Don't Let It End

I had kind of a weird day today. It started off well, with a run and a yoga class with a friend this morning, but the afternoon was filled with little bursts of work (all I could muster) followed by multiple naps. In part I think the sleepiness had to do with the germs my kids currently have that I've definitely been fighting, but I also felt sort of a general psychological malaise that I couldn't pinpoint.

After rousing myself from nap #3, I decided to drag my ass to an Alanon meeting. I knew a friend of mine would be there, and I thought it might lift me out of my funk or at least illuminate it a little further.

I wasn't disappointed. I got to hear people talk about how they deal with the desire to control the things they can't control, and that was helpful. And then this woman starting talking about the death of her mother, and her adolescent's lack of appropriate response to it, and then I both realized and shared (complete with tears) that in a way I'm a bit like a 42 year old adolescent when it comes to my mother.

I don't like how things were when I was a kid, I don't like a lot about my parents' lives now, so I try to avoid having too much contact with them. This gives me the illusion of control (plus some real control) but it comes at the expense of what might be a more authentic relationship.

I say might because I don't know that for sure. It might not. I do have the sense that if I can let go of this hardness I have toward my mother, it will allow something to soften in my daughter, and that feels worth the price of admission even if the show is not pretty.

On the way home from the meeting, I heard this song on the radio:

What can I do
Pictures of you still make me cry
Trying to live without your love
It's so hard to do
Some nights I'll wake up
I'll look at your pillow
Hoping that I'll see you there
But I get up each day, not much to say
I've nowhere to go
Loneliness fills me up inside
'Cause I'm missing you
So if you'll give us a chance to remember
The love we had once together
Wait and see
Time is all that we really need
I'm praying you won't say no
I mean to tell you

Don't let it end
Baby we could have so much more
Don't let it end
Honey please don't walk out that door

And I felt so much gratitude for the fact that although my honey did walk out the door, now he's saying things like this:

I'm telling you baby, I made my mistakes
But I'll make you this promise to do what it takes
I'll be there to protect you and hold you tight
You got my lovin' baby every single night

I'm gonna have to wait for a while for the every single night kind of lovin', but it really looks like it's coming, and I'm damn glad. Because as he was leaving, I was saying:

Don't let it end
I'm begging you, don't let it end this way
Don't let it end
I'm begging you, don't let it end this way

Babe

This past weekend, I talked to my favorite New Englander for the first time since he left. It's difficult, I think for both of us and I know for me, to figure out how to navigate what we're going through right now. In the past I've always tried to control things that didn't seem to be working out, regardless of how I felt. I made rules for myself and rules for us.

Time after time, in this relationship, my heart has told me in no uncertain terms that my rules are irrelevant. I don't know if it's that once you let this kind of love in, it never leaves, or how to explain it, but I know that despite his decision to move across the country, I haven't stopped wanting to be with him:

Babe I'm leavin'
I must be on my way
The time is drawing near
My train is going
I see it in your eyes
The love, the need, your tears
But I'll be lonely without you
And I'll need your love to see me through
So please believe me
My heart is in your hands
And I'll be missing you

As I was biking all over Madison yesterday, this was the song I heard in my head, the song I sang as I pedaled, and it's the song I woke up to this morning, all inspired by him calling me babe in our phone conversation on Sunday. It felt sooooo good, it was such a relief, to hear that word come out of his mouth, directed at me:

'Cause you know it's you babe
Whenever I get weary
And I've had enough
Feel like giving up
You know it's you babe
Givin' me the courage
And the strength I need
Please believe that it's true
Babe, I love you

I love being his babe. That much is crystal clear. My confusion is that another part of me feels really strongly, and this is a real part of me, not fear talking, that I need a man who is physically present and therefore capable of making me feel loved in my love languages (thanks to Gary Chapman for this id): quality time and physical touch. This hasn't changed, which is why I don't feel like I can remain committed to someone who can't deliver the love I want and need and deserve (and he doesn't expect me to):

Babe, I'm leavin'
I'll say it once again
And somehow try to smile
I know the feeling we're tryin' to forget
If only for a while
'Cause I'll be lonely without you
And I'll need your love to see me through
Please believe me
My heart is in your hands
'Cause I'll be missing you

But it's ok. I can live with being a little confused for a while about how all this is going to play out. One thing's for sure: I'm not going to deal with it by making more arbitrary rules. His departure has softened me. It's taken away an element of my need to control. These things are good. It's also testing my faith that I'm going to have everything I want, I just don't get to control when or how or who. That last one's especially tricky. Because when you love someone like I love him, the last thing you feel or want to be is neutral on the who. The who for me seems very, very clear:

Babe, I love you
Babe, I love you
Ooo-oo-oo-oo, babe

The Best of Times

I know, I know. Two songs from Styx in one week?! What can I say? I don't control it, not consciously, anyway. But as the sun was coming out this morning, this song began playing internally:

Our memories of yesterday will last a lifetime
We'll take the best, forget the rest
And someday we'll find these are the best of times
These are the best of times

I tried to ignore it, to block it out. Still too sleepy. Not ready to face the day. I don't have any window coverings in my bedroom, so I tied a dark-colored shirt around my eyes and tried to go back to sleep. No such luck. I could block the light, but the music would not cease:

Tonight's the night we'll make history, honey, you and I
And I'll take any risk to tie back the hands of time
And stay with you here tonight...

I'm having trouble understanding why this is the song choice for today. I think the likelihood that my love and I will make history tonight, manage to tie back the hands of time, or even stay with one another is pretty slim. I remember hearing this song back in the day. (I was 11 when the footage was taken in this video.) I distinctly remember, with my preadolescent brain, contemplating "making history" with my lover.

