I grew up a very romantic little girl. I dreamed of knights and castles and eternal love proclaimed by jousting tournaments and royal decrees. My heroes were Lancelot and Rhett Butler and Captain Von Trapp as portrayed by Christopher Plummer. Love, to me, was Marion the Librarian singing “’Til There Was Youâ€, Prince Charming carrying a slipper made of glass around an entire kingdom or Johnny Castle taking Baby out of her corner and teaching her to do the Lift.
I had little experience with love’s realities. Even my biggest high school romance had something of the cinematic surrounding it. I was young. I was dramatic. And really? I knew nothing much at all.
It’s been over twenty years and quite a few transformations since then and those who love me most are STILL telling me that I have much to learn.
They have questions.
They are worried.
They do not, they tell me, understand.
How, they ask from all corners of this country, could I be here in this town, living this life, with this man?
See, they remember. They remember when my idea of love was someone so valiant that it seemed I was looking for a demi god. They remember the books I was always reading, the poems I was always writing and the dreams I had for my future.
It didn’t quite work out like I planned. I’m not beautiful or glamorous. I don’t have epic adventures. I’m not admired by all and sundry and, as it turns out, I’ll never be a mother.
And my friends worry.
In their concern, they ask me questions.
How?
Why?
Do you really think you’re ever going to be happy this way?
They question my relationships, my choices. They tell me something’s not right.
And more than once, someone has told me that God wants me to be happy.
I’ve tried.
Believe me. I’ve lined up every little tool I have in my bag of Church Kid tricks and I’ve tried to believe that this is true. I’ve tried to justify the things I think I want by telling myself that the One who Created me is Kind and Loving and Cares about my bliss.
But…
I can’t do it. I just can’t do it.
Don’t get me wrong. The God in which I believe doesn’t want me to be miserable. I’m not saying that life is made for drudgery and merely getting by.
I’m just saying that what we think of as happiness probably isn’t really the point of it all.
For example, I am sometimes tempted to ask my friends what would happen if my happiness derived from the cooking and eating of one of them. Would God then provide me with a big pot as well as all the seasonings and salts my taste buds required? Of course not. Some things are just wrong and we can’t expect God to just hand us over to them, even if they do provide us enjoyment.
My friends aren’t idiots. They know this.
It’s just that my friends can be very much like I am. We want concrete answers. We want resolved plots. We want neatly wrapped up chapters and it hurts when one of us is going through some kind of ambiguous limbo that seems to have no easy resolution.
Right now, of course, I’m the one dealing with the confusion. I’m the one experiencing the uncertainty. And in the absence of physical comfort, my friends offer me their words.
The problem, however, is that no amount of advice, however well meant, can really touch the core of this undertaking. Life in this little town, the manner in which I conduct my part of my marriage, the manifestation of my particular broken heart…all of these cannot be lived or honestly felt by anyone else but me.
I try. I do try to explain WHY I’m making the choices that I make and WHY I’m doing the things that I do, but I don’t think my words amount to anything more than noise most of the time.
See, my Kenny is many things, but romantic is not one of them. He isn’t anything like a knight, he’ll never feel for me the way Rhett did for his Scarlett and should he ever try to dance with me at a dinner, I would probably fall over on the spot.
It’s okay. I knew that he didn’t subscribe to such theatrical concepts when I married him. What I DIDN’T know was just how wide the gap between my dreaminess and his practicality would grow.
Because it has. Grown, I mean.
Over the years, my Mister has gotten more curt, more brusque. He has less time for anything not having to do with work or taxes or what must be done over the next time our office is open. Unfortunately, that “anything†often includes me.
I’m not the only one, I know. Kenny tells me stories of his aunts. Strong women they were. Independent too. Though married, they often lived and worked in different cities than their spouses, only living as a couple on the weekends.
Me? As you may have guessed by now, I’m NOT strong. I’m NOT independent. I can do wonderful things in my “me timeâ€, but I will never truly be a Sims, sending my life’s partner off on a train, knowing I wouldn’t see him again for a work week or more.
I know. I know. Compared to military wives or women married to men who run companies and help rule the world, I do not have it hard at all. I’m not a woman in an impoverished region with a husband who was killed for being the wrong race or religion and children taken away to be turned into soldiers hardened much too young.
Believe me. I know I have it easy. I’m in the United States. I have the freedom to worship where I wish, or not to worship at all if that was what I choose. I have a computer that, while acting like a cranky, complaining old woman, still allows me to talk to the people I love who are scattered all over the world. I take shameless advantage of the fact that my boss is also my husband and I can do or not do many things according to my whims.
