Relationships

When I was between 12 and 15, I experienced a steep learning curve on the realities of relationships with humans. My first boyfriend, as sweet as he was when he was quoting me lines from John Cusack movies, dumped me six months down the line for another woman. I was never quite sure why. All I knew was that I went away to California for spring break and came back to find that my poetry writing boyfriend was suddenly with some other girl and had morphed into one of my high school, hippie, wanna-be-Jim-Morrison, theatre friends. It sucked. It hurt. I was annoyed because up until that point I still had the Disney Princess Goggles. You know the goggles... the happily ever after goggles? The one where as soon as you find true love you'll never question your life again Disney goggles.  This was my first lesson in love going wrong.

But I wasn't a complete sucker. That whole believe in your heart, and you'll be okay thing can only go so far. Mostly the day that I found out that one of the friends I had spent a lot of time with in middle school, had come to high school only to denounce my relationship with my first boyfriend to her entire girls' swim team. I'm not sure what she found so offensive about the relationship. Was it that he was bi-racial? Was it that he wasn't in our "gifted" education program? Whatever it was, she decided to tell the swim team that I was letting James pull my tampons out of me with his teeth. First lesson in friends going EVIL -- and even more embarrassing about what 14 year olds will believe.

Between 12 and 14, I had watched my parents end their 20-year marriage. And what I couldn't quite get my brain wrapped around at 12, I understand more at 32, but it still sucked. The eve of starting seventh grade was when my Dad announced he was moving out. That night we all, strangely, went to my seventh grade orientation, where I told my best friend Laura about my newly broken home. I was hoping for some kind of condolences or at least an invitation for some free nights away from the mental anguish my mother was clearly going through as she cried herself to sleep, ate nothing and hurled every demeaning word she could find at herself. Instead, Laura's face turned cold.  "You're making this up," she said. "You just want attention."

It was a double slap. 1) Because a person I considered a part of my core support group had just called me a liar, and 2) because she somehow thought that me seeking attention was kind of a norm for me. I was shocked. So on top of the anger at my parents, I suddenly got to add one of my best friends to the pile.

The let down of people I considered close to me just kind of kept happening. Each time there was a lot of heartbreak and confusion. I kept trying to figure out what I had done to make them so angry to say or do things that were so offensive to me. But in my early teen years, I hadn't quite worked up the balls to walk up and ask people what the hell was going on. That would have to wait until much, much later... after I knew myself a bit better, after I ran out of patience with what I consider other people's crazy.

I choose to look at these long-ago episodes as lessons in human frailty in myself and in others. At the time, I thought each loved one was just another example of how I was unlovable -- or more exactly unworthy of love of any kind. I decided that there was something just plain wrong with me. And it also taught me not to have a lot of faith or demands on the people I cherished.

I want to say that at some point I learned differently, but I never have. I keep most people, even MacTroll, at an arm's distance. I don't expect people to be around forever. I don't expect them to have the same interest in a relationship with me as I have with them. It's easier that way when people move away and you learn that your relationship was really one of proximity rather than of the soul. It's easier when you have a major life event, like a baby, and people stop calling or don't even make arrangements to meet your child until he can walk and talk and feed himself. It's just easier to cope with disappointments when you're not holding "high" expectations of them, and I put "high" in quotes because a lot of times, my expectations seem like the bare minimum to me, but my bare minimum is apparently a pretty tall order for most.

I guess what I'm learning now though. Is that by being the person that's "easy" and "low maintenance" it gives an aura that I don't care if people are cruel or flaky or inconsiderate. And what being "easy" does do is make it easier for people to step on you, ignore you and just assume because you're standing you weren't at all tarnished by the harm that was inflicted on you. But you keep standing because if you show that you care, you'll let them know you were really never very "easy" to begin with. 

Maybe then they'll know that they never really knew you at all. 

The worst part of this being, of course, that if they were too selfish not to notice -- they really didn't give a rat's ass about really knowing you in the first place. 

And trust me, when I've got my shit together, I'm so worth knowing. :-P  

"Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die." — Carrie Fisher