love and relationships
One of the themes that runs through The Girls from Ames (which I just finished last night) is dating, finding the right and wrong men, marriage, divorce and more dating. As far as women have come, and I am told it’s a “long way, baby”, much of our lives is eaten up in the pursuit of coupling. The author notes the “girls” boyfriends and romantic ups and downs as far back as elementary school.
I don’t have a romantic past that stretches back that far. I crushed on guys certainly as a girl and teen, but I was shy, very fat and too ambivalent about the whole thing for there to be much to talk about. College was pretty much the same. I thought, and I don’t think I was unique, that someone would just “find me”. See me walking or in class or dancing in a club and know that I was the one for them. I hung hopefully on the edges and, of course, nothing happened. The few times I stepped up and laid my cards on the table – I was rejected – which is ironic when you consider that by stating my feelings and intentions openly I wound up married – twice. I was ahead of my time, I suppose.
One of the women in the book, Karla, was married and divorced with a baby in her mid-twenties when she met her second husband. It was one of those “just sorta knew” relationships. The other women in the book hold her relationship up as the ideal. It certainly is a meeting of partners where each one is more concerned about the other than themselves and see downs times as just as normal and necessary to a relationship as up times. Ebb and flow. If you can’t float a boat on both, failure is a given.
Two things that dovetailed this morning, one was an FB status update about Camp Widow. Some of my FB friends belong to a bereavement group that holds yearly “conventions” to deal with widow issues. Two of their speakers, according to the update, will be talking about the “how” of recoupling. There is a “how”? Specifically? Hmmm. And I read a widow grog that seems to be mostly about dealing/rebuilding and much of what the bloggers there write about are the disappointments and challenges of rebuilding. The post today dealt with the anger and frustration of dating again. Mostly about comparing. I am probably just revealing my too practical side here, but why compare at all? Or make lists?
One of the girls in the book divorced in the last five years and is searching for the kind of marriage that Karla and the others seem to have. Operative word being “seem” and has a list, comparison dates/shops. But how can you find someone when you after assessed yourself and let go of who you were?
That’s key to moving on and new love, isn’t it?
I didn’t compare Rob to Will. Even if there had been a basis for doing so, I made up my mind to put Will and our relationship in the past. Nothing good would come of my trying to recreate that time or using my old self as a basis for future happiness.
There is the sutra argument that our true selves are eternal. Regardless of our current perceptions of who we are, which is based largely on the world around us, we are always us deep down. It’s necessary then to not rely over much on past actions, relationships, and such, as touchstones. The past has limited use in determining present day direction.
I knew long before Will died that I needed to be married again. I felt unfinished in a way that transcends the ability to put the feeling to proper words. There was someone out there and I was meant to love again. So when the time came, I put Will in his place in my past and I left him there. He had no purpose in my future. He was done, another piece of my foundation.
One of the things I loved about Karla’s story was the way her second husband, Bruce, totally embraced being her daughter’s father. I am puzzled by people who don’t dive in as a parent or people who refuse to allow their new spouses to be parents. Like a child can have too much parental support and love? My own opinion is that a potential spouse who can’t love your child isn’t a good pick and that children aren’t mature enough, or have the ability to see past their self-centeredness to know what is best for them sometimes. Loving a person with children means committing to parenting too. Otherwise, forget it.
All the talk – on blogs and talk shows and in books – about the need to be single, find yourself, learn to be you, blah, blah, blah – is directly contradicted by the fact that we spend most of our lives searching for love, maintaining/nurturing love and lamenting/longing for it when it ends. I don’t think this is a dysfunction. It is human. Alone is not the norm though it certainly can be unavoidable given the way society works anymore.
I identified with the girls in the book who felt there was something wrong with them as teens and twenty-somethings searching, putting their hearts out there and being rejected. I know better now. There is nothing wrong with me. I was being me and the rejection wasn’t personal really. It was steering me – too slowly it felt like – to where I was meant to be. We can be so impatient. We think we are ready and we’re not, or we think we need someone who is merely a want. Needs and wants stubbornly don’t match up a lot because our true selves are hard-hearted on our behalf.
I totally believe that we choose our destinies for whatever reason yet to be revealed and that it’s the human imposed perception of time that keeps us from realizing that we have so much more time in the larger scheme of things. Even if I live to be 110, the years are a blip in terms of my true self’s existence. The time I have spent on this plane with Will and Rob is just a drop in the bucket of the time our souls know each other, and we must carry little bits of each other around or else how would we know each other again?
Forgive the rambling. I am in the throes of yet another allergy attack. Two nights in a row. It appears I am allergic to cleaning solvents which is going to make cleaning a challenge and avoiding them in the world a priority – though how I am going to manage, I haven’t quite worked out yet.
I would love to hear your thoughts on the whole love and relationship thing. Without them, do we have lives at all really?
