I Thought You Said This Would Work

by Ann Garvin

When girls were friends, it was like a beautiful bouquet of funny flowers eternally watered by their togetherness. When the friendship failed, it was an ice storm on a hothouse plant.

“However large or small a group is, the addition of one person will forever change interactions, and preexisting ground rules no longer apply.”

When I cried, my mom said in a matter-of-fact but not unkind voice I’ve carried in my brain throughout my life, “People die, Sam. That you can count on.” My mother had a way of simultaneously talking to me as both a child and an adult. It could be harsh sometimes, but there was a stickiness to her lessons. “We’re odd, we humans,” she would say. “We know people die, but we act astonished when it happens. What is astonishing about death is our certainty that it isn’t going to happen to us or anyone we know without some kind of warning. And, we live our life doing stupid things like gossiping, when we should spend all our days planting flowers.”

When you were a child and you were taught to avoid fighting at all costs, you never got to see the rewards of having the hard conversation. If this continued as you aged, you got the message that the spoils must be so terrible, so ungodly horrible, that nothing was worth an argument. When you were an adult, you could reason yourself out of that, see evidence everywhere that wasn’t true, but your child hid and whispered, But what if the result is worse than the fight?

For my part, I realized that putting your thoughts and emotions into simple sentences was easier than building a life where those sentences would never have to be uttered.

“Safety and the idea that you can keep anyone safe is an illusion. But, loving someone is the ultimate safekeeping.”

Curing yourself from avoiding conflict wasn’t just about stepping up to fight. It was also about learning to lean into discomfort. Maybe the process was like washing windows on a sunny day: the big dirt was easy, but the final smear on a filthy windowpane could be the hardest to rub out.

This was the comfort of love. It didn’t cure cancer or reduce the pain of childbirth, but it cloaked lovers, friends, and family in an embrace that stretched far and wide and was supremely difficult to break, despite our best idiotic efforts.