Descent from the summit

‘I think you are the sweetest, kindest, dearest, loveliest, most thoughtful, best looking and most loveable girl in the whole world. I love you with all the strength that is in me.’
-Dean P. Stiles to Marion E. Davison, April 1945

‘What I want to convey in this note is that my thoughts have been filled with you constantly since Sunday night and that the days have seemed dreadfully long, I’ve missed you so. Already tonight I miss you voice. Somehow the day doesn’t seem complete. I wonder where you are and what you are doing. Are you thinking of me? I love to spend my waking hours each day running over and over again the things we have done together, the things you have said to me and to recall every wonderful moment you have been in my arms. I do believe I remember every little detail. Yes, I even remember that the big toe on each of your feet is relatively shorter than the one next to it.’
-Dean P. Stiles to Marion E. Davison July 1944

‘Can you keep a secret? You can? Well, I love you, sweetheart, so much in fact that these words form with my every breath. May my love for you keep you warm and close to me. I’ll be with you soon.’
-Dean P. Stiles to Marion Davison July 1944

All these love letters and twenty something years worth of birthday, anniversary, Easter and Mothers Day cards, stored away in boxes all over the house. Love. It can be so ephemeral! It can build you up and break you down in a day. I found a card sent from my Grandfather Dean to my Nana after twenty something years of marriage that read on the front- “Can we get together on this?”. When you open it up there is a picture of a bed and it’s signed, your loving and hopeful hubby. He sent it from the post office in their town to the house they shared. Weird. And sad. And damn if history doesn’t repeat itself!! My husband hasn’t had a regular sex life in years. Poor guy… Anyway, the infamous story is that when my Grandfather left my Nana, he threw a book at her that he had bought full of new sexual positions he hoped they could try. My Nana was crippled with arthritis and probably depression and my Grandfather was sexually frustrated and unhappy with the way his life had turned out. Love in all its new beginnings is so Utopian but loves’ decline is anything but idyllic.

My husband told me last night that he’s been spending time with a woman he met. Not official dates, just getting together and talking. I didn’t feel a shock or jolt of pain. I felt calm and actually happy for him. Huh. I mean that says a lot right? But I also have some excitement going on here so maybe that’s why I’m so OK with it?
This guy that I fell head over heels in love with during a summer spent in Oregon eleven years ago, recently opened a FB account just to find me. I mean this guy……… I haven’t ever really gotten over the sense that I missed out on something big with him. Total unrequited love. He, (I’ll call him J), had a girlfriend when I met him but the draw we felt towards one another was so strong that he told his girlfriend he needed to spend time with me to figure out what was going on. She gave him her blessing and I’ll always admire her for that very strong and difficult decision. We only spent time alone on two occasions and kissed with sweet longing and immense restraint. We jumped into a freezing lake and collapsed laughing and shivering on our towels. We lay on our bellies, shoulders touching and talked for hours. On the drive home that day he reached silently across the car and ran his fingers down the entire length of my arm to my fingertips. I can still remember how my arm tingled and practically burned from his touch. Then she recanted and made him choose. He chose her and rightfully so. I was devastated and spent the last three weeks crying myself to sleep and slept with some dude who was just that- some dude. At the end of my last day of work at the resort lodge, I called the bellhop service for a ride to the golf course where the car I shared with friends was parked. Who should show up to get me but J. I walked to the back of the shuttle van, the only passenger in there and sat with arms crossed in the very back. He drove me in silence for most of the way and suddenly pulled off to the side of the road practically skidding to a halt. I can’t remember if he turned to face me or if he spoke to my reflection in the rear-view mirror but he told me that he needed for me to know, with out a doubt, before I left, that the decision had been very difficult for him and that he cared for me very much. That he thought about me every day even though he couldn’t call. He delivered me to the golf course, I hugged him goodbye, flew back to Boston the next day and that was eleven years ago.

He ended up marrying her. She asked for a divorce a few years ago. Now he writes me out of the blue and our emails have that same veiled excitement that our conversations did all those years ago. The excitement that comes from wanting and finding yourself able to discuss anything and everything with a matched wit, imagination and intelligence. Then he tells me in his last email that he has a girlfriend out there that he got together with shortly after his divorce, who followed him from New Orleans to northern California. He intimates his unease at not feeling sure that she is the one he wants to marry and have children with. She wants this with him and he wonders if he is being unrealistic and selfish in holding out for that ‘mind bending’ love as he calls it. Oh man… My heart fell about three stories when I read this. He has a girlfriend. Pffffft. But then this is the shit I’ve been thinking about and writing about every day for years now, so you can only imagine the lengthy email I sent out in response.

