Love – The Green Study

Love in Exceptional Times

My 20th wedding anniversary was on April Fool’s Day. This will suffice as an explanation for the rubber chickens, whoopee cushions, and jester hats at our wedding reception. I drew the line when my husband said I should walk down the aisle with a pillow stuffed up my dress. To celebrate two decades of commitment, we quietly acknowledged the date and guilted our teenager into playing card games with us. The day was a tick on the calendar, but had less meaning to us than the days prior.

canstockphoto8378139 Despite our efforts to stay quarantined, my daughter had a medical emergency three nights ago. The on-call oncology doctor sent us to the emergency room. We didn’t want to go, knowing that we’d be utilizing resources and making ourselves vulnerable to the coronavirus, but she was in severe pain. Then we made a choice that was unusual for us – my husband would stay at home to lessen exposure and I would take her to the ER.

The night was a blur of watching my brave kid be in constant pain. Six hours of testing and alternating pain meds. I broke for a moment when I asked the nurse where I could get a cup of coffee – in tears, shaken, unmoored. I thought I can’t take this anymore. My texts to my husband throughout the night were straight reporting until the last one. It will be better when you are here.

By morning, she had been admitted to the hospital, which was strangely comforting – we’d spent several weeks there over the last year, so the surrounding canstockphoto26182548 s and routine were familiar. Except for the extra precautions – everyone in masks and gloves – even more critical on the pediatric oncology floor. My husband arrived with overnight bags. He’d fed the cat, straightened up the house, notified his boss. I could feel myself breathe again.

Before he arrived, I thought of the other many long nights that we’d spent in emergency rooms, surgery waiting areas, by hospital beds, and sitting at home, alert to our girl’s every sound and movement. It has been a long year and while I could call it a bad year in terms of everything we’d all gone through, it wasn’t a bad year for our family relationships, our marriage, our time together. Our true fortune is that we know how to take care of each other and we know how to laugh.

canstockphoto0506045 I tend to eschew sentimentality. It took me five years to tell my husband I hated heart-shaped anything. And it’s taken him a long time to get used to my distinct lack of interest in celebrations or gifts. There is this idea that anthropologically, humans need ritual and celebration, but I think those events are simply about noticing the moment. If noticing and appreciating the moment is the point, I probably have 50 micro-celebrations a day. The pleasure of birds on the feeder, that damned good cup of coffee in the morning, a wonderful paragraph I’ve read, laughing with a friend or just hanging out with my tribe.

By late morning, my daughter’s pain had dissipated, test results were good, and we were discharged with a plan. Transitioning back to home meant dropping our clothes in the garage, hitting the showers, and disinfecting everything that had been at the hospital. And the re-set on quarantine has begun again.

I thought about love, what it meant in terms of our marriage. For the last few years, while my mother-in-law was struggling with Alzheimer’s and the last year when our daughter went through surgeries to remove tumors, my husband and I learned just how much weight we could bear. We discovered that we could still be tender, even under the worst circumstances. We could still laugh when things were darkest. And we practiced kindness when it would have been so easy to rage.

canstockphoto16583600 Perhaps it is not the length of time, but the fact that this commitment ever came to be that still amazes me. I placed a Yahoo singles ad twenty-two years ago, long before the swiping and the algorithms. I was 29, had just moved to Minneapolis, and wanted to get on with a social life. Of the responses, many creepy and weird, I picked his. With no locations mentioned in the metro wide ad, we found out that we lived two miles away from each other. We exchanged emails for two weeks before going on our first date. Thus far, it’s worked out pretty well.

Like character, love shows its nature under duress. The world seems like a very scary place now. Nothing is assured and everything is shifting and changing. The greatest luxury of all is to be kind to ourselves and to one another in the midst of chaos – and to realize that celebration can’t be saved up for singular occasions. When so much suffering is in the world, we are sometimes afraid to let the moments of joy in, to say yes, in the middle of all this, I can have moments of happiness. The gratitude for those gentle moments seems a lot like love.

April 3, 2020April 3, 2020

Michelle at The Green Study31 Comments

A Misshapen Valentine that I Made Myself

canstockphoto1838112 It was at a relative’s funeral over 15 years ago that I began to wonder about my ability or inability to love. The spouse of the deceased, an awkward and unlikable man, cornered me. He began to explain my relatives to me in critical terms. She doesn’t know how to love. They are such cold people. He would never understand love. Grieving requires latitude, so I stood there, numbly, and listened as he described the people I loved as terrible. And maybe they were.

