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Child Again

Reading The Lioness Awakens has been a wonderful experience for me even though I bought the book as a gift for J. It turned out to be complicated to give her exclusive access on our shared Kindle account so I ended up reading it. Every poem in the collection can give a woman food for thought. Reading some took me back in time - a time of ignorance and stubbornness laced with vulnerability. 

This short one for example made me think of my late teens when I still lived with my parents. The value and importance of marriage was being impressed upon me regularly because I was demonstrating signs of being a contrarian - not sold on the concept at all and looking for ways out of that inevitability that was to come in my twenties.  

The idea that you invest the best years of your life to overcome friction and incompatibility with your spouse so when you both finally run out of steam to fight and are too old to need much beyond a nurse, you have a reliable one at hand free of cost, seemed like the very definition of living in hell. Why would any sane person want to sign up for that was beyond my comprehension. Eden has the best words for that feeling:

They’re all looking for someone to grow old with and I am looking for the one who can make me feel like a child again.



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