Simple Girl

Love Needs a Vacation

This can be interpreted a few different ways; so let’s count this post as three more things I know about love (bringing us to 19 in case you are counting).

Like that slacker co-worker who always manages to schedule time off just as major deadlines loom, so too does love pack its bags every so often and leave you to fend for yourself. Occasionally you can plan for it. Anniversaries of life-altering events, such as an untimely and tragic death can alter you or your loved one to such an extent that love is not only not in the room, it is unthinkable. In this case, you know to just stand on the corner and wait quietly for its return.  But other times, when you least expect it, you turn around and love has left the building without a word. Now you’re just standing there, looking at your partner and wondering “what did I ever see in this asshole?” Hang on, let that moment pass.

Or maybe like a weak cell phone signal, you just need to get to a better zone before love is clear and strong again. I think we can all agree, whether we have children or not, that moms sometimes (desperately) need and deserve quiet time away from the kids, right? So, why as partners do we women often question motives if the man in our life says “I need some me-time.”  Please don’t be that clingy, insecure girl. I used to be that girl. I am so over that girl.  In fact, you should be the one requesting “me-time” – and frequently! Togetherness is good, but just like your favorite personal massager, you need to turn it off and recharge the batteries every now and then.  

Now, I’m just back from a mini-vacation with this assho… er, I mean the man I love and we are both (individually and together) so much the better for it. It’s a cliché, really, so I’ll keep this paragraph short (plus I’m lazy). Get away with the one you love. Turn off the TV, leave the house and when you want to complain about the way he drives or remind him for the tenth time that you always make all the plans … shut up. Leave the bitch at home and pack extra love.

And, don’t forget to bring it back home with you.

Be Simple

Ten more things I know about love

Over the last thirty years, I have accumulated some wisdom about love. So many chick flicks playing over Valentine’s weekend, we learn from Bridget Jones: “he loves you just as you are”; Anna Scott (Notting Hill): “just a girl, standing in front of a boy asking him to love her”; or Pretty Woman Vivien who when rescued by Richard Gere, then “rescues him right back.” And surely, when I playback my own history, I laugh, I cry, I cringe in my seat with embarrassment. Its award-winning stuff, but we’ll never see my movie in the theaters, no. The most complex of plots lines is girl finds boy, girl loses boy, girl finds another boy. How else to make a succinct three-part story line for Rachel McAdam’s next role? But now, in a world where we’ll never see Diane Lane starring as me …. my chick-flick as TEN-part parable:

1. Girl – Too young and with no clue as to what might be within her reach. Should have found a mentor to open her eyes instead of spending so much time opening her legs.
2. Finds boy – Now here’s a nice young man in uniform, steady income, good prospects. Will never regret running away to Alaska (and the two children they bring life to), but will always wonder what might have been had she been braver still and ran away home.
3. Marries boy – Turns out the nice young man, was not so nice after all. At least not true. A mature woman of 22 (and seven months pregnant) forgives, right? What if she had a career, a network of her own to turn to?   
4. Finds another boy – Turns out the girl is not so nice either. But this is the romance she had always dreamed of…. Not so much. Overacted parts by amateur actors cannot sustain the drama. Friendships that might have been forever important are forever lost. 
5. Loses boy – (That would be the boy she married in #3 – stay with me). Though she doesn’t so much as lose him as makes him go … and she will regret it for the rest of her life.  She thought the boy should be true (and he should), but she also thought he was responsible for her happiness, and that, she will learn, is not at all true.
6. Finds boy – She’s starting to learn that she must make her own way – back to school and building a career, but this is so hard. So the boy with the appearance of a good life – who puts the big red bow on a new car at Christmas and has a solid family – seems a reasonable alternative. Until she sees he is bat-shit crazy and then he is not. Then her Grammie dies and she is sad and alone and a call is made and she pretends she has found home. But home and pretend do not belong in the same breath.
7. Marries boy (the sequel) – And when you let yourself pretend you are home, you are actually just screwed. At marriage counseling less than a year in, Satan (aka my ex-husband) lists as one of the reasons he loved me: “she always looks nice.”  If this happens to you, ladies ... check to make sure he hasn't been trying on your underwear and then run, don't walk, to the nearest exit.
8. Loses boy – Which is to say, I could not run away fast enough.  See Kim Kardashian 72 day wedding, and what women of a certain age could learn from her experience.
9. Girl – Single girl at 40ish, riding in the back of her parent’s Buick to go out to eat (at 5:00 pm). Single girl romancing herself at home with candles, music, a book, and an entire bottle of wine and half pack of Marlboro lights. Single girl back in school, making ends meet, raising her kids, making bad choices, and seemingly few good ones. Single girl, growing up, realizing there are no short cuts and no Princes on white horses coming to my rescue.
10. Simple Girl – Making my own way and my own home. The independent in me wants to say “ten years later and still happily alone”, but I won’t lie. I found a Prince and if I can write the end of the movie, it will be a happy one. Thing is though, he doesn’t have a white horse, and he couldn’t possibly rescue me, because I’ve already rescued myself.

