Emerging from the long dark winter

I've come to that bit after a long, hard and confusing journey, where I get it all. I understand why it happened and what I needed to learn. It makes sense.

We're still in the dregs of the end of whooping cough in our two small children, and I realised from that whole trip that it was about love. I could write pages and pages on cures and tinctures and how we dealt with it, but early on in the process I read a doctor's comment that whooping cough is mostly unaffected by medicines, and will just run until it's over ( the 100 day cough ), and that if you lived a healthy lifestyle and had breastfed babies they'd manage allright. All you can really do is stay warm and calm, eat well and keep quiet (which was EXTREMELY challenging for my mob!) and most importantly, LOVE one another. That literally was the most important thing for us to remember. You see, whooping cough found us in the middle of one of the most protracted and nasty inter-relationship periods we'd ever gone through. I had post natal depression, and the energy that I'd had for years to float around certain behaviours and keep our relation-ship sailing just dried up. I no longer had time or energy for certain ways and attitudes that I'd side stepped for years, and it took my lover some time to catch up and work out why things he'd done for ages were no longer acceptable. Of course he was a mite defensive, and I was a tad pissed off and demanding that he change instantly, and our little cherubs were in the middle wondering what the hell was going on.

Enter whooping cough stage left. For the first couple of months we were just in survival, and so afraid of our children coming to serious harm that we just over rode the personal hassles we were having and loved our kids cause we were scared. Later in the process we tried to rekindle some arguments, and noticed very quickly that the minute we let our nastier sides come to the fore, our kids would have coughing fits and get worse commensurate with our moods. So no matter how much we wanted to keep fighting our points, our kids were more important so we just let it go. And lo and behold, as we let it go and focused on love, the issues seemed to evaporate, and crystalise into a few simple issues that seemed a lot easier to deal with. We both came to some important realisations about our patterns and how they had formed and interconnected, and we all collectively started to heal. At this point, I've also got to say that living on a community helped the whole situation - our fights were by the nature of living so close to others very public, so we also had public input and compassion, and well as other people keeping stock of the progress we were making.

Long and scary illnesses have a way of putting things into perspective. We now have a benchmark by which to judge things. And fundamentally we realised that our family and our way of life was worth fighting for and keeping together. You know that statement 'fake it till you make it'? It works......