to acknowledge my feelings yet I spent endless hours listening to him complain about his job and the daily stresses he was under. He moaned endlessly about the state of the house but rarely did anything about it except to occasionally gather up thing that weren’t his and bin them. If I stood my ground he would walk out of the room, refusing to hear what I was saying. He would then proceed to ignore me for weeks on end, breaking the wall of silence only when he would come home drunk and demand his conjugal rights. I quickly learned to wear as many layers as feasible in bed so that he would give up and fall into a drunken stupor. Thankfully, after several years we had an extension built and gained a spare room to which I would retire on the nights he was really late home and I knew he would be worse for the wear and possibly aggressive.

As time went on, I began to give up on the marriage, working only at keeping the peace, thinking long and hard before saying anything, going along with his plans whether I liked them or not, including going on holidays I hated, days out to places I would never in a million years dreamed of going. The children too learnt not to argue, not to express an opinion or preference for fear of being shot down. They learnt that nothing they could do would ever earn them their father’s approval. Anxiety spread through the house like a disease, we were constantly on edge. Despite my yoga and new-found confidence outside the house, I was a shadow of my former self, actually more than that, a ghost in my own home.

During 2014, I met with someone whom I barely knew though our paths crossed on a regular basis we had never actually sat down and had a one to one conversation. My husband generally made sure that at social events I either sat with the children or was never in a position where I could converse freely with others and on the rare occasions I got sat next to a possibly sympathetic woman he would find a reason to move me or would take my seat if I left it for any reason.

She was part of his extended family and had asked me to meet her after a family gathering. She was having problems in her relationship but didn’t have anyone else she felt comfortable confiding in as she was too embarrassed to admit to her own family and friends what was occurring. I listened to her speak and after about an hour she asked why I wasn’t horrified by what I was hearing. My explanation was that what she had just described was my life, my relationship, my marriage. She told me that what I was living with was abuse, financial and emotional abuse. I had never come across those terms before. Yes, I knew about domestic violence, but my husband had never hit me. Whenever I broached any problems with him I was told that I expected too much of him, of the relationship and that all marriages were like this. I didn’t know any difference as this had been my one and only long-term relationship.

This conversation led me to research and read many books on abuse. The more I read the more convinced I was that this was indeed what was happening in my relationship. The realisation sent me into a tailspin leading to what I now know were panic attacks. At the time I thought I was having several heart attacks a day. I couldn’t think, eat or sleep, my heart was permanently racing. I was sent for ECGs and blood tests and my then GP told me I was fine and prescribed antacids. I continued to write, mostly journaling trying to sort through my feelings. I was scared of what I had become, of what would happen if I rocked the boat, I knew I couldn’t continue like this but has no idea what to do or where to go for help.

My youngest began to refuse school due to anxiety so I made an appointment with the GP for her. I was told that our GP had retired and been replaced new one, so it was with some trepidation we turned up that day. My daughter asked to speak to him alone, and to this day I have no idea what she said to him and she said she was so upset and anxious that she can’t remember, but whatever it was it triggered him to request that I make an appointment to come and discuss my relationship with him.

It took me a few months to see him and even then, I had to write out the problem, I couldn’t speak about how I felt. I was so confused, so angry, with myself more than anyone else. Angry that I had gotten myself into this situation, that I hadn’t been able to stand up for myself or my children. Disbelieving of the fact that someone who supposedly loved me could treat me so badly and not seem to care that I was hurting.

Once again, I was referred to counselling but this time it really helped. I felt believed and validated. She understood what I was going through, she confirmed my beliefs that I was a victim of emotional and financial abuse. She referred me to the appropriate authorities and a solicitor, and I started to think about leaving, about divorce.

Three years ago, I finally plucked up the courage to tell my husband that I wanted a divorce. I wanted him out of the house. He fought it, not for me though but, because he didn’t want to lose his home comforts and half his assets. However, within a few months he had left, rented a flat nearby and begun another relationship.

Surprisingly, it was at this point that I really fell apart. My friends seemed to withdraw, feeling I guess that the hard bit was over, he was gone, so they thought I no longer needed them as much. The truth was I was struggling to come to terms with being a victim of abuse, I really couldn’t understand how someone I loved had moved on so quickly, had shown no desire to try and fix things yet had bad-mouthed me to all and sundry, making out that I had kicked him out for no reason. He spread rumours that I was having a fling and that as soon as it was over I would be begging him to come back. This was not true and really upset me as throughout our twenty plus years relationship I had never so much as glanced at another man let alone had an affair.

He told the children that I had broken his heart and destroyed his life and that I was taking him for every penny he had. Within weeks of moving out he had introduced them to another woman. They were confused as his actions did not match his words. They weren’t ready to have someone new in their lives, they were still trying to understand the break up and its implications. The girls seemed permanently on the brink of tears and my son was incredibly angry. It seemed I hadn’t achieved anything, I was still walking on eggshells in my own home, afraid of provoking aggression or tears. The children didn’t feel able to discuss their feelings with me, in part because they didn’t want to upset me and because I had been the cause of some of those feelings.