I’m blessed. I know this. This richness begins to slip through my fingers like an overabundance of coins every time someone raises the possibility of my pursuing someone else or chasing something new.
It’s not as if I haven’t thought of it myself. Believe me; in my daydreams I lead a hundred different lives a minute. It’s just…
What my friends don’t seem to understand is that leaving this man isn’t just leaving this man. It’s leaving a world, a life, an entire existence.
They tell me I’ll be better off.
They tell me that I’ll finally have a chance to be loved the way I need to be.
They tell me that with someone else, I could have what I want most, a child of my very own.
They grow impatient with me when I cannot intelligently reply. Logic, coherence, the simple stringing of words together…these have never been my strong suit.
If I could, I’d tell them of my guilt. I’d tell them of the girl that I was raised to be, the one who doesn’t leave, ever. Even with a broken heart. They know, of course. They blame it on a religion, a denomination, an upbringing. They even blame it on the interpretation of the Scriptures which I have been taught since infancy.
They tell me to think for myself. They tell me to form my own opinions. Their concern makes them more harsh, perhaps, than they mean to be, yet I still question it. If I were to leave this life just because I am being urged to, would that not make me be doing the same thing that they are accusing me of doing now? Blindly obeying someone without independent thought? I want to say this sometimes, but I don’t. I know how frustrating my Laura Petrie, fifties housewife demeanor can be to those raised in the post seventies demands for authority and equality. I know I’m an anomaly amongst my group. Even WERE I to begin some kind of breakaway journey, I still would not be understood. So I thank them for their advice. And I try to remember that their lives, their choices are not mine.
They can never, for example, call themselves princesses without meaning it sardonically. They do not understand the extent of the protective bubble that has been wrapped around me. They know I do not drive. What they do not know is how afraid I am to attempt most ANYTHING that is out of my ken. I can help breakdown something by Frost or Browning for you more easily than I can cook you a dinner. I am not helpless (as is pointed out to me with increasing frequency), but age does not equal experience, at least in my case.
See, were I to go, there would be much about me akin to a baby bird falling out of a nest. I am not someone to whom calm is an emotion easily achieved and panic would be my ruler for a very long time.
As I said, leaving this man means leaving a life. An existence. An entire ecosystem, if you will.
Our lives are twined together fairly well by now. To separate would mean losing my friends, my church, my job, my society. And forgive my skepticism, but much of me does not believe that the proffered help would actually appear.
And I do not care to be stranded.
You can GET another job, I have been told.
You can get another love.
You can get an apartment, a car, new friends.
You can even find a church, if that is what you care to do.
Really? Are you sure? Is what I want to reply. And yet I don’t. My friends are well aware of my fears. They know that telling me that someone, somewhere, even now is longing to love me, build a life with me and give me children is just going to provoke blank stares and disbelieving shakes of my head.
It’s true, my friends insist. There will be a job you love. There will be a car you can drive. And there will be a family. A real family, to give you the love you need.
See, that is a big word in our conversations. -Need-, I mean. It’s a word that cuts and hurts.
Because, you see, just as guilt is one of my struggles, just as trying to divide what is merely tradition and words of man from what is true and what I actually believe is something I’m currently burdened with, so to is the concept of want vs need.
The man I married, I am told, the man who is supposed to love me above all else, is not meeting my needs.
And yet. I am fed. I am employed. I have a roof over my head. I have more clothes than some people will see in a lifetime. There are days when I have ice cream running out of my nose and chocolate running out of my ears.
But, they ask me, don’t you want a real home? Don’t you want a place of safety, free from the ambiguity of your current arguments? Don’t you want a baby?
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Of course.
But there is that word again.
Want.
Just as what makes me happy changes from day to day (and sometimes minute to minute), so too does what I want. I can’t even decide what to watch on TV without flipping from show to show most nights. How then could I decide on a whole new life?
And whomever said that a baby was a NEED anyway?
There is fear, of course. Fear that no one will ever love me. Fear that my friends are wrong and that the man I am with is the only man who could exist with my moods and my variances and the sins that my mind constantly whispers that I commit over and over.
There is fear that the words are right and I AM a person incapable of the kind of love which I have begun to desire. There is fear that I will never be wrapped in someone’s arms as if I were the most precious thing in the world and that time will never be allowed to slip away as if there were no meetings to be attended, no ringing phone to answer.
