A Mother's Musings and Mumblings

Nostalgia has hit and I find myself thinking back to times gone by and wondering what, if anything, I might have learned. This is a theme that has shown up in my journal before but I thought, perhaps, I’d put it up on my blog. I say perhaps because this is going to be one of those posts that gets written over several days and sat on for a week or more before finally getting “published”.

In the words of the Indigo Girls:

There I am in younger days, star gazing,
Painting picture perfect maps of how my life and love would be
Not counting the unmarked paths of misdirection
My compass, faith in love’s perfection
I missed ten million miles of road I should have seen

So where have I been, who have I loved and what did I learn? There are some spots where a long relationship hasn’t taught me a thing and others where a very brief one taught me volumes. In light of that, I’m just going to ramble and see what makes sense.

Chuckles deserves mention although the irony here is going to be painful. He was depressed nearly all of the time we were together – as in, not functioning depressed, not the sort of depressed that the rest of us take Prozac for before we head off to our unfulfilling jobs everyday. I knew I shouldn’t have married him but we’d already lived together for a year and I felt like not going through with it would be a mark of failure. Likewise, when I “knew” it was over I couldn’t leave because I felt like that, too, would be failure.  Thus, the greatest lesson was that one person cannot make or break a marriage.

There was a second lesson there, too. He was so far gone – constantly threatening suicide or homicide or both – that I felt like I couldn’t leave. I worried that if I did, anything that he did would be my fault. I had to really reach the end of my rope before I could make a break and say “his actions are his responsibility alone”. I learned that I could not save someone who did not want to be saved.

And on the heels of that lesson, I met Shane. I crawled out of my marriage with very little left of myself in tact and that’s where he found me. It didn’t take him long to see that I needed more than he could give and so he bravely put a band-aid on my amputated dignity and sent me on my way. He showed me, vicariously, how to save yourself from being pulled into the kind of situation I’d had with Chuckles without being cruel. And, more importantly, he taught me how harmful it would be not to do that.

Along came WF. My own personal case study in opposites. Anyone remember the saying “The enemy of my enemy is my friend”? Well, WF taught me that the “Opposite of my nightmare is NOT my dream”. WF was everything that Chuckles wasn’t. I could list off the character traits one by one and show how they were just exact opposites. It seemed like perfection – a relief from all that had oppressed me. Until I realized that there were at least as many problems on that side of the pendulum as there had been on the other side.

Funny thing is that I saw this before we got married. And I married him anyway. Why? Well I can think of at least two reasons – I was already living with him and would have felt like a failure for not going through with it (for a Pagan I have some pretty conservative values, can you tell?) and because there was a big part of me that believed that he’d mellow over time. So the secondary lesson was “What you see is what you get.” Put another way: “The only time you can ever change another person is when they’re in diapers.”

Who’s next? JD, I suppose. Without waxing poetic about him I think I can say that he and I were compatible in a lot of ways. The one way that we weren’t proved to be our undoing. We didn’t share a goal. Without that, there was nothing to build for or toward. We had a good foundation but couldn’t agree on what to do with it. And no matter how good the foundation is, it’s not enough. For me anyway. So that taught me the absolute importance of a shared goal.

There are two names missing from this list: RG and Guido. I don’t know that I can speak intelligently to either of them at the moment but for opposite reasons. Guido is still a bit too fresh – it’s been over a year since I asked for a separation and I’m still processing everything. He was a liar and I fell for it and I’m still not sure why. Worse, I’m not sure I’ll be able to figure out why until I let go of some of the guilt I have about taking the Witchlets along with me on that nightmare ride. Besides, I think there’s a requisite amount of time you have to have before you can even see such things.

RG, on the other hand, would suffer from too much time and distance. That was so long ago that I dare say I’m not even the same person I was then. What did he teach me that changed me or that would have had a chance to last this long? I’m sure there’s more than one thing but there’s one that stands out the clearest in my mind – something he said early on to me that really stuck. I clung to this for years and I’ll be damned if he wasn’t right.

Way back then, I really felt out of place. I was a dweeb/geek/nerd/insert hurled insult of choice here. I looked the part. Funny how I know I was a cute kid but I sure as Hel grew out of it. And one day, RG told me I was beautiful. When I got done choking on my Pepsi and laughing my head off I told him that he needed to get his glasses adjusted. He replied that the other girls were “cute” but that I was beautiful. He said I might not see it, but in 10 years and once I was out of River City, I’d realize he was right. I clung to that for a decade, the thought that I was just a late bloomer and that somehow, someday, I’d be pretty enough that someone else would notice. RG was halfway around the world before I finally saw it, but I felt it long before that.

The lesson he taught me was the hope of change. That no matter what the mirror shows you today, there’s the hope that it will look better soon. Maybe not tomorrow, but if you keep the faith it will come. I forget that lesson from time to time but it’s still there, lingering.

Now, on to the next lesson. The teacher has been selected, I wonder what I’ll learn?