Everything Good Between Men and Women

"...has been written in mud and butter and barbeque sauce."

This was the beginning of the poem my husband gave me on Valentines Day.

You might be sick of Valentines by now.  The holiday, full of its chocolatey, stuffed-bear and balloon cynicism draws to a close tonight, and I have a dispeptic belly-full of cheap jewelry ads and schmaltzy marriage proposal stories. 

But the mystic in me finds it hard to hate a day that remembers how central love is to our existence.  Remembers that all the world for love may die. [Ben Jonson] Love, in all of its iterations, is reason to exist.  Ok - a bright pink stuffed bear has not nearly enough gravitas to make it real.  I'd submit that a half-pound of dark chocolate sea salt caramels just might. 

But love is real.  Realer than anything else that drives us.  Here is what I know, today, about love:

Love is the husband who calls his wife driving home from the city in the middle of the night, just to keep her awake over the miles.

Love is the husband who jumps up later that night to get a bowl for a feverish wife who feels like she's about to hurl.

Love is the husband who makes the kids heart-shaped waffles on Valentine's morning and lets his wife sleep until 8.10 when he absolutely-has-to-really-must-leave.

Love is the husband who posts a poem that he knows will break his wife's heart in a million (mostly good) ways as a gift, right out there for all of Facebook to see.

Love is the husband who leaves work after a quiet, miserable call from his sick wife.  Leaves work, arrives home with laptop in hand and plops himself on the floor to build a marble maze with three cabin-feverish kids.

It wasn't your standard Valentine celebration at the Yellow House this year.  But oh, it was filled with love!  The kind of love that makes days, weeks and months into rich and full lives.  Not happy perfect filled-with-glitter-and-champagne-and-swanky-dates lives, but lives filled with Quality.

Surely we can't hate a holiday that celebrates that.

The Tightrope

Random fact: I am completely obsessed with tightrope artists.  Funnily enough, this doesn't come up often in conversation.

This weekend, friends shared with us that they have hit a bit of a rough patch in their marriage.  Along with the heartache that quite naturally springs from a revelation like this, I was left with a vague sense of imbalance.  I went to sleep troubled, and woke with the vivid image of a tightrope walker on my mind. 

A tightrope stretches in front of each of us, in any relationship that matters.

You begin your journey in confidence.  Of course you step out in confidence!  How else could you be convinced that this was a reasonable undertaking, if not for your blind faith that you absolutely have the skills and abilities to reach the other side?  As you inch your way out over the chasm, your confidence is so great that the twist of rope beneath you feels as solid as a twelve inch plank.

You get a bit further out, and the winds pick up.  Maybe it is a single gust, that blows you momentarily off balance.  Maybe it is a steady breeze that makes each step, each inch forward a challenge. Maybe your legs simply start to tremble.

Whatever the reason, all of the sudden you are wobbling, way out on this woven cord with nothing to hold onto. Every rule of tightrope walking tells you not to look down - never look down - but maybe it's the looking down that made you start to sway in the first place. Maybe you took your eye off the far side, and started focusing on your toes curling around that stupid skinny rope instead.

So you're wavering, and you know good and well that you are the only person who will steady the rope. It won't happen by looking down, it won't happen by flailing your arms around helplessly. The only thing - the only thing - that will stave off disaster is a change of focus. Pulling your eyes up, and finding the far side again.

Maybe some of us won't be able to pull it back. Maybe some of us won't be able to withstand the buffeting wind, or maybe the sway of the rope will have gotten too far out of control. Maybe all that can be done at that point is to consciously look down, to keep looking down, and believe with all your heart that the safety net of those that love & care for you will be there as you fall.

Some of us...some of us will make it through those vicious winds. Some of us will find the steadying stillness, and we won't be sure quite how we did it. The only way through the swaying is to continue: stopping - standing still - is simply not an option. 

So, whilst I've had that vague swaying feeling all day, having heard my friend's news, I will choose to continue along the journey on my own rope, stretching out over the void. Inch by inch, my toes will creep across the twisted cord. 