Be Simple.

 

 

29 Things I Know About Love | It Must Be Kept, Nutured, and Spoken

There are things you love when you are growing up that – if you knew then what you know now – you’d hold on to more tightly.  Three things about love here that must be nurtured from their beginnings and not let go: the love of place, the love of family, and the love of creating. All things that help make you wholly you.

1. I loved being outdoors. The smell of crisp fall or winter air that lingers on your skin when you come inside is still my favorite smell. It conjures up late afternoon games of flashlight tag, or sledding and snowball fights. I would spend hours outside: rearranging the snow banks and slush piles in the front yard to create winter kingdoms of moated castles or walking (what felt like) so very deeply into the autumn woods on old logging roads just to feel the quiet.
2. I loved my brothers and sister so dearly. They would include me in their games of make-believe and together we would create family traditions (for fun or for defense, I’m not now sure) like getting up at 5 am on Christmas morning to huddle in my sister’s and my room and plot our strategy for attacking the tree, or raiding the "costume box" every Halloween.  They would tease me when I had nightmares after watching Dark Shadows and exclude me more and more as they outgrew our games but they were never mean-sprited. Never.
3. I loved books and the stories I would write in my head but never put to paper. I would pick a new book from the little town library every week. I just went to the Junior Lit section and selected a cover that looked interesting. I was never let down. There are bits and pieces of every one I could still remember – like the book about the kids who made 26 different kinds of hamburgers, using letters of the alphabet as inspiration (from avocado to zero). I would get A’s on my creative writing papers, but I never once realized that being a writer was a profession one could pursue.

I wonder how different my life would have turned out (for better or worse?) if I hadn't left behind these childhood loves for pursuit of “finer things”.  And now, at 49,  I  try only to make up for lost time. Yes, I am fully embracing my love of the outdoors with a commitment to be outside as much as possible – whether just a daily walk around town or hiking all 44 of the 4,000+ footers in New Hampshire. You see here, I am writing… or attempting to do so. Both of these things fill me up, make me a better person, a better mother, a better lover.

As for my brothers and sister…. I try to say I love you more often to my sister when we talk a few times a month; one brother expresses surprise when he sees me once a year or so – that I’ve grown older, I suppose, or that he has.  I've forever missed the chance to tell my oldest brother how much he meant to me, and will always regret it.  And there's the lesson about love. It must be kept, nutured, and spoke.

Be Simple

29 Things I Know About Love | Girlfriends Do It Better

The love you get from your girlfriends is an endlessly renewable resource.

Ask me where my best friends from college are today and I couldn’t tell you. (Something to bear in mind if I ever promise you I’ll ‘stay in touch’). But, those friendships are still powerfully important to me … empowering, is the better word.

Girlfriends will turn on anyone you think has done you wrong, prop you up 24x7 (e.g. “you’re not fat,” “he was an asshole to you”, “that wasn’t the right job for you anyway”), and remind you are better … no, “the best!”.

For some reason, those reassurances are cumulative and ever-lasting-gobstobber reliable.

 

how about the hair ? .... oh my!

29 Things I Know About Love | It Leaves a Mark

First love leaves a mark (I’m talking to you Peter Fenlason). At least, it sets your expectations…which for me meant pretty low.

When you are not the most popular girl and the most popular boy finds you interesting, it is reason for suspicion. Unless your 16, when it is reason only for celebration! For a few weeks, you get to take the arm of the trophy boy and bask in his aura. Until the old girlfriend reappears and whispers of “bitch” hover over home room. She is prettier. You don’t deserve to be with him. You agree.

And despite the fact that you never really shed a tear and you had to look up the spelling of his last name, this early experience colors your view of relationships for another 20 years.

29 Things I Know About Love | Love is intangible.

It’s not easy to pin down your first memory of being loved or loving. I remember food, of course. Well, actually, the smell of food.

Sweet, heavy brown bread and the molasses of baked beans. Around the velvet aroma at the core of a cozy, warm kitchen clung a vaguely sour smell of cabbage, but you didn’t mind so much because what was at the center was so perfect.

And up close, “Roses, Roses”. (Remember? It came in a pale pink bottle with a robin’s egg sized gold atomizer bulb.) That classic Avon perfume was the smell of Gramie’s neck, and her damp skin, where my nose would bury itself cold and dripping from the snowy outside.

Be Simple