I’ve written before about my upbringing and childhood. And it is only significant in the fact that it had consequences. I was a sensitive, shy kid in a household where tears and really, any emotion, were mocked or ridiculed or punished. When I laughed I was too loud, when I cried I was being too sensitive, when I was sick I was faking it, when I was angry, I was unjustified. Toughen up was the order of the day.

So I did. I took up sarcasm and cynicism as weapons and armor. I worked when I was sick. I cried in private. I muffled my laughter and subdued any excitability. I smoothed out the sheets until there was not a wrinkle in sight. I grew up, muted and self-conscious of any outward indications of emotion.

I did well in the Army. No drill sergeant could yell me into anything more than a look of stony silence. I’d stare placidly as my bunk was torn apart and an angry man got up in my face screaming about my worthlessness. It was nothing to me.

canstockphoto13168497 Once I started college, I couldn’t relate to the excitable undergrads and buried myself in work. The cracks were beginning to show. I began to suffer chronic depression. The emotions that I’d suppressed had begun to curl inward and were finding their way into toxic relationships and self-destructive behaviors that left me gasping for air.

But I was tough. I could survive. I could make it through anything, especially the self-generated miseries. Two decades of muted smiles and disdain for anything sentimental or emotional. I was still me, sensitive to not only the moods and whims of others, but of the environment, of sounds and smells and shifts in the wind. I just had a hard shell.

This is what we’re told as children – grow up, toughen up, be like an adult. A generous interpretation is that we fear for these little, soft beings going out in the world. So often, though, we’re re-enacting our own childhood pains and fears, wishing on our children a kind of protection we never had.

It would be easy for me to say that being in a happy marriage and having a healthy child was what changed me. It did. How could it not? But the change began happening before he came along and she was born.

canstockphoto18089949 It started with decisions. A decision to leave a dead-end job that made me feel stupid. A decision to leave a relationship that would have gone nowhere, a relationship that made me feel inferior and worthless. A decision to leave a town where I’d worked through a lot of permutations and none of them fit.

Then there was therapy. Talking about things I’d never talked about, to a person who didn’t have a horse in the race. Crying a lot. Often feeling worse than I’d ever felt in my life. The cracks became canyons and I feared I would never get out. But every gaslight was extinguished when the therapist leaned in, with a quizzical look on her face and said “You do understand that they were trying to hurt you, right?” The elemental difference between feeling worthless and not.

I’ve softened over the years. It’s uncomfortable to me still. Sometimes I’ll hear myself laugh and I’ll think stop that cackling, a phrase I heard repeatedly as a child. But I split my heart wide open when I committed to a marriage. I laid all my vulnerabilities out on the table when my child smiled her first smile.

canstockphoto20639927 The softening of middle age isn’t just happening around the middle. I seem to be leaking tears and flashing smiles at the most inopportune moments. It feels like an odd awakening to the exquisite beauty of this fragile existence.

I will never be an effusive person or greet Valentine’s day with much more than a grimace. But my family is well-loved year round and I laugh a lot these days. I’m at a point where repairs are no longer underway, my psyche no longer under construction.

There’s a peppy little song by Cathy Heller called “Gonna Be Happy”. The lyrics are saccharine sweet, but there’s a line that has burned itself in my brain.

How can we set each other free?

I’ve been thinking about this as I go about my day. I’ve been watching people – at the grocery store, at concerts, walking their dogs, talking to their children, using their walkers, and blasting their car radios. And that line pops into my head.

It’s realizing that a smile can make a difference in a person’s day. It’s understanding that most people are not out to intentionally hurt us, that we are all on our own orbital paths and sometimes that makes us careless of other humans. It’s assuming the best, giving the benefit of the doubt, of attributing things not to malevolence, but to inattention.

canstockphoto3960689 It’s love turned outward. It’s that moment when it cannot be contained and wrangled into submission – when the impulse to smile or laugh or cry is no longer embarrassing or shameful. It’s startling when it happens. My first thought is always “Who is this weirdo and what do they want?” But defensiveness obscures my vision, makes me miss the moment, the connection. Curiosity is the antidote and is, in some ways, the best gift of love we can offer each other.

