The First Cut is the Deepest

This song has been with me over the last few days, but it took listening to it during the predawn hours that are so often most filled with clarity for me to understand what it was here to say.

About two weeks after I had my second child, I lapsed into a depression so deep it threatened to swallow me, a place so dark I could not even find my own husband. I was scared. I was (or at least I felt) totally alone.

Then one day, in that lonely state, I was driving in my car when I heard Sheryl Crow's cover of this song:

I would have given you all of my heart

But there's someone who's torn it apart

And he's taken just all that I got...

And I started thinking about my first love, which at the time I thought was that first deep cut. I reached out to him, hoping he could still see me, even in that dark place. He did. And thus began the emotional affair that I'm going to guess remained so (rather than full-blown) mainly because there was an ocean between us -- I certainly didn't have the strength at that time to throw back the life preserver he represented.

Quite a few years and a lot of healing later, I now understand that the first cut came, as it does for so many of us, not when I was a teenager falling in love but when I was a small child. And as I work to shed any part of those childhood experiences that hold me back from giving and receiving the love I want in the present, this song -- and in my mind it's most often Rod Stewart's version of Cat Steven's original -- still resonates:

I still want you by my side

Just to help me dry the tears that I've cried

Cause I'm sure gonna give you a try

And if you want, I'll try to love again

Baby, I'll try to love again, but I know

The first cut is the deepest, baby I know

The first cut is the deepest...