OBJECTS D' HEART

"They are just things," he has said to me, "I don't know why you get so upset about them."  I know that, on the surface, but its the deeper meaning of the objects he doesn't seem to get, or wants me not to look at, when he uses that argument with me.
I'm doing better with the things around me, or maybe they have just been disappearing more and being replaced with my things, or our things, so the past is less likely to bother me now.  Maybe lately I have just been thinking of other things.
There is this person I know.  She has been struggling with some inner demon.  It is easy to look in from the outside and say, gee, that is really messed up, but none of us really know what it is like on the inside.  She sees things the rest of us do not see.
Lately, she had a freak out about something that seems so minor, really.  It was nothing more than an object, basically wood and string put together in ways that veil us from the rest of the world..  That, though, combined with some other triggers, set wheels in motion in her mind that led to a confrontation between her and her husband, with one of my best friends, between my friend and I perhaps, everyone jumping at the sound of her gun.
I decided this time I was going to hold my ground, I was not going to be sympathetic about the pink elephants that danced around her mind.  It is easy to be selfish, and want to draw lines between friends and family.  In the end, though, I struck a different tone.  Maybe I wanted to see if she would admit to me what she had done, and for me to set her straight in her mind with gentle persuasion instead of anger.  I still did not understand or agree with her point of view, but I could see the hurt she was covering up inside over this exterior of toughness and I wondered....if you want to remove this thorn in her side, you have to start at the source.
Even though we didn't support her position, we did support the removal of the plank from her eye, and so, the one from her house.  To that end, this morning we stopped by to pick this object up, this simple thing that had triggered this most recent flare up.  Curtain rod and valence now sit in our garage, waiting to be returned to their rightful owner.
About a half hour later, we were on our way to meet up with another couple to pick up some other objects.  These particular objects had held sway over my man's heart for a long time.   These objects, basically wood and string put together, help connect us to the rest of the world.  His uncle, his father, they used bows to bring down game to eat, and then passed down this ability to a young boy who was impressed by this, and he learned it so well that he set several records in competition.  It was a huge part of his youth.  The whole family was involved for some time, and later just himself, and now all the memories of archery are also connected with the memories of family, and of this uncle who passed away just a couple of years ago.
I remember my man talking about his connection to these objects, but I was not expecting his reaction to them, especially to the one his uncle had let him use during his youth.  I had never seen him react to something so strongly, and I realized in that moment something special had happened, some kind of transcendence I had been waiting to happen for him.
Also, it made me think about things.  About the places certain objects belong in our hearts, about how sometimes taking them away, and sometimes bringing them back, helps change our emotional landscape and the way we think about...well...things.
Somewhere behind these thoughts, I am sure, you could play another object of wood and string, a scratchy violin tune that pulls our heartstrings and makes us feel something...undefined...something kind of sad, kind of nostalgic, kind of yearning and missing and hoping for things to change and fade and yet always remain alive in our memory.

ON THE INSIDE

Some years ago, I was kicking it in Austin with my best friend from childhood. We had been girl talking until late in the evening, and then she had told me she was tired and was going to bed. I laid down on the inflatable air mattress futon with my little son, but had a hard time sleeping over the next hour or two, because of the cacophony of laughter and muffled conversation coming from the master bedroom, where she laid with her husband.

I remember being annoyed by this. I had driven all that way to visit her and longed for late night analyzing of people and relationships, the way we were when we were in high school and college. What she was doing with her husband, that kind of inside amusing conversation, is part of what I had driven all that way for. I felt like she had lied to me by telling me she was tired as an excuse to go hang out with her husband instead. But he's always here, I thought, and I hardly ever am, why can't she spare the time for me now instead?

For a certain amount of our adult life, I felt like this friend tried to make me jealous by deliberately showing me or telling me about things that she knew I didn't or would never have. For instance, I remember her once talking about how much closer she and her husband were after traveling to foreign countries where they both knew very little of the language there. I was telling my sister about some of her comments like that, and she said, "well, you should say, well, having a baby together, you should see how close THAT makes you," to one-up her at her own game.

The problem with that is, it wasn't all that true. At some point, I realized that perhaps some of my perception of this issue with her stemmed from my unhappiness with my own life, and that just being happy for her when she showed me these things was in fact the only right response.

It was the only response that wasn't self centered. After all, she wasn't the one responsible for my life being different than hers. Just because she didn't know what "the Other Side of the Bed World" was like doesn't mean I should punish her for it by not genuinely being happy for her when she had things, even if they were things I didn't.

I didn't understand for the longest time why my girlfriends didn't have the same need to talk that I did. For years, it felt like I was the one who called them, who maintained the relationship, who wasn't too busy to pick up the phone or to have a long conversation perched on a chair in my backyard, or the front porch. I didn't understand why, if they had the same number of kids I did and the same amount of work inside and outside the house, why did they not have the time for me?

Lately, I have been figuring it out. For twelve years of my life, I had a roommate who had little connection to me, though we were bound by legal and responsibility matters. We knew each other, but we weren't each other's best friends, and certainly not the ones we turned to with our deepest and closest secrets. Now I don't have time to call my girls anymore. So much of my attention is focused on this man I live with now, and what I don't give him, I am giving to my kids. I don't have all that much to say to those outside anymore, because the language between us is different, and things that are so exciting and hilarious to us would seem probably pedestrian and mundane to the outside world.

The other night, an hour or so after I had tucked the kids in, this man and I were still awake between the sheets, talking and joking around. I was laughing so hard I could barely breathe, ribs hurting, whole body shaking with the effort of trying to be quiet about the hilarity, while in the other room, my son yelled at us, "GO.TO.BED!", the same words and same tone I might have been using a year or two ago at him and his brother, who by now was long fast asleep. The next day, I was kind of laughing to myself about that, and finally, I think I understood my friend a little better.

HEARTS TOWARDS ZION

Originally, I was crafting a post in my head about transformation, about how my internal life has been changing over the past months. I've been distracted from this mission, however, by the demands of daily life, by my little children, by the packing up of my house, the seperation of things, by living in the moment, and mostly by this book I have been reading that has been sucking up the spare time I would have spent writing.

Today I had a flash of insight, though, about something I have been thinking about regarding the story I am reading. The story (Devils Gate, by David Roberts) is a historical account of the Mormon emigration to Salt Lake City, mostly centered on the plight of recent converts who dragged poorly built handcarts 1300 miles to get to their "Zion".

There's a lot I could say about this story. There is a lot I have said about this story, actually. What I want to focus on, though, is what has both impressed me and bothered me about these people I am reading about. Most of the people in this story were from England or various other places nearby there. They were converted to Mormonism by disciples of Brigham Young, who sent his people over there to obtain more souls for his recently settled-on piece of land in Utah. In the short amount of time between their conversion and their persuasion to board vessels that carried them overseas, then trains that took them from New York to Iowa City, then their overland journey through the wilderness of the west, they became so strong in their faith that that it was enough to carry them through a journey of incredible hardship. When they faltered, they relied on this faith to get themselves back up again and keep them moving. When members of their party were dropping to death from starvation and exhaustion, they prayed over it, they asked their God for strength. They honestly believed that reaching Salt Lake City would be akin to reaching their land of milk and honey, that Zion lay just ahead on the horizon.

