A few stale phrases — chestnuts, really — of my mother’s came to mind on a recent walk with my partner, as we weighed our own current parenting dilemmas. I related two linguistic bugbears from my personal archive. Ursa minor went, “Children are to be seen and not heard.” This one generally rolled out at restaurants, which my grandfather loved frequenting after grandma’s passing; my mom drove us three there for dinners and Sunday meals.
My main most-loathed parental prod, or Ursa major, had it that “You’re old enough that your wants won’t hurt you.”
My main most-loathed parental prod, or Ursa major, had it that “You’re old enough that your wants won’t hurt you.” I wondered, though I could not quite put it into words then, “Why are pleasures hurtful?” In my worldview, wanting a Creamsicle or hoping for a trip to the swimming pool just was. That is to say, desire was at the very least neutral, if not benign. But no. Through drilled repetition, I came to realize that the things I wanted were insignificant and, ascetically, stoically, I had to kill the thrill or else hide it.
And, without even knowing it, I took this parental advice wholly to heart. At the pediatrician when I was seven — oh, dear, doubting Dr. Thomas, how little ye listened — “She must have cut those bald spots out. Hide the scissors.” I’d told the truth. I twisted my hair around my finger and pulled. (Yes, it hurt.) That simple. And complex, which I know now (hello, body-focused repetitive behaviors!).
In this either-or environment that I found myself in, wants either went unfulfilled, though expressed, or fulfilled but utterly hidden. That way, I could either love myself or hate myself, keeping all under wraps. Unseen could also be unheard, and I, therefore, became the perfect model of a figment of an actual child. Hence, I could feel unloved, unlovable, and hopeless out in the open, but I could also scar my back with a belt buckle in the privacy of my own room. And, as my parents had never seen the brilliant dystopic flick “Brazil,” by Terry Gilliam, they did not have the suspicion bred of confidence. Or, if they suspected, they certainly did not report!
And so it went, unabated.
I pursued boys, and eventually men, rather than the way that society told me to do it: waiting silently, like a maidenly grail. Finally, I caught a few companions (but, fortunately, no diseases) and threw most quickly back into the pond. I was also dumped at prom (“you’re a nice girl, but…”), ardently loved an older man who finally frightened me away with a love letter, groped by another teacher’s spouse when I did computer chores for them, and assaulted at school (way pre-camera era) by a boy who’d pushed me into a deserted bathroom. Fortunately, he was as wiry as I, and I was more pissed off, so whatever his evil mission was, he failed.
As an adult, I fell for unattainable men (engaged, married, celebrities) time and again, repeating childhood patterns that would unearth Freud for a psychological field day. Absent father, ja, ja.
There’s a solo Phil Collins song called “All of My Life,” about the drummer-singer’s experiences with an emotionally distant father, that has resonated for me (and my wants) for some time. The narrator, presumably Phil himself, narrates that the Diogenes-like pursuit of one’s meaning is unceasing, that while looking around, “it’s hard to find the way/Just reaching past the goal in front of me/While what’s important just slips away.”
Now I’m in my middle-late, or late-middle, way. Perhaps even my last act, for who really ever knows? Call it perimenopause, call it personal failures or flirting with nonmonogamy, but my wants can — and have — hurt me and people I care about. Sadly, over and over.
Vis-à-vis Valentine’s Day, here’s the anecdote within this extended rant-lament-dissection-flagellation. Despite having a loyal and loving partner, I (when our romance began to age and we took each other for granted) sought out something that eventually became someone. But the someone was unreachable. In so many ways. Not for lack of effort, but our distance kept us forever apart. And then I literally cracked, after breaking off the hot-and-heavy portion of the long-distance interlude. Did he truly love me? The world, and I, may never know.
Then, a few years later, I found myself a real, live man. Unfortunately. He was sweet and romantic, giving me a ring he’d metal-smithed, just a month into the relationship. He was quirky and artistic (I’d nicknamed him Caravaggio), even had a cat. And I, wishy-washily at fault as I was for telling my partner a second time “I think I’m done with our relationship,” took the easy-at-first wanting way — the desire to be loved and to fall in love again again — to the mouth of the inferno. Alas, what Buddha could teach me about the right path. In any case, when I (still besotted) left Caravaggio, sigh, he texted that he had angry friends at a nearby hotel watching me, that I should be careful. So I was the “sociopath,” a “mad(woman)” and “evil,” and, still, also the person he most loved and wanted in his life (the messages alternated). To be honest, I do miss him, but not the dangerously mercurial part.
Something else I missed, however, is the self-knowledge mark. The being-a-good-partner bar. Like Collins’s song, I reached past the love I had to recapture something . . . desirability and sensuality, romance and pursuit, time, spontaneity, lack of responsibility . . . . or to attain the singlehood and independence I’d scarcely had.
These days, I’m desperate to make amends to Mr. Umber and in Stephen Stills’s lyrics, “love the one [I’m] with,” though I’ll likely never not be a restless overthinker.
To that end, I recently asked an equally puzzled longtime-single friend “how does one deal with contentment?” In essence, what happens when wants are either extinguished, if that is humanly possible, or kept under tight rein? His response: “I’ll tell you when I figure it out.”
