Years ago, before either of us had children or spouses, I slept with an old friend. The morning after, we went out to breakfast in Ravenswood. We were bleary with lack of sleep and the coffee tasted good.
He would call me once a few days later, with gentle consideration, to check in. He was teaching film in Texas, he had only been in Chicago for a weekend shoot, and we both knew that our one night was spurred by little emotion more than curiosity and nostalgia for our graduate school days. We would exchange nothing more than Christmas cards in the ensuing years, but I appreciated the kind gesture, and the closure, of that phone call.
But that morning after, in the red vinyl booth of the diner, he flashed his charming blue eyes at me and called me the most dangerous thing in his life of late.
"Me? Dangerous? Oh, I'm harmless," I laughed and I truly felt that way with this friend, as edgy as our friend talk had always been and as adventurous as our gymnastics were the night before.
He had nothing to worry about with me. I knew, and I might even have shared with him, that I was capable of romantic obsession and desperate dramatics in the name of love and longing. Not so here. His curly red locks did remind me of the perennial object of my heart, but I felt a hollowness here that would somehow avoid being damaging, probably from his careful courtesy, and that one kind, short, final phone call.
****
Last week the therapist said "You know, Cindy, you can't avoid it," when I trotted out that old canard "I don't want to hurt anybody," and I nodded, ever the agreeable student, switching gears to supply an example, "Yeah, like 'want to go to lunch?' 'Oh, I'm sorry, I can't' and you can hurt someone's feelings without meaning to."
But the therapist is also touching on something deeper: Being a mother -- or a wife -- or a teacher, friend, any meaningful relationship really -- brings with it the risk of imbalance in the power and tenderness and measurement of love.
"Do I love them more than they love me?" The question can hurt you or you can take pride and comfort in your larger heart.
Or you can go a little crazy (see "Obsession" and "Dramatics" above).
****
The bleary breakfast memory of my friend calling me dangerous came up when I re-read two Sharon Olds poems this morning: "Looking at Them Asleep" and "Sleep Suite." The two are companion pieces, a mother watching her resting children, first when they are small, and in the later poem, when the son and daughter are "nearly-grown," "in a little hotel suite."
Olds' eye is so sharp, her words so precise, the moment so tender, that mothers will gasp with recognition. Do we all watch them sleep, take a moment to forgive them in their unconsciousness and vulnerability?
So grateful I am for the communion with a mother poet who sings my life with the words "I roam in the half dark, getting ready for bed. I stalk my happiness. I'm like someone from the past allowed to come back, I am with our beloveds, they are dreaming, safe."
But there is another phrase that strikes deep within me as she describes the power and safety of this scene, this place: "it is broken, the killership of my family, it is stopped within me, the complex gear that translated its motion."
Olds came from a family of brutality, her father not only alcoholic, but Calvinistically abusive to his children and his wife, who was not able to protect her children from his wrath.
I too have a "killership," a legacy of caring adults who kill in accidents, who hurt without intention, who leave devastation in their wake. I fear at times that it lives within my genes.
Olds offers me forgiveness and hope and endurance, of course, the pattern of harm "broken" and "stopped" by a moment of peace and rest, a moment of many that leads down the new path, where children grow up and all is well.
Thank you, Sharon. Thank you, Kyle. Thank you, Mia and Nora and Randy, for breaking the patterns of the past and walking with me toward something better, something far more safe.
