After all the folderol and hauling over coal stops, what did I learn?

I often say that I don’t see any point in defining myself by what I am not, but thinking about it, I do exactly that all the time, when I compare myself now to myself in the past. I’m less emotionally reactive now, I think to myself, I’m not as attractive, I’m certainly not so promiscuous or as prone to falling in love. I’m less exuberant. I’m less argumentative, and not so damn certain I’m right.

I don’t think I want to define myself that way. I don’t want to define myself by what is absent, but by what is present.

So here is a list of a few of the things that I am more of.

1. I am sadder. This might not sound like a good thing, but in a profound way it informs almost everything else about me; instead of shoving my sadness into a corner, to break out and overwhelm me when I can no longer contain it, I let it be. I acknowledge it, and it coexists with my other feelings.

2. I am more moderate. I have gotten better at seeing multiple perspectives, and to appreciate that there often is more than one truth, as well as more than one way to look at things. While there is value in going hard, there is also value in going steady, and for now, I am finding more pleasure in going steady.

3. I am more vulnerable. With my sadness right out in the open, what do I have to lose by letting people see it? If there are multiple perspectives, what do I have to lose by trying on someone else’s? If error is an important part of how we learn, what do I have to lose by finding out I’m wrong? I have nothing to lose, but I stand to gain a lot.

4. I am more strong. I know that every heartbreak, little or big, is another bump in the road, and that I can grieve and feel lost when I need to feel those things, but ultimately I will persist, I will survive, and I will feel happiness again.

5. I am more present. It’s not that I don’t have hopes and dreams and plans for the future, but the future will have unexpected changes, some wanted and some unwanted. The path will diverge and it will almost certainly not be the path I imagined. I can’t predict other people’s actions or feelings or thoughts; I can barely predict my own, and I have a lifetime of experience at being me. So, I can feel certain that things will happen, good and bad, and they might be things I can influence but they will almost certainly not be things I can control. I can do my best to take care of the things that need to be taken care of in my life right now, including myself, my children, and my friends, but that is all I can do. And that is OK.

Ultimately, I am still me, and that is not going to change. My temperament is what it is; probably not set in stone, but probably to a pretty large degree determined before I was born by the fabulously complex assortment of alleles given to me by my mother and father. I can see both of them in me, and some elements I cherish while others I’m not so keen on. That isn’t to say that I am without choice; just to accept that the foundation is what it is, and how I change as I get older is more likely to be small shifts in the expression of the essence of me-ness, not the formation of a whole new me. So I am still exuberant, enthusiastic, passionate, opinionated, assertive, intemperate, and stubborn; just maybe, hopefully, a mellower version of all those things, a better version of me.

Snapshot in a shoebox

Where to start

This is not a sobstory

20 ish years ago I met this teenage boy, and somehow sitting mostly silently in a room with this boy I fell in love with him. It is important to note that I was not much older than a teenager myself.

One night he confessed to me that he did not like girls his own age very much. I said, perhaps you should try dating older women? I was all of 22. I meant me. Stupidly, so stupidly, I meant me and hoped that my hint would somehow take, or that I would somehow get brave enough to tell him. I was kinda dating someone else, but it was a rebound and I was ready to move on, I thought. Two days later, the teenage boy was dating my best friend. And a year or so later I married my rebound. End of story.

No, that isn’t the end of the story. Of course it’s not, why would I even write it if it was the end? That would be pointless.

Several years later, I divorced my rebound. I had two children. I was a 30-year-old mom. And the boy… the boy was single again too, living with another good friend and one day, I realized that I was still in love with him. Of course, it makes sense that I should have told him so. Of course, I didn’t. I was a single mom. What would he want with me? And while I was agonizing over whether to tell him, of course he met a girl. And then he moved away, back to where he came from, to go to college.

I have never made good decisions when it comes to men. I had no good model. I don’t know what I am doing with them, and I never really have. I can be forward in low-stakes situations. In high-stakes situations… I don’t have many of those, because I can’t breathe and my heart stumbles and I run away.

A couple of years later I met someone, and I remarried. And when the boy got married, on the other side of the country, I cried myself to sleep. It made no sense, really, none at all.

I don’t want to be one of those old women who has a picture of a young man in a shoebox, a picture they drag out from time to time to cry over, because it represents a risk never taken. A might have been. I have a photograph of him with my daughter on his knee.

Fast. Fast. Forward.

I divorced again. And then he divorced, and three thousand miles away a little piece of  my not-entirely-competent heart quietly, secretly rejoiced. I started talking to my friends, saying I should tell him. I should tell him. Shouldn’t I tell him? I should tell him, right?

Because telling someone and being rejected is way better than getting old and dying with What If hanging over you, the shoebox of elderly tears. I figure. It has to be.

