four people asked me to stay

and somehow, that was enough

recently, like today, i was thinking, yeah, maybe i don’t stay here on substack. maybe i focus on the move to spain and go in a different direction.

you sometimes wonder if you’ve made an impact, if you’ll even be noticed if you drop out of what can sometimes feel like its own kind of rat race. yes, even here on gentle ol’ substack.

we have to push push push ourselves along and keep keep keep rolling along.

y’all know the vibes.

but then i posted a few comments to that effect today and the other day, and four different people said how they would miss me and my words.

yes. four people.

that’s more than i have close friends at this point.

i have had to walk away from so much.

and if you follow my work, you know why.

the one long run-on sentence for newbies goes like this:

husband died of cancer, venus was left an inheritance that she had no idea how to manage at first, was taken advantage of by people who resembled family bonds, took a deep dive into healing and was tossed about by a flood of noah’s ark proportions, recalled childhood abuse, eventually told her kids, more memories and truths surfaced, venus barely held it together, house went to hell, relationships fell by the wayside, bridges burned, i sat on my land crying and smoking many a day and night (no, i wasn’t a smoker before and i am not now), kids struggled, legal things happened and are happening, became estranged from family, made an album, titled birth of venus, bought a studio, sold a studio, lost that relationship with the producer as well, somehow made it onto substack, crawling on hands and knees, begging for it all to be over, kept being nudged by dead people, medium/psychic abilities came online, family began to heal, venus decided to move to spain, we leave in ten days.

so there you have it.

what was i saying?

oh yes.

i wish i could write like some of the writers here. but alas, i do not.

i write like venus.

and that’s enough.

sometimes it’s poetry.

sometimes i channel-write messages of hope that i feel come through me from beyond and i sign them:

love,
the universe.

sometimes i synthesize transcripts from my live sessions, using ai help, and i write complex articles about grief and trauma, spirituality and brain science.

sometimes i write to you like i would talk to you, like right now.

sigh…

i do love you guys.

i feel your eyes in the future reading this.

to touch and be touched by love.

it is the whole reason i am here.

i wrote a song with that title too.

thank you to the four beautiful souls who said: stay, venus. we love you here.

i love you too.

and those words gave me courage to continue.

it may never go anywhere, this little substack of mine.

but that’s ok.

it’s been such a beautiful journey.

i still don’t have a visa. and i leave in ten days.

it’s all based on faith that the conversation i will have next week, with my mid-level spanish, will be enough to convince the director of this master’s i want to do that i am a good fit.

the other program turned me away. basically, the director told me that i am not in my early twenties and needing strong academic hand-holding. so i found this other program thanks, in part, to his advice, though it stung at the time not to be chosen.

but this program is actually a better fit. it is geared toward professionals like me who already have careers and a life behind them.

it’s the whole one-door-closes-and-another-one-opens type of thing.

so i hope that when i get to spain i will have three days to submit the visa request, if they end up accepting me.

and if not, i will find another way.

because we only have 90 days we can stay on our u.s. passports as tourists.

trust is required.

and i still need to find a way to send my pets.

my german shepherd, it turns out, is too big for any of the airlines where you can check the animal with your ticket, so it will cost almost seven grand to send her. my other two cats and the border collie we will take with us. we’ll spend the night in frankfurt on a layover, and they will stay in the animal lounge, which is basically an animal hotel.

i know you maybe didn’t need to know these details, but now you do.

my landlady is so nice, though.

i had to hire a realtor to find an apartment that would take pets. there were only two listings in all of sevilla that did.

and luckily, this woman is an angel.

she was going to move out of the apartment and take all of her furniture, but my realtor—a mom from the international bilingual school where my kids will go—convinced her to leave it furnished, and thank god, since otherwise i would be arriving with my four pets and kids to an empty flat.

to be honest, having this apartment is what gave me a sense of hope that it would all work out.

that, and the fact that because i didn’t have a spanish bank account to guarantee the rent, as is the norm in spain, i had to pay the entire year upfront.

and because i have life insurance money from when finn died, i could.

but that was also a huge stress because i had paid for an apartment but had no legal way to get there and stay.

so here i am in bed typing to you.

it’s midnight.

my girls just got back from a punk show.

“yep, i am up,” i just called to them as they are chatting away.

i am so lucky my two teen daughters are close.

one cool thing is that i have been teaching all my kids to do intentional healing on themselves. like when they are sick or not feeling well or feeling overwhelmed, they practice turning their thoughts around. and this creates physical changes too.

i am so stinking proud of each of them.

the oldest is 19, the middle is 16, my son is 10, and my youngest daughter is 7.

if i didn’t have my kids i would be such a sad sad squish.

finn was nine years older than me, and when i convinced him to try with me to have our last child, he was already a dad to my two girls, who he considered his own. finn had taken them on as his own from the beginning.

then we had our son, and he was good with three.

but i had this persistent thing i call a knocking on the door, or a knowing, that another daughter was on the way.

and finn had always dreamed he would have a daughter.

he had been with a woman who had a late miscarriage, and his baby daughter is buried on our land. so i think that got to him, and he was willing to try.

he gave me one chance.

because he also seemed to have a strong premonition that he was going to die young, and i was honestly haunted by the same fear.

he would always say, “i can’t be 50 with a newborn. my dad died at fifty.”

as if the two went together.

i had this gnawing fear he would die somehow, but it was so irrational that i brushed it off.

it didn’t really start until, i believe, the cancer was slowly making its way into bigger and bigger tumors in his stomach and esophagus.

by the time we caught it, it had become a giant tumor.

he had chemo and a long operation that was supposed to last four hours, but ended up lasted ten, where he had most of his stomach and part of his esophagus cut out.

he had always been a strong, athletic man and weighed 200 pounds at one point, solid and muscular.

but he became bone-thin with the cancer.

by the time he died, he was a literal skeleton.

he held on for so long to be with us longer.

he had finally found the family that he had longed for for decades, only to die eight years later with a toddler and three other young children.

but i often think, though i am still heartbroken, that if he wouldn’t have died, things might have turned out very differently for our family.

in a way, it feels like he had to die so i could remember and save our kids.

that’s how it goes sometimes.

you mix the love and the pain and the memories and the sorrow.

you make a mix of bittersweet batter and bake a pie of memories that warms you from within.

and then there are the rainbows.

finn always sends rainbows since he died.

the fourth anniversary of his death is coming up, the 14th of september.

and we are getting rainbows again.

it’s that time of year, and many people said the year that he died, me included, that they had never seen as many rainbows as they did that year in the two weeks after his passing.

i do love rainbows so.

we always say, “look!”

and we don’t even have to say the rest anymore because we are all thinking it:

look, there’s a rainbow papa sent us.

last night i took my youngest two swimming from 8–9 at the rec center.

we already roll on a spanish schedule. we eat and go to bed later than most americans.

maybe it was grief and adhd and having two sets of kids, where you give too many fucks with the first round and then have none left with the second set, so they get to stay up late, eat ice cream before dinner if needed, and be the last ones closing down the rec center pool.

and on our way in, this was waiting for us.

isn’t that life?

you get the sunshine and the rain, the love and the pain, all mixed up together.

and somehow, it makes a rainbow.

i’m a writer, speaker, and musician exploring trauma, neuroscience, and spirituality. i write about what it means to remember who we are beneath our survival.

if this resonated with you, i’d love for you to join me here and share your thoughts.