Part of me wonders, especially after reading some of the gritty details of their grueling journey, how they could have been so sold on this idea that it was enough for them. I marvel at the fastness of their faith. Along the way, their brethren was dying alongside them, and yet on they marched, hearts set towards Zion. I wonder why they just didn't give up on the idea of reaching Zion, and how hard it must have been for them to believe there was something good waiting for them at the end of the journey on the dark winter nights where they trudged on, surviving on such small rations that surely would have made any one of us living in this day and age cry and give up after one days worth.

And yet...is there that much of a difference between that faith and ours, in mine? Sometimes I wonder how I got to be such a polly-anna optimist. When things get hard, when things don't seem to be working out, there is this part of me that is just convinced that Zion is right around the corner. I haven't always been this way, though. I think there are times I have been, and that perhaps that was my natural tendency, but that was something I lost in the past dozen years or so. A number of times during those years my heart was heavy and despondent, with the attitude that things would never turn around, that my life was shit and would always be that way. I felt like giving up a lot, even as recently as last year, my optimism grounded to a halt. I didn't have much emotional strength to "rally the troops" and convince myself that "this, too, shall pass".

I have beat depression, or maybe I was never really depressed. Well, I do think I was, during some of those times, but I do remember having an epiphany at one point, after a terrible low, that the one thing that combats depression and sadness is Hope. When you are really, truly down, though, it is hard to have that hope that things will get better. Once I realized Hope was the anti-depressant, I tried to focus on that when things got difficult. It is hard to hang on to that, though, when you can't see yourself out of a hole, when you look around and all you see is the darkened edge.

I am so far past that now, though. Now my heart is soaring and it seems like nothing can really get me down. I can see it in my responses to things, situations that maybe last year would have seemed a calamity, but now are easier to recover from. I can feel the difference in the emotional center of my chest, where there is just calm and light where there was heaviness and darkness before. I feel like I was "saved", not really in terms of my "salvation" necessarily, but in the way that my entire internal landscape has shifted back to this trust and faith that things will work out, that there is something Good in this life. There are times now where I feel bliss and joy, feelings I haven't had in so long that it makes me feel like a kid again, or takes me back to times long ago where I felt this way and then had forgotten what it felt like.

Sometimes in my responses to situations now, I feel some of what these emigrants must have felt, with the blind certainty that somehow I will make it to the land of milk and honey, that soon, just around the corner, Zion will appear, and there will be much rejoicing. I think I understand their heart's compass a little more as I question my own and find it pointed in hope's direction.

SATISFACTION DIPS

Hello world. It's been a while. I've been lost for a little while down a rabbit hole, and am just coming back up to take a look around. Spam bots seem to have taken over the comments section, and my blogging fever is running a different direction these days. I'm hoping soon I will be able to share that direction with my friends that have stopped by here.
Meanwhile, back here in the wild yonder of my own mind, I've been meandering down some road for months now, chasing elusive answers to age old questions. I've been questioning the nature of love. When I say nature, I mean exactly that, in some ways - the way Mother Nature designed us to fall in love, and why we choose who we do, and why love sometimes stays and why it sometimes goes. I've been looking to various places, but mainly the realm of biology, and evolution, and its effects on relationships between men and women.
I don't know if I have all the answers yet, or even if I know what the questions are. I do know a bit more than I did before, though, and I am curious to see if I can put it into some form that makes some kind of sense, and teaches us what we need to know to have some kind of hope in the futility of it all.
Let's start by considering the prairie voles. After all, that's where the scientists who study these sorts of things started. Not many animal species have monogamy down pat, but of the ones that do, the prairie voles are the ones that do it best. There are many species of voles, which is a small rodent, but Microtus ochrogaster, commonly referred to as prairie voles, are the only ones who are monogamous. When researchers took a closer look at these animals, they found some interesting hormonal relationships that encourage long lasting pair bonds.
What we have learned from the prairie voles so far strengthens the hypothesis that love is hard wired in our DNA as a response to a combination of hormonal interplays. When two opposite sex prairie voles meet, the interplay in the smelling of each other's pheromones may result in an increase of norepinephrine, which results in the mania and sleeplessness of early attraction. After spending some time together, the voles become habituated to each other, which causes a decrease in cortisol levels in the pair, the hormone of "stress". They are calmed by each's others presence. Following this, they have sex for 24 hours. In these rodents, like as in humans, this brings about a release of oxytocin and vasopressin, the hormones of love and commitment. The two are now mated for life, and help each other raise the young.
The prairie vole model demonstrates the importance of oxytocin in developing long term pair bonding, but what does it mean? The roots of monogamous human relationships have some similiarities to the hormone changes in the voles. The initial surges of a love relationship between two people follow some of the same hormonal pathways. The beginning stages are dictated by surges of norepinephrine, then the latter stages of commitment and long term relationships are fueled by oxytocin and vasopressin levels.
Studies of humans who had fallen in love showed that during the initial phases of pair bonding, the woman's testosterone levels increase and the man's decreases. In the woman, this change drives the woman to initiate sex more, and the man to intitiate more cuddling type behaviors. Those actions, in turn, stimulate the levels of oxytocin in the other to increase, causing more satisfaction or affection; in turn, deepening the bond.
In a similar monkey study, they found that the couples with high oxytocin levels would act in ways to comfort each other after a relationship stressor, such as the introduction of another female's scent. The pairs would seem to have an understanding of what the other one needed to raise the oxytocin levels back up to the optimum level.
So this is how Mother Nature designed this thing, this thing called love, to promote relationships steady enough to raise the offspring until the point at which it can take care of itself. In humans, the hormonal cascade seems to run in four year cycles, which is consistent with what evolutionary biologists belief was initially the time period that it would take for sucessful mating to occur and then the need for parental investment from the father. Early in the formation of a bond with another person, a hormone called DHEA (for short) increases, and stays high for about four years before it starts to wear off. Four years is also the time that most couples report a "satisfaction dip" in their relationships. My current theory is that if people had some understanding on what that feeling is, that dip in hormones, then they might be more likely to stay in the relationship when that dip occurs.
Over the past months, I have been spending an increasing amount of time trying to understand all this information, and more. My interest in it was of two fold, one with trying to understand why divorce happens, why love doesn't work, and the other part trying to understand what was happening to me, as I was falling in love again, and not wanting to repeat the mistakes of the past, or humanity as a whole. I'm trying to understand what draws us to one person rather than another, what is making me feel like I have never felt this way before, and how to keep those feeligns over time, as oposed to wasting energy going from one relationship to the next. I have more in my mind about evolutionary biology, and how we can use this knowledge of hormones to add to and deepen our relationships over time, so expect further entries on this subject.

