Good morning everyone and welcome to Friday’s Morning Open Thread.
Morning Open Thread is a daily, copyrighted post from a host of editors and guest writers. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum.
I’ve come to think of this post as one where you come for the music and stay for the conversation—so feel free to drop a note. The diarist gets to sleep in if she so desires and can show up long after the post is published. So you know, it's a feature, not a bug.
Join us, please.
Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?
At 7:24 (CDT) last night I got this text from my love (8:24 her time):
I’ve been reading on the porch for several hours and thinking you might call once home and settle in. I miss you ….
I had been home for a good hour or so and had, in fact, settled in with my own book on my patio. I had not, as she pointed out, called her. So—the matter: how to respond to what is clearly a text about disappointment that also reveals so much in so few words. As is my habit (much to my own detriment and a clear sign of my inability to relate to another person in pain), I was a bit of a prick (is that a word still allowed on this site?).
Oh, I’m sorry I didn’t measure up to your silent expectation, love. I will do better tomorrow. I promise. Good night. Since I write early on Fridays, I’ll be calling you around 3:00….
And then I called her.
But before I go into that, there’s backstory that has to be filled in. Because, without backstory, I just sound desperate, crazy, and a bit on the insecure side; and I’m truly so much more than just that.
First of all (because I’m writing this and need to set up a plausible defense), I rarely call her without first checking her availability. Like rare in the sense of a couple times a year. She calls when she has a minute to spare and at all times of the day or night. It’s almost “our thing” and has worked well for some 47 years. I’m less secure, generally—I know that—but am as sure as a Catholic faith that she’s busy at any given moment in time and I wouldn’t want to intrude. Until recently (in her own tip-of-the-hat to me) her days would routinely begin at noon. Shows, clubs, work, parties, whatever, until all hours of the night is her true regular schedule.
Me, well, more of a sort of 6-to-6 work day Monday through Friday with a few hours (occasionally) on the weekends. So we live in different time zones and use different measures of the day. It isn’t that odd for me to get a text at 2:15 on a Tuesday afternoon asking, simply, “So, what are you doing?” To which I reply, “Working. You?” And it’s just as un-odd for me to text at the same time on a random Wednesday to get from her the reply, “Who is this?”
Okay, that was a joke. But you get the idea.
The important time for this story, though, is those few seconds between my responding to her text lamenting my inattention and then calling her (because letting such sadness fester just breeds rot and regret and because I can admit when I’m wrong). That mountain range of recollections of my childhood and my own understanding of what it means to be ignored and loved was scaled in those few moments.
The time I was forgotten at the public pool. Those birthday cakes that had my younger brother’s name iced on them so “he wouldn’t feel excluded.” The missing invitations to family gatherings. The time I was told I couldn’t go on the fishing trip to Last Island because the boat would be overloaded. That time and time and time again where my existence seemed (to a child and then teen and then young man) less than important.
And, then, the night of my high school graduation. I was giving a speech that night (of which I remember not a word). I hadn’t officially invited anyone (not my parents or uncles or aunts or anyone else allowed on the list) and didn’t expect anyone would even notice. I had suffered so many graduation parties with my older sisters and only older brother, but my experiences in school were hardly noticed and seldom mentioned. There was no talk of my graduation at all—something I was callously annealed to by then as I either shied away from or was (thankfully) ignored from most benchmark commemorations for the length of my childhood. Stuck between what, at the time, I would have described as an abusive mother and an indifferent father for close to 16 years of my life.
Thing is, after I had read that speech and turned from the podium toward those tortuously-uncomfortable folding chairs, I saw him. My father. Standing in the shadows in the back of the auditorium next to my principal. It was him, in that fucking burnt-orange leisure suit with the wide lapels and even wider blue- and silver-checked tie. The one that, back then, made my testicles shrink with embarrassment. The one he wore only at special events. Before I could search him out, once finding my chair, he was gone. Like the fact that he attended mass at 5:30 every Sunday morning before returning home to wake us with the smells of breakfast cooking, I had slept through so much of what his generation would call love or attention or even kindness.
That’s sort of the story of my father’s love, I like to think. Hidden in the shadows or lost to a distracted teen. Lurking in those places that only an older man would even care to look.
So I called her and apologized—as did she—for nothing at all. We talked, eventually laughed, and she even sang a few words of a song I didn’t recognize but reminded me of Carole King’s song about situational love. If there is one thing positive about all those perceived slights from my past, it is that I know they were at least half my responsibility. Oh, how one loves to be pitied (particularly for past hurts), to be seen as helpless victim, discarded child. But those memories are only part true and in those rare times between text and call, I can be honest enough to admit that we sometimes hurt the ones we love—even unintentionally—but that the love isn’t thereby diminished. And that I can trust that she will still love me tomorrow.
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Be well, be kind, and appreciate the love you have in your life.
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Grab your coffee or tea and join us, please.
What's on your mind this morning?