I Need Some Support - I’m Freaking Out!
Dear friend,
If you know my partner Chiara, you’ll know how dynamic she is. Yesterday afternoon, we’re having lunch when she suddenly stops and looks confused. A tiny flake of tooth enamel has broken away from a lower front tooth.
At first, she thought maybe a seed had stuck to the tooth, making it feel odd. You know how a tiny change in the mouth feels huge. The tongue struggles with proportions of scale.
It was odd to watch her standing in the kitchen doorway as she called the dentist, only to find that they had removed her from the practice registry—without notification—because she’d only been to see the dental hygienist in the last two years and not the dentist.
So now we’re looking for an emergency appointment, as she’s off to Germany and then Tuscany for the next few weeks.
She’s searching online, and all you see on the NHS website are dentists accepting children under seventeen and people who qualify for free dental care.
Neither applies in this case.
“I need some support, I’m freaking out!”
The sentence rings clear as a bell.
Something shifts inside me, and my mind and body switch gears.
We find a solution, weigh the costs, and book a private dental session—coincidentally, exactly opposite the garden centre where we bought pansies last year for our garden and window boxes.
That sentence—the one about needing support—there’s a lot gone into it, earning the ability to ask for what we need from one another. It can be painful, moving past the extraordinary expectations we project onto one another in the early years. The requirement for the other to read minds when the mind requiring reading is indecipherable even to its owner. The daft idea that now we’ve found each other, all our problems and challenges will melt into a pink, fluffy cloud of bliss.
As you know.
They don’t.
The path of relationship asks of us that we relate to one another.
I see it more as a fire, burning away all that no longer serves.
I’m learning to willingly step into the flames.
Living with the discomfort.
Witnessing rebirth.
Over and over.
We’ll plant those pansies this afternoon.
"Pansy" was an insult when I was a kid, hurled at the sensitive. It was a culture of steel. Forged under great pressure.
Those plucky little flowers, bringing so much colour to our seasons, right up to the door of winter, earned my respect long since.
Till tomorrow
Love
Mikey