STAGES

I'm cutting through the dark night on a highway I've traveled down hundreds of times before. It's a way I know by heart, or so I think. A phone call from an old friend, distractions from the back seat, and I'm cruising through the memories of times gone by without even looking at the signs, lost in my thoughts and the music. I start to point something out to my son, a story from the past, and I realize this is not the town I thought it was, and suddenly nothing looks familiar. Suddenly I am seeing the signs, incongruous signs for Lake Somerville and Caldwell. This is not the highway I know, and with a rush of clarity, I remember the right turn I was supposed to make God only knows how many miles ago. I call the friend whose house I am on the way to for her to talk me through which turn to take out of this town. Ironically, two GPS receivers sit idly next to me on the passenger seat (they only work if you turn them on, see....).
So I make a turn, and now I'm on another highway, the unexpected highway, the highway that used to take me to San Marcos, and the horse of my heart, but now I am hoping is taking me back to the highway I was supposed to be on this whole time. I'm not really sure where I am anymore, but somehow I'm okay with it all, because I'm tuned into classical music and the concentration of calm. It's all about the journey, and I am just trying to enjoy it without worrying about where it's going to end up.
Except that my friend is expecting me, and I make the night more of a comedy of errors when I try to make it her house from memory and not off the directions. At any rate, I'm an hour behind anticipated arrival when I finally pull up at her house.
She welcomes me in with a smile anyways, and after some discomfort trying to to get the children off to bed, I join her and her husband at the kitchen table. Everything in their house flows in neat, orderly lines. Abstract art hangs from boldly painted walls, staring down at bantam futon furniture. Classical music flows from unseen speakers, settling us into "serenity now".
I sit across from D., who is stirring a cup of tea, and her husband G., who is sketching with charcoal over an etched drawing, lines moving every which way but somehow connecting to a coherent whole. I begin our catching-up conversation with an explanation, a redirection of parenting skill attempts based on the premise that I have to become more self reliant, learn to be mother and father both, because the father is not coming back, or at least not in the ways that it was before.
Each explanation begs another explanation, and we go back further and further, to explain the demise of this relationship that wasn't meant to be. I pose questions, questions directed to G., questions as if I am questioning myself, but I'm not, really, It's almost like I want him to agree with me on this thing, which is "the thing that is not love", showing them the scars as if I need to prove my pain to them. They get it. I ask G what it would be like if he was across the world from his wife, and he looks at her like it pains him to even think of it. "And if you were, would you want to write to her? To talk to her? Would you miss her?" Of course, of course, but it would never come to that. D has her hand on his leg, and he looks up from his sketches to meet my eyes, and then look at hers as he gives his answers. She listens to him with half a face turned towards him, smiling softly. I draw on my own experiences, asking him if he would make the same choices as this man did, and yet knowing the answer was no, before I even asked.
So then we're done talking about 'what is not", now we move on to talking about "what is". I've had enough of the darkness, and I move on to the light. I tell them about hope, and about yearning, and I ask them if they ever felt like that, do they understand what that is. I ask them questions about how these things start out. It seems like it's been so long for me, or maybe that I've never felt like this before. I explain what I am feeling now, and ask them if they ever felt this way. G looks up at me and meets my eyes, and they both kind of smile and start to tell me the story of their beginning, a story I have never heard the whole of. She starts to talk about a note he left on her car, about six months of letters back and forth, of a picture of him she could look at and hold in her hands. "This was in the old days," G. teased, "before Facebook profile pics. Back when we had like real pictures, you know. Remember those things?"
So I ask them questions about how these things start out. It seems like it's been so long for me, or maybe that I've never felt like this before. They identify with what I am explaining, nodding and giving each other knowing looks. Then G explains it better, the beginning of knowing.
"At first, you discover each other's intrinsic qualities, those little things you have in common. And those things begin to take on a life of their own. Then there's the inside jokes, which also begin to take on a life of their own. They build on each other, until you've got this whole...thing going on that's bigger than all of that." He gestures, a hand flowing up into the air. I get it, and I also see from them, from the way they are together, what that looks like as it grows.

Then it's late, and we retire. In the morning, D and I talk as she prepares her day's lunch in the kitchen. She tells me about a radio program that morning talking about a book that reminded her of our conversation last night, and about how sometimes the things that happen to us that are sad, or bad, are really there to help us appreciate the good, and the light, that much more. It's something I have heard a few times, a few different ways, over the past couple of months.
In the end, she gives me some direction on how to get to what I need to get this morning, a map of sorts, outlining some stops along the way. She leaves for work, and I begin preparing to leave. As I went to get the children ready, I saw a picture from their wedding. It was the most beautiful scene I had ever seen. They were standing by a window that looked out on a rainforest, somewhere exotic, like perhaps Madagascar, and it was just the two of them and the minister. She was so beautiful, and they looked at each other with adoration. It made me smile, remembering her as the Prom Queen, and G teasing us about our alleged dorkiness.

I drive off to the next stage of my journey, thinking, thinking about pictures and maps and directions, and how sometimes we have to take the wrong way before we see the signs that are pointing us in the right direction, to the road of light and better days ahead.

COME ON GET HAPPY

So, the guys I work with like to talk. Occasionally, I hear snatches of rumors regarding myself. Today's rumor made me laugh, as if I wasn't already. My "assistant" told me one of the guys told him I had gone crazy. Crazy, he says, because every time they see me, I am laughing.

And this seems like a departure from the me of the past, the one who they used to occasionally find crying in the back hallway, or with the long face of a sad life. They aren't sure they know this "me", but they like it. "You always look good," says one of them, "but when you smile, you spark. You look much better with a smile on your face."

And I know the reason why I am so happy, and I know I should just let it be, but you know I have to examine it closer. I really search myself to see if I am just acting happy as a way to cover some deeper emotional issues. Really, should I be this happy right now, with what I am "going through", or walking into? I want to make sure this is a real emotion, and not a "masking" emotion. Why do I feel so good? Why am I not hurting more as I walk away from this bad marriage?

The fact is, I was hurting. I hurt for a long time, but the acute pain of letting go already happened for me the past six months or so. I knew it, too, when I was going through it. I could recognize the different stages of grief as they rolled over me, and named them, one by one. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. I think I finally reached that fifth stage, and that is why I can just let it slide right off my shoulders at this point.

I know some of my friends don't understand why I like Dr Phil, but you know, sometimes he says some incredibly wise things. The one thing he said once on his show that I really paid attention to was this: "The time to get divorced is not when you are hurting, and not when you are mad. The time to get divorced is when you feel nothing. That's when you are ready."

I know I held on to this decision for far too long, but the fact is, I really didn't feel nothing until just lately, the past couple of months. I still felt love, I still felt pain, I still felt rejection, anger, sadness and all those miserable emotions that I carried for so long. I still felt the burden and anxiety of trying to hang on to a sinking ship. I know that during the summer I was just trying to stay afloat, so I wouldn't drown. Then, it was time to act, but I couldn't. I was still in the thick of the process, and I still cared about it.

I know there was a point when my Anger began to cease, that I started to head into Bargaining, and I didn't want to. I saw what was happening - I was trying to re-negotiate the terms of affection to be able to stay in it, even though it was so not right for me. During this time, some of my friends became concerned for me, because they have been ready for me to get out for too long. One of them gave me a number of a hotline I could call, to discuss these emotions with someone trained to deal with them.

When I called the hotline, I talked to this woman for about an hour about these complicated emotions. I told her I was ready to start the healing process, and I was wondering how I was going to be able to heal emotionally from the scars I was holding on to. I told her how I kept running to him to be the salve, even though the injuries were his own doing, and it made no sense. "You can't start healing until you get out of it," she told me. "Meanwhile, let's see what we can do to help you feel better about YOU." She gave me some suggestions, and we laughed about them at the time, but you know, it worked. I had to reclaim some parts of myself that I lost to this. And maybe I am still working on that part, but you know, I am closer to "fine" than I have been in a long, long time.

There are no tears about letting go at this point. There is no hurt in my heart, no anxiety about the future. Sometimes, though, there are still tears, not shed of anger or frustration, but of realizations, and expectation of future joy.

