Stephanie Says.. Take a walk inside my head

This One. This Man. This Love of Mine.

I was fourteen the first time I fell in love. Ninth grade was a very heady time for me. We were reading –Romeo and Juliet- in English class. We were working on –West Side Story- in Musical Theatre. And I was chasing after someone who was chasing after my best friend. Soapy? Yes. Dramatic? Yes. But it fed right into my boy crazy, drama queen tendencies and helped pave the way for the rest of my overly emotional, “…but…but you just HAVE to love me forever and ever” adolescence and young adulthood. I came out of that year the star (at least in my mind) of my own little reality show. In truth, I was no more special or unique than any girl going through poutings and pangs, but I loved him. As much as a fourteen year old can love anyone, I loved him. And though it was one sided and I acted in ways that now cause my older, more experienced self much grief and embarrassment, we are currently friends of a sort. And every now and then I flash back to our lunch breaks and the way my classmates and I would giggle, believing that we knew, really knew about love.

The second time I fell that deeply came when I was seventeen and a senior. It, too, was (in its way) a heady, romantic year. In class, we were reading –The Once and Future King-. We were putting out a school newspaper. And, once again, I was chasing a boy, believing I knew everything there was to know about love. I didn’t, of course. I knew something of heartache, something of loss, something of packing up a life and moving from one country to another and back again. I knew something of the pressure a girl can put on herself when she is being schooled with bright, driven young men and women all looking beyond their own campus to future opportunities that would take them around the country and even, in some cases, around the world.

On the back side of Christmas Break, I learned something of what it meant when the boy you had been dreaming of, chasing after and journaling about looks at you one night and decides to kiss you. But still, though I was sure that the most romantic year I’d ever known just HAD to be a sign of something predestined, I knew nothing of love.

And now? Well, to be honest, I’m not so sure.

Indulge me for a minute, will you? Travel back in time with me to a place called 1992.

If you have read my previous entries, you will recognize that date.

1992:
The year I graduated high school and moved to yet another state…this time to Kentucky, where I still remain
The year both of my mother’s parents died, plunging my family into deep grief and an inability to help each other that lasted well beyond the twelve months of that particular calendar
The year I began college, introducing me to people who are now dear and trusted friends for whom I will be forever grateful
The year that someone decided to put his hands on me, causing a deep seated belief that I had literally lost my mind and could never trust my own instinct or judgment again

And, of course:
The year that seventeen year old Stephanie met a twenty eight year old man who is now her husband

It was not, in case you were wondering, love at first sight. I was still coming out of my Year of Beau, still dreaming of a combination Lancelot, Rhett Butler and Heathcliff. I was about to enter over a decade of believing myself hopeless, helpless and insane. He was in his third year of professoring and thought of me as “The New Minister at Church’s Little Daughter”.

Two years later, after Kenny had moved away to graduate school and I had begun a life of college during the week and my parents’ hometown on the off days, we were a couple. Some months after that, I was beginning another romantic senior year. This time, however, instead of being kissed and sent away by the boy I was chasing after, I was wearing an engagement ring and dreaming of dresses, flowers, vows and cake.

The problem, however, was that I still knew nothing of love. Because of this, I began a new life that was troubled almost from the moment Kenny and I began envisioning it.

See, here is something that most people do not know-or have forgotten: Kenny married for love. I did not.

Are you shocked? Do you think me some kind of manipulative user? Do you want to stand up for my man and call me a liar and a deceiver? It’s okay. That’s what I was…to a point.

Manipulative? Yes.

User? Yes.

Lover? Well, to answer that one, you’ll have to define “love” for me.

Did I love him? Yes. Yes, of course I did. Even as young as I was then, I knew that there-right there standing in front of me-was the man that God had put down into my world, my own personal little world, to marry. I knew him to be smart, and kind, and faithful and hard working and protective. And I knew that he loved me.

I, however? I was, in my own way, using the man.

See, with the grief over losing our loved ones and the confusion over moving from country to country only to discover that finding a place where we landed was not going to be very easy, came anger. My people are not quiet, like Kenny’s side is. We have feelings and we express them somewhat freely. We are tightly knit. We are bound together. But we are not afraid to emote. And we do a lot of it.

A year out of college, five years after my brain rolled out of my head and about twenty months into being engaged, I couldn’t take it anymore. I loved my family, but I couldn’t live in that world. Our hurts and hearts were colliding and no one was being healed. Enter my Mister.

