Michael asks what I'd tell Melby were she in the same situation.

I immediately know I'd tell her about when we were ready to have a baby. During a visit to California, Nic and I had high-fived on Hendry's beach after practicing our handstands. The high-five sealed our decision to start a family together. That same day I told my parents we were going to have a baby and, perched on a stool in the kitchen, somewhat anxiously requested their permission to name her Melby, should she be a girl.

Once you are ready, you're so ready, but first I also wanted to make sure my body was healthy. After decades on birth control, I needed to know my cycle was regular, strong. So I removed the hormones, continued my somewhat orthorexic diet and exercise routine, and saw my acupuncturist routinely to monitor my health. Several months in, we decided I was stable enough to begin trying to conceive. And then several excruciating months later, I one day found myself the crankiest I'd been in ages, my nipples an unfamiliar kind of sore. Somewhat unceremoniously, during a pee break from some show Nic and I were watching together, I pulled out a pregnancy test and discovered I was having a baby. A baby girl, of course. My Melby.

The part of that story that's important now is the waiting— the painful stretch of time between that high-five and the positive pregnancy test. While it certainly wasn't long, maybe a matter of months, half a year at most, that time was made of the stickiness of longing. The impatience for a new chapter to begin.

It challenged me, and, once she was born I knew I had been waiting for her. I was not meant to have any other baby. I was meant to have her, my fierce, reluctant, sensitive, curious, brilliant child, and that required some waiting. We cannot rush what is meant for us, only await it with grace or torturous impatience.

Currently I am in the latter category. I am waiting.

This is the story I will tell Melby when she is one day waiting, too. There is no way to race for what's meant for you.

Today I am not waiting to have a baby. I am waiting for partnership.

Saying it is uncomfortable. I feel like I am not supposed to want such a thing. The law of attraction says I just need to emanate, embody, live love and love will come to me. I should not wait. I should not want. I should blissfully live my most aligned life and love will come when I least expect it!!!

The truth is, I've always been looking for it. Male attention has been important to me my whole life. So much of the work I've been doing lately has been in balancing my own masculine and feminine. I have this powerful masculine energy. It is wounded warrior energy. It is always on high alert, ready to fight and protect. He is prepared and fierce and capable. He is also exhausted and overworked and makes very little room for this soft, creative, flowing feminine I also long to embody. I have been working to meet him with kindness and respect, but also with an understanding that allows him to lay down his swords. So much of my longing is for someone to hold that grounded, protective energy for me. It was always my job to hold that for Nic and myself. I hold it for my girls. I hold it at school. I hold it and hold it and hold it and I feel like I can never quite relax because the vigilance is mine to uphold. It is beyond my nature. I'm tired.

I listen to a podcast from an astrologer who urges me to explore my wildest sexual fantasy, followed by prompts to unearth what's beneath it. When I close my eyes and imagine what I deeply crave, what my animal body is screaming for, I only see myself folded over the arms of a man. I am just being held in full surrender. I am completely relaxed. I want to be cared for. While I am a progressive woman in many ways, I do believe the masculine balances the feminine and I am looking specifically for that, and specifically in a man. I am looking for a truly embodied, grounded man to balance my deeply creative and juicy feminine. I am looking for a partner.

Recently, a friend I made last year at a training came to visit. We spent two days in my sweet little house living my tiny fantasy. We roamed around outside and laughed and talked endlessly. We sat by a watering hole after a sweaty hike, looking into each others' eyes and speaking truths that would have otherwise felt uncomfortable to me. We read good words together. We held each other. I could feel my heart open and flowing and his as well. I could feel my swords being laid to rest.

My heart was so full and then when he left, I felt cracked open. He was a drop of water in the desert. It was almost unbearable to my physical body, my heart.

Shortly thereafter, I sat at the playground one day, while my girls played, blissfully unaware of the heartache of adulthood, and cried. I kept asking myself what this pain meant, where did it begin? Because it wasn't with him.

When I close my eyes, I'm in front of the Gap Kids that still stands in the open air mall in downtown Santa Barbara, sobbing. I must be 8 or 9 years old, in third grade. My hair is in a short blonde bob and at this age, I'm already crying when I miss a single percent on French tests. Several decades later, I don't speak a word of French but I do still carry a seemingly primordial fear of imperfection.

My dad, always deeply generous, wants to buy me this denim bomber jacket I must have seen on one of my dozen of other classmates. It has snaps and tan sleeves with striped ribbing at the sleeves and neck. I remember being desperate to own this article of clothing; even then it seemed that one more thing might be the portal, the missing piece to feeling complete. Complete or maybe, just a little bit less like myself, a little incomplete, just different enough.

It is being offered to me, but there is this deep, sticky part of me that says, You do not deserve something you want so much. So I sob in front of the store, resisting my dad's desire to do something nice for me. The tears are not a denial of the gift; they are a fear I don't deserve it. I can almost feel my prayer that his own will to give to me will override my resistance to allowing it. I need a tsunami of love to overtake me. It has to be that big. I need someone to insist I am deserving.

As an adult, I frequently find myself asking others, What is your relationship to want? As in, can you allow yourself to want? Not need or deserve or earn, but just to deeply want something? Can you indulge without justification? Can you allow yourself pleasure?

Am I allowed to want to be in love? Am I allowed to want partnership? Am I good enough to be loved, wholly? Is it possible that one day someone will see me as I am and fall in love with exactly that person? Who is this girl who can't accept a nice gift and how is she keeping me from what I want? Or is it just timing?

My deepest longing right now is to be seen, to be met, to be held. I've been solo parenting for 2.5 years now, running a school alone for 4, protecting myself fiercely for perhaps 40. Some radical part of me wishes I could escape this longing, outsmart it. I wish I could be so satisfied by my own presence that I wanted absolutely nothing else. I am not delusional about love. I don't think it will fix me, make me love myself. I think it's a mirror, a portal to knowing myself better, a joy, a source of both pleasure and pain. I long for the radical source of growth, expansion, and connection that is sacred partnership.

What I understand is that my heart has broken open. I’ve received energy work many times over the past years and every time receive the message that there’s something constricting my heart. There’s a cage around it, a rope, a big squeeze, a suffocation. It’s all the love I tell myself I don’t deserve. It’s all I long for but don’t allow myself to acknowledge. It’s all I’m afraid to want. It’s all my shame and self-loathing and pain braided into a noose.

I have tried to unshackle it myself to no avail. I believe the hurt I felt after my friend's visit was the beginning of the softening of a lifetime of constriction. We heal in connection and he cracked me open. He was a portal to beginning to healing something that has long stayed guarded. What feels like pain is actually a coming back to life, my heart willing itself once again to be open, to breathe. The bittersweet agony of allowing myself to be vulnerable.

I'm in it. I feel impatient. Someday, in hindsight, I will understand this waiting. I will see how I needed time to become the person who was ready for the exact kind of love I wanted. I will hold this winding road of unfolding as a story to tell my babies when they are again someday in the forest of their own murky becoming. I will look back and it will all be crystalline.

I will love and I will be loved. I will be love. My heart will continue to soften, to open up, however terrifying, and when the moment finally arrives that someone extends a gift my way, the one that connects to my deepest longing, I will look at him and say, yes, yes, yes, yes. I deserve this.