There is fear that what he said standing in the kitchen is correct and that I AM too selfish, too given to my own whims and vagaries, too familiar with the emotions that drive me to my bed to ever lovingly raise a child. There is fear that I have become so driven by ego, so unaware of the thoughts and feelings of others that any mothering I attempted would be haphazard and neglectful at best and harsh and abusive at worst.
Besides, love, at least the kind of love which is often held out to me as being something which I could attain, is only a want. Do I not already have everything I truly need? And more?
It is not as if I have not been dissatisfied before. It is not as if my heart has not previously been broken. It has. And yet. Am I not still here? Will I not still be here should I make decisions that contradict my friends worried, yet well meaning advice?
They love me.
And I love them.
And yet.
They cannot hold my heart.
They cannot look at me as if I were the most precious woman in the world.
They cannot hold my hand and lead me to a new job, a new love, a new universe. They cannot even assure me that there IS a new job, a new love, a new universe.
Stop wanting guarantees, they tell me. Stop wanting to know where the road ends before you take the first step. Just…walk.
And yet.
I try. I love them.
They love me.
And I try to listen. I try to take their words to heart.
They see me hurting.
They see me feeling unwanted, undesirable, unloved.
And they want to help.
So they put on their thinking caps. They give me their best advice.
And they do not understand why I don’t take it.
They cannot understand. This is not their man. This is not their world.
I do not see myself as they see me.
They are not reminded, for example, that no matter how great the hurt between us, this is still my man. This will always be the man that God put in front of me that day in 1992 to be my husband. Kenny was in that place, at that time, to marry me.
No matter what happens, I will always believe that.
I am not saying, my friends tell me, that he doesn’t love you. I am not saying that he is not heaven sent. He just is unwilling or unable to love you THE WAY YOU NEED TO BE LOVED.
That phrase. That word.
Need.
Need. Need.
None of us, right now, are able to properly define it.
Even after endless nights
Of endless discussions
We still cannot tell you what it means.
He loves me.
He was sent to me.
We know that for right now, that is not enough.
We know that soon,
Decisions must be made.
But we cannot tell you what must happen.
We cannot tell you exactly
How to ease the sadness
How to dry the tears
How to let love in
Someone loves you, they tell me.
And yet, they don’t know that anymore than I do.
And they are not the ones living this life.
They can hold my hand.
They can lose sleep.
They can cry and pray and urge
But it’s not their bodies
Not their words
Not their man.
I’m hurting them.
I don’t mean to.
I’m hurting him.
I don’t mean to do that either.
It’s killing me in fact.
I do wish…with all my heart…
That I could see things his way.
That I could be all about the things that he is.
That I didn’t need to be taken in someone’s arms and rocked
Until I felt safe.
That I didn’t have so many fears that I literally pull the covers over my head
And weep
Until the storm passes.
I wish I could be as sure as my husband.
I wish I could be as wise as my friends.
But I’m not.
I’m full of doubt
And fear
And uncertainty
And a history
Of changing my mind.
So I don’t know much
Of what it is I want.
I do know that:
More than a baby,
I want love.
More than being a mother,
I want to be safe.
More than a family
I want to be someone’s only
I just don’t know why I can’t see it when he tells me I’m loved
I just don’t know why I can’t believe it.
It makes me feel awful.
Like maybe my fears are right and I don’t deserve happiness
Like maybe I’ve been so self centered over my lifetime
That I can have no more
So they give their advice
They tell me time is running out
They ask me why I’m not moving on
Toward love
Toward happiness
Toward a baby
And I cannot explain
I can tell them I’m afraid
Yet they do not understand why
I tell them I’m unsure
They ask me to take a leap of faith
I want to ask if it doesn’t take just as much faith to wait…to listen
But my friends are all about action
They want me to just do something
Well
I don’t know what I’m going to do any more than they
I may go crazy and refuse to speak anymore
I may dress in white and hand out flowers promoting peace
I may give myself to every man I see
I may become so immersed in prayer that I become no good for anything on earth at all
I may actually follow through with what I’m always saying and go around hitting people over the head
I just do not know
I know that I want love
I know that I want TO love
And I think that sometimes that love is not a Want, but is a Need
But I cannot tell you where to find it
I cannot tell you where I’ll look for it
My friends wonder, I know
I wonder too
And worry
And weep
And grieve
And yet I know that I love him
I just wish
I just wish
I just wish
The heart holding that love
Was able
To love him enough