I had had other options. My best friend’s cousin, for example, offered to set me up in a trailer, hunt me squirrels and give me many many babies. As my best friend’s cousin was barely of age and had never worked a day in his life-and I kinda wanted more than he was offering…oh, who am I kidding, I wanted a LOT more than he was offering- I hastily declined. (He was in prison and in between wives the last I heard, if any of my single friends want to follow up on THAT lead.)
Kenny, though? Kenny wanted to marry me. Kenny wanted to MARRY ME. Kenny STILL wanted to marry me after our wedding day talk in which I told him I didn’t and couldn’t love him and he replied that he was okay with that, that he had enough love for the both of us.

It was the perfect line. It could have been scripted, it was that romantic. And suddenly, there he was, my man, the spouter of perfect lines.

And we got married. And we had a blissful almost month long honeymoon in which the real world only intruded during infrequent phone calls “back home”. I was a princess. I was a Southern Belle. I was beautiful and charming and very very young.

And still, I knew nothing of love.

DID I love him, I can hear you asking. DO I love him now?

Well yes, yes, I do. And no, no, not in the way you mean.

I was nineteen when Kenny and I first began to be seen together. He taught me everything he could think of. He stood me over the sink and handed me peanut M and Ms one by one until I could swallow them whole. This was his way of combating my lifelong conviction that I just couldn’t and wouldn’t swallow pills. He had me practice pouring catsup until I could start my own portion and didn’t need to ask anyone else to do it for me.
I was in awe. He was smart. He was confident. He was capable. And I was very much in hero worship mode. True, he didn’t fill my car with roses like my brother did for HIS girlfriend. He didn’t plan scavenger hunts that ended in surprise picnics. But he loved me. He was the strength I ran to when my family was fighting again. He was the calming influence who almost singlehandedly planned and orchestrated our wedding because I was a blubbering mess through both the rehearsal and the ceremony. He introduced me to people like Styx and let me dance around his living room singing “Crystal Ba-a-a-ll”, not even minding that I was badly out of tune.

At twenty three and newly married, I was STILL in hero worship mode. The problem was, I was often in hero worship mode alone as Kenny was still working on his doctorate and teaching at two schools, trying to be a new husband AND caring for gravely ill parents. Several years ago, in one of our relatively drama free moments, we decided that if we had it to do over again, we probably (had we been thinking) would have waited AT LEAST until he had gotten his PhD and some of the pressure was not choking the life, and love, our of our brand new togetherness.

For it was. We were under tremendous pressure. I was isolated much of the time in a town where, though I had lived here for college, I really knew no one who had not graduated and moved on. Kenny was on the road in a ninety mile triangle trying to attend to teaching, his mother who was, it turned out, not going to live much past our honeymoon, and me. By the time he got to me, I was angry and bored. It was not an auspicious start.

Still, we thought, five years later after having attended funerals for at least ten close relatives and friends, including both of Kenny’s parents…still, we love each other. We have a new house to fill with memories. Surely we are past the worst of it.

And we were right. In a way, we were. What we didn’t count on was that little girls grow from twenty three to thirty in ways that men aging from thirty three to forty do not. Suddenly, the hero worship goggles began to chafe. Kenny and I began to fight over things we never thought we would…and believe me, our first five years were doozies. He had an office to escape to when things got bad. I had nowhere to go, nothing to do except pace the hallways growing madder and madder.

I loved him…at least, I thought I loved him. I couldn’t understand why things were getting so much harder. I was hurting. I was dying for some kind of change, but honestly? I didn’t see a way out.

The way out came, as ways out often do, in a most unexpected place. A tiny little town named LaFollette, Tennessee came calling at just the right time. Kenny had a friend who wanted to buy a small print shop and needed someone to partner with him. He thought that Kenny might be the right person for the job. He was right. Kenny IS the right person for the job. What none of us foresaw, however, was that in getting Kenny, the shop got me too. Suddenly, we had a common goal. We had something to strive for. We had a reason to work together. We were happier. We fought less. I had a reason to test out my latently developed grown up skills and Kenny was able to stretch and expand his abilities and creativity in ways he had not been doing as a man teaching about computers.
Still, even then, though I had learned more of love and the twists that lead off in unexpected ways, I did not fully know it.
I still do not know it.

Kenny and I, as you may have observed, are stretching once again. Once I hit thirty, once I was able to find counselors and companions whom I could fully trust, I slowly, very slowly, began to grow away from my husband. Some of this amuses him. Some of this, however, leads to conflict the likes of which I had thought we put away years ago
.
If you ask me, I’ll tell you that we fight over typical things:
He cannot, for example, seem to put his things away and implores me not to touch his office, for, though it is a junkpile to me, it is a finely organized mess to my husband and he has everything just where he wants it.

