sarahntastic

I didn’t want to get married the first or the second time I did so.  The first time I was trying to out-reverse psychology my parents.  I ended up married.  Sobbing and hyperventilating down the aisle, yet still ended up married at 19.  The second time was for pragmatic reasons that ultimately were for naught, yet there I was, married again.

Neither time did I think I was following through on a life-long desire to partner up with someone.  In fact, both times I knew very well the decisions would likely lead me to disaster of some sort.  I’m the person who desired love and commitment more than anyone I knew, even at a young age, but never, ever did I think that meant marriage.

I believe in long-term relationships.  I believe in fidelity and commitment and partnership and team work and building a family and sharing lives.  More than a lot of people I know, certainly.

I think it is unnatural for humans to spend long periods of our lives alone.

I think we are at our best when we live with and alongside someone we care for deeply, support faithfully, trust absolutely.  He is the person you are willing to get dressed in front of unabashedly.  He is the person you know you can puke in front of and in return he can do the same.  And then you are willing to clean up the sick and the poop and the snotty kleenex.  We know what the other wants to say, even when we can’t spit it out.  We know favorites:  food, perfume, magazines, literature, films, television.  Because this is how you are for someone you love.

And you might argue.  You might even fight hard and mean and tough once in a while.  But those times are rare.  Because you know that you cannot make it if this is how you are most of the time.  Because it is how things were before, and it never worked.  Because none of the others were the one.

None of this means I care to be married.  Certainly there are pragmatic reasons that might change my mind like getting health insurance and making end-of-life decisions.  But there are other ways to manage these things.

I believe in forever more, happily ever after, not wanting something good to end, ever.  But all of this does not mean marriage to me.  And frankly, I think I’ve used up my marriage tries.  I gladly give up any more to those who legally cannot marry but want to.

High school mostly sucked for me.  I was smart and sarcastic and too mature to relate to most of my peers.  I had a mom everyone knew as The One to Ask What Such-and-Such Means (dirty words, mostly), and a penchant for loving books more than anything else.  I had a really cool car thanks to having a really cool dad.  Everyone thought that 1966 Mustang  was amazing, but really I cared mostly about getting to school and work and One Step Beyond (see underage club, circa 1988, 1989 for definition) in it.  I liked having money; I liked reading in my room; and I liked a few close friends.  Mostly I wanted to grow up and get the fuck out of high school.

So then there was facebook.  I had no idea so many people were nosy, adding me just to see my pics, because really? Why else are you friending me, peeps I haven’t seen or heard from in nearly 20 years?  I mean, we didn’t jive back in 1987, we ain’t gonna jive now, knowhatI’msayin?  But it was sort of neat to see a few people grown up.  Via facebook, of course.  Even the locals.  There would be no actual meeting.  Why would we meet now when we couldn’t bear each other during high school?

Then the 20th reunion came along.  I didn’t want to go.  An old friend persuaded me to go.  I got drunk really early in the night.  Because I couldn’t bear the whole thing.  I don’t know why.  Most people were fascinated that I wasn’t married, didn’t have children.  I was some anomaly to be interviewed.  Unfortunately I was so far gone on vodka I had to tell myself to stay quiet to avoid embarrassing myself.  One dude grabbed my ass many times.  Women wanted to know what life was like without kids.  I wanted to get the fuck outta there.  Just like 20 years ago.

It was nice to see  a few people.  But after all is said and done, I could have done without.  20 years is really no time at all.  Everyone still looked like their 15 year old selves.

Adults with a weird history of weird awkwardness to the weirdth degree really need to meet again after 20 years?

I’m thinking no.

Me:  I can’t wait til Thursday!

BFF:  Really? you’re that excited about getting your IUD?

Me:  Say wha? I’m talking about you & I going out Thursday night.

BFF:  Oh.  I thought you were super excited like maybe you’re just gonna start fucking and fucking.

Me:  Um.

BFF:  Maybe that’s just what I would do.

After seeing her for a few months years ago, I was well enough to start thinking about re-starting my life, this tiny, long-haired, nose-pierced, bright green toenail polished, Stanford educated M.D., Indian woman said, “Don’t complain about not having a boyfriend when you leave the house looking like THAT.”

