Al is up early and off to work today so I am here; happily with my coffee.
I have been thinking lately about the nature of love. What is love? How do we know if we love someone? I have always thought of it as a feeling, a feeling over which I have no control, that comes and goes like a thunderstorm. With the drama of a thunderstorm. But now in my second marriage, with my seventh grandchild on the way, I find love quietly seeping into my thoughts almost daily.
I have recently reconnected to an old high school friend. Her name is not important but for the sake of this writing I shall call her Maureen; the important thing is that she was my first adult friendship. That first close friend emerging at the end of high school when so many thoughts were needing expression. Maureen was that friend, the one I could talk to, that would form the basis for all my other adult friendships. But curiously, when she was in college and I was newly married I cut off the friendship, telling her cowardly through a letter that I didn't think we could be friends anymore.
That was in 1971. Earlier that summer she had traveled a thousand miles to be my maid of honor; by the next summer I had no idea where Maureen was living or what she was doing. Throughout the years I would often think about her and occasionally hear news through common contacts; then nothing for years. Last fall as I was celebrating my sixtieth birthday another high school friend reminded me that we had jointly celebrated our sixteenth birthdays at Maureen's house. I began to think about trying to find her.
Maureen and I have had several conversations through email now. She teaches educational psychology at a small college in Nebraska, and while she remembers me cutting off the friendship and the confusion around that, her memories are more of how confused and lost she was, not knowing what she wanted or what she was doing. Her remembrances of me are more fond that fraught with anger; in fact there is no anger.
We were in essence children in 1971 despite the fact that we had both just turned 21. I was married, working as a nurse and she was still in school in Texas having transferred from New Jersey at her parents insistence. I think that all my energy, graduating from nursing school, getting married and joining the Army was aimed at getting out from under my parent's control. In the face of a best friend who was floating, letting her parents direct her course, and unhappy in the place she found herself I thought we had nothing to offer each other so I cut the relationship off, completely.
When I look back it is so unlike me, the me of today, that it is hard to imagine my doing that. I must have had a very strong unconscious need to get away from that mirror, but at the time it felt like she was drowning and I was in danger of going down with her. Cutting her loose and getting on board my husband's ship of well being turned out to be a good choice, even necessary, to keep the demons within me at bay. Now that I have faced those demons I can see that it wasn't Maureen that was the problem, it was me.
So what does this have to do with love? Well, I loved Maureen as only that teenager on the verge of adulthood can. We did everything together. We talked about everything. She was beautiful; not in a classic kind of beautiful, but in a striking, every time she walks into a room, people stop and look, kind of beautiful. I loved that and I hated that. But mostly I loved it. She was insecure and I was very secure and I loved that. But she was honest in her insecurity and I was dishonest in my security. And that is where the rub came in. If I entered her world of being unsure, unhappy, lost even, then I might become those things too. And I couldn't afford that; my ship with my husband was sailing and like so many young marrieds it was the good ship. So she was cast adrift.
I think I lost a part of myself when I cut those ties. The part that was honest. And it took many years before I became honest about my own insecurities, my own unhappiness and my own sense of being lost. But here's the interesting thing, by being honest with myself I found the part of myself that was able to love. It was, and is, a simple love, pure and joyful, as only those first same sex love relationships can be. A love that hasn't yet been jaded by human faults and frailties, that is fully trusted and so tender that it fills the human heart to the point of aching and then beyond. A love that is easily lost and remarkable in the finding.
I think this must happen to us over and over again in our lifetime. The vulnerability that comes with loving unconditionally. And while it is sweet, it is also painful; maybe that is why we cannot stay in constant connection with it. So that is the thunderstorm aspect of love, the raw beauty and power of it. The rest requires the daily conscious effort to love and be loved. It is the day after day of bitter cold, or the drenching humidity that makes it unbearable to go outside. It is the sun that rises every day, so taken for granted that we sleep through the wonder of it. It is the moon that waxes and wanes like clockwork. And like the ebbing and flowing of the tides we may not even be aware that we are in the midst of love until it is gone.
So do I love Maureen now? Of course I love her; not with the expectation that we will be best friends again or even have much in common, but with the tender memory of first love as a starting point. The proffer of a new friendship being born of renewed dialogue is putting the meat on the bones. Where that goes, what that means for the future I cannot yet imagine. But perhaps we'll share another thunderstorm or two along the way.