I had begun the divorce process, but he stalled every step of the way. We hadn’t even got to discussing finances, this was merely the initial stages, but he wouldn’t agree to the petition. It felt as if I was going backwards I and one day I stepped out in front of a car, intentionally, but also impulsively, I just wanted the pain to end. There was no joy in anything, just tears, darkness and fear.

The driver managed to brake and barely touched me. He started yelling at me, swearing and calling me names that I can’t bring myself to type. I was mortified. I apologised to him for my absentmindedness and continued to walk home. By now the tears were flowing and I was torn between what could have been and what I was going home to. The peace I could have known and the hurt I would have caused those who loved me, and my children were already hurting enough.

I went to the GP once again. The man deserves a medal, he has listened to me, supported me, even when I refused medication or his advice. This time I decided maybe he was right, and I should take anti-depressants and I accepted a prescription from him. I still had it in my pocket a few days later as I walked to work, and I had the most astonishing experience which set me on my current path. I quite literally saw the light, felt the light, was the light.

The last two years have been extraordinary, many many downs but also countless moments of pure sheer joy. I am compelled to share my story and hope you will join me on the journey and that what I write will resonate with you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chasing demons…

We all have our inner demons, for some they are stronger than for others and we spend many years fighting them without success.We take drugs, drink to excess  or overeat all in an attempt to assuage those demons. Some of us will continue to do these things for as long as we live, never facing up to those demons, or dealing with past hurts and the emotions that arise instead we bury them deep and pour down our poison to keep them there.

Some are luckier than others, they have talents which they use to channel the angst, anger, sadness that they feel. They write songs, they paint pictures, and without actually having to talk about it they share their feelings with the world. They have the gift of letting others know that they are not alone in their pain, and can bring a form of release to strangers.

Music has always been a large part of my life, I was brought up on classical music,  and as I hit my teens graduated to pop music and as I have moved through life one artist has stuck with me the whole way through. Whatever mood I am in I can find a song and sometimes a whole album to suit it. I have sat and cried while listening, I have danced with joy, I have had moments where everything just seems right and the words of the song speak loud and clear and I am grateful for all that I have.

That artist is Bruce Springsteen. I was introduced to him at university by a young lad who had spent the summer in America and was hugely influenced by him. This young man spent a lot of time at our flat as he fancied my flat mate, after several months she finally made it clear that nothing was going to happen and he drifted out of our lives leaving behind all his Bruce collection. I contacted him to try return the tapes (yes tapes, it was that long ago!) but he told me to keep them for which I am eternally grateful. I still have those tapes though they are no longer played having long been replaced by CDs and an iPod but the songs are still played on a regular basis and still resonate in my life today.

I went to see Bruce in concert, last Saturday, and was amazed at his verve and energy, how he related to his audience and they to him. He has touched so many lives with his words and music and continues to do so. He has spoken openly about his demons and the fact that performing helps him exorcise those demons, though I hope that by now he has come to terms with his past and that his performances bring him the joy he seems to exude on stage.

My friend who came with me did not understand my excitement before the gig and the crushing disappointment I felt when it was over. Though I was still buzzing on Monday I came down with a thump on Tuesday, when the realisation hit that I had been looking forward to the concert since last December when I booked the tickets and now it was over and there seemed to be nothing bright in the near future. Bruce has provided a soundtrack to my life, through the good times and the bad. The last time I saw him live I was at a high point in my life, young, enthusiastic, with my whole life ahead of me, this time I could relate so much more to those songs, to the atmosphere, to his performance, I recognised in him, and me and a lot of the other people there, a need to have to something to hold on to, to get us through just one more day.

I have him playing now as I type and spend one more day chasing my demons but without the talent he has to share and comfort others.

 

 

 

And so it goes on…

A frustrating week. I had hoped to prepare and send some poems off to a couple of competitions this week but that unfortunately, was not to be. We have reached Friday and the impending weekend alone with kids means I will have little time to do the things I want to do.

I have spent the last two days just setting up my laptop again. Once I had re-installed Windows, it immediately went off and found 111 updates. I installed those and decided then to install some of the other software I normally use, however it seems that everything moves with increasing speed and my operating system in its current state would not support the newer versions of the software I wanted. So back to Windows updater and another 83 updates later I have my computer up and running almost the way like it.

I still have one rather erratic and irritating problem that I have yet to mange to sort. When I type, every few letters the cursor jumps back either a few words or up a few lines and inserts the text I am typing there rather than where I want it to go, i.e. where it makes sense.

I have Googled this problem to no avail, it appears that it is a problem with this particular brand of laptop but no one has as yet come up with a solution that works. Changing the keyboard or mouse/touchpad settings as no effect. It wouldn’t be such a problem if it wasn’t so erratic, I have managed to type most of this paragraph without  a problem but then suddenly the cursor will jump half way up the page and to the middle of another word and insert whatever I am typing in there. As a  result it has taken me more than half an hour just to type this short piece, which is very frustrating. I guess I could just type and see what comes out but it would probably jut be gobbledy-gook.