Last night, I shed some, unexpectedly. Something magical happened, and I don't know if anyone will really get this, except maybe Jen. I was about to go to bed when it happened. I started chatting on Facebook with an old friend, a former roommate. This roommate and I had gone through some real shit together, and I would say at one point in my life that she was my "frien-emy" (and yes I know you read this, but you have to admit it is true).

She told me to call her, something I would never have done at that hour, but there we were, on the phone, and she cut right to the heart of it. She told me things I never knew, like the true reason she didn't come to my wedding. She told me things we never discussed, like the good she saw in me. She told me how much it bothered her to see me unhappy for so long, and what her perception of my marriage had been, the things she couldn't tell me until I was ready to find my way out. Her words touched me more than my three best girlfriends words ever did, because they were so rare. She and I never really shared those kind of sentiments with each other, but here she was, telling me the value she found in me, and the value he should have seen in me, and what she hopes for me to find out there. I loved her across those phone lines, and I smiled through our conversation, but when I hung up, the tears came hard. How could I have been so blind to have not seen what she saw, in all those years?

But I'm gonna try. My history is my past now, and there's a new future waiting out there. I'm ready for it, and I am not going to look back anymore. So here's to moving on, and here's to letting go, but most of all, here's to being happy.

Come on, get happy....

THAT'S HOW THE CARDS PLAYED...

She asked me to shuffle the deck. I know how this works, how my energy is transferred in this manner to the cards. I also remember that sometimes it just feels right - sometimes a card just jumps out at you. In this case, I kept coming back to one card, and put that pile at the top of the deck. She turns the card over.
"Wheel of Fortune, reversed..."
Twenty minutes later, I had heard her sum up the upcoming changes in my life. The message was positive, but it also revealed some information about two major players in my life that surprised me greatly. Both were confirmations, one a confirmation of fears, and the other of a hope for the future.
The next day, I played the recording the lady had made for a friend of mine. We talked about the message, and I thought about it a lot that day. I was trying to decide what to do with the information presented. I felt torn between revealing it to the other two people involved, or waiting to see what unfolded.
Finally, I told one of them. Curiously, he contradicted what the cards told about him. I thought the cards accurately represented something I already suspected, and it's possible that this person was telling an untruth.
However, if they were being honest, and it really was untrue what the cards revealed about them, then were the cards wrong about the other person? I am not sure I am completely a believer about any of it, but I wonder. If it is possible that what came out in the cards was really my fear about this person, would what it revealed about the other person just be what I hoped would happen?
Only time will tell.....

BOOKS

"The Shack", by Wm. Paul Young

I recently read a book that changed my perceptions, or illuminated some previously held ones, and wanted to share my thoughts on this book with those around me, including those who occasionally peek on here to see what I am up to.

I just finished this book today and am still digesting it, so I am sure I will have more to say about it in the future. After I finished it, I went back through it and marked certain passages that really seemed to speak to me. In fact, the whole book seemed to be speaking to me, which is something I haven't felt in a long time. I wanted to write about it now while I still had the copy in my hands, and before I send it to someone who I would really like to share it with.

I have become aware that there is a lot of controversy about this book in Christian circles, which shouldn't really surprise anyone (isn't there always, particularly in terms of Christian fiction?). It doesn't surprise me, in a way, in terms of what I read in the book. There are some unusual ways of confronting ideas in the novel, a prime but obvious example that God is personified by a large African American woman with a sassy attitude and penchant for cooking and funk music. There are also some unusual ideas for approaching some questions of faith. The most notable examples that are highlighted in the controversy are the explanation of the trinity, and salvation and its relationship with sin.

This book was recommended to me by my friend Rachael, who had listen to me struggle with some common questions of faith. The same questions I raised, and many of us Christians raise, are dealt with in this book, and answers are offered, although not always the ones you would expect, questions such as:

How does a merciful God allow evil to exist in this world?

Why do bad things sometimes happen to good people?

What is expected of us in our relationship with God, and what can God offer us, and why?

What does God's love mean for us in terms of a relationship with Him, and with others?

How does the Trinity work, really?

How do we reconcile with those who have pained us in our life? How do we reconcile with God for the pain that exists in life, even when we love and trust in Him?

What does sin mean in this world, and does God use it to make decisions about our lives, both here on earth and after?

This is a book about forgiveness, and about how to love. This book may challenge some ideas you have about God, or confirm them. For me, it opened up my heart to accept some ideas I had been fighting in my personal life and relationships, although not in a way I would have expected, nor that all I know agree with. I feel like it helped me grow in my relationship with God and with others close to me in my life, as well as those I don't know as well but who are involved in the community around me that God intended for us to be involved in. I feel it calling me to walk down the dock of faith and trust, even in the absence of certainty, and love in the way God calls us to love, and not just in the way that our society teaches us to love. It's letting go of these preconceived notions, and freeing ourselves to really trust completely, that let Peter walk on water, with Jesus by his side, and right now, that is what I am intending to do.

Faith. Trust. Love.

Yeah, it's been there a long time. What should be done about it? Should we talk about it? Should we address it? Should we shoot that fucker down?
Tried confronting it head on. It's ignoring me. We'll see where that takes us.
Stay tuned.....

And, speaking of tuned...don't look at those comments on the past few entries. I am fairly sure at least one of them is a virus bot. Only bots leaving comments these days....
Maybe my friends don't want to talk about the elephant either.....

ABSENCE MAKES THE HEART

So, I haven't been doing much blogging lately. Kid has been claiming the computer a lot, and I've been going through something, maybe I'll be able to explain later. However, I was listening to my Ipod while working on my computer at work, and this song came on. I wanted to share the lyrics with you, my few friends who read this thing now and then. This is the most beautiful love song I have ever heard, I think that every time I hear it, but I mean that as a contemporary love song, a modern love song. It reminds me of someone really special to me who is not a part of my life anymore. Once, this song was his song, and now I can listen to it and smile thinking about that time when this song said everything I wanted to say, even with the knowing that sometimes you find out that love was just a wish an empty heart makes. Sometimes you meet people later in life and realize the two of you have come too far away from the people you used to be when you loved each other. That's okay. The person I loved was a person who no longer exists, and that makes it easier to let him go, anyway. When I hear this song, though, I remember the feelings I had once, and it's not a bad thing. It makes me smile with the remembering.

