Not just me & you anymore (G!P)

C. 11

Hi everyone!
Thank you always for reading and for your kind and lovely comments! 
See you soon!

Since my relationship with Maya gives me stability and security, I have "come back to myself": after meeting her again, I realized how much I had become just a shell of a person in all the years I had spent without her. Above all, I no longer liked myself; there was nothing positive in me that I could recognize as my strength. I had lost all my lightness that had always characterized me: I could no longer live a quiet and peaceful evening with friends, I no longer had the lightness of a subtle joke or even the flirtatious ones one exchanges with strangers in bars. Together with Maya, I went back to being exactly as I was and how I like myself: sweet, but also spicy, caring and attentive, but also more relaxed and thoughtless, lively, cheerful and carefree, but also responsible, determined and wise. And the great thing about Maya is that she helped me to find all these aspects of me, for my own well-being, in a way independent of her: she never pushed me to change for her, but supported me to change with her. Thanks to Maya and also thanks to my psychotherapist, I have taken back the reins of my life, in the way I like best, rediscovering my personality.

In therapy I am able to do some deep reflections on my inner self, on how much I actually never got over my mother's grief, how pissed off I am to have actually suffered my father's abandonment, and how my brother in some ways is so similar to him. Through these reflections, however, I realized that all the anger I should have been pouring out on fate and my family, I actually self-reported it to myself, convincing myself that deciding to keep a stranger's child, something I never thought possible, was reason enough to punish and disgust myself. We reflected a lot together with respect to how much I closed in on myself, punishing myself, sacrificing myself, wanting to pass in everyone's eyes as the poor victim raising a child alone, when in fact the decision to keep her and not abort was a more than conscious choice. I waited for years for people to judge me, not realizing that the first one who was being misjudged was me.

With Maya, on the other hand, we immediately, from the moment she came to live with us, decided to do work on recognizing our individual needs and private spaces. The fact that no matter which way the day goes, we will still be in the same bed at night makes it much easier for me to accept that it is okay to take our own spaces, which I gradually feel we really need. This means that we both strive to carve out individual moments for ourselves, whether it's to go shopping alone, to pursue a hobby of our own, or for a night out with friends. Maya has been much happier about this from the start because this division also means that Viviana and I have moments alone of our own and vice versa, the two of them can also enjoy moments without me. To go along with my need to always control everything, we almost established a fixed routine as far as evenings were concerned. In fact, at first I would find any excuse I could to manage to get my alone time when Maya was at work and Vivi at daycare, while I maybe had the afternoon shift. Maya, however, slowly managed to make me realize that the sense of own space had to be larger and not just a "forced" cutout from the daily routine. And now I have to admit that I am really enjoying my evenings out, whether it is even just a pizza with Amelia. In any case, to accommodate the part of me that is most resistant to change, we have almost established a routine with regard to evenings out as well, so in fact we go out one evening each, alternating in the weeks, thus having two "free" evenings each per month, in accordance with my work. Another beautiful thing, however, that we have organized, and which is a commitment we try to keep to every Friday night except when I work, are the evenings with Federica, Leonardo and their son Mattia. Every Friday night we meet in the house, usually ours, to have dinner all together, with the excuse that in the after-dinner we will follow a program together on TV, which is a challenge between pastry chefs. It is nice because there is a family atmosphere, serene, light-hearted: often Federica and I meet as early as the afternoon to try the desserts we saw on TV the previous week, and when the program ends and the children are long gone to bed, the two of us exchange confidences with a hot herbal tea, while Maya and Leonardo have a beer and bring to life their common passion. In fact, they have recently discovered that they have an inordinate passion for board games and are entertaining this habit of always discovering new ones and then spending evenings playing them, even Maya has discovered the existence of a store that not only sells them but also rents them, and she is now a regular customer. Sometimes I get emotional when these evenings end because that is exactly how I would have described happiness: with my family, my childhood friend whom I saw often as a sister, her family, all together spending happy time together. The wonderful thing is when Maya catches me in bed being moved by these evenings, instead of teasing me, she fantasizes with me, about how nice it will be, in just a few weeks, to spend summer evenings together, moving from the couch to the garden, us with our iced teas in mugs and them with iced beers.