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But compassion isn’t about solutions. It’s about giving all the love that you’ve got. So give it. It’s clear that you’ve done it already.
Your mother-in-law is dead, but she lives like a shadow mother in the woman you love. Make a place for her in your life too.
People die because they want who they want. They do all kinds of crazy, stupid, sweet, tender, amazing, self-destructive things. You aren’t going to make anyone “see the light and realize that what they’re doing is wrong.” You just aren’t.
These are not pretty things, but they are true things.
dreadful to watch a friend make choices that you fear will cause her pain. But this is where boundaries come in, my dear Worried Friend. Do you know what boundaries are?
And in the meanwhile, cultivate an understanding of a bunch of the other things that the best, sanest people on the planet know: that life is long, that people both change and remain the same, that every last one of us will need to fuck up and be forgiven, that we’re all just walking and walking and walking and trying to find our way, that all roads lead eventually to the mountaintop.
and your husband repair the damage his affair has caused. What strikes me most about your letter is how little you say about him. Your rage appears to be directed solely toward the woman with whom he had an affair. You write that she has “caused damage in my family that I never imagined possible,” but of course she couldn’t have caused damage if your husband hadn’t let her. They both violated your trust, but your husband committed the graver offense. He took a vow. She only took a job.
When bad things happen, often the only way back to wholeness is to take it all apart. You have the strength to do that, no matter how marriage-mucking and soul-shaking that will be. A terrible thing happened to you, but you mustn’t let it define your life.
Accept that the man you love was unfaithful to you. Accept that a woman you once held in regard treated you with disrespect. Accept that their actions hurt you deeply. Accept that this experience taught you something you didn’t want to know. Accept that sorrow and strife are part of even a joyful life. Accept that it’s going to take a long time for you to get that monster out of your chest. Accept that someday what pains you now will surely pain you less.
Acceptance asks only that you embrace what’s true.
You’re so outraged and surprised that this shitty thing happened to you that there’s a piece of you that isn’t yet convinced it did.
looking for the explanation, the loophole, the bright twist in the dark tale that reverses its course.
You’re cutting off its feeding tube and forcing a new thought into your head—one that nurtures rather than tortures you. It’s essentially mental self-discipline. I’m not suggesting one deny negative emotions, but rather that you accept them and move through them by embracing the power we have to keep from wallowing in emotions that don’t serve us well. It’s hard work. It’s important work. I believe something like forgiveness is on the other side. You will get there, dear woman. Just try.
You want the dream too! But, M, you didn’t get it. Not yet. Not quite ever, perhaps. That doesn’t mean all is lost. This is not “how your story ends.” It’s simply where it takes a turn you didn’t expect.
Getting sperm does not mean that you are “deciding definitively” that you “will not get married and have a child.” Life is long, darling. Who knows what’s going to happen? You could meet your Big Love tomorrow. You could meet him in ten years. You could have a baby on your own now and another with him when you’re forty-two. You don’t know. The question about who you will love and when you will love him is out of your hands. It’s a mystery that you can’t solve. There is, however, no mystery about sperm.
They take everything. They will bring you to the furthest edge of your personality and abso-fucking-lutely to your knees. They will also give you everything back. Not just all they take, but many of the things you lost before they came along as well.
The reality is that, regardless of the circumstances, most moms are alternately blissed out by their love for their children and utterly overwhelmed by the spectacular amount of sacrifice they require.
What you must answer when you delve into this question about whether to have a baby alone, honey bun, is what the landscape will look like for you. Not what it looks like for “single mothers by choice,” but how it will actually play out in your own life. How will you need to restructure or reconsider your life if you become a mother? What resources do you have, what resources will you need, and how will you get them?
And it will be lonely too, doing all that without a partner. How lonely, I can’t say. You will hold your baby and cry sometimes in frustration, in rage, in despair, in exhaustion and inexplicable sorrow. You will watch your baby with joy and laugh at the wonder so pure and the beauty so unconcealed that it will make you ache.
What’s important is that you make the leap. Jump high and hard with intention and heart. Pay no mind to the vision the commission made up. It’s up to you to make your life. Take what you have and stack it up like a tower of teetering blocks. Build your dream around that.
When two households merge, roles of authority and responsibility must be rearranged—sometimes subtly, sometimes drastically—and they must be rearranged in a way that often reverses the long-established parent-child order. This is unquestionably a complicated thing.
Perhaps the best way to get him to stop telling you what you don’t want to hear is to ask him about what you’re willing to listen to. Maybe he simply needs to finally
open up about his life to someone he loves. Why not try to engage him on a deeper level? Ask him to share with you other stories of his life—the ones that he’s never been brave enough to
There’s a line by the Italian writer Carlo Levi that I think is apt here: “The future has an ancient heart.” I love it because it expresses with such grace and economy what is certainly true—that who we become is born of who we most primitively are; that we both know and cannot possibly know what it is we’ve yet to make manifest in our lives.
You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that’s all.
The most terrible and beautiful and interesting things happen in a life. For some of you, those things have already happened. Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.
I hope when people ask what you’re going to do with your English and/or creative writing degree you’ll say: Continue my bookish examination of the contradictions and complexities of human motivation and desire; or maybe just: Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters. And then smile very serenely until they say, Oh.