I have to believe that my friends' toes will keep them moving across the rope too. If not, I sure as hell am one of the people who make up the net underneath.

*********

There are millions of blogs out there - funny, frank, or starkly painfully honest - that will freely discuss our failures as parents. But I find that when it comes to our failures in relationships, we are less able to open up, to admit that we are wavering.

Just for today, let Your People know that you love 'em, no matter where they are on (or off) the rope.

Capacity

I had a chat with a friend of mine today, about God-given gifts. I do believe we are given these gifts by the Divine. And then I sort of think that the Divine sits back, grabs a cold beverage, and waits to see what we'll do with them. (Rooting for us all the way, of course.) Let's just say I don't believe that the Gifts come with receipts for exchange or return.

So. God-given gifts. Turns out my gift is the capacity for great love. (Not great lovin'. Although maybe that too. I just haven't had enough wine to blog about it.)

Ahem.

Great Love.

This is the space in your heart to love someone - be it spouse or friend or sibling - with the depth and breadth of all emotion. Maybe it could be described as Super Loyalty: an unfailing belief in my people, regardless of missteps, ill-chosen words or outfits, even the most awkward of moments. (What? Kiss me and then vomit on my new shoes? No, I'm sure you didn't. I don't remember that at all!)

But this capacity for love can be crippling. Because to love that much? It hurts. And it is never more painful than when you are watching those you love grow, change, and do all the painful things that humans must do to become more - to get bigger according to the Existential Size Chart of The Universe. It hurts to be along for the ride, even if you're not the one doing the growing that particular day. Did I ever tell y'all about the year I grew 8 inches and woke many nights with searing pain in my limbs, as I literally felt my legs stretch into a 34" inseam? These are the same searing pains, just in your heart.

But equally, when you experience love this deeply, you will also live with transcendent joy. You will feel the moments of gut-busting pride, the seconds of evanescent enchantment when happiness trumps all, when dark and sad and bleak become mere grease stains on the hem of delight's napkin.

Come Monday, I will put my eight year old on the bus. I will send her to a new teacher, and trust my girl's sensitive loving heart to go out in the world and come back intact. Then, I will take my five year old and my two year old by the hand and we will walk a trail and look for the first signs of autumn, and I will show them "how this life became a miracle to me."

I came across this Dar Williams song this week - a friend posted it and commented that ''this is for all those parents sending their child out into the world this week."



Again and again the chorus muses "so when they ask how far love goes/ When my job's done, you'll be the one who knows."

This is what I do with my gift: I show them how far love goes.

Fourteen

They didn't think anyone was listening.  Two waiters, gossiping over the canape trays whilst they waited for more bruschetta and mini quiche.

They're so cute, aren't they??
Yeah... they are.
You know, a lot of these gigs you totally know the couple's not going to make it past five years.  But this couple?  You can just tell they're going to make it. They're for real.

Two catering waiters, maybe working a summer job to get back to Georgetown in the fall.  They passed judgement on this young couple, in the midst of the happiest night of their life, passed judgement without emotion, without investment.

What they didn't know was that the best man stood directly behind them, waiting to refill his gin & tonic from the secret stash in the fridge (woot! for non-alcoholic weddings).    He heard them, and his heart swelled.  Because he knew too - he knew this couple was the real deal. He knew that they would fight and they would cry and they would laugh - laugh so much -  and they would be broke and they would be rich.  They would be rich in all they needed.

He knew they would make it.  And on the eve of their 14th anniversary, he emailed this:  "happy anniversary my dears. love you guys!  you have - and are going to - make it."

see the brand-spankin-new wedding band? ooh, shiny!

Happy Anniversary - happy anniversary to the man who makes me laugh, who makes me crazy, who is my biggest champion and my very best friend.  This year we earned it, my love.  May fourteen be the smallest drop in a huge bottomless bucket of anniversaries.