Oh, no, I didn’t. Of course I didn’t. Are you kidding me? Why would I tell a man on the other side of the country “hey dude, BTW I have always kind of been in love with you, just FYI”? How would I? Fuck no. Even if it made sense, even if it were perfectly reasonable, I don’t know how to do that  kind of risk, to make myself vulnerable that way, I never learned how to. So I didn't.

But still, it lived with me, and it kept creeping into my mind. What could I lose by telling him, really? It would be better than never telling him. If it didn’t go over well, if it was completely unreciprocated, he lives on the other side of the country. We could just pretend I never said anything, and forget about it.

I wanted to tell him. I was terrified, I felt like a friable winter leaf, strong strong bold me just gut-clenchingly frightened, fragile enough to be blown down the street in a strong breeze. My friends were lukewarm about the idea, at best. Probably not a good idea, I guess. Shelf that. Another year went by.

And then he said he was coming to visit for our friends’ anniversary party, and I made my resolve. I could make it light,  make it non-threatening and non-vulnerable. I could keep myself protected

Ohhh the reality was so different. I am forty-two years old, and I have never learned to be smooth, and I almost chickened out. I bet you’ve been there, but you were probably seventeen. It was a party, and all our friends were there. I was way past my tired point and I knew I should have gone to bed, but… if you have ever been a dumb kid who kept drinking because the boy/girl/whatever you liked wasn’t done with the night yet, you know.

I had myself convinced. Not gonna say shit. But I walked into the kitchen and this neckbeard I don’t really know, a friend of a friend, was in there. “You really like that guy, don‘t you?” he said.

My drunk-girl, at-the-end-of-the-party, should-have-gone-home-hours-ago self said something like “Yeah, but nothing will ever happen.”

Neckbeard said “Does he know?”

I said “how could he not know? If I’m that obvious?”

Neckbeard says “Listen. He’s a nerd. He won’t know unless you clobber him on the head and drag  him back to your cave. I know about this, I’m a nerd too.”

So, I went back outside with the blood and liquor roaring in my ears and I told him. That part’s kind of a blur, but I remember that I said “I’ve always had a thing for you” and he said “you’re fucking with me, right?”

I had to convince him. I had to unravel the weak-ass explanations about this twenty-year goddamn infatuation I’ve been packing around. I’m pretty sure I convinced him I was serious by kissing him, and the kiss was amazing. And then our host shooed us off to sleep and we laid down together and made out and my MIND WAS GODDAMN BLOWN because what do  you do when something you’ve wanted for that long is actually happening? I felt like a seven-year-old at Disneyland, man, I felt amazing. Even with too much alcohol in my bloodstream I was tuned in, making slurred confessions of affection with an addled brain and tongue but with the connection to every nerve-ending in my body completely, brilliantly lucid.

We didn’t have sex. There were times when we were half-undressed  and god knows we weren’t shy about touching each other, but we didn’t.

And then it was morning, and he walked me to my car and gave me a hug and I stole a kiss and I drove off and that was that.

I saw him again before he left. I thought (hoped) we would be alone, but it was him and his brother and then other friends joined us. There was no kiss, just an awkwardly unintimate hug at the end and a promise that he would return soon for a longer stay. And my heart stumbling like a drunken sailor, my heart wanting him, my heart confused about whether to sing or sob, my heart at least not destined to be the old lady heart that breaks over a picture of a young man with a toddler on his knee, tumbling endlessly over the question of what if, what if, what if.

This is the story I haven't told. I've told parts of it, but not the most important part, which was the moment I leaned my head against the window of the car and let trust slip out of my loosened fist.

I was thirty one, and my baby was two months old. We, my new husband and I, had been in Sacramento visiting his family, and we had the most wonderful, happy, beautiful time together. He was the one; I was madly in love, and couldn't believe that after all the struggle and all the disappointment and bad choices, I could finally be so lucky. We had made love the night before, and it had been amazing. I was, for the first time in my life that I can remember being, happy. Not just situationally happy, experiencing joy in the moment, but truly, deeply content.

We were driving home, just starting the long drive North, and he said it. "You know, I've been thinking. I'd really like to open our marriage".

I don't think about it much. I'd rather not. But that was the moment I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I would never trust anyone again. Not as a partner. My stomach turned cold and I leaned my head against the glass and let the tears drip silently off the end of my nose, as the road, like my happiness, unraveled underneath the car.

That's the story of why you never stood a chance.

My dad

My dad comes over every Saturday and... well, I kind of just wish that there was someone here besides the kids to listen to this shit. It's a recap of the same things he's told me every week for the last 5 years, intermixed with horrifyingly personal reminiscence and personal information. This is a very different dad from the one I remember from just a few years ago... no less long-winded, but more scattered and less filtered. I have been getting (and trying to hide from) the feeling that this is the last wind of a man who is on the decline into dementia. He corners me in a room while I clean furiously, and tells me deeply personal stories, stories that often make me uncomfortable, but I can sense that he feels like they are important, and that I am one of the few people... or maybe the only person... he can tell them to. I am, he likes to remind me, his baby girl. His littlest daughter.

