Right after I told him I would.
I know, I know -- this one is like serious ancient history (the ten-year anniversary of my divorce is in February). But I've been thinking about it a lot lately. I had a birthday, uh, a while ago (in fact, I'm closer to my next one now than I am to the last one, but whatever) and it was a big one. Well, not like the traditional kind of big one that marks the middle of one decade or the start of another. But still a big one -- at least for me. Because for the first time it really registered just how quickly the years have gone by. I feel a bit like Edward Norton's character in Primal Fear. "Well, what happened?" he's asked. He looks at Richard Gere blankly and just says, "I lost time."
I remember being a kid and hearing my dad talk about how the older you get, the faster time passes. Being a kid, where every minute that was not summer vacation seemed to stretch torturously into the next and I couldn't grow up fast enough, I didn't get what he was talking about. Plus, my parents were young -- younger than all my classmates' parents anyway -- and I knew that, so I couldn't understand what all the angsty fuss was.
But now that I'm roughly the age my dad was when he began this weary lament, I kind of know what he means. And speaking of being a parent's age, if I were my mother, I'd have a freshman in college and a freshman in high school right now. Gah!
Anyhoo, so it got me thinking about how we end up where we end up, and the choices that get us here. It's easy, I think (especially for me, who tends to rumination), to wonder about the might-have-beens and the should-have-dones and the wish-I-hadn'ts -- particularly if you wake up on your (cough cough, mumble-dee-somethingth) birthday, take a long look around, and find yourself exclaiming, "WHAT the F*CK!! Where the ... ? When the ... ?? Wait, how did I get HERE??"
In truth, this isn't at all where I thought I'd be. And in case it's not obvious, by "where" I don't mean "Colorado." I mean where I am in my life. I never thought I'd get here and still feel so lost. I never thought I'd get here and still not know what the hell it is I want for my life (er, other than my afore-blogged-about yearning to be known).
"Really??" I told my dad on a recent visit home. "I'm sitting here all these years later and I still don't know what I want? Ok, yes, I want a partner. But, come on. What about the rest of it? I mean, for f*ck's sake! It is seriously time I figure my sh*t out. Because, still, after all this time, I can generally tell you only what I DON'T want; I can't seem to figure out what it is I DO want."
"Well, that's a start," he said. "Knowing what you don't want."
I snorted. "You know that's what I told [my ex-husband] when I asked for the divorce? 'What do you want?' he kept asking me. 'What needs to change?' And all I could tell him was, 'I don't know. I just know I don't want this.'"
"Do you regret that decision?" my dad asked. "The divorce?"
"Not for a millisecond," I answered, without hesitation.
And that's when it hit me.
There are things we know in our bones, things we know to be true even when we don't have the words (or the strength) to express them. Things we know to be as real as the daily sunrise. But we make mistakes -- we do things we shouldn't, we DON'T do things we should, we fall in love with people who are only going to hurt us, and we say "yes" when we should be saying, "oh, HELL, naw!"
If you're like me, you make a LOT of mistakes. So many that, when you're taking inventory of your life and considering how you got to be where you are, it's easy to think you've lost your way. It's easy to think you don't know.
But you do. You always know. Your heart always knows. And the real courage is in trusting that.
I knew the instant my ex-husband asked me to marry him that I should have said no. Knew it knew it knew it. But I lacked the courage to say so. And it took me almost five years to remedy that wrong. I knew my last boyfriend was never going to love me the way I wanted him to, the way I needed him to ... the way I loved him. Knew it knew it knew it. It's the number one reason I kept saying no when he'd suggest we move in together. He insisted it must be because I was a Christian and had some arcane moral opposition to the notion. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Hahahaha! Ha ha... Ahem. (Sorry. That one still makes me laugh. The poor guy really did not know me at all.)
See, the honest-to-goodness truth is that there was nothing on planet earth I wanted more than to make a home with that man, to share a life with him. But deep down in my heart of hearts, I knew that even though it was forever for me, it wasn't forever for him -- it was only "for now." I am thankful I at least knew that (untangling our lives when it ended would have been vastly more complicated had we been sharing a mortgage -- or even just a cell phone bill).
But even though I knew that, I still stayed. And tried. And hung on -- hoping, wishing, wanting for more than I would ever get from him -- long after he had begun regarding me as scarcely more than a nuisance who "needed too much" and was pretty much only good for the occasional lay and being a sometime dinner companion or movie date (provided, of course, I didn't breathe too loudly or scratch any itches until it was over -- or tell anyone I was his girlfriend). But I shan't perseverate anymore about such regrets.
The point is, even when we think we don't know what we want, even when we think we don't know what's right for us, we actually do. A friend of mine -- actually, a couple friends of mine -- frequently remind me of this. They tell me that the answers to the questions we ask and the doubts we harbor are in us already, whispering with quiet, gentle certainty.
All we have to do is listen.
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