Personal growth and responsibility for my own choices: I usually fight them, feeling sorry for myself, pouting and indignant that everyone around me just can't see it the way I do. This is the way I feel about having to explain to someone why I still "love" all the people I have ever loved, even if I don't want to be with them. This is a story about why hope floats to the surface, and becomes a life vest.
Patience.
Yep, time for me to explain the story.
The first man I fell in love with (and mean that in the adult sense, and not the crushes I had during school) was a wonderful guy I met my senior year of high school. He was brought to my class as a subject matter expert in the Church of Jesus Christ Of Latter Day Saints. Yep, a Mormon boy stuck in a room full of Catholic girls. I was *lucky* enough to have picked LDS as the religion I would write about, and he seemed like a really good source. We exchanged phone numbers after class, and made arrangements for him and his companion to meet one day to talk.
Many things happened, not the least of which was getting to know his room-mate, who hated the Church and was only on his mission to be away from the beatings his father used to give daily. I learned about the church, wrote my report, made an actual choice not to let these two men out of my life. The room-mate was candid and funny and for some reason trusted me enough to know that I would never tell anyone about his plan to disappear after the mission was over, and never come back. The man I fell in love with was shy, sweet, a pleaser. He had his whole life already mapped out with a fiance back in Idaho whom his parents had arranged for him, and a job waiting. He would be an elder in the Church, a good husband and provider, and would settle into a routine that would create harmony for his life and Church. He hated every minute of it, and though his faith seemed certain, he was questioning, the way I was questioning my Catholicism, that there had to be something more.
During that five months, while I played softball and ditched my extra religious studies classes so that I could spend time with him, I learned about faith and pressure and love in a way I never had before. I knew I was not really a Catholic (in my mother's definition of the word) and he learned he was not really Mormon. The difference was that when he talked about being together it was based in his definition of the future. I would move to Idaho, we would live far enough away from his family to not get the dirty looks from having dumped his fiance, but we would join the church, work in a family business, and have a bunch of kids.
He had been devastated to find out I was not a virgin when he talked about saving ourselves for the wedding night. He was overwhelmed to learn I was not moving from California any time soon. He was grief stricken to be confronted with my new found enlightenment on religion, and that I had no intention of joining the Mormon church, then or ever. He left, begging me to go with him. I said no, I could not become how he expected me to be when that version of the future would doom us, and I would end up hating him ,and hating myself in the process.
So why write about this now? It happened 27 years ago. It is because I still carry the guilt I feel over not complying. Over promising love and then backing off when it seemed to get too hard. Shouldn't I have been able to withstand being in a suppressive religion, popping out babies to satisfy a church directive? Shouldn't I have been willing to sacrifice my education, my family, and my roots for the sake of the love he was offering me? Shouldn't I have been grateful to have a man say he loves me and that be enough?
Turns out it wasn't enough, but that hasn't seemed to keep me from holding on to it.
The next man I loved that deeply disappeared in the middle of the night because of baby-momma drama. I was at his house one day, and heard from him again 6 months later. We had been together 2 years. He had moved to Nebraska, was working as a carnival roadie and wanted me to drop out of school to come on the road with him. He said I could make a lot of money and he had a wonderful trailer and room in his bed waiting for me. We would be on the road during the season, about 8 months, and could drink beer and have sex the rest of the time. When babies started coming (and he is now the father of 7, but that is a different story) we could buy a bigger trailer and maybe some land in Omaha. I said he would have to come to California to get me. He never did. I never went.
I fell in love with my drama boyfriend because dancing and sex was a priority. I left that relationship because, well, the drama, and his desire to have a boyfriend as much as I wanted one. It was complicated, and heading nowhere.
I fell in love with my first ex-husband while being stood up for a date. When, 7 years later, he left with a pregnant mistress, I did not try to get him back. It had zip to do with loving him. I just could not see my future as anything but hurt and pain.
When I left my children's father, it was for the same reasons as all the others. My need for stability and love, growth and happiness, a future with hope and desire was met with something I could not wrap my brain around. In the last case, it was alcohol and despair and, for lack of a vocabulary word, it was the opposite of fulfilment and connection.
Through all of this, and maybe why I still hold on, is that there was, and still is, this sense of longing. I want to be in love. I want to feel needed and desired. I want to share and give and find the goodness in a single man, in a single joined life. I want to know that there is value in differences without there being predefined roles that must be lived. I did not want to be a metal-worker's religious baby maker. I did not want to be a carnie's trailer whore in the middle of nowhere. I did not want to be a fag hag with a lifetime supply of condoms in a box under my bed. I did not want to be the nurturer to a child that was not mine, constantly reminded that the child came from a devastating infidelity. I did not want to be scared ever day that I might come home to a drunk, mean, abusive man who could not plan Thursday, much less the next 20 years.
I did not want to be alone, and yet I am because honestly I was already alone as each of the relationships took me into, or tried to take me into, roles where I could not go. And the guilt of that selfishness still finds a way into my world. Not as much as it used to, granted. It was never because of potential, it was because of reality. If I could have changed to be what they wanted, then we could have been happy, right? If I could have just been happy with what I was given.
So my task is to figure out the balance between letting go, and not giving up hope. How to still love all the things and future and brightness, while accepting the darkness but not letting it swallow me. It is about loving on all levels, but mostly about knowing who I am in the process and not regretting the choices to not stay when I was sure staying would not change anything. It is about growing up, and still finding wonder. So when I tell you, and mean it honestly, that I LOVE every single person that I have ever loved, do not take it as a bad thing. It is trying very hard to hold on to hope, not with them, but with myself.
