~ Raising the Bar ~
Perceptions can be wrong.
Was I here because of what you had been rather than who you were now?
Lies and deceptions piled up like wood, and I closed my eyes and forgave until I was dry.
A kinship of disease became a diseased kinship.
Those first few days even, I ignored the warning flags and the immediate distrust that I felt.
I should never have come back, again and again and again.
How many times had I left you already when I had somewhere else to go?
Always the apologies, the excuses... “I’m only a man."
My reputed, intellectual, educated, intelligent, well read, well spoken, charismatic man.
In my young girls eyes, I saw my father who was incapable of doing anything wrong. Its not possible, It can't be... and yet its blank expression stared me right in the face.
I had raised the bar..... so I thought, to a man of a " higher caliber."
But deception and disloyalty come in all packages, shapes and sizes now I know.
A man from backwoods Alabama could have given me more integrity.
I was enough, I am enough ... and I will always be more than enough for the right man.
Your intelligence and life experiences only taught you to lie more intelligently and with more experience, my love.
Just one thing would give you away... Your eyes, the windows to your soul, could never hold my gaze without fear in them.
Raising the bar should not be the measure of a man's background, or of his weapon, nor of his size on the playing field of life... but rather, it should be of his heart, his truth and his integrity.
And that my dear, is the true "Measure of a Man".