Collecting You (by the Indigo Girls...of course)

I could paint you in the dark
Cause I've studied you with hunger like a work of art
These are very secret days
I collect my information then I stowe it all away
Call me when you breeze through to your appointments
The work you do
Call me, I'm collecting you
The pleading prayer and hairshirt sting
My hair-trigger love and faulty spring
Motivation smokes a name, but I don't like that smell applied to me so
Blindly just the same call me
When you breeze through to your appointments the work you do
Call me I'm collecting you
Turning up my collar to an unseasonal chill you ask a favor, you know I will
The rain comes a surprise we fly across the railroad ties
I feel the danger the foolish thrill oh yes I will
What it will or won't be then
The shutter pre development the ink full in the pen
Mind the mind's eye's trickery
You might picture killer beautiful much more than it might be
Call me tell me what you're up to what you'll do
Call me I'm collecting you
I would be foolish to think that I could turn it off and stay alive
The way I live when you switch on hand on the dimmer, give me just a glimmer
Give me just a shadow hope around the edges, agony and rapture forever uncaptured
Take these secrets to your grave
Drug across your landscape and buried in your cave
You're piling up and out of sight
But trying to add it up just feels like counting shades of light
Call me when you breeze through to your appointments what you must do
Call me I'm collecting you
Hang it in my window let it complicate my view
The separation the glass of you
But I can paint this picture any way that I see fit
The art of pain the subject sits unmoved

TYPED

She shakes her head and looks at me.
"I still can't believe that. I just can't imagine it," she says.
We are standing outside on the wooden balcony patio of a club where we have come to see my first lover perform. I am talking to an old friend, someone I knew in my teenage years and probably haven't seen in over fifteen years.
"I just would never imagine that you would have married a soldier. That doesn't seem like your type at all."
"Why?" I ask her all the while thinking, I had a "type"? I ask for elaboration. "Because I was all 'peace, love, and -fff'-?" I make a sound of an inhale while holding my fingers up to my mouth, as if I was smoking a joint.
"Yeah, because of the peace, love, and fff..." she says, also bringing her hand up to her mouth as if she is smoking some herb, and laughing at me. Suddenly the years catch up with me, and I remember the girl she must be remembering, the one in long boot cut jeans and funky necklaces, hanging out with the long haired boys with a roach clip in my pocket, a Kerouac book in my hand, and The Beatles playing on a cassette tape in the car.
The funny thing is I don't feel like I have changed at all. I myself have been caught up in the dilemma of being married to someone who supports something I completely oppose. I would nonviolently protest his deployments but no one seemed to notice. I would stick a flower in the muzzle of his gun, if he was allowed to bring it home.
I don't support the war, but the war supports me, I used to quip while anxiously awaiting his letters home. Or, I don't support the war, but I support my soldier, while filling care packages to go overseas to an APO for sorting before being delivered to a base in the desert.
I never meant to marry into the military, and I tell her a story about how my college boyfriend was headed to the military until we got serious, and I told him how adamant I was that I would not be a military wife. He decided to go in another direction instead, and eventually I ended up breaking his heart anyway, to marry this man, this man who was NOT going to be a soldier but still had a contract for a few years with the National Guard. Then poof, 9/11 happened, and that which never happened before started happening - they started sending the National Guard, our "weekend warriors", overseas to fight the war on terrorism. Suddenly three of the ten years we have been married has been spent apart while he fights, something I don't believe in, for our "freedom".
At any rate, I am wondering what "type" of person she would have imagined me with. Would he have long hair and some kind of eclectic profession, some sensitive pony-tailed guitar player? I run through my top five loves in my head again, trying to determine if I had a "type".
Meanwhile we are there to watch one of those five perform with his band onstage. I was struck by something while watching him that I never noticed before, in all these years of rememberance of years past. There was something remiscent in his jaw structure, in his mannerism, his profile...Oh. I never noticed before how very much he looks like my college boyfriend. He makes a face a couple times on stage that was exactly like one R used to make to me sometimes. And I realize that maybe, just maybe, I had some kind of type there, some physical characteristics I was looking for without even realizing it.
Maybe it is a little unfair to lump them together. After all, their life circumstances and professional interests are completely different...
But for a moment there, watching him center stage, I think...maybe I did have a type after all.

TAKE MY HAND

A palmist who truly knows how to do a reading will look first at the back of the hands. They will attempt to a get a sense of the person's life by rubbing their palms while inspecting the back of the hands, the nails, the fingers, for signs of who this person really is.

If one did this to my hands, if I sought a palmist who knew their stuff, there would be a pause, and a question, when they got to my thumb.

The thumb, in palm reading, indicates anger. Fierce and terrible anger, if enlarged or disfigured, or other smaller subtler forms of aggression and assertion. Courage and fire, courage and fire.

Across my left thumb, there lies a raised and ugly scar. One almost doesn't want to touch it, and yet the finger falls towards it in the natural slope of the lower knuckle. It lies across the first, bottom half of my finger. What's this from?, one would question.

An image in my mind of the day it happened. I was in the kitchen in our cold and lonesome Northern California ranchhouse. I was looking out the window at the pastures, and thinking hard about my anger. My little baby son was in the playpen in the dining area, and I could hear him playing as I scrubbed and soaked. My hands were pressing hard, too hard, on the fragile glass cups as I raged silently about the fact that my husband was gone. Gone on yet another errand, which was supposed to take a half hour, and now here gone a half day with no phone call, no checking in, no thinking about how I must be wondering what happened to him.

This was before cell phones were common in this rural town where he lived, but he had just gone to pick up a female cousin to bring over to play with me for the weekend. She, too, had a kid, but she, too, liked to get into trouble, like my husband. This naughtiness that ran in the blood, tempting all. The girls loved their cigarettes and booze, and the men favored more reckless pursuits.

And I wondered, fiercely, where he was, and what kind of trouble he might be getting into, and I pressed so hard on the cup that it broke, and yet still I didn't realize it, with my eyes outward on the cold pasture ground in front of me. I just kept washing the broken cup, until I cried out and looked down into the sink and saw blood instead of water in the sink below.

And now no transportation, and no idea where my husband was with our truck. The little one cried and I was trying to comfort him with a towel wrapped around my bloody thumb as I fretted about what to do. I called my husband's uncle, a "first responder" for the local emergency response team. He had an ambulance on stand by as he came out to the house to inspect my wound.

At this time, there was no health insurance. We were barely scraping by in this tiny little town, just inside the county, and the poverty line. There was no extra money for hospital trips and even medicine.

He looked at my hand. "You could just bandage it and let it heal naturally," he said. "Of course, it's gonna leave a scar."

Or, he explained to me, I could ride in the ambulance to the nearest doctor and have them sew it up.

"That'll probably cost you around a thousand dollars, when it is all said and done."

Well, the logical choice in this situation, with no money and no way to get ahead, was to agree to let it heal on its own. And it did scar, a hard and nasty scar, like the one on my heart caused by frequent disappointment in the man I chose to marry.

That one I sought to heal, through counseling and compassion, through exercise and right intent, through eating and reading and all those Lifetime movies of retreat and escape. That one is the scar that never healed properly and so is glaringly visible to those who want to look inside, and so I keep it wrapped up.

Like a present you forgot to give and so keep stashed in a drawer, in a closet, waiting, someday, for the right moment to come again.

WASHERS

Yesterday morning on the Rob Ryan show, they were talking about the game of washers. Rob Ryan was saying he thinks that game was invented in Texas, and there is some kind of washer tournament coming up that he was trying to put together a team for.

I've never played washers, but I know what he is talking about. My memory took me back along the path of association to the dusty little town of Alpine, Texas, where pronghorn antelope graze on the hills surrounding the campus of Sul Ross State University, where my boyfriend of years ago was a student. It was evening, almost twilight, and we were standing on a hill in this backyard of a friend of his. My boyfriend was slowly and carefully tossing the little silver washers, about the size of a quarter, at a target at the other end of the yard. He was explaining to me how the game worked, and how he and his friends would come out here and play, and then I saw it, the dark cloud that passed over his face as he struggled to get a grip on his emotions.

This thing has happened and it cannot be undone.

The day before this, I had come home from college to spend my birthday weekend with my mom. She and I had gone out for barbeque, and we were just laying out the fixings for sandwiches when the phone rang. It was my boyfriend's father, and I could tell from the tone of his voice that something was wrong.