February 14, 2018February 14, 2018

Michelle at The Green Study33 Comments

The Snowflake and the Fist

canstockphoto8520880 Since I live in Minnesota, I find the term “snowflake” to be an innately irritating and overused bit. They all look the same at the end of my shovel. It’s generally used against liberals or basically anyone who disagrees with the person using it. It’s used as a way to shut down opinions, to end the conversation – a way to show what a tough you are. Liberals do the same thing with the “check your privilege” childishness. It ends conversations. It is aggressive and condescending.

Language matters and how we learn to talk to one another can be the difference between peace and violence.

I often struggle with this. Sounding tough is armor – a protection against getting hurt or having to examine one’s own words and actions.

My home life as a child was unpredictable and could, at times, be dangerous. When in pain or afraid or angry, I was mocked for being too sensitive and consequently spent many of my years practicing toughness. I put some meat on that bone by joining the Army, training in martial arts, and becoming physically stronger. I was determined that no one should ever hurt or threaten me again.

canstockphoto3491219 Over the years, especially being a parent, I’ve had to reverse engineer my vulnerability. I’ve had to learn to take harshness out of my tone, become more cognizant when teasing might cross the line to meanness, learn to nurture and give without regard to how it makes me appear. I’ve had my moments, though. I liked the idea that I could sing silly songs with my girl and still be able to take down an attacker if needed.

These days, I am approaching life with a little more subtlety. The current environment of political dysfunction and the dangerous things being done in the name of “toughness” have made me think about what strength means.

Imagine what the conversation would be if instead of saying “Lock her up”, people had shouted “we’re afraid”. Or instead of calling President Trump cutesy insult names, we had simply said “we’re afraid”. Would the conversation change? Would the tone of the whole campaign season have changed?

Instead, we’re bordering on an authoritarian regime. When people are done being afraid of Muslims, who is next? The rhetoric is already setting up the press, scientists, intellectuals, actors to be targets. We’ve seen this game before. A propagandist with the President’s ear now sits on the National Security Council, billionaires are preparing to dismantle citizen protections in order to fill their coffers, we’re being told lies are truth and anyone who says otherwise is an enemy. Meanwhile, people who have power are kowtowing and those who don’t, are risking more and more to protest.

So perhaps someone being snidely referred to as a “snowflake” should be the least of our concerns. But it is how we dehumanize others who disagree with us and this is one of the tenets of authoritarianism. It’s how to silence the opposition. This isn’t President Trump and his confederacy of ne’er do wells. This is what we do to each other. This is the ground floor of the Tower of Babel, where we refuse to listen to each other and stop speaking the same language. Chaos and separation and disintegration ensues.

Several months ago, we put a sign in our yard. We choose love. It was a plastic sign, given out for free by a neighbor a few blocks over. I realized yesterday how it is getting harder and harder to make that choice.

I am afraid. I am afraid of the hatred and the actions being taken based on that hatred. I’m afraid that my daughter won’t have the same choices and opportunities that I have had. I’m afraid that our air and water will be poisoned by pollution and chemicals and that we’ll destroy this planet, one species after another.

I am afraid of all the guns and the violence surrounding them. I am afraid of the wars and the death they will bring. I am afraid of the religious zealots, the ones who live in this country who want to inject their archaic belief systems into our laws. I’m afraid of what we will do to each other in the name of our beliefs. I’m afraid that we’ll sit too long on our hands and then they will come for us.

canstockphoto2264577 In the face of all those fears, choosing love can be quite difficult. It sounds like this inert, fuzzy thing on the face of it. Part of me wants to mock it, name call, make up some farcical meme. My lesser self still has space in my brain. It is so much easier to be a jerk in the face of fear than it is to wrangle with oneself and choose kindness or compassion or curiosity or love. And I wrestle with it everyday.

Even now, my mind is objecting. But, but, but… if I choose love, won’t that mean I’m complicit? Don’t people who use force and violence only respect force and violence? There are some people who will remain in their armor, no matter what you do. But there are others who will soften and engage and stop their own words and actions of violence.

