My daughter Hannah and I hadn’t been to a vet since we had to put our 11-year-old white-and-tan basset hound/Jack Russell terrier Kipper to sleep on Nov. 8. This morning, we left our new toffee-colored pit bull Captain all day to have his teeth cleaned, and I’m a wreck. As we loaded the car on the way to the vet, our neighbor Randy Smith told us his mom died, and I gave him a hug. I’m quite shaken up and I have no idea why exactly, other than the unique combination of stress and worry and pressure that kept me awake half the night. I need to call the doctor’s office because the other day I put the expensive device that helps me monitor my blood sugar called a continuous glucose monitor in the washing machine and removed it dripping water like a fish tank.

Last night, I discovered and healed a part of me that didn’t love my daughter or want to hug her. It was the part of me that wanted to be perfect, that believed anything other than perfection was weakness.

Is this another one of those times when I move a support beam and things fall down around me?

Hannah, age 16, told me recently that she learned inadvertently from me that our divorce was her dad’s idea.

“You said ‘We decided to get divorced, and I was so mad…’ and I knew if it was your idea you wouldn’t have been mad.”

This I never wanted her to know unless she asked me later, when she was older. The very smart marriage counselor had helped us realize this info wasn’t for her. Hannah was 13.

She couldn’t tell me exactly when she’d figured it out, only that she’s known now for a long time.

She looked at me. “What was that like?” The conversation shifted then, so I didn’t really have to answer. I’m not sure she’s ready for the cascade of grief that would be my answer. Since this discussion, I’ve had an opportunity to re-examine my seemingly boundless grief at rejection, first from my dad and then from my former husband and Hannah’s dad, Steve.

The grief is boundless still. I write into it because I finally understand that it is in the bottom of this grief where I need to claim myself fully once and for all and love myself and be the authority over whether I’m okay and embrace myself here, there, in the crux of my femininity, sexuality, creativity, and in all the ways I don’t fit in.

In my body I feel deeply sad, sad beyond words, sad beyond time.

Please fill me with Your love and grace today. I know it’s pathetic, these wounds that throb after all this time. They ache and ache. It feels as though this wound is what’s in the way now, but it’s bottomless, and I’m scared I’ll fall down and never be able to get out.

I never fully grieved the loss of my father at the time. It was too big. It was more as though an asteroid had hit the Earth turning the entire world to blackness. To write about it is to return to immense vulnerability. I realize it’s this, this, that’s been at the heart of every single morning I’ve lived through when I didn’t know if I could do it, any of it.

And suddenly I know the world will not crumble if I fall apart.

I look out with deep gratitude through my tears. I held it all together just long enough to allow myself room to release and let it all go.

I turn to the rejected one at my core. Sweet succulent girl-child-woman, I love you, all of you. And I’m so, so sorry for your losses.

I’ve looked without realizing it for men to be this pillar, the one my dad left, to hold me up through their love. I’ve grown so strong since the divorce. I cried right through the center of all of it. I’ve found strength I didn’t know I had and healed countless broken selves that now glow.

And yet it took my beloved, Christopher, having a blind spot about loving himself and my experiencing it as rejection for me to realize all in a flash in the middle of dance class, that I’d put him there, where the support beam is supposed to go. I’d made him, just like Steve, and my dad, the authority about my singing, dance, and creative life because I’ve never succeeded all the way at taking that back right at the center of the wound, right there, there, at the epicenter where the world turned black and I disowned myself in the wake of my father’s rejection.

Why did my father reject me? I remember that question going off in my head like a silent bomb at 10. Because from that moment on I feared and rejected myself. And when then, the other kids began teasing me, I went as far from my body and this life and the Earth as I could—I tried to leave all the way but found I was somehow tethered.

I’ve healed this wound for years, ever since I did parent chord work at 22. Elise Rosa and I looked together psychically at my father: He’s a creative artist at heart. His mom (crazy, wild, creative, female) tried to kill herself with the gas oven and take him with her when he was just a baby. She was dangerous. He rejected the feminine and the wildly artistic within himself as a threat. He cleaved to the rational, to science, to control. And that’s why, as my breasts budded, the love in his eyes darkened like an overnight outage of the sun, and why he could never meet my eyes in the same way after that.

“Is this the person you want to make the authority over whether it’s okay for you to be a woman?” Elise asked back then as we looked at all this together.

“No.”

“Would you like to take back that authority now?”

“Yes.”

And I did. And I have. But you know I did it about being a woman, about being sexual, but not specifically about being creative. Not specifically about my singing.

I was furious Christopher hadn’t asked me first to perform at this wedding, that instead of our original love songs written together, he’d chosen to perform cover songs with another woman. It showed a rejection of both me and of his own brilliance. We argued pointlessly until, back at my house, I simply felt into the grief and begin to cry. And then, only then, did my beloved soften and see and hold us both.

I’m willing to claim all of me, be my own authority for everything about me. I claim this back from everyone. And the tears come. First, Harmony said “What was that like?” and then that Christopher and I had our “fight” and healing Sunday and then, yesterday I realized that Steve was the creative one in his family and yet he’s denied it utterly in himself and rejected it in me.

This is part of that epic battle going on on Earth right now. Women need to be in our own full power, claim our own total sexual desire and power and creative potential, unlock it, stand with and for ourselves utterly in this world and no one else can give us this gift.

And I think back to the one male psychiatrist who refused to work with me back during my breakdown as a young woman, before I met Elise.

“If I work with you and you get better,” he said, “it will just be another example of a man saving you. You need to work with a woman. You need to learn that women can help other women.” I did. And I have.

I move outside to write for the first time this spring. I think of all those mornings writing after Steve and first told me he wanted a divorce. How I wrote through and through all that grief and anger and loss, all that confusion and fear, feeling like I’d never make it through it but feeling it all anyway.

I emerged into the brightest light I’ve known. I now thank him for freeing us both.

So, what is this latest grief? As I feel it, my arms buckle. Nothing holds on. I threaten to totally fall apart, which means at long last I’m safe and whole and can allow the vast dark pit of despair that loomed at 10 and 12, the one I was not ready for, the one that would have killed me then perhaps, and just cry, and just feel it. Because I know too, that this pit of darkness has a center and an end, and that at the very heart of the deepest saddest part of all of that is me.

I’m coming for you, sweetie. I love you. I’m the one who gets to decide if you’re all right. I love you. I decide. You are worthy. You are the light worth fighting for.

And I take the plunge for all life everywhere. Because I cannot save one single other anything unless I can save myself.