"There's been an accident," he said. My heart lept into my throat. "Noah's okay, but he's in the hospital." Then there was a pause. And? But? What? Then I thought of the giddy phone conversation the night before, how one of our high school friends had come to Alpine to visit Noah, how they were so excited about their plans to drive to Mexico the next day, this day...

"How's Brandon?" I asked.

"Brandon died."

I dropped the phone and walked off a few steps, hand over my mouth. My mother, hearing the clickety clack of the reciever on the ground, looked up. "What's going on?", she asked, as she came over to me. I couldn't talk, though, and just gestured to the phone. She got on the phone and there was a lot of "yes, yes, of course", and then she tells me to grab my things, that Noah's parents are coming to get me and we are driving to Alpine now.

We drove all night, the four of us packed in that little car under the stars. His mom and brother slept in the backseat while his dad and I tried to stay awake. I am sure I was driving them crazy singing along to the Indigo Girls, and finally when I hit a skunk in the wee hours of the morning and not only stunk up the car but got guts on the tires, they had it with me driving. We ran low on gas as the sun was coming up and waited in Fort Stockton at the only gas station along the highway for two hours before the man came to open the place. He wasn't surprised to see us at all, so I am sure he was used to customers doing that same thing (it is a desolate piece of highway).

We got to the hospital in Alpine mid-morning. As we walked in, I knew, I could tell, this experience changed him forever. His journal lay on a table in the hallway when we first walked in, and I flipped through the last few pages, and what he wrote in there brought agony to my heart. He was in the bed, bare-chested, but still wearing the torn and bloody jeans from the wreckage. I wasn't sure what to say to him, so I just curled up on the bed next to him, laying my ear in the hollow of his chest where it had always fit so perfectly. We used to lie in each other's arms like that all the time, and I would listen to his heart beat inside his chest and it felt like an extension of my self. This time, I was expecting it to sound different somehow, like the change he had gone through in his soul would be evident in his body. It sounded like the same old heart, and somehow that comforted me, made me think he was still there.

That day, he kept trying to bring the framework of his former life over his life now. He showed me his dorm room. This was only one month into our freshman year and we had been burning up the phone lines staying in touch, but we hadn't really gotten to show each other our new lives. He introduced me to his friends. We ate lunch in the campus cafeteria.

On the way out of the cafeteria, we ran into a woman who had been the first one on the scene of the accident. She happened to be an EMT as well, so that was helpful, only there was nothing she could do. While Noah turned away to talk to someone, she asked me how he was doing. She told me about driving up to the wreck, of seeing Noah running into the road in those same torn and bloody jeans to flag her down. He was asking her with desperation in his voice to please come help his friend. She had gone over to Brandon, but knew immediately it was too late. He had suffered a traumatic brain injury and had died on impact. The others who had been in the car with them had all suffered catastrophic injuries as well, and were life-flighted to the nearest major hospital. The details she gave are seared into my memory and created a visual picture for me of those desperate moments.

Later that afternoon, we are driving to his friend's house whose backyard we were playing washers in. We were still trying not to talk about it, try not to dwell on this recent tragedy, and we were singing along with the radio when "Spirit in the Sky" came on. I still can't really listen to that song without that connection, and tears welling up in my eyes.

So we are out there in the yard, and Noah is throwing the washers, and stops, realizing that this life he is showing me is now a past. There is now Before the Accident and After the Accident, and this moment is somewhere in between, the transition. I see the anguish in his face and it kills me inside.

"What can I do for you?" I ask him. "How can I help you?"

At first he gives me a one word answer, and it doesn't make sense.

"Time" he says.

"You just have to give me some time to get over this."

Of course. We were young and time went on forever. I could give him that. During the darker moments, later on, when he was self-medicating and pushing me away, I wondered. How much time is enough? I really wanted to know. I wanted someone to tell me. How much is enough? He went to counseling, took medications, but still he struggled, and we struggled. He was like Humpty Dumpty, and I was not all the Kings horses and all the Kings men. I was just a girl.

I was just a girl who was going to school many many miles away from him, and who was meeting new people and experiencing new things. I was a girl in a new life that became my life that he had little part in. Four years went by while we saw each other less and less, while the phone calls petered off, while we grew apart in our seperate cities with our seperate friends. No matter how much I had loved him, it was not enough to conquer time, time spent apart, time spent healing. Time was not on our side.

A few years ago, Noah and I were talking about that time, and he answered the question that no one knew the answer to until after it was over - how much was enough time? Turns out it was about eight years, he said. That's how much time he felt it took before he started putting his life back together again and moving forward.

Now it's been almost fourteen years since The Accident, and Noah is back in Alpine. I hope he is throwing his washers now and not trying not to think about it. I am sure he has other things to think about now. But I think about it, I think about us, and how we were like one of those perfect throws that falls in the dust just short of the target, and everyone says "ooo, that was so close." And we were. Before that time. A part of me will always love him, and he will always be dear in my heart, and my memories of him make me smile, like the song we once said was ours.

Think of me, think of me fondly

When we've said goodbye

Imagine me, once in a while

Please promise that you'll try

BEAUTY IS PAIN?

In one week, I will be on a beach in Florida, soaking up some rays and knowledge. I decided it would be a good time to use the rest of my gift certificate for the nail salon (see previous post - "Just What the Doctor Never Ordered). There is a good likelihood I will be getting some beach time with my friend from another work site that I might want to work with some day, so having professional looking nails seemed like a good idea.

This time the place was dead, so I had two women working on me at once, one at my feet and one working on my hands. They of course went for the upsale at once (see Anjela Johnson's Nail Salon jokes). They tried to sell me the deluxe package, which I declined, but then one looked up and suggested an eyebrow wax. "Show off your eyes, make you look pretty", she says. She then says something in Vietnamese to her coworker, which I think was a comment on my appearance, and the one working on my hands quickly looked at me with pity in her eyes, which guided me to think it was not flattering. I was not really concerned with this, and I mentioned to them that getting my eyebrows done "always hurts a little bit".

"Oh honey, but beauty IS pain."

My immediate thought was, So that's what I've been doing wrong these years! Which was a joke to self, really. In my honest reflections, I know that I am not as pretty as I used to be, and in my darker moments, I mourn the loss of my beauty. When I say things like that, people assume I mean that I don't feel good about my appearance, but it is not that at all. I am comfortable with what I consider as my "reasonably attractive" appearance. Like most people, I have good and bad days. I can put on the shine and look nice, and I can look downright ugly.

However, I can tell that I am not as attractive as I once was because of the way people respond to me. We like to tell ourselves we don't judge people on their appearance, but it does factor in to the way people treat you. People don't treat me the way they used to.

In my younger years, I learned how to use the power of my sexuality to get what I wanted from people. It was a trick in the toolbox of manipulation that I wasn't really aware of how to use until college, but then I perfected it. I would go to bars with no money in my pockets, knowing full well I could get drinks by flirting with men. My attractiveness worked on women as well, helping me to impress during interviews and work the networking ladder. It was especially helpful in getting me out of speeding tickets. I talked my way out of thirteen tickets during the years of my physical prime, but nowadays, the cops take one look and they start writing the ticket before I even start talking.

