Stranger

Both the East and the West set in my bones
I’ve survived each blizzard of winter
as if I were made for snow
I’ve become Snow

🐦‍🔥

Fatimah Asghar

Meaning: stranger, one without a home and thus, deserving of pity. Also: westerner.

on visits back your english sticks to everything.
your own auntie calls you ghareeb. stranger

in your family’s house, you: runaway dog turned wild.
like your little cousin who pops gum & wears bras now: a stranger.

black grass swaying in the field, glint of gold in her nose.
they say it so often, it must be your name now, stranger.

when’d the west set in your bones? you survive
each winter like you were made for snow, a stranger

to each ancestor who lights your past. your parents,
dead, never taught you their language—stranger

to everything that tries to bring you home. a silver sun
& blood-soaked leaves, everything a little strange

& a little the same—like the hump of a deer on the busy
road, headless, chest propped up as the cars fly by. strange

no one bats an eye. you should pray but you’re a bad muslim
everyone says. the Qur’an you memorized turns stranger

in your mouth, sand that quakes your throat. gag & ache
even your body wants nothing to do with you, stranger.

how many poems must you write to convince yourself
you have a family? everyone leaves & you end up the stranger.

@APW,

Once you get rid of the inappropriate LE and its roots — an absolutely tough and possibly long journey, you will BECOME your dreamt PARENT to your Children and your SELF that is never static but constantly healing and growing.

Yes, NO External God (let alone any LO) could ever Reparent the wounded, awakened, and renewing you, except YOU!

Thanks for taking the time to respond to my post Hamlet and ‘Shocked Face’ 😉

You’re both absolutely correct, I have decided who I want to be, who I am (despite periodic ‘break out’ behaviour’s which would suggest otherwise) now, where I want to go and the type of wife + mother I want to be. Limerence is death to those things.

And it HAS been a long journey. Once that goes right back to my childhood with a narc father and BPD/Bi Polar mother who was under convert control + emotionally unstable, despite being my main and genuine source of parental nurture growing up. Dad passed in 2022 and I did as much as I could to heal that relationship (it did get better once my parents eventually broke up after 28 years, his relationship with my bonus mother was more balanced than with my mother who was 12 years his junior, 19 when they got together and under his control) before he passed.

My mother has come leaps and bounds since leaving dad, she’s now married to a very stable counsellor (not hers;) and has apologised for where she let me down + has largely stabilised.

Both my parents had affairs when I was growing up and were limerents – especially my mother RE LE’s .. escaping into romantic fantasy.. something she hasn’t done post menopause.. deep healing and now being in a stable relationship for 10 years

Who knows with my father RE whether he was a limerent or just narcissistic. There was so much dishonesty/lack of self-awareness and running from his hideous unbearable feelings of rejection/correction/guilt having been abandoned by his birth mother at 9 months and not finding out he was adopted until 21 (a trauma he never really reconciled); there was however the fruit of plenty of adultery I was pulled into as a confidant for him, growing up.

The point of me unpacking all of this is, that I’ve realised how this started .. in that it was modelled to me and from the start, my parental nurture was so unreliable.. I was set up to form bonds quickly with other people (particularly men because that was the most toxic parental relationship) to try and fill the void of paternal love/acceptance/validation.

I’ve come to realise that what can feel like a ‘soul mate’ is actually a ‘wound mate’. It’s effectively a trauma bond that’ going on rooted in my unresolved wounds (this last one was particularly frustrating because I’ve already done ‘so much work’ and thought I was more immune to further LE’s than I am. I guess the hormonal changes, health challenges, grief and being complacent with filling my tank through legitimate ways; all took it’s toll. Especially in view of such a compatible and talented LO who really wanted me this time. My previous ones, haven’t, nearly as much.

My LO’s have in some way all made me feel seen, validated and connected and like I’ve finally ‘won’ the love I didn’t get as a child but from someone, in some way who resembles the person who hurt me then.

The truth is that the time for unconditional parental love and childhood nurture is past.

I need to reparent myself RE the gaping holes.

@APW

You want to bring another possible LE-genetic baby to this world, when your two cute kids’ wellbeing is dangerously dangling in the LE polluted air?

My opinion: take an urgent “surgery” with DrL to remove your tangled LE root(s) once for all….

Hi APW,
You’ve had a long journey. My opinion is that you need to figure out who you are, who you want to be. I think you know the two options as you present them. You can’t be the same person and take either option as though it was just a coin flip.