Next she lectured on the “fact” that fat women make compromises in their mates, because they can’t snag a good looking man who also happens to be a good man.  She knows so, she said, because she sees it amongst her friends.  Perfectly smart, able, ambitious women–fat women–pairing up with men who, in every way, are inferior, but hey, that’s what fat gets you.  So can I please get over myself and do something about my weight?

I always wondered which Stanford class, exactly, she learned to be so bitchy forthright.  I liked it, though.  No bullshit.  I couldn’t pull my sob story for long with her.  She succeeded in properly medicating me so I was much better than when I dragged in months earlier having been in a fetal position on my couch for six months prior to that.

So when I needed to see her again, because the dark abyss of depression had crept up on me this year, after a few years of sanity and clear-headedness, I was running late.  I put on jeans, rather than yoga pants, knowing she would cringe.  But I didn’t put on makeup.  I didn’t dry my hair.  I really couldn’t.  Didn’t have the energy, physical or mental, to do much more.  But I knew she would have something to say about it.

I explained my descent back into near-severe depression the last six months, and my frustration and anger with myself that I just cannot make myself do anything.  She did her doctor thing.  She told me she would adjust meds.  She told me that I am depressed, duh, so no amount of self-pep talk is going to work until I’m moving out of the dark parts.  She suggested I try to do small things, allow myself accomplishments on a much smaller scale.

Call a friend back.

Clean off my desk.

Blow dry my hair one day.

And there it is, folks.  Psychiatric honesty at it’s finest.  For $250, no less (no, she doesn’t accept insurance).

I can’t wait to see her again in two weeks.  Needless to say I won’t dare show up makeup-less or with undone hair.

How much would I have to love you for you to stop hating yourself?

For you to believe you are worth loving?

For you to love me back?

How much would I have to love you for you to believe that I love you?

Don’t tell me that something cheap, low-class-by-your-standards, a neighborhood you might be unfamiliar with, a person who might speak in a way you don’t approve of or are culturally naive to, or anything else for that matter, EXCEPT FOR A REAL-LIVE GHETTO, is ghetto.

In my presence, someone pointed to Prada shoes, albeit very unattractive shoes, and said “oh, those are so ghetto.”  My response was something like “you’re a stupid cunt that will never, in even your most dire circumstances, know what a ghetto is. Step away from me.”  I didn’t care that we were shopping together.

Most of us?  Don’t know from a ghetto.

Wipe this word from your vocabulary unless you have a paper on the ghettoization of ethnic groups in America due.

I have always felt ill-equipped intellectually to read poetry.  Perhaps I hadn’t enough life experience or the right frame of mind to appreciate what a smart man so simply explained to me is “just concentrated prose.”

And so I have read a bit of poetry recently.

“Music Swims Back to Me” immediately took me to a time my mother broke into a million pieces.  My father’s mother, my beloved grandmother, the only mother figure my own mother knew, died.  We were all distraught.  She was the most loving, funny, silly, sweet person all of us knew.  My mom had a horrible mother.  My grandmother took my mother in when she was 17, cared for her, and loved her as her own for 30 years.

So, when my grandmother died, my mom left us for months.

She was with us physically, but so far gone emotionally, we had no idea what to do.  Most attempts to coax her out into the world were met with anger, lashing out, screaming, complete and utter despair-filled, fetal position on the floor, sobbing.  She checked out of life.

She remembers little of this now, many years later, long-recovered from this break.  This wasn’t the first time my mother exited reality for the broken place in her mind.  Her recollection is disjointed, makes little sense.  Yet she remembers details so tiny and specific, I often think she created them in her mind to soothe herself:  the exact shape of clouds on a particular day; music on the radio when we would go for drives; a book I suggested to her.  These are the sort of details she would never, ever remember under normal circumstances.

Having had my own tortured mental breaks in my life, I know how important these tiny, pleasant bits are.  What swims back to you when you are broken is what keeps you, in the sane times, remembering why you never want to go back again if you can help it.

