There are at least two kinds of letting go. One ends with a bit of a whimper, a few fond memories, maybe embarrassment, mild indifference, genuine affection and no real hard feelings. A second requires time out, a shut and locked door or tightly closed box to hold in all that has been experienced. Real love gone by the wayside belongs in that place of containment for self protection and an ability to move along.
This is how I have learned to care for meaningful memories and the sacred parts of my life with others who are important to me when a time to say goodbye comes. I have wondered if I am afraid of intimacy and have come to the sensibility that I am not. I have fled to that place of safety that is solitary so that I can regroup, reflect and try not to impose my healing heart onto others. The second kind of letting go creates the pulse from which growth and learning is possible. I fail to find words to describe all that is in those tightly locked rooms of memories and maybe that is why I think of them as sacred, whether they are devastating or things that were a source of great elation and fulfillment.
Love is a big thing. And it is much more than a feeling. In his widely read book, The Road Less Traveled, Scott Peck argues that loving is about "doing"--being there even when you don't want to be, loving another even when they are not behaving in a lovable way, and making a choice to commit to making it through difficulties. "Doing" love means taking a partnership or parenting relationship seriously enough to choose to be there. Yet that gift of love becomes a kind of masochism for the tenacious one when another has already let him or herself loose from genuine commitment.
That is the tricky part. For me with family members, that commitment is lifelong. There is no question and no letting go. In relationships of choice, there is an everpresent opportunity to enhance or destroy what is there. While the same opportunity exists with familial ties, there is no good that can come from doing things that destroy relationships with people who will in the end, be the ones to lean on when everything else seems to be falling apart.
I have been loved unequivocally by certain people at my best and worst moments and hold those who have done so with a felt tenderness that is immeasurable. I believe these folks know who they are. I cannot explain what boils down only to an overly sentimental sounding description of a place where souls meet and I have been "known" by that other with pure acceptance. This is the best approximation of the experience I am trying to convey, but it is still inadequate and cheesy. Another way to put this is that they "get it" and show me love anyway. These gifts have come often enough at just the right times to allow me the freedom to let go when I have needed to. I don't know if I will figure out the rest of it, but knowing I have places to go where I am loved, accepted, enjoyed and appreciated makes life more meaningful than anything if all else from daily living is stripped away.
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Ventures into virtual land
I admit I am a techno dinosaur. My laptop is slow and low on memory space. Maybe these first two lines parallel mid-life. Both of my daughters have recently married in the last two years. I am at odds with myself and contented at the same time. Is that possible? I began this blog in a technology boot camp that was our faculty retreat just days before the halls of our new building were filled with cute boots that college girls wear and the sounds of cellular equipment dinging, vibrating and rapping. Within the span of two years, I turned fifty, traveled to Africa, accepted a position as Associate Dean of a brand new School of Communication that had long roots in a small department I have been part of for eighteen years at an institution I love. I became a grandmother of a little girl, deployed thirty five students to mentor young girls, women and migrants from faraway places out of one of my classes, and traveled to two different states to stand in my role as proud mother of the bride. Alone. Their weddings were as perfect as my daughters are different. I cried unbridled tears at the ceremony where I felt like I was revisiting my former life with their father's family and loving them all, healing from an ancient divorce and regretting the unfinished business I have with the bride. The second ceremony signaled a "coming out" of shyness I had never seen in my younger daughter. I have not been successful in love, though I have loved and been loved; yet both of these beautiful young women, my daughters appear to have found their life's mates. I wish I could take credit for that, but I have no idea if any is mine and am grateful for their good judgement. My insides moved at the second wedding from fatigue, joy, a sense of completion, and overwhelming sentimentality at the simultaneous sight of watching my eldest nurse her baby, worry about a baby girl's fusses while cutting new teeth, and my youngest's embracing of her big, beautiful day that she had worked months to deploy with a budget spreadsheet, delegation of roles to aunts, uncles, parents, grandparents and her truest friends. I spent that day in two places very far away from each other--ecstasy and longing. I celebrated a beautiful couple's joy, likeness, practicality and sense of humor, watched my parents who are in their seventies dance for perhaps the first time in fifteen years. They came alive as if they had not suffered the loss of many dear friends over the past few years; they looked young and as I remember them loving each other in sweet and funny ways throughout my growing years.I felt the loss of my importance in each daughter's life as I watched my eldest fulfill her role as wife and mother, nursing her baby girl, feeling those early pangs of watching your daughter suffer, even if only from cutting new teeth. I felt like a woman cutting new teeth in suffrage and liberation at once. I was far away from my home in Chicago and close to the home of all that I knew as a child and young mother stranded between the whole of what I thought I might do with my life's future over five decades. I have failed miserably in some things and reached heights I never knew I was capable of. I finished a book manuscript over the summer that took me eleven years to write through the trials of tenure, raising teenage daughters and managing parts of my life that always seemed like bikes and ropes and water and steam that I tried to hold onto, but could never fully grasp.
I believe that ALL relationships are by choice. That even though there is a life long expected commitment, that one must choose everyday to do things to make that relationship work. For instance when Cora needs me to do something, I choose to do it, I don't do it because I have to or because I am obligated to do it- even when I don't want to get up and make her lunch because I don't feel good or whatever- I choose to do it- not out of sacrifice, or obligation but because I have that power to choose who I want to be what I want to do. Love, Amanda
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