I know that some of it is age and life experience. I see the biggest differences in my appearance in my face and my weight. I can see it in my face most clearly. When I look at pictures of myself from five to ten years ago, I see how much smoother the skin on my face was. There is an absence of lines and blemishes that seem to appear around the time I had my first child and increase exponentially through the years despite my skin care regime. I am carrying fifty, sixty pounds more than I was back then, which I can blame on having two kids, my metabolism slowing down, the lack of a proper exercise schedule, poor diet, and/or my overriding desires for cheeseburgers. Stress and hormones haven't treated me well.

Even so, though, I don't feel bad about the way I look, I just notice things are different for me. I think there are nice features about myself that still get noticed. When I met Indy's girlffriend for the first time, she slid into the seat next to me and said sweetly, "You're really pretty." I smiled at her and replied, "Thanks, so are you!" I had put on the makeup and the nice dress that night, but most days I don't bother, because I am not that concerned with my physical appearance. I would rather someone find me I was smart or interesting than attractive.

Perhaps, though, these girls in the nail salon are right. I coasted along in my prime years off of what God gave me. I never really had to work at being attractive, and I haven't really ever endured pain for the sake of it. The closest I have come to feeling a true understanding that "beauty IS pain" might be some brutally intense physical workouts. I have an obsessive mind and sometimes it focuses on exercise, and during those times, I lost thirty to forty pounds pounding the streets, treadmills, and stairmasters of various gyms around town for a year or so before losing interest and moving on to the next obssessive behavior (which very possibly could be cheeseburgers again, leading me into some vicious get fit-get fat-and-back-again cycle).

I haven't sacrificed for beauty, and in some way in the back of my mind, I think maybe we shouldn't have to. I mean, what is the function of beauty anyway, as I am fond of asking? At the heart of this is a philosophical debate that I could elaborate on but will choose not to in the interest of brevity (brevity, she says? What does she know about brevity, laughs my inner jokester). In my opinion, the function of beauty is to find a mate. Does it really matter if anyone else finds you attractive other than your mate? Does beauty simply rely on external factors, or is it a combination of a number of features? Does beauty exist in a vacuum?

In thinking about beauty in the terms of relationship with one's mate, let me examine two statements made by my husband regarding beauty. One day we were looking through a tabloid magazine, and there was a page with several fresh-faced Hollywood women. He went through and pointed out which ones he found to be more attractive, who were not the more conventional choices. "You wanna know why I picked these ones?" he said, "It's because these women are smiling. These ones over here look unhappy. To me, what makes a woman beautiful is when they are happy inside, and you can see it on their face. This is a woman you want to be around."

I thought of another time he made a statement about beauty. Those who know our recent history have heard the story about our Great Flood Story, when we had to be rescued by boat when a river flowed into our campsite in the middle of the night. We had only made it to safety by pushing each other through the shoulder-deep water to our vehicle and climbing on top. As the waters raged around us, I held my ten month old baby to my chest, hair dank with river water in the dark of the night, and prayed that God would help us get out safely. My husband said later, "You never looked as beautiful to me as you did at that moment."

Clearly my husband has an unconventional idea of beauty, or perhaps he, as others do, understands that beauty is "more than skin deep", that "beauty is as beauty does", and half a number of the other cliched statements we make but yet have trouble living by. Over the recent years, I have come to see that my husband's attraction for me has less to do with what I look like, and everything to do with how I act. A smile and kind words goes further with him than fresh makeup and a tight sweater.

I went ahead, though, and agreed to a little bit of pain for my beauty today, telling them that since it was my wedding anniversary, I did want to look nice, and so perhaps an eyebrow wax might be beneficial. It does seem rather odd to me, though, that today's standards of beauty involve the removal of hair from places God allowed it to grow. I think if God intended for us to perceive beauty as freshly waxed, shaved, and plucked body parts, then wouldn't He just stop it from growing? Of course I am being facetious, but at the same time don't understand a society that places value on false appearances - fake tans, nails, breasts, hair. Why can't we be happy with the way God made us, individual yet all beautiful in our own natural way?
I could write an entire essay on what I think is wrong with cultural standards of beauty and how it affects women and their self esteem. But not tonight. Tonight I am going to shave my legs. I am going to style my hair, put on my makeup and jewelry, and prepare to go on a romantic date with my husband to celebrate our ninth wedding anniversary. I'm going to put on my cutest outfit and bring out my most beautiful self. Before I walk away from the vanity, though, I going to put on the finishing touch, the one last special touch - a genuine smile. It might be the sexiest thing I'm wearing tonight.