I'm not sure if this is better or worse than what we used to do on Saturdays, which is argue about politics. He said that I was the spitting image of his mother, Ida Bea, in personality as well as looks, and so Ida Bea is the name he calls me when I'm being obstinate or argumentative or opinionated. My dad used to love to get me riled up, because he said that everyone else is scared of him and I'm the only one who will get in his face and argue. God fucking damn, that man could piss me off. He would come over and almost before he was in the door he would posit some ABSOFUCKINGLUTELY BULLSHIT premise, and I would tear it apart while he defended it and I became increasingly enraged and frustrated, pulling myself as tall as I could and glaring up at this big smug motherfucker in his fucking green beret and yelling "THAT IS FUCKING BULLSHIT!".

Eventually I would defeat him and he would ruffle my hair and say "OK, Ida Bea, you win." After years of this, when he revealed to me that he was just messing with me because he liked that I would argue, I was a combination of angry, proud, and relieved... because it always dismayed me that this man I knew was brilliant (Well, he's also a medic and a chaplain, commander of a ranger base, and has a Master's degree in education) would come to me with arguments that it seemed to me only the mentally defective (such as Tea Partiers) could support. My dad is--or was--a troll. Most of the time I thought he was full of shit until he started taking me to his council meetings and dinners and events, but I realized one night when he left me alone at a table with two generals who laughed at the fact that I bossed my dad and he meekly said "yes, dear" and went to do my bidding... oh. Oh... my dad, Daddy, he is the real deal, even though he's just a sergeant. They said "In all these years I've never seen him take orders from anyone... little girl, you don't know your power!" and they laughed and laughed, making large of it. Years later, another dinner at a table with other generals, and one of them said "You don't really know who your father is, yet". It was a statement, not a question. So I know that in addition to the pages of documents of things that I know, some of which were declassified the year I turned 30 (That's when I found out why he was gone during my infancy, for which my mother never forgave him) there is a great deal more to come. Probably among them things that I don't want to know.

In addition, of course, to the things he tells me that I already don't want to know. I won't go into details but my father's romantic history has more shocking, more tawdry, and more tragic than anything I've ever seen in a movie or read in Henry Miller. Fucking hell, dad.

A year or so ago my dad was convicted of voter fraud. Voter fraud. What the shit, dad? For voting under my dead brother's name and the name of my missing-presumed-dead uncle (allegedly a mercenary; also allegedly a crossdressing burlesque performer who, in his youth, went by the stage name of "April"). Local news and a random "debunking" website latched onto the story and attempted to debunk my father's military record, accusing him of fraud based on the inconsistency of his stories with public military records. During the trial I learned two things; one, that my father has been diagnosed with Alzheimers, and two, which the judge said while looking me straight in the eye, that my father's military record is exactly what he has claimed, and more. The judge said in court, on record, that my father is a bona-fide hero. So, while I know he has also been a wily old bastard, and fuck-all knows what kinds of schemes he's planned up and what I have yet to learn, I also know that all the crazy tales he has told me are true. That he has taken part in incredible, historical POW rescues. That he is a remarkable, and honorable, man.

He talks a lot, recently, about how everyone will come out of the woodwork when he dies, looking for a slice of the pie. They don't know that there is no pie, that he has put all of his properties into other people's names, that there is no inheritance to be had there. That his inheritance is the act of having put up with him over the years, his trolling and stories and bigness and loudness and sharp, sharp eyes. That his inheritance is him putting his big brown hand on my head and saying, "OK, Ida Bea".

Quality of loneliness

The quality of the loneliness is different now,

because I had a kind of understanding with him.

It's like speaking a language nobody else speaks,

that has words for different ideas; even though

you learn the language of people around you,

you always feel a little foreign. You get used to it,

so that it doesn't seem bad or even, usually,

all that alone. But then you meet someone

who speaks your native language, and you feel

like you can fully communicate for the first time.

It's not until they go away that you discover

what it really feels like to be lonely.

He still loves her

but he doesn't love me.

"That's not nice".

Someone I am acquainted with was trying to explain why they don't like someone. They said "He's a really nice guy and everything..."

But here's the thing.

"Nice" is usually, on some level, a euphemism with "OK with the world as it is".

In other words, they may be "nice" but they aren't GOOD.

Because NO FUCKING DECENT HUMAN BEING could look around at this shit and what we're doing to ourselves and everyone else without wanting to cleanse it with fire. That doesn't mean lacking sympathy or kindness or human decency. It means understanding that nice people have the wrong priorities. Nice people support genocide and war and poverty and cruelty by default, and that's the worst part, because they don't even have the decency to be malicious. They're banal, and that is perhaps a worse evil than malice.

Rather than being nice, try being good. It's a lot harder, and damn if you might not find that it's almost impossible to do in a world where our shoes are made by child slaves overseas, but it's worth a shot.