And choosing love doesn’t mean being passive. It means that love drives our words and choices. It means that fear has to take a backseat. I am afraid that as I rise to this occasion in our history, I may inadvertently cause harm to myself or my family. But I love my family enough to know that passivity and cowardice is not the example I wish to set. Civic engagement is critical now. Speaking up is critical now. I’d rather be an alarmist and wrong, then passive and right.

canstockphoto25488454 In the end, you may not change a single mind. You may not even be able to affect the course of events. But you will be someone with strength of character. You will be someone you can live with. I’ve ordered a carved wooden sign for a more permanent place in our yard. We choose love. Every single day we have to do the heavy lifting in re-choosing love as our guiding principle. That’s what being tough really means.

January 31, 2017January 31, 2017

Michelle at The Green Study40 Comments

Love is Not Smothering…with a Pillow

People like to write a lot about love and romance. Not I. One of my goals as a writer over the next year is to write outside my comfort zone, no matter how awkward or sappy or…no, just awkward.

No one has ever accused me of being overly romantic or sentimental. And frankly, you just don’t know, when push comes to shove, if you will make it through the endless night of the man cold without rolling over and gently, but firmly pressing your memory foam pillow to his face, until the tuberculosis-like hacking and wheezing of snot becomes a blanket of comforting warm silence. You just never know.

I’ve spent most of my life getting this love thing wrong. I’m an impatient person, so I rarely waited to be asked out on a date. As soon as I spotted the most unlikely suspect for a love match, I was on the case. A drunk? Awesome – I could work out my daddy issues. Religious zealot? Super – we could have wildly guilty premarital sex. A polygamist at heart? Fan-tabulous- really adds that competitive edge that we women lack.

Even at 46, I’m pretty sure I’m still relatively clueless in the love department. Getting married and having a child seems rather accidental to me and on occasion, a little surprising. I stopped believing in the one after I met a couple or ten of those. As much as I’d like to re-write the narrative of my courting and marriage, it was a linear story, if not slightly awkward. Sounds unromantic, doesn’t it?

If you’re young and gravity hasn’t taken its toll, your love is unwrinkled, shiny and new. I didn’t marry young. By the time I even remotely imagined settling down with one person, I was quite cynical – and tired. My future husband was easy – even-tempered, kind, consistent, sober, funny and smart. I felt happy when I saw him and while I worked out all my relationship angst, he remained a calm and generous partner.

When I hear love songs or read the occasional romance (just for the sex scenes, of course), I wonder at this idea of fiery, sustained passion – this desperate feeling of not being whole or being a sacrificial lamb to love. And now that I’m at the mid-point of life, I’ve forgotten what that felt like. And it’s a damned good thing. Like the flip side of any emotion, passion involves drama and I just cannot do drama. It’s exhausting.

Lately, we’ve been trading off maladies, neither one of us ever in top form. My eyes, the flu, work irritations, scheduling conflicts. Our daughter is flourishing, although suffering from the micromanagement of people parenting an only child. We discuss house projects and schedules and relatives’ health. We laugh a lot. We drift in the tide of daily trivialities, closer and farther, farther and closer.

On occasion, I’ll look at him as if from a stranger’s eyes and my heart fills with gratitude and warmth and yes, love. Our life is a smorgasbord of joyous times and dull moments, tedious conversation and that of two people who can’t wait to tell each other something. Familiar sweatpants-wearing couch potatoes and formal, polite strangers. People in their 50th year of marriage or awkward newlyweds.

There are always those occasions that make me wonder if we are supposed to be more intense, more romantic, but those gestures, those sentimental soliloquies happen throughout the year. I nearly wept with joy when he fixed the washer last week, flinging my arms around him in a spontaneous gesture of gratitude. We thank each other a lot – not just for big moments, but for the little kindnesses that make our life together easier, more pleasant and more enjoyable.

As I’ve grown older, although not exponentially wiser, I like being with someone who makes me want to be a better version of me. Not because he’s critical or judgmental, but because he’s a good person who deserves to be with someone who doesn’t take him or our life together for granted. Maybe that’s what love is for me. It’s not a sacrifice or a roller coaster ride or fiery, exhausting passion. It’s how I show gratitude for this fellow traveler who likes walking next to me, no matter where we journey.

February 14, 2014

Michelle at The Green Study52 Comments

Ambivalent Love

It’s the month of February, a month for wiping out huge inventories of red roses and setting false romantic gestures in motion. I haven’t written much about love and romance, because, with the exception of my husband, I have a long history of being quite awful at it. That’s a subject for another day. Or never.