Long Distance

Generation X doesn't have many claims to significance.  But, if pressed someday, I will say with confidence to my kids "my generation was the very last one to conduct a relationship through the mail."

It's a unique thing, a long distance love affair managed through envelopes, stamps, ink and paper.

There's the long wait for something to arrive in your mailbox.   There's the initial disappointment when said letter is only one page, two pages, maybe a stack of pictures and not many words.  (No matter how long, it is never long enough.) There is the breathless devouring of the contents, searching for magic phrases and inspired ideas that will remind you of why you're so crazy about this person.  You hunt for the ambiguous phrase, the ones that will stay with you for days and days as you wonder 'did he mean that?'  "if he meant this, then surely he meant to imply that?!"

There may even be a turn of phrase that confuses you - sends you down a rabbit hole of doubt, confusion, misunderstanding.

But here's the thing: the only resolution is your letter in return.

You might have stewed for days, about this little phrase.  You might have obsessed long into the night over what the words meant, specifically.  You have turned it into a proposal, a rejection, or a double entendre, just depending on the hour of day.

But when you write back, you have to play it cool.  You have to keep all options open, whilst trying to make your meaning clear between the flowing lines of cursive.  You play with words, you offer several scenarios, without committing to any of them, all the while trying to craft a letter to triumph all letters - the one that will get the true meaning out, the one that will be the ultimate love letter.

With each successive missive, you do the same thing.  Over and over - until the letters get gradually shorter as you get closer to meeting in the airport, the train station, the bus depot. 

There is an enforced delay, between dropping the letter into the red postbox adorned with Air Mail stickers and a variety of stamps and the m.a.n.y. days whilst you wait for response.  The delay in which you wonder if you made yourself clear.  In which you wonder if he'll answer the Big Question that you'd tossed in there so casually.

It's nothing less than Art, this long-distance relationship.  And it's an art that my kids will never know.   When their time comes, when they meet a heart-breakingly gorgeous Scandinavian who approaches English in a whole new way, they will have Skype, text, email, instant messaging.

Actually, who am I kidding?  By the time they're doing this, Skype will seem as antiquated as the rotary phone. My kids will never be forced to imagine what might be going on in a continent 6000 miles away, will never be obliged to craft a whole Parallel Theory of Post Feminist Romance from the book Grapes of Wrath in an effort to not be obvious, will never be forced to wait for days and weeks to find out if you bared your soul to the right person.

Those relationships will always miss something that mine had. Has.  The alchemy of paper, words, and distance:  the stuff that romance is made of.

I Feel Pretty, Oh So Pretty...

There's not really a cool way to say this, so I'm just going to dive in:  I felt beautiful today.

Now, I just clicked through 4692 photos taken today that say otherwise - in the photos I saw the Me that I see most days. The Me that has taken a bit of a beating in recent years - the Me with dark shadows, weird skin, and more double chin than I'd like to see.  The Me that has clearly had far too many short nights, far too many early mornings, and just a few too many glasses of wine.  The Me that hasn't had enough time to work out, and way too much time sitting still during potty training (them, not me.)

Nonetheless:  today I really felt like one of the prettiest girls at the party.

It wasn't my outfit - although it was just fine. It wasn't my makeup - although I did take the time to put on eyeliner.  (Woot!)  Sure as heck wasn't my genetically cursed hair.

You know what? It wasn't even just me that noticed.  An acquaintance stopped me after church and told me that I looked 'just radiant' today.

Then, later, I got an email from a friend (one who'd also been at church).  It said "you...and your family positively radiate love. It makes me smile."  And the light bulb clicked on. 

The thing is, it wasn't anything physical about me that looked at all different today.  What was different about today is that I went out into the world knowing in the deepest parts of my heart that I am loved - and that equally, I have a tremendous amount of love to give.   

This has transformed me in ways entirely unreachable by any plastic surgeon's instrument, and in ways entirely unaltered by losing ten pounds or by purchasing a new dress.

Love has changed me - it has made me beautiful in all the ways that matter.