I don’t want to be let down again. Nor do I want to be used like a sandbag on his scale so he can determine how much he loves this woman. But I also don’t want to let him slip away again if this is life yelling in my face. Maybe as we communicate more I’ll realize he’s a total dork, or he’s way into God, or he’s too straight laced for me. Or maybe I’ll just tell him to get some balls, take the reigns and come for a visit to New England.
But just as ephemeral as love can be, it can also suddenly sprout the most tenacious roots that declare permanence. It remains to be seen what will happen between J and his lover or what he wants from me. Just one more thing for me to add to the list of uncertainties that make up my present and future. This afternoon I will continue to immerse myself in the lives of my grandparents, whose future has already become their past, the last chapters already written. THERE is something I can hang my hat on-a future that I know awaits me with absolute certainty: a final chapter. Here’s to a damn good read until then!

I too have a dream

On NPR this morning a Reverend Kyle noted that so often pioneers don’t live to walk the trails they blaze. Kyle was with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the day he was shot. My mind skipped back to something Elizabeth Gilbert said on ‘The Exchange’ the other morning, about marriage and how in essence, we are all pioneers of modern marriage right now. She said that we really only have two generations of women to model ourselves after, who have married with equal rights and choices. And because of this marriage is still evolving and we are in the thick of it. I nodded my head in agreement over the sink of dishes I was tackling. This is partly what I touched on in one of my earlier blog posts: that the multitude of choices women have now can negatively affect our success in long term relationships. I just hadn’t thought about it the way she presented it, that we have so little in the way of role models, that we are the pioneers. It would make sense then that women can feel so lonely and isolated in their desires for an alternative kind of marriage or for freedom from their marriage simply to pursue some of these choices we now have. Choices that guide us closer to ourselves. In our great grandmothers day, it was bona fide scandal if a woman left her husband-especially if it was for another man. Depending on where she lived and who she was, she could lose her children, reputation and social standing for choosing selfhood or passion over wedlock. Wedlock. What a terrible word. Implying that there is a lock holding two together, also implies that there must be a key. Who is the holder of the key? I wonder if I will ever get to pioneer by example before I die. Will I ever test or achieve the relationship I envision? Will I see in my lifetime the necessary major shift of consciousness surrounding marriage? I wholeheartedly support wanting and having a till death do us part relationship. I think cohesive, successful ones greatly benefit society. Our society’s inability to adapt it’s thinking and teaching of marriage will only allow for its continued decline. History has taught us so many times it’s hardly necessary to point it out again, that failure to adapt results in extinction. So why don’t we start with early education. Teach children that a ‘normal’ marriage might consist of two people keeping separate bedrooms. Not for a lack of intimacy between them, but in the interest of achieving intimacy with themselves, to satisfy a need for personal space, to provide a retreat, a place for expression through the chosen color of paint, textiles, artwork etc. A ‘normal’ marriage may work best when the couple sees each other one or two weeks out of a month. A ‘normal’ marriage may facilitate sabbaticals so to speak. I would like children to learn that monogamy and marriage are not about owning another person literally or figuratively, that it is about supporting and helping your loved one live a fulfilling life that is guided by an internal compass and expecting the same in return. I would like to steer love and ego in separate directions- like state and church they shouldn’t be mixed.
I have the basic outline for what I consider to be the New Marriage but I still need to meditate on the fillers. For example, teaching myself how to be productive and self reliant when my lover is off on sabbatical or, back it up, when I am newly dating and waiting around for that phone call, that assurance I am so used to seeking. I realize this is all big talk from some one petrified of even dating! One of these days it will be time to step down from my soapbox and conduct some trial runs and I imagine I will fail more than once. The early American settlers lost many lives to the winters of this strange new land and we all know what atrocities the survivors went on to commit. I pray my own errors will not wipe out any chance my children have of achieving healthy love. If I do not ever get to walk the trail I am helping to blaze, I hope that my children can, that at the very least the path if not paved, will be well trodden.

Thumbs Up Party

Today while driving my husband to work ELO came on the radio and my four year old son announced from the back seat that his two and a half year old sister was, "having a thumbs up party." Sure enough a glance in the rear view mirror confirmed that she was in full party mode, thrusting a thumb up on alternating hands in perfect rhythm. Not only was I impressed with her musicality but I was jealous that she could feel so much unbridled joy at 7am on a gloomy, cold Bavarian day. I had a million things on my mind and the weight of the screwed up world on my shoulders. NPR came on and summed up the VP debate. Then the generally depressing round of reporting on various world events. Then we're at the gate and I flash my ID to the guards and drive on into another world. Our Base has doubled in size in the last year and the number of single soldiers has more than doubled. At least it feels that way. Every where you look there are young men and women in their ACU's. Many of them are participating in 'exercises' and are carrying machine guns with helmets on and lower lips full of chew. My son calls out eagerly when he spots a gun and I think to myself for the umpteenth time- "How the HELL did I end up here?"