Her father was a raging alcoholic.  He beat them all for his own personal recreation.  Her mother, her brother, her.  He threw her against the brick fireplace and broke her clavicle when she was a small child.  He berated them all; he viciously beat them all.  And yet somehow she was his favorite.  She stared him in the eye while he beat the shit out of her.  He had a respect for her that he didn’t have for her mother and brother.  Because of this, her mother resented her and abused her emotionally her entire life.  She would spend most of her adult life chasing her mother’s love.

In 1968, she was 17, angry, and hurt because her father forced her home from college simply because she was dating a Jewish guy.  Otherwise she wouldn’t have been home that day when he returned from after-work drinking, enraged by Black Panthers and hippies and socialists.  He beat her while she sat in a kitchen chair, staring at him.  When he was finally done, she left, with nothing.  She got in her car and drove 200 miles west to a family friend.  She had the phone number of a former college acquaintance from California.  She called.  He drove 1,500 miles to get her.  She left with him and just a few clothes she had sewn for herself, waiting for this kid to come get her.  She wouldn’t return to her home state for many years.

He was angry and hurt, too.  He left college because the money ran out.  He had a large, close family, but he was the youngest and left behind a lot.  In 1968 he was 18.  He drove 1,500 miles to rescue someone he barely knew.  He brought her to California, and she was immediately embraced by his family.  His mother loved her as her own from the start.  His mother said, whenever anyone asked how she could take in a stranger, “she was a child. I never understood how her own parents could throw away their child.  Now she is my daughter.”

After a year living and working together, she asked him if they were going to get married.  They did.

Then they had three kids.  And lots of pets.  And a house with a pool.  And vacations.  And their kids grew up.

And they stayed married.  Continue to stay married.

After he saved her and she saved him.

you can’t have just the best parts of me

you can have my kindness and my generosity and my I-will-always-make-you-feel-special

but you must have my wounds and my mistakes and my temper

you can have my trust and my adoration and my I-will-always-make-you-laugh

but you must have my tantrums and my over-thinking and my jumping to conclusions

you can have my love

and you must have the rest of me

or you can’t have any of me

Many years ago I had a friend who challenged me to my core.  Often in manipulative, unrealistic, and simply insane ways thinking back on it all, but at the time, I thought she was wise and smart.  Her AA, OA, NA and whatever else Anonymous theories I met mostly with a “get over yourself” attitude, but I certainly was not, am not, perfect.  So I listened.  I learned what I could.

She was considerably older than me.  I was 24 when we first met and she was near 40.  She had had a life, a child, a couple divorces, many boyfriends, many dates, many a fall-out with her family, and of course the addiction battles.  I was divorced but still very naive.  I hadn’t yet had my first cocktail, never smoked, never did drugs, and never really dated, having married my second serious boyfriend when I was 19.

Mostly I thought she was a mature, confident woman who did whatever she wanted, and I wanted to be like her.  She talked about sex like no one I’d ever known.  She told men off for being bad in bed.  She was honest with men and required them to be honest with her.  She was confident at work.  Confident with women.  And I was fun, single, and pretty much willing to let her take me on as her project for awhile.  We were perfect for each other at that particular time in our lives.

After a couple years, though, I wasn’t cutting it with her.  I never did meet her expectations.  After all, I was still me.  Certainly I learned a bit more about men and relationships and making a place for myself at work.  I learned I was lucky to have a supportive family, something she did not have.

But it all ended when she challenged me in an honest and forthright way during a time I was particularly depressed and lost.

She wanted me to commit to a trip, a seminar, a plan for my life–many things at once that I had been putting off.  We argued, I cried, she was frustrated with me, I was frustrated with me.  I wouldn’t commit to anything.  I remember, vividly, the final phone call.  I said over and over again that I was confused and unsure of what to do with myself.  Finally she said, “Sarah, confusion is a delusion your brain allows you so you don’t have to make choices.  It’s an excuse.  You aren’t confused, you are scared and so you choose nothing.  But you are not confused.”

And there it was.  Straight truth.

I know what I want.  I know who I love and care for.  I know who is good for me and who isn’t.  I know that I put myself in situations that allow for the delusion of confusion to be cultivated so that I have an excuse not to be myself, not to do anything, not to commit, not to move forward, not to find a man who wants to be with me fully and completely.

I am not confused.  And neither are you.