First time poster and new to this site 🙂 which I am finding so therapeutic to navigating my current LE. I’m really enjoying reading everyone’s experiences and it helps me not feel so alone. I’ve started the emergency deprogramming course.

I am 41 and am perimenopausal, these are my insights of my recent experience –

Now I know what limerence is (came across Fenna’s and some others contents, during last LE 3 years ago) looking back, every relationship I’ve got into, I can see the signs that I was limerent and then had a kind of ‘waking up’ period, once the relationship settled into the more committed stage at the 18 month – 2 year mark and I was hungry for ‘the sparkle’ again.

Have been with my husband for 16 years and have two primary school age children now.

This last LE has been particularly perplexing/challenging because LO is mutually limerent, particularly enabling (wants a life with me and all the things and hasn’t let me go easily despite multiple cut offs and NC from me) AND I wasn’t physically attracted to him initially (am still not really) however he ‘grew on me’ emotionally; the relationship developed over phone/message etc.

Leading up to his pursual – I have gone through 18 months of health challenges, encompassing what will be my third major surgery next month, and a hysterectomy (May of this year – have kept my ovaries so still having a cycle).

My therapist thinks this is significant, because I experienced a lot of ‘grief’ leading up to the hysterectomy. Even though I had accepted ‘rationally’ my childbearing was over, emotionally it was a ‘grief’ because I have yearned at times for another baby was facing the end of my own fertility/sexual viability etc etc. I’ve also had 3 people close to me die in the last 6 months + I nursed my father through his cancer and death, right before my last LE 3 years ago (with a totally inappropriate LO who was unhinged but intoxicating however the danger factor which did make things intense also helped me break away from him more easily as well). My husband is now approaching late 50’s, struggling to find work, I’m supporting the family entirely financially, so there’s been PRESSURE on top of the health challenges, grief etc to navigate

SO is 14 years older than me and very much my ‘physical’ type – I fell hard (limerent) for him when we got together, I was in my mid 20’s he was nearly 40 and I’d say I’m from the tribe and he isn’t (although he still experienced the normal falling in love experience, he’s never been a particular romantic, expressive type.. he’s avoidant, analytical, practical, masculine, engineer mindset etc).

LO on the other hand has very high EQ. Is in sales like I am, hugely supportive mentally/emotionally and wanted to make my life easier. He’s also only a couple of years older than me, (so compared to my long term relationship, has felt like a kid in some respects when we were in each others presence) we had some of the same old school circles .. it was like a teenage reawakening especially because people from that time in my life were part of his story and it all felt quite surreal.

There was definitely an element of a younger man finding me attractive that signalled I was still viable which fed my limerence + I think in my 20’s when I was looking for a mate + father of my children I chose a traditionally masculine man (strong, fit, angular, capable of protection/fixing things, rides motorbikes etc) whereas now I’m entering middle age and more aware of myself after much therapy and self reflection – connection/self awareness/communication etc are all more important considerations and while falling into this LE took me by surprise; I can see the personality traits of my current LO were attractive to me at this phase of my life more so than when I was in my 20’s when I may have perceived some of them as ‘weak’.

The perimenopause libido kick in also factored.. while this LE never escalated into a full blown physical affair (it got close) LO described it as a kind of ‘Cougar Puberty’ and that tracks for me too.

LO even suggested we could try for a baby (despite me not having a ‘womb’ and him having had a vasectomy, because I still have my ovaries and we could technically go down the IVF/surrogacy route + he has the $$ to ‘fund’ ‘ take care of me financially – this was an intoxicating proposition and his willingness, despite his own children being teenagers was particularly heart string pulling!

Autumn’s Gold

George MacDonald

Along the tops of all the yellow trees,
The golden-yellow trees, the sunshine lies;
And where the leaves are gone, long rays surprise
Lone depths of thicket with their brightnesses;
And through the woods, all waste of many a breeze,
Cometh more joy of light for Poet’s eyes—
Green fields lying yellow underneath the skies,
And shining houses and blue distances.

By the roadside, like rocks of golden ore
That make the western river-beds so bright,
The briar and the furze are all alight!
Perhaps the year will be so fair no more,
But now the fallen, falling leaves are gay,
And autumn old has shone into a Day!

Robert Louis Stevenson

In the other gardens
And all up in the vale,
From the autumn bonfires
See the smoke trail!

Pleasant summer over,
And all the summer flowers,
The red fire blazes,
The grey smoke towers.

Sing a song of seasons!
Something bright in all!
Flowers in the summer,
Fires in the fall!

John Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.