Blenders and Buttercream Frosting

What is the big deal about dating? Why does everyone, including me, get so spun over something so painful? Dating takes a middle-aged person who is relatively secure and happy with his or her life and just beats the ever-living crap out of them. How can a 39-year-old woman who is independent and self-reliant end up so insecure? I honestly do not get it.

The question is, however, do I wish to remain alone and “happy”? There are the pros and cons of enduring singlehood versus annoying couplehood. Singlehood allows you to be independent, happy, carefree, answering to no one. I like that. I have just recently extricated myself from emotional entanglement from my mother. It is an amazing feeling of freedom not to be living every day trying to keep another person happy. I answer to no one. I am responsible to no one. I have my “kids,” and I am reasonably happy.

But what of love? I have love… I have my dear sweet sisters-in-life that I adore. I have my darling children who, except for the cat, worship the ground I walk on. How could I even handle MORE love? Well, what of that life-mate, that companion that promises on a blood oath, at least traditionally, to be by your side through thick and thin?

“’Cause I’ll be by your side

Wherever you fall and

Dead of night

Whenever you call

Please don’t fight

These hands that are holding you

My hands are holding you”

From “By Your Side,” Tenth Avenue North

What about that? Yes, the song is about the love God has for his children, but the metaphor of this love is also used to describe husband and wife, mother and father, parent and child. We are all searching for this earth-shattering love that is so horribly elusive. Sometimes I just want to give up, and many times, I have done just that.

I am tired of having my heart ripped out, thrown in a blender, peed on, and thrown on the dirty ground at my feet while the perpetrator of this agony laughs in my face. WTH?!? EHarmony sucks. Plenty of Fish sucks. Match.com sucks. They all suck. These clowns are all profiting, and profiting terrifically, on the unmet desires of millions of people trying to find love. Where is love? Does it exist? Ok, you know I have left the God metaphor at this point. I know exactly where He is. I just wonder if there is someone out there that I am going to be able to share the rest of my life with. And in wondering, I run across someone and I think, hmmmm…. What if? And then we are back to the blender and the pee and the agony.

Yes, I will admit that I am extremely sensitive in this area given the crap I have been through in my life. It is difficult. I have a bleeding heart that just melts when someone touches me. I do not know how to stop that. I am quite certain that my God has designed me this way for some special purpose, but, as is His nature, He is not divulging this deep dark secret. He is keeping it under lock and key somewhere down in King Solomon’s mines.

The thing is, if I do not even try, there is absolutely no chance at all to find love. I must risk the blender in order to find the butter cream frosting. Hmmm…. Maybe that is why my heart keeps going into the blender. It needs some serious liquefying to go in the frosting. But then again, who needs to make the frosting when you can just go to Publix and buy some?