But the best explanation I can come up with for this song selection this morning has to do with a conversation I had yesterday with a friend. The gist of it was that all of it -- being wracked with sobs when faced with separation from a lover, fighting with our kids -- constitutes a life being lived:

Our memories of yesterday will last a lifetime
We'll take the best, forget the rest
And someday we'll find these are the best of times
These are the best of times

The best of times and the worst of times are sometimes, or maybe even always, if we really take a zen perspective, all rolled into one. I spent much of yesterday reading coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings, and it seems like many Bostonians are feeling that acutely:

I know you feel these are the worst of times
I do believe it's true
When people lock their doors and hide inside
Rumor has it it's the end of paradise
But I know, if the world just passed us by
Baby I know, you wouldn't have to cry

The headlines read 'these are the worst of times'
I do believe it's true
I feel so helpless like a boat against the tide
I wish the summer winds could bring back paradise
But I know, if the world turned upside down
Baby, I know you'd always be around

Maybe sometimes always being around doesn't get to remain manifested in the physical plane. I reckon that's one of the hardest things about a loss of any kind, whether it's a death or just a parting:

Our memories of yesterday will last a lifetime
We'll take the best, forget the rest
And someday we'll find these are the best of times
These are the best of times...

Come Sail Away

I've been getting back into Ashtanga Yoga, which is the type of yoga that first hooked me over a decade ago. It's a vigorous practice, but the pitta (fire) energy in me really responds to it. Yesterday's practice was really challenging, but also physically satisfying and I had enough of what felt like victories to endure the difficulties and deal with my limitations with equanimity. Good practice for life!

Anyway, after class a fellow student asked if I was a sailor. I wasn't sure why he asked, and then he and the teacher both made reference to the swallow on my upper arm (pictured here in an old blog post). I said no, but I like the freedom that she symbolizes.

The desire to be free is a strong one, and I think it's healthy, too. If we bury that desire too deeply, we tend to be unhappy, and that's no good. But I think there's such a thing as too much freedom. I read an article in The New Yorker about Aaron Swartz, a boy genius who wound up committing suicide while still in his 20s. While many factors contributed to his decision to end his life, the article discusses the fact that he had always been allowed to do what he wanted to do, so he never learned to cope with things he didn't want to do.

And the thing is, life, whether it's a life of total servitude or total freedom or the something in between that most of us experience, is gonna come with some things we don't want to do. Learning to stay is really difficult sometimes, and I believe this, in a nutshell, is why children are such great teachers. Children force you to stay, to cope with your old shit, and they show you the value of a relationship, of the kind of love that is allowed to bloom when no one's going anywhere.

This is the kind of love I want to have with my partner, too. Previously, I had someone who wasn't going anywhere, but we didn't share the kind of love that is powerful enough to continue breaking through the difficulty. We also failed to find enough ways to be free, even within the confines of our grown-up lives, and it cost us.

With my love of a lifetime, on the other hand, we've got the powerful love thing going. We've both grown immensely and positively glowed on a regular basis just from being together, but when it didn't feel easy, when freedom was restricted, when compromises had to be made that were in conflict with what one or the other of us valued most in life, one or the other of us has always walked out. In the past, that's been me, and now, it's him. Or rather, it's me walking out because I'm finally confronting the fact that he's really gonna move away from my kids and I, so it's time for me to put my energy elsewhere. Sigh...

The other night I was reading to my son, and I came across a passage that beautifully expresses the depth of the loss I'm experiencing. I had to stop in the middle of this passage, too choked up to continue to read aloud, but also comforted by the universality of what I'm experiencing:

The world turns and the world spins, the tide runs in and the tide runs out, and there is nothing in the world more beautiful and more wonderful in all its evolved forms than two souls who look at each other straight on. And there is nothing more woeful and soul saddening than when they are parted.

--Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy by Gary Schmidt

What a great passage. The main character, Turner, often fantasized about "lighting out for the Territories."

Speaking of lighting out, Styx has something to say on that score, as they began reminding me on the drive home from the yoga studio last night:

I'm sailing away,

Set an open course for the virgin sea,

'Cause I've got to be free,

Free to face the life that's ahead of me,

On board, I'm the captain, so climb aboard,

We'll search for tomorrow on every shore,

And I'll try, Oh Lord I'll try, to carry on

I look to the sea,

Reflections in the waves spark my memory,

Some happy, some sad,

I think of childhood friends and the dreams we had,

We lived happily forever, so the story goes,

But somehow we missed out on the pot of gold

But we'll try best that we can to carry on

A gathering of angels appeared above my head,

They sang to me this song of hope and this is what they said,

They said come sail away, come sail away, come sail away with me lads,

Come sail away, come sail away, come sail away with me,

Come sail away, come sail away, come sail away with me baby,

Come sail away, come sail away, come sail away with me

I'd sure like to do that sometimes, but I can't. I'm not 20 anymore. I've got a couple of kids, a job, a house... One day I'll have more freedom again, but for now, I'm going to discover what I can from staying put. I'm going to have adventures, but they will most likely be either in the Midwest or they'll be planned and budgeted for months in advance. That's just the reality of my current situation.

I know that I will discover more with a partner than I can on my own, both on the adventures and back at home. I've learned that over the last couple of years in a way I didn't understand it before. Now I just have to get used to the possibility that the man who drove that message home so handsomely may not be the partner I'm seeking after all...