Wind of Possibility, Wind of Change

This morning, as I stood outside on the deck to feed the dogs, I noticed the wind blowing through the yard and thought there was something familiar about it. As I loaded my toddler up in the car to leave for work, I realized what it was, remembered where I knew that wind from.
It was the same wind that blew the night of a Halloween party I hosted when I was seventeen. I was out in my yard with Kevin. There were some other folks from the party outside, but that moment will always remind me exclusively of Kevin.
As the wind blew across my face, I remembered moments, like snapshots in time.
Junior high. Kevin had been my boyfriend, and one day while we were having lunch with his friends in the cafeteria, he had slipped his hand under my skirt and rested it on my bare inner thigh. It freaked me out, and I told my friend Chris about it, after which he dubbed him "Mr Scary". I had wanted to break up with Kevin because of Chris. There was always Chris during those years, my sometimes boyfriend and best friend. One day I decided there was enough reason, and when I told Chris, he offered to go tell him. There was a bit of drama, because instead of telling Kevin, he told a female friend of Kevin's, who kept saying "Kevin doesn't accept this breakup", which eventually erupted into a screaming match between Chris and her.
Day after eighth grade graduation. Kevin and his best buddy Stephen had invited me to go swimming at their neighborhood pool. While we were swimming, Kevin was being a little handsy and I kept rebuffing his advances, because I had yet another boyfriend. Later, Kevin and I were drying off on the stairs of the clubhouse. He was still flirting and I was still rejecting him, and as we played around, a friend of my boyfriend's walked up and acted like he had busted me.
Later that afternoon, I went over to Kevin's house with him and Stephen because he wanted to show me something on his computer. It booted up, then as the programs opened, an audio clip played, saying "Kiss me Keely". He looked over to gage my reaction and I just looked at him, "stop it already!"
Later that night, I got a call from my boyfriend's friends, telling me he wanted to break up with me because "he knew I had been cheating on him". I kept telling them to put him on the phone, "let me explain," but they wouldn't. I am pretty sure it was the same guy that had seen me earlier in the day and took the whole thing out of context.
It was okay, because there was always Chris, Chris whose picture I slept with underneath my pillow every night. I would take it out and kiss it before I went to sleep, then put it back under my pillow to give me sweet dreams. My mother found it when she was changing my sheets one day and she asked me, "does this boy know you sleep with his picture under your pillow?" My answer was along the lines of "I'm sure he wouldn't be surprised." Chris and I had gone out, and he knew I wanted to get back together, but my reputation as a heartbreaker prevented it. The halls of my junior high were littered with my discarded boyfriends, and he said he didn't want to be the flavor of the week again, that he wanted me to prove to him I could stay in a relationship that lasts.
So I spent the dreary summer dating the boy next door. Three months into it, and we had gone a month without seeing each other. I had been gone for two weeks, and when I got back, he was at a friend's house for two weeks. Apparently when I was gone, he had seen a letter I sent to my best friend, and he called me one night with one question, "Who's Chris?" My response was only "I think we should break up."
After that, it was high school, and football season, and Chris and I in love. His kisses were hungry and always had the threat of sex on them. We talked about it as a possibility down the road, but we both knew we weren't ready. Our relationship was one of hot heat, of fire, a passion for each other that sometimes erupted into fierce fights, arguments over the phone, in the hallways. Months later, I was sick of fighting with him and broke it off. A month later, I met Billy and all bets were off.
Next year, football season again. Billy and I had a traumatic breakup and I had been through changes in my soul. Chris and I spent every day on the phone. One day when I came in from a run during which I had been thinking of him, the phone rang. He was on the other line and suggested that we break off our seperate dates for the night and go out together. While I was talking to him, there was a knock on my door and that night's date was there. He came in and was giving me some apologetic story for why he couldn't go out. "It's okay, " I told him, pushing him out the door so I could get back on the phone with Chris, and that night we went to dinner, went to a party that I don't even remember, because we spent our time pressed up against my car, making out, with those hungry kisses and the possibility of sex, or getting back together.
We didn't, because the next night the girl he was supposed to take out showed up at my door and wanted to talk, and it caused a big fight between Chris and I that we never really got over, though the possibility was always there.
Halloween night, my junior year. I was seventeen. I was hosting this party and had brought my latest boyfriend over to the house for my mother to meet. He was fifteen and innocent, and initially I had thought I was going to take that innocence from him, the way Billy did with me when I was fifteen and he was seventeen. I saw the situation in reverse. When I picked him up for our first date, his mom had hugged him close when he was leaving, kissed him on the top of the head, told him she loved him, told me to be careful with her baby. He was still a kid, still mommy's baby, and I saw that as part of his appeal. I didn't want to take that from him. We had gone to see the laser light show downtown, and during it, he had taken my hand and we held hands all night. After the show, we parked at the neighborhood park and sat in the car in silence, holding hands and looking at the stars. That is the closest we ever got in the three months we dated. Our relationship was like a cloud, soft and pretty but nothing you could touch. If you got too close, it would evaporate.
On this night, he was inside toasting pumpkin seeds with my mother, and a group of us had gone outside. Kevin and I were running in the yard in the wind, and suddenly he tackled me, hiking his knee up inside my skirt. I felt it then, the possibility of desire running hot in my veins. "Do it again!" I laughed, and ran through the yard, him chasing me, then tackling me again, his weight across my chest, his leg hard between my thighs. I realized then I felt an attraction for Kevin, but he had recently acquired a girlfriend, Christy. "Crusty", I dubbed her, out of a sudden jealousy, and vowed to hate her, but I met her eventually and she was pretty cool.
There was always the possibility, though, that they might break up. I held on to that night in my yard with the wind, the possibility that time was still long, that anything could happen, that someday I might actually kiss Kevin and know what that felt like, that someday Chris and I could forget our differences and work things out.
When you are young, you have this feeling that there is always time, that someday those things might really happen. The future is unknown, and in it lay a thousand possibilities. I wondered in that yard that night what might happen in my life, who I might end up with, and there were so many options, opportunities, and one day those are just gone, the future is past, you are locked in to a present that may or may not offer those golden chances.
At my high school reunion, I looked for Chris, and I looked for Kevin. Kevin was in Dallas making audio clips for video games, and Stephen was there, showing me pictures of Kevin's wedding in Scotland. Chris was nowhere to be found. I have heard he is living in my hometown again, somewhere probably within miles of my house, but I will probably never run into him. I always think about him, and the chance we had that we didn't take, and sometimes I long to talk to him and tell him about how I married "him", a man that was so much like him in so many ways.
For now, though, I have the wind that sometimes blows in and brings these memories, the memory of "what was" and "what could have been", and the winds of change that brought my husband to me and my two children and my life now.

Sylvia, The Movie

Last night I watched this movie on the Ovation channel, where Gwyneth Paltrow plays the famous poetess Sylvia Plath in the story of her life. I kept thinking I was going to turn it off because it was past my bedtime, but between the story of her life and the book I was reading on the commercial breaks, I was completely sucked in.

At first what was intriguing me about the movie was her courtship with fellow poet Ted Hughes, the story of how they fell in love. It was making me think about a blog I read regularly, and a piece this week on whether or not women should settle. In my comment response to the entry, a point I was trying to make is that sometimes it doesn't seem like settling initially, but over time in a relationship people evolve, and a woman might find herself trying to make a decision whether to accept or not certain things that maybe were not present early on but became present during the years.

I had been discussing that idea further over lunch today with a female co-worker. I asked her if when she was walking down the aisle, did she have full belief that she had found Mr Right? Conversely, at this point, I am guessing about twenty years into the marriage, does she still think she has found Mr Right? I am curious about other married women's perspective on this. From my own experience, I know that when I walked down the aisle, I felt like the luckiest woman to be marrying that man. I had never loved someone so completely. Yet at this point in my life, although I still love my husband, I know and have known for years that he is not the best romantic partner I could have chosen.

In that respect, I really related to Sylvia's story. In the early phase of her relationship with Ted Hughes, it was great and golden. The movie shows them cavorting on the beach in the sunshine, taking boat rides, sharing a passion for poetry, supporting each other. Then she has a baby. She struggles with finding time to pursue her dreams in the face of motherhood and household responsibilities. She makes sacrifices for her husband's career. They begin growing apart, there is another child, and then there is an affair, and she kicks him out. I'm not saying I share exactly the same situation she did, but I do understand the disappointment of her relationship.

Gwyneth does an incredible job in this movie portraying the subleties of mental instability on Plath's part. My opinion is that Plath probably suffered from depression or bipolar disorder. She certainly felt things emotionally at a deeper level than most people, which I believe was responsible for her ability as a poet. This undercurrent that drove her literary success probably drove her to make the choice she makes to end her life. I know I am giving a lot of movie spoilers; however, if you know or read at all about Plath's life, you can't avoid learning of her death as well, and that is the part that really impacted me about this movie.

I was really bothered by the fact that her husband had gone to live with his mistress and she was left responsible for the two little children, despite the fact that he was quite aware she was not emotionally stable. I also got upset when I saw her making buttered bread and leaving that and little cups of milk in the room with her sleeping children, then seal the door. I knew what was coming, and I felt for those little kids, who would wake up in the morning with their mother gone from their lives forever. I could not relate. I would never make a decision that would take me away from my children who need me. I've been that depressed, but no matter how unhappy I have been with my life, my children are my anchors that keep me on the shore. I would never leave them, and their happiness, their desires, their needs will always come before mine.

When I finally came to bed, I was sobbing. My heart was breaking for Sylvia, for her children, for the fame she acquired after death, when the her husband published her last manuscript. My husband woke up and I talked with him of all the things I felt about the movie, and finally about my anger in the betrayal I saw in Ted Hughes, how he left her with those little kids knowing how she was, and my anger in general that love never stays golden and true, that most of my married friends struggle with the decision to stay married when love doesn't always match their expectations. Why is there so much sadness in the world? I lamented. Why can't men live up to our dreams? Why why why I asked, as tears streamed down my cheeks.

My husband said I should stop watching those movies because I know they get me worked up, and can't we just go to bed already? I went to sleep dreaming of Sylvia, and poetry, and the dream of the perfect man.