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May 11 - May 25, 2019
“Accepting things as they are is difficult. A lot of people go to war with reality.”
This forgetting, this slide into smallness, this irritability and shame, this disorienting grief: It’s like this. Minds don’t rest; they reel and wander and fixate and roll back and reconsider because it’s like this, having a mind. Hearts don’t idle; they swell and constrict and break and forgive and behold because it’s like this, having a heart. Lives don’t last; they thrill and confound and circle and overflow and disappear because it’s like this, having a life.
“Makes you wonder what else people might tell you if you just keep asking questions.”
We couldn’t know the future, was his refrain, but we could learn how to know each other—or rather keep knowing each other, and that would keep our union safe.
There’s no expectation of some linear progression from agony to okayness. It goes in circles. It’s sloppy.”
twelve-year-old Lucy, who probably didn’t know Tom Petty from Ben Bernanke, ran her nearly weightless hand back and forth across my back and said what I wish everyone would say—not “I’m sorry” but “I know.”
“I’m fifty. Just about everyone’s broken at my age.
The next day I asked Cookie, “Do you think broken people are better?” “It’s a big price to pay,” she said with tears in her eyes. “But yes. I do.”
You can’t be really loved if you can’t bear to be really known.
we can be damaged and heavy-hearted but still buoyant and insightful, still essential and useful, just by saying I know.
Learn to say no. And when you do, don’t complain and don’t explain. Every excuse you make is like an invitation to ask you again in a different way.
It must be possible to say no nicely and still be loved.
“I just want to enjoy what we have. I want to be the family we are.”
sometimes the art of relationship is declaring your limits, protecting your boundaries, saying no.
I’ve come to feel downright uneasy with people who can’t say no. What if they yes you to death and then secretly hate you for it? If they never say no, how can you trust their yes? Besides, no makes room for yes, and who doesn’t want more room for that?
the cornerstone of a proper apology is taking responsibility, and the capstone is naming the transgression. Contrition must be felt and conveyed. Finally, apologies are better served plain, hold the rationalizations. In other words, I’m sorry should be followed by a pause or period, not by but and never by you.
That’s why I prefer I was wrong. It’s harder to say. It’s singular in meaning. And it reeks of humility.
But, even as I own up to my wrongs, I wonder if it’s ill-advised to call attention to the lesser parts of myself. What if the truth about my character is not that great and this is how word gets out? Not to mention: once I say out loud that I was wrong to toss or undermine or shirk, I can’t keep tossing, undermining, or shirking. Being a permanently better partner than I have been seems unlikely and a hair ambitious. It’s a daunting combination: exposing our crappiest selves and creating expectations of personal change.
Maybe being wrong is not the same as being bad, I thought, not a sign that your insides were rotten. Maybe you can still be a decent-ish person, a person with a personal mission statement, a person who aspires to be someone habitually good and highly effective, and fuck up.
to love someone is to love the people they love, or at least, try.
Would they visit my parents? Would they want to? Would it matter to them that it mattered to me? And would I forgive their predictable indifference? I would, of course, because the being-wrong business never ends. I would forgive my someday-children nearly as often as I would need forgiveness from them. Together, we would practice a circular, ongoing amnesty. It would be required.
‘You don’t need to be something you aren’t. You’re good enough.’ ”
“Thirteen is a pivotal moment, and not just because of mustaches and curves. It’s a time of explosive intellectual and emotional growth. But it’s also when life tends to get treacherous. They are going into the eye of the hurricane.
You don’t need to get it right every time, you know what I mean? A couple wins here and there is plenty.”
That’s how it works: someone important believes in us, loudly and with conviction and against all substantiation, and over time, we begin to believe, too—not in our shot at perfection, mind you, but in the good enough version of us that they have reflected.
Informed love, love that has cut across time and thwarted its pressures, is a two-ton emotion, and the plain, full statement of it often makes my throat clog with feeling.
I love you is not I love your giggle and mysterious expressions or I love the way your bra matches your panties. It’s Even though your neck dropped into a wattle last year and you burp a lot after you eat Thai food and have not conquered your social insecurities and I heard you yell sharply at our kids again and you still can’t seem to bring yourself to be nicer to my mom or ask for that raise, I love you.
The first time the words pass between two people: electrifying. Ten thousand times later: cause for marvel. The last time: the dream you revisit over and over and over again.
The other problem with language is that arranging words into sentences requires we flip on our thinking machine, which necessarily claims some of our focus, so that as soon as we start deciding how to explain a feeling, we’re not entirely feeling the feeling anymore, and some feelings want to be felt at full capacity.
I’m better at the close silence parenting often requires. My needs diminish. I am less outside my life, critiquing it, and more in it, moving quietly, even reverently, through its spaces, awed by the way two people—even a gung-ho mother and her tapped-out teenager—can hold each other without touching and cheer each other without saying a word.
Thank you for the food before us, the people around us, and the love between us.
People ask how we’re doing. Poets have tried for centuries to describe love, loss, death, and how these things transform the living. So I want to level-set people’s expectations about what I’m about to say. It is beyond my abilities to describe how we’re doing. There. Are your expectations sufficiently low? Good. I’ll give it a try now.
talking about other things adults need to be able to say to each other if they want to be in long-term relationships.