There’s a kind of love that is harder to practice than all the rest. There are people in my life that make love a challenge, a constant renegotiation to see their positive sides, to recognize their intent versus what actually happens or is said. We all have them – friends or family that don’t make it easy to love them.

Many years ago, shortly after having my daughter, I decided to talk to a family therapist. Some issues of childhood had reared their ugly Medusa-like heads and I desperately wanted to be a good parent. I was involved in a dysfunctional volley of exchanges with someone I wanted to believe could change. I quit acquiescing and started to challenge this person’s behavior.

I come from a long history of mental illnesses and substance addictions. The easiest people to love were the ones that married into our families, but often, due to the aforementioned issues, those people came and went on a fairly regular basis. We got glimpses of normal behavior – just enough to know that normal would be an ambitious goal for anyone in our family.

I have compassion and understanding for those that suffer from mental illnesses. I’m all for social justice and a better system to identify and support people who need assistance and kindness and compassion. When it’s in my face though, infiltrating every corner of my world, exhausting me at every turn, calling me names, stealing my money and holding me hostage to drama, I can feel very hardhearted.

It’s hard to love someone who can only take. They’re so knee-deep in their own shit that they can’t see anything else. You long for them to be interested in your smart, delightful daughter or what you have written or to appreciate what a kind, decent man you have married. But it doesn’t happen. They never ask about your life during phone calls and when they do, it’s a perfunctory nod before they go into their own tales of woe.

Growing up, I was good at being a fixer, a mediator of sorts. This role followed me and even after I left home, I’d get letters letting me know everything that was going wrong, being asked to intervene on this person’s behalf or that. As a kid, I felt important and needed and valued in that role. As an adult, I was frustrated and angry and I’d swear that I wouldn’t get sucked in again. Until the next desperate phone call.

This self-importance gave me a way of positioning myself, a way of seeing how I fit into the world, a false sense of superiority over those more troubled than I. Until my troubles came. Instead of saving everyone else, I had to save myself. If they threw me bricks instead of life preservers, I shut them out. I quit a dead-end job, an off-again on-again relationship, and moved farther away. Emotionally, I might as well have been in outer space, unreachable.

I needed that time to establish my own identity. It’s a natural process as we become adults to see those boundaries. It wasn’t until my late 20s that I recognized that it was even okay to have boundaries -that it was okay not to be a dumping ground for everything wrong in one’s family.

I got married. I became a parent. And my heart softened. I again longed for connections to those people that I had loved my whole life. I longed for some sense of normalcy – family holidays, pictures of all of us in one place, children laughing and playing together, running around the dining room table. I longed for stupid Norman Rockwell. I longed for something that never existed.

Re-entry was horrible and painful and left me heartbroken. The sickening realization came over me that there would never be another family gathering, except possibly for funerals. Even then, we’d stand shoulder to shoulder, like strangers on a subway.

My daughter would likely never know many of her cousins or aunts and uncles. People had begun dying in sad, awful ways before she was born. My father committed suicide. Alcoholism had killed several others. I was left with a handful of people with whom relationships were difficult, uncomfortable and frustrating.

Romantic love, when you’re both ready and right for each other, is easy. Day-to-day love can be challenging at times, but you learn and adjust to the others’ needs. Family love inside this house is very easy. We work together, squabble on occasion, but for the most part, we have each others’ backs.

Loving people that don’t have social skills, who are so mired in their own worlds that they can’t imagine you existing outside of their universe, who only come to you when they need something – that is a tougher kind of love. Loving people that seek to lash out, to cause harm, to damage everything in their path, is nearly impossible.

While in therapy, I ran across a passage in a book (I wish I could recall the source) that has stayed with me for many years. It referred to treating someone with mental illness like a force of nature. You wouldn’t stay in the path of a tornado, just in case it changes direction. You’d get out of the way, seek shelter and protect yourself. You can’t love a mental illness away. You can’t empathize self-destruction out of someone.

I had more leeway in my life for drama before having my own family. I’m at a time of life when things are the busiest – a young child at home, aging relatives to care for, juggling career goals with family goals, trying to accept that it’s okay to be happy, even when those people that I love are not. But the longing never goes away, no matter how much I intellectualize things.

I love them and I miss them. I’ve helped all I could manage. I’ve listened for as long as I can listen. I will rally myself for another round. I don’t want to enable or to judge. I recognize that their lives can be painful and difficult and I do feel compassion. It’s a hard kind of love.