He thought about her often. Time being so much on his hands to the point where he felt the urge to nudge it forward like an awkward child who shies back from a room of strangers. Though he hadn’t fallen so far that he lacked willing couriers, he solicited them only to send final missives to his sons. Notes which could cause no great harm if fallen into unfriendly hands for not even his enemies could begrudge a father his last words.
His tower cell looked over the deserted yard and out to the Thames where he tried vainly to drown her image. She’d married finally they told him. She was safe, he heard.
It was nearly two years since he last touched her. Soft and smelling of roses fresh from the markets of Calais. She’d found him, hiding in the dank corridors near chapel, crouched low, hands folded, thumbs indenting a time-worn brow.
“Time is past for prayers,” she said.
He didn’t look up but opened his eyes to the fullness of a sky blue skirt so close he had but to release his clasp and gather her to him like the air.
Once was a time he’d have slipped beneath the folds and run rough common hands up to delve royal treasures well-known. Instead, he reached out a tentative finger, briefly catching the pleated fabric between index and thumb before pulling back to monkish misery. She was beyond his knowing and they both realized it.
“It’s all I can do,” he replied.
He expected her to chide him over his failure of conscious, his weak-kneed capitulation, but she did not. Her grasp of the complicated was as grounded in survival as his own.
“She sends this,” and she dropped an English bible at his feet. It fell flat and hollow, the sound echoing down the drafty hall. “She faults herself only she says.”
“Kindness out of character for her, methinks.”
“Kindess is all the vengeance left to her.”
He looked up. Her pale moon shaped face pinched in places and tear swollen in others in comic effect that nearly cracked his own matching facade.
“I’d heard she’d turned over that leaf,” he said. “Perhaps she is not so shriven as she gives out?”
“Do not jest with me, Master,” her reply worn and thin. The last days have been long and though near over, she is spent like a farthing in the hands of beggar.
“I’ve missed our little assignations,” he countered in a dipolmatic tone that marked him courtier but with eyes that belied the disinterested tone.
“You’ve heard? You’re angry?”
“No,” he said. “How could I ever be made angry be the practical choice. Practicality is the foundation of my life. It is nearly my motto and I daresay will serve me as a fine epitaph.”
“Do you ever want, Tom*?”
He gathered a handful of her gown as she stepped nearer, her fingers playing tentatively through his salted locks.
“Modestly,” he admitted.
“Or wish?” tone more hopeful.
“Not at all,” regretting the cold water as soon as it tripped the tongue.
“Why breath?” she asked.
“Why indeed Mistress Mary,” he said. “Should you puzzle it out, share your revelation with me.”
“And more,” she agreed, slipping away from his grasp until only her shadow caressed his own with the whimsy of a ghost.
A stained wood block tore his gaze back from the water to the courtyard below. A beggar would find himself poorly mounted astride my wishes, he thought. Cold seeped into his forearms and up through his resting chin, chilling his memories as he noted the gathering crowd.
Grey, as though it knew her melancholy, the sky clung to its tears. It wept but a little for her sister as she recalled, stingy when it might downpour and damp the moment called for more.
She stood alone on the parapet. Hooded cloak concealing only so much of her identity as to not arouse suspicion. The times balanced precariously on princely whim and temper. In the yard, she noted the ugly mood and the grimly satisfied visages of the lords in attendance. Little did they know they disservice they did themselves this bleak morning.
He stumbled a bit as he made his way to the scaffold. She wondered that he wasn’t bound for humiliation’s sake. She hoped he would make a noble end without tears but knew that he would not. He left much behind and he was not such a man that his many regrets wouldn’t rise up to choke him at his end. He bent not a whit for his enemies, scowling and impatient for his end.
“I die a good true Catholic and his majesty’s most humble servant who I beg all to pray for so he should continue long and in health,” he spoke to the small crowd as if he were at Parliament, catching unwilling eyes and noting attendance though he did not glance up to see her.
Stepping to the block he knelt before it as if it were the altar and bowed his head to pray before gripping it either side with a soldier’s steeled nerve.
“I pray you all to learn from me,” he said. “Want modestly, but wish upon stars. Had I done this, a happier man I would have undoubtedly been.”
The blade landed to high to be true, the crack of skull followed shortly by a soft gurgle as the axe was lifted for a second stroke. She turned as his fingers clutched convulsively before going slack.
*I’ve been reading Hilary Mantel’s delightful Wolf Hall. I am a Tudor junkie and am well read on the time period, but Cromwell is more often than not a footnote or a very minor character. He is usually portrayed as a self-serving villain, but as the Tudors had a habit of rewriting history to suit their purposes, it’s hard to get an accurate picture of who he was and what might be true and what was merely invention by his enemies after the fact. Mantel’s novel is startling in its compassionate view of him and the hint of a romance between Cromwell and Mary Boleyn (Queen Anne’s older sister and mother of at least one of Henry the VIII’s bastards) caught my fancy though it would have been a very unlikely thing to have happened.
This is so not done. The roughest of drafts and I really envision it as short story that tells about their affair in flashback.
anniegirl1138 