JUST LIKE HIM

I, like you no doubt, have heard the Adele song hundreds of times.  "Someone Like You" emerged when Rosanna was little and I was moved by it.  Her voice was powerful and thick with emotion, she took me along her journey of heartache and longing and I felt as though she were telling my story.  I get emotional like that.  In fact, just last weekend I fought back tears when I overheard a man reminding his wife of her ring size.  He knew it more readily than she did. This is the kind of love I want.  Anyhow- I was listening to that song again today, reminiscing how little RoRo would sing it with me in her lispy 2 year old voice, and it occurred to me that the song is even more sad than it seems.  

Think on it for a tick: she is still so stricken by this love lost that she seeks the man long after the romance has died.  So long, in fact, that he is completely over it and is taken aback that she has shown up again.  Despite this, she croons to us that it is no biggie, not to worry, she'll find another JUST LIKE HIM.  **Girlfriend**: unless we're looking to relive the situation that caused you to write an epic-ly moving and wildly popular love song- I suggest we shift our focus to someone NOT like him.   OR she is making deeper observations about the nature of human beings to choose the same situation over and over again through different people/scenarios while still incurring the same results- thus "finding someone like you" is inevitable.  

That's really not why I sat down to write this evening.  I sat down to give myself a genuine high five.  I heard a piece of the song differently tonight and it gave me a moment of reflection: I have chastised myself for the amount of pain I suffered while my world was disintegrating.  I had, pre-Ethan, built sturdy walls around my vulnerable parts and, as a result of work and love and trust, I had let the man in.  I hated myself a good deal for not being smart enough to stay walled up, while at the same time knowing that "walled up" isn't  a way I want to live.  Ethan, knowing me better than me, insisted that loving is my nature.  He told me I couldn't shut it down even if I wanted to.  He saw in me things that I refused to, he lifted me up (ironically, during the time when his actions were stomping me down) and promised that who I am is amazing.  I am acknowledging some of this now, and this little snippet of the song brought it into new light:

"Sometimes it lasts in love, but sometimes it hurts instead

Nothing compares, no worries or cares
Regrets and mistakes, they're memories made
Who would have known how bittersweet this would taste?"

I heard it like this: it's all perfect.  There is no choice but to live through all the moments, without endless second guessing and analyzation, the result isn't promised- so we just live it.  Then! this song comes on, and I was like, "HELL YEAH":

"I hope you fall in love and it hurts so bad- the only way you can know is give it all you have....."

SO -you guys- IT HURT SO BAD.  Just thinking about the hurt is making me cry again.  From this I can discern that I freaking gave my all.  I am so proud that I gave my all.  What a waste if I hadn't.  I am so proud that I hung on to my marriage and made gargantuan attempts to make it right.  I am so stinking proud of myself for the stubborn clinging and no-shit honoring of a commitment.  I'm also proud of the moment I decided that I was worth more than what I was fighting for, so I took out my scissors and, through mind-numbing sobbing, cut loose the life I was promised.  

For record, it still hurts...just not as bad. 

Oregonia Lumps

There is a place I covet in my mind that brings serenity and release.  I didn't know this was so until I was led through a sort of meditation and was prompted to rediscover this place behind my closed eyes.  Since then, I return to that place weekly, eyes closed, and feel the feels, touch the touches, smell the smells and hear the sounds.  I shared about this place to my male comrade who simply asserted that we ought to go there.

Well of course.  We ought to go there.  How completely obvious and yet hidden from view this option was.  A few weekends ago was THE weekend, and after a half day's drive, we were practically there.

I was born in Oregon.  I like to fantasize that this gives me some sort of divine right to call myself a native, to say to people that I am from there.  Alas, I can't really pull that off.  Funny thing- as a kid I became quite concerned when the Beach Boys "California Girls" song would come on that perhaps I wasn't a California girl because I was born elsewhere.  I was assured I could be grouped in with the CA girls.  Now, I pine for it.  It sits there above my state, being all gorgeous and lovely, taunting me and calling me like a Siren.  And here I'm stuck.  Now more than ever.  Unwilling to leave family, anchored by my children's needs for stability in this shitty chaos.

Mountain air is not the same as town air.  Have you noticed that warm has a smell?  I want to know

why the smell of warm dirt and Sugar Pine haven't been made into a candle so I can play pretend at home.  The goal: find THAT place, the method: HIKE.  Pounding down the trail together we kicked up red dirt, brushed past the vibrant green soft tips of baby pine trees and listened to the high creaking of towering old trees.  It was occasionally too much, leaving me tearing up more than once with a hard, painful lump in my neck.  It took miles, mis-steps and releasing the idea that my 20 year old memories would serve me directionally, but eventually we made it.  It wasn't obvious at first.  In fact we were there a bit before my breath caught and I smacked my companion on the shoulder exclaiming, "OHMIGOSH, this is IT!".  And it was.  The place from my memory, my serene place of release and calm was right there laid out glistening in the sun rays and bending in the breeze.