It doesn’t seem to be working because you aren’t really friends with this man. You’re having a sexually repressed, mildly deceitful romantic relationship with him.
To get what you want in a romantic relationship you must say what you want. Shall we say it together? You want your friend to be free to fall in love with you for real if you are really going to fall in love. This tortured, half-assed, overheated game of faux friendship footsie the two of you are playing simply won’t do.
Yet I also realized they had to know—their fascination with Jesus’ agony was proof of that. I’d hit a nerve. I’d revealed a truth they were ready to know. Not about Christianity, but about the human condition: that suffering is part of life.
wanted what I wanted and I expected it to be given to me by a God in whom I had no faith. Because mercy had always more or less been granted me, I assumed it always would be. But it wasn’t.
It was not granted to all those people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time when they came up against the wrong virus or military operation or famine or carcinogenic or genetic mutation or natural disaster or maniac.
It implies a pious quid pro quo that defies history, reality, ethics, and reason. It fails to acknowledge that the other half of rising—the very half that makes rising necessary—is having first been nailed to the cross.
If I believed in God, I’d see evidence of his existence in that. In your darkest hour you were held afloat by the human love that was given to you when you most needed it. That would have been true regardless of the outcome of Emma’s surgery. It would have been the grace that carried you through even if things had not gone as well as they did, much as we hate to ponder that.
What if you allowed your God to exist in the simple words of compassion others offer to you? What if faith is the way it feels to lay your hand on your daughter’s sacred body? What if the greatest beauty of the day is the shaft of sunlight through your window? What if the worst thing happened and you rose anyway? What if you trusted in the human scale? What if you listened harder to the story of the man on the cross who found a way to endure his suffering than to the one about the impossible magic of the Messiah? Would you see the miracle in that?
You’re generally less humble in that decade than you’ll ever be and this lack of humility is oddly mixed with insecurity and uncertainty and fear. You will learn a lot about yourself if you stretch in the direction of goodness, of bigness, of kindness, of forgiveness, of emotional bravery. Be a warrior for love.
And your question to me—the very core of it—is circling around the same thing. It’s not Will I ever find someone who will love me romantically?—(though in fact that question is there and it’s one I will get to)—but rather Am I capable of letting someone do so? This is where we must dig.
But I do know that we are here, all of us—beasts and monsters and beauties and wallflowers alike—to do the best we can. And every last one of us can do better than give up.
Anyone who has lived in the world for twenty-six years looking like what he is—“a broken man”—is not “just average on the inside.” Because of that, the journey you take to find love isn’t going to be average either. You’re going to have to be brave. You’re going to have to walk into the darkest woods without a stick.
What I want you to note is that Belle loved the beast when he was still a beast—not a handsome prince. It is only once she loved him that he was transformed. You will be likewise transformed, the same as love transforms us all. But you have to be fearless enough to let it transform you.
Have you made overtures and been rebuffed or are you projecting your own fears and insecurities onto others? Are you closing yourself off from the possibility of romance before anyone has the chance to feel romantically toward you?
mean to inquire—without diminishing the absolute reality that many people will disregard you as a romantic possibility based solely on your appearance—about whether you’ve asked yourself if the biggest barrier between you and the romantic hot monkey love that’s possible between you and the people who will—yes! without question!—be interested in you is not your ugly exterior, but your beautifully vulnerable interior.
Inhabit the beauty that lives in your beastly body and strive to see the beauty in all the other beasts. Walk without a stick into the darkest woods. Believe that the fairy tale is true.
She told me that at a certain point we get to decide who it is we allow to influence us. She said, “I could allow myself to be influenced by three men who screwed me against my will or I could allow myself to be influenced by van Gogh. I chose van Gogh.” I never forgot that. I think of that phrase “I chose van Gogh” whenever I’m having trouble lifting my own head up.
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You say this terrible experience no longer impacts your “day-to-day” life, but you also say it played an important role in shaping who you are. The whole deal about loving truly and for real and with all you’ve got has everything to do with letting those we love see what made us. Withholding this trauma from your boyfriend makes it bigger than it needs to be. It creates a secret you’re too beautiful to keep. Telling has a way of dispersing things. It will allow your lover to stand closer inside the circle of you. Let him.
My memory of how it felt to glide through the water without my mother is still so fresh, so visceral, even though it was forty years ago. The sensations were both physical and intellectual. How strange and glorious it was to be anchored to nothing, to be free, in some particular way, for the first time in my life. How quickly I shifted from the shock of my mother’s betrayal to the terror of my new reality to the pure delight of how it felt to swim. My mother had been right: my bubble held me up.
But I’m quite certain it will turn out to be a healthy shift for all of you. Much as your sons no doubt love you, it seems clear to me that they don’t see you as truly separate from them. Your needs matter little because it barely occurs to them that you have any. They moved into your house without asking you because they don’t really consider that house yours—they believe it’s theirs too, that they have a right to it because it belongs to you, their mother. Theirs.
The point is, you get to choose what you wish to provide when it comes to money and resources now. You raised those boys into men. You paid your dues. It’s time for you to allow your sons to pay theirs. It’s only once you fling them away that they can do this, that they can see how it feels to float, how you look to them from that distance on the other side of the pool.