Or, take for example the way we communicate:
I like stories. I have a co worker with whom I frequently converse. It has literally taken three days before to reach a conclusion of one of my tales as I tend to meander off into stray paragraphs here or lost sentences there. Kenny? He believes in the fewer words, the better. Perhaps it is because he expends so much of his energy on his students, but, by the time he returns home to me, he doesn’t want to hear my chatter. I have literally had to tell him…please be quiet. You are NOT going to be interested in this, but you are the only person I have to talk to right now, so I’m telling it. I will let you know when I have made my point and you can talk again.

This is typical. There are often messy vs neat and quiet vs rambling people in relationships all around the world.

Some of what we fight over, is less typical but not unheard of. I was, as I have said, raised in a somewhat freer emotional state than my husband. We talk over each other. We cry. We tease. We laugh. We love. We hug. We like our puns and our inside jokes and we have been known to say “It’s a Hall thing. You wouldn’t understand.” Somewhere along the line, however, I absorbed into myself a need to be loved on. It wasn’t as if the people around me DIDN”T love me, it was just that I needed to be TOLD and SHOWN such.

My husband is not a shower. My husband is not a teller. He is not my father, bringing flowers and chocolates on both holidays and just because. He is not my brother, coming home to play with the children so that his weary wife could rest. My husband is an “I feed and clothe and shelter you. If I didn’t love you, you’d know it because you’d stop eating” kind of person.

So he loves me, yet we fight.

Again though, this is not unheard of. There is a whole series devoted to finding the way individuals both receive and express their loves to spouses and children and the world around them. Some hug. Some clean out garages. Some bring in just because bracelets and necklaces. My husband feeds me and keeps a roof over my head.

And yet.

And yet.

I am no longer twenty three sitting alone in a trailer on a hot summer day. I am no longer thirty standing at the door of our new shop helping my husband greet customers. I am four decades old. I am still trying to figure out this love thing.

Do I want to scream?

Sometimes.

When I think I’m trying to express why I’m hurting and how what he said made me feel yet he thinks I’m bringing up something from the past to punish him for a slip of the tongue that he can’t even remember?

Yes, I want to scream.

When I start to cry and he asks me what’s wrong only to hear the answer and turn away with a “Haven’t you gotten over that YET?”

I want to scream.

When I approach him for affection only to be told that, “kissing is stupid. Wouldn’t you rather have supper?” and “Of course I love you. What makes you think I don’t love you? I feed you, don’t I?”

I want to scream. And hit things.

When my friends say, “but you jump. You run. You are so friendly with people and like to talk. Your husband, however? He’s so…boring. Aren’t you bored?”
I want to scream at him to do something, not remembering that the twenty hours a day he works-the very things making him so sleepy at home- were part of what I considered pluses when I was younger and knowing deep down that I wanted someone faithful, someone people could trust.

So, do I love him?

Yes. And no.

It’s not a Guinevere kind of love. It’s not a Cinderella kind. It’s not the kind of love that my brother and sister in law have. Kenny and I aren’t romantic. We aren’t domestic. And I’m only a princess in my own mind.

Yet.

For every time he tells me that only stupid people watch the television shows that I do, only to not understand that saying that is to call ME stupid
There is the time that the heater went out during my shower and Kenny boiled water on the stove so that I would not be cold while rinsing the shampoo out of my hair. It was the –Out of Africa- moment I’d dreamed of and one of the sweetest, most perfect things anyone has ever done for me.

For every time I cannot make plans because we don’t know if one of the local funeral homes will need us to print cards or we don’t know if the machine will act up running a new order

There is the time that I stayed home from work in order to meet up with some of the girls and see a movie. When they couldn’t make it, Kenny drove back from Tennessee, took me by the hand and presented me with a date, even though he knew going in that it would be a movie he hated. He was right. It was. He took me anyway.

It’s not unusual, of course. Every couple has a story. Every story includes likes and dislikes, happy surprises and broken promises. Almost every couple goes into their relationship thinking that they know love, only to realize later that they really knew nothing at all.
Not every young bride grows up the way I did. Kenny was my twenties and soon will have been my thirties. Twenty years is a long time for a young woman. Even one who thought she knew of love.

What do I know for sure?

Not much, really.

I don’t know what is going to happen.

I don’t know if I will forever be sad over not having babies.

I don’t know if I will always be looking to my husband for affection he just cannot provide.

I don’t know how badly my heart will continue to break.

I don’t know if my melodrama will influence him any more than I know if his coolness will influence me.

And yet.

This is still the man who held me all those afternoons ago while I was crying.

This is still the man who told me he wanted to marry me no matter what.

This is still the man who said he had love enough for both of us.

This is the man I have used.

This is the man I have idolized.

This is the man I have learned from, the man I followed, the man I chose.

This is the man I have married.

This…this is the man I have loved.

Even though it is something of which I know
Not much.

Not much, it turns out,
At all.