The girl with a girl's tender heart

She is not malicious. She is not calculating, she is not manipulative. She is not unreasonable. She is not making things up. She is not crying because she is trying to make you feel bad, she is crying because she feels bad.

Look at her. She looks like a girl. A woman, but we call ourselves girls. A mother. She is hard as iron, tough as nails. She endures like a mesa, bends like a fir in strong winds, stands upright after the storm. She is soft; she has curves, warm breasts, smooth arms, a nape on her neck that is made to be nuzzled. She is pretty. She has lips for kissing, eyes that can call for silence or snap and rage or fill with tears.

And she cries. A lot. More than she thinks she cries, because girls are made for crying. Crying and loving and holding people. And her heart is a soft, soft tender girl's heart. As strong as she is, as tough as she is, her hard hard heart softens at a moment's notice, and lets in the biggest baddest wolves as long as they talk gentle, move slow, and tell her the right stories. Because girls aren't made to be suspicious, aren't wagers of war or hostage negotiators. And it's too bad, because the hostages are our own hearts, our very tender not-lying-when-they-cry hearts.

Girls are amazing. There is no code; we are deceptively simple. We will tell you, in plain simple words, what we want. Love me. Be there when you say you're going to be there. Tell me what you want from me. If you listen, you can hear it. Don't complicate us; we aren't speaking in tongues. Don't pretend you don't understand. Don't pretend you never heard us. Just listen.

Just listen, and remember that inside the girl you are looking at is a girl's tender heart. Try not to hurt it. And when you have it, remember that she isn't very good at guarding her heart, so that will be up to you. That's a thing a man is good at.

Missed opportunities

I miss my little brother a whole lot today. I don't know why it hits really hard sometimes... I can go months without thinking about him much, and then every so often I'll have a really hard day.

Today I keep remembering the opportunities I didn't take. The time when he was 16 and he wanted to spend the night at my house but I didn't let him. The letter I forgot to send, when he lived in Seattle and I lived in Oakland and I was going to invite him to come spend a week with us but somehow I just got too busy.

The poetry I never shared with him. I didn't know he wrote poetry too, until his funeral.

I know it's not good to dwell on what would have, could have, should have been, but of all the things that have happened in my life, the only things I long to go back and change are the times I let a chance to connect slip by.

I don't miss the relationship we had, I miss the relationship we didn't have. Shit. God, let me never fuck up that badly again.

Oh, no. Not this time.

Things have been pretty good. Counseling has been helping.

But I fucked up, you guys. Oh no.

I fucked up. Something awful.

Look at what it's like

when it all come apart.

A couple of days ago he took off his wedding ring again. Handed it to me again. Tossed it, really. Again. In a casual gesture, like you would toss the remote. And I went after him again, again, again, even though I said I wouldn't do it again, couldn't take it again.

And we made up, again. I cried in his arms, again.

But I haven't put my wedding ring back on, and I haven't given his back. And finally I feel like my heart, my stuttering arrhythmatic heart, has been lacerated just enough or built up just enough scar tissue that this just isn't hurting so much this time. And all I can think about is how to get enough hours of work in so I can pay for the house on my own, and whether I can wait until our next therapy session to tell him I am done, and how to time it so the kids won't be around when he's packing.

It's not that he's a bad man. He certainly didn't start out a bad man. But being with me is making him one, and I can't live with this. He was inexperienced in relationships, and I am not a starter wife. I did the drama, the cheating, the threatening to leave, the ultimatums, the irrational midnight arguments with other people, when I was inexperienced. I have a good ten years under my belt of being responsible, the bill payer, the child taxi, the grocery shopper, the appointment maker. I don't have it in me, I don't, to stress about not being free. I don't have it in me to argue about responsibility. There is no argument. It is just there. Someone takes it. There is no room for resentment, no room for "this is not how I pictured my life". Life is harder than it seems from a distance. Parenthood is harder. Marriage is harder. We make choices, and sometimes we find out later that the choices we make lead to something that is a lot more challenging than we imagined.

That is growth. You can fight it, you can resent it, but you can't take back your choices, you can never go back to the way you imagined it would be. You can't keep punishing the people around you for the disparity between your youthful imaginings and the way things turned out. And if you do punish them, if you hurt them, you can't expect them to just bounce back, endlessly, forever bouncing back into your arms with a forgiving smile and a boundless libido. People are real, tender, breakable things that need to be nurtured in order for you to get nurturing back out of them. They are not computer programs that can be fixed in a day. If they are wounded, they need time to heal. If you pull open the wound again and again and again in your frustration, it will never heal, and eventually, if they have the choice, if they have a sense of self-preservation, it will override the love they feel for you and they will do what they have to do to get the respite they need to heal, even though it means walking away from you for good.