Of course, nature could care less if my memory was of a meadow with a bit of a pond/lake in the far reaches.  Nope.  Nature said, "You've been gone twenty years, things change."  The water had expanded and become truly a lake.  It swamped the trail in one spot and completely overtook the cabin that sat in meadow-turned-lake-bottom.  Regardless, it was there.  I tried to lose myself in the shimmering surface of the water and the awe of this vast transformation, but the mosquitoes are thriving there and my collection of welts was becoming a bit unbearable.  So we left.

Our hiking totaled about 14 miles.  My shins and hips complained for a few days afterward.  I hesitated washing the dirt off my body, wearing it like a proud badge of Oregonian honor.  The next day we met up with a man who I haven't seen since I was....5?  Maybe 7?  We got to share stories a bit and I sat in the weird reality of being an adult with kids, the very scenarios that we could remember are happening to our children now and WE are the facilitators.  I was left wanting more, to stay forever.

I felt that way for the whole week after returning home.  I was a bit mopey.  Emotional.  Stuck.  I get a little relief that it is right there, just North.  I can drive there in a day.

For better or for WORSE

So there you are, all decked out in a heavy, gorgeous white dress with makeup perfected and hair that

has been heated, molded, pinned and threatened so as to make it just-so.  You're excited.  The thumping in your chest is fast and full.  This is awesome.  He is awesome.  His smile is elusive and gorgeous and he looks like a freaking model in that suit.  Hot damn- that man is about to be your husband!  Won't your babies be gorgeous?  Won't forever be a breeze if it's with that guy?

At some point you agree that, yes, whether you are sleeping between bedposts made of gold or shivering cold huddled in the nook of grocery store and it's newspaper stand- yes, you will stay together.  You agree that in the peaks of fitness and the depths of addiction, you will stay true.  And finally, the traditional summary, "for better or for worse" presents itself and you agree, but of course.  A most definite hearty and enthusiastic confirmation that this union is the shit.  You feel it powerfully, you judge those who have come before you and you know that you will not be like them.  No, this is a love unlike the rest.

It takes time.  It's always a disappointing and comforting lesson to be reminded that we are not different from each other.  We are all the same.  Our experiences are vast and immeasurably varied, and the bottom line is always that we are, at the core, all the same humans.  There are plenty of ways to convince yourself that you are special and nothing like so-and-so, it's the way we behave on the outside that convinces ourselves of these dividers.  It's the inside that is always, always the same.

I traveled forward into marriage on the high of the "better".  Everything was freaking awesome!  I relish big life changes, it excites me and motivates me.  In that moment you can only imagine what "worse" represents.  I didn't spend a lot of time considering it.  In a vague way it meant to me being annoyed or disappointed.  A feeling that may last a day or two but wouldn't permeate our bond.  I could handle being annoyed and even disappointed.  So that handled that.  No biggie.

In a week, that heavy dress will have been stuffed in a box, dirt still having it's way with the hem, for nine years.  Compared to some, we are still babies in this venture, but this year I feel like I am one hundred years in and am beat up, dirty and dragging small people through a dessert mirage- yes kids, this is real!  This is wonderful!  There is beautiful, clean water in abundance!  This is the year our relationship was KO'd, this is the "worse".

I know it's going to be annoying that I don't spell out the details, but 1. it's not really fair to the man and, 2. I really just need to pour out my emotions on 'paper'.  Y'all: the "worse" is worse than you think you knew in those wistful moments.   For me it looked like days of sobbing with bits of being normal for the small ones.  It looked like every blood cell in my body vibrating with rage and threatening to come out in ways that would have gotten me arrested.  This is not me.  But it was.  I kicked the sofa.  I powered it with the heel of my foot.  I screamed with my whole into a pillow, over and over and over.  I shook all the time.  I cursed and wept in all kid-less moments.  At some point I realized that this whole experience could end.  Like really end.

That end had all kinds of ugly, complicated and heartbreaking new beginnings.  Getting a divorce was never an option for me, yet I wasn't able to see continuing on either.  I am not a patient person, I am a hypocrite in my need for others to make decisions now but insisting on time and space to make them myself.  I became a person who was waiting and surviving the days.  I knew it was time that we needed.  This grand canyon-esque fracture needed time.  Fucking time.

I can count on my family to be wise.  Loving, supportive and wise.  And so it was, this piece of advice that gave me the freedom to have all of the feelings and craziness I was going through, this piece of advice that made the valley (which feels more like a crevasse) that we are experiencing ok.

"Sometimes you just have to be committed to the commitment."

And WOOOSH, I was freed from all the guilt of hating him and despising him and the impossibleness of being near him.  I could let go of my commitment to him- the person, for now, and be committed to that commitment.  Words.  A promise.  I could hang onto that for dear life, squeeze it close and it could be the eye in the center of this overwhelming hurricane of breakdown.  And it's working.  It's only three short months later and we are not healed.  We have a rough sketch of who we want to be now.

Freaking time.