Create your own heaven! that’s what my grandmother used to tell me. She sat on the edge of the bed in the room near the entrance, the room with the sunniest mornings, the room of my childhood bedtime stories, with the candle lit all the time and the jars with fleshy pieces of aloe in the full process of maceration. I took the powder from the shelf, opened it and looked fascinated at the fine texture of the compact powder. It’s as old as forever, she told me, and every gentle wrinkle of hers smiled at me. She was the gentlest woman in my entire world.
Create your own heaven! Seen through the eyes of her “coffee” friends, Adela has a perfect life, a tall and funny husband who loves her and pinches her butt while cooking in the kitchen, two children with plenty of personality, jobs that others just dream of and a fairytale house. They are a wonderful couple, made of love and jokes, always with a wide smile, aristocratic, vaguely arrogant, she delicate, with an exotic beauty, sometimes a bit naïve, but full of kindness.
However, Adela has her own dramas, stumbles now and then on cultural differences, suspected, but unconfirmed infidelities, the difficulties of having two teenagers boys, and is always exasperated by the Dutch unpredictable weather. However, she strives daily to create her very own heaven!
Like any other marriage, Adela’s marriage has ups and downs. At one point, she was even seeing a therapist every Wednesday, during the lunch break. She was somehow stuck in the disastrous answers she found to the questions that had been popping up in recent years.
As idyllic as her life seemed to be looked from the outside, she felt as if she were drifting on a daily thread. She was unhappy with the results of parenting for which she had worked hard, unhappy with the new boss who had proved to be a total motherfucker, she no longer felt like constantly being suspicious of new infidelity and it seemed to her that her own life, already halfway, it was just like a huge clock that deafened her with its infernal tick.
After a year of therapy, she began to understand that sometimes, you must create your own heaven yourself, that time is too short to wasted crying around the corner of inevitable problems, that this heaven comes most of the times with disappointments, hardships, compromises and shrugs, occasionally.
She was tired of being unhappy, of looking for happiness around her first, and decided it would be best not to stumble into maybe, but, if or other unidentified probabilities and just be happy no matter what. She shook her doubts off her shoulders, straightened her lovely back, raised her chin as a damn Queen, and chose to enjoy whatever life had to offer.
Learn to create your own heaven! That’s what my grandmother used to tell me.