In June of 2002 I was living in NYC just managing to make ends meet and feeding off of the creative energy that abounds in that magical city. I was held up at knife point in the upscale bathing suit store I was working at and quit the next week. I was renting my own wing of an apartment in the upper west side of Manhattan from friends of a friends parents for $500 a month. Try finding that anywhere in the city. The same week I quit my job they told me their daughter and her new husband were moving back home and I'd have to find somewhere else to live. I didn't have any money saved so I had to leave the city. There's usually a silver lining and mine was that I reconnected with an old friend and casual lover and this time the chemistry was undeniable and unrelenting. He had already signed up with the Air Force and was about to leave. We consumed one another as new lovers do and then he was gone.... Over the next year I waited through basic training and then he went to tech school and we could talk and write letters again. He came home for christmas with this new wiry, muscly body and sadness in his eyes and my heart couldn't accept being without him. We decided soon after that visit to go monogamous and I went out to visit him on the Gulf Coast for valentines day. When I arrived at the small airport I didn't see him and started down the escalator to the lower level. A huge bouquet of yellow daffodils was thrust in front of my face about half way down and I felt his kiss on my neck. After some hemming and hawing and a summer spent in a tent so I could save money, I moved to his first duty station in Belleville ,Illinois. Now two things I had promised myself were that I would never work at a fast food chain or live in the mid west. And there I was. We lived in a tiny house off base and I got a job tending bar at a couple skeezy joints and he was working all kinds of crazy shifts. We made love two or three times a day most weeks, got in terrible drunken fights and started getting to know each other bit by bit. Six months into it I was pregnant. Being young and idealistic we decided to have the baby and get married. Then came the orders to Germany which we had both pushed for and when our son was 8 months old we moved across the ocean. Two months after arriving I was pregnant again and very nearly had an abortion but my husbands eagerness to have another baby rubbed off on me enough for me to change my mind.

That's the epidermis. The dermis is that I had quit my jobs once I became too sick from the pregnancy and I didn't have any friends in Illinois so my days were punctuated by the coming and going of my husband's little red car. I would loiter in front of our kitchen door window until I saw that flash of red. During the days I would invent errands for myself to get out of the house. I was for the first time since leaving home, fully dependent on someone and it didn't feel totally right. After all I certainly wasn't thinking about marriage and never really felt that stereotypical urge that women have to 'be taken care of'. I had left behind a very full and fulfilling social life and family support network and wasn't able to share my changing life and body. After the first baby was born I remember a lot of new parent bliss and the isolation became more bearable as my days were filled with the new wonders of a baby. I finally made a good friend with a baby around the same age who was as laid back as I and who could sink a glass of wine with me in between nursings. Then we moved to Germany and the next baby came which I really wasn't ready for. She was a screamer and I had a very busy toddler and most days felt exhausted and overwhelmed. I let the baby cry a lot and felt a lot of resentment towards her. Then I felt guilty because our bonding wasn't happening as effortlessly as it had with my son and I worried that she would be an unhappy person because I let her cry so much. Those were dark days. I didn't want to make love, kiss or even to be affectionate with my husband- that lasted nearly four years. I felt like a part of myself that had once been so healthy had sickened and died. The guilt was endless-knowing how much hurt and insecurity I was causing my husband sent me on a downward spiral. I never felt like I had enough for anyone let alone myself. Again I made one dear friend and this time she left me about half a year after my daughter was born.

Trying to insert myself into military life and the things that wives do has been like the old square peg in a round hole saying. The isolation got worse and the depression got worse. I had lived a prior life full of amazing friends, artists, musicians, thinkers, doers, questioning, seeking, creating and supportive people. Now my social life revolved around the occasional work function where none of the young 20 something single soldiers were interested in my mind or what I might have to say. I am a spouse and a mother and it stops at that. I felt myself slipping farther and farther away from an identity that I could be proud of. My marriage was falling apart and had been for a long time. I started to internally shoulder all the blame for this and all of my unhappiness. One night found me wailing and sobbing and a mantra escaped- " I hate myself, I hate myself.." I had one brief thought that everyone would be better off without me and that was it. I made an appointment the next day to see a doctor on base, sucked up my pride and asked to be put on an anti- depressant. I am of the opinion that Americans are over medicated and I had just read the report that the waste from Americans is full of by products from anti- depressants and is affecting the water life. But my husband was preparing to deploy for six months and I couldn't mess around- I was about to be a single parent and could not risk being that depressed. I asked to be put on Welbutrin because I had read that in some clinical studies it was shown to improve sexual disfunction which I hadn't been diagnosed with but I certainly wasn't functioning like I wanted to in that department. I started the medication and my husband shipped off. We didn't make love the night before he left and our parting was thick with sadness and relief.