So this is, necessarily, a short post and until I get this problem solved most of my posts will be short as there is only so long I can cope with this erratic behaviour.

(No apologies for errors or typos, it is not my fault!)

 

Holding on…

It would appear to be a week since I have written anything  on this blog, I knew I hadn’t spent much time writing recently but hadn’t realised it had been that long. It has been an emotional week, with my youngest finishing primary school, she is finding the end of all she has known very hard indeed and has had trouble keeping the tears at bay. Despite a year of ups and downs, of being reluctant at times to go to school, having friendship problems and not wanting to do her homework, she is not quite ready to leave it behind and move on. Her next school is much bigger with approximately four times the number of pupils, so it will be a big adjustment, different classrooms and teachers for each lesson, finding her way around and as well as making new friends.

It is a difficult time for me too, although I have tried hard not to let her know how I feel as I want her to feel good about moving on, a new start, new opportunities. For me though it is letting go of twelve years of familiarity, of seeing the same people each morning and afternoon, chatting and catching up with their news. Some of us would go for a coffee once we had dropped the kids off and many have promised that we will continue to meet, but it won’t be the same, the regularity won’t be there, the knowing that you will see someone every day, that if you don’t catch them in the morning then you will see them at afternoon pick-up. I know that as their children settle in to schools and they adopt new routines the effort of going out their way to meet for coffee will become a burden that will be dropped.  I suspect a few stalwarts will keep going but it won’t be the same.

It is an effort in this day and age, despite all the technology at our disposal, to keep in touch with others. Everyone seems so busy, juggling work and family and social lives that those things that require effort or thought are often the first to be dropped. Facebook and texts while allowing us to keep up with what people are doing in their lives, are a poor replacement for face to face encounters however brief.

I have made some good friends at the school gates over the years and I am not prepared to let them just slip away and, unless they tell me otherwise, I shall continue to contact them, to turn up for prearranged coffees, to try and organise nights out. I believe the people I want in my life are worth making an effort for. I guess I will find out in due course if they feel the same way.

 

The power of prayer

 

Now many would say this is coincidence, or that the things we lost were bound to turn up somewhere eventually, but I believe it was prayer that did it. Not just any old prayer to but a quite specific prayer to the patron saint for lost things, St Anthony.

Last week my son lost his house keys, he thought they had slipped out his pocket on the bus. We contacted the bus company to no avail and a thorough search of his bedroom, pockets of all his clothing, school bags and gym bags yielded nothing. I meanwhile, panicking and imagining vans being driven up to our front door and loaded up with all our things while we were out and about, decided to pray to St Anthony and ask him to help us find them. My daughter was sitting on the sofa yesterday evening when the stylus for her DS slipped down between the cushions, she put her hand down to retrieve it and lo and behold, there were the lost keys. We have no idea how they got there, my son put them in his pocket as he was leaving in the morning, as he usually does, but when he got home that evening he couldn’t find them to let himself in, it is a mystery as to how they got under the cushions on the sofa.

Then last night I decided, for some strange reason to update the SATNAV as the last time I used it it didn’t recognise one of the roads we were on and kept telling us to turn back even though all the road signs told us we were heading in the tight direction, apparently it was a newly opened bypass. Now, I have an absolutely appalling sense of direction and frequently get lost so the SATNAV is a Godsend for me, I can now travel to a fair number of places without fear. I left it to my son to do the update while I cooked dinner, he failed to backup before he started andd then discovered afterwards that it would not do anything. It kept looping from an introductory screen to shut down, but wouldn’t even turn off properly. As it was late in the evening I took the decision to just leave it to wear its battery down and try again in the morning.

As I prepared for bed I shot off a quick prayer to St Anthony to help us fix it. When I arose this morning my son greeted me by waving the SATNAV at me with a grin a mile wide. He had fixed it, I have no idea how and I am not too sure he does but it works and that is the main point. I thanked him and then as I sat down to breakfast I said a prayer of thanks to St Anthony. The children looked at me askance, “You can’t pray to St Anthony to fix broken things” they said. My reply was that I had and that it had obviously worked, and besides it wasn’t just any old broken thing, without it I was in severe danger of getting lost, them with me too I may add, so therefore my prayer to St Anthony was totally justified.

They remain unconvinced that it was St Anthony at work, putting it down to sheer coincidence or luck. I maintain it was prayer and that St Anthony knows that I too was lost for a long time, and now as I begin to find my way again he is right here with me.

The above is a post I made last year but thought it was worth a re-posting as once again St Anthony has come to our rescue, this time finding my daughter’s iPod touch which we had written off as gone for good, tonight after a week of searching and praying it turned up.

Have you had experience of this or your prayers being answered in any other way? If so I would love to hear your stories.