Home: Where Ever is Your Heart (12/60)

John at me at a friend's 50th birthday celebration last week

Watching my children fall in love has brought home to me my own fall and reminded me of the mystery of it all.  There aren't words or explanations or reasons.  It just happens for no apparent reason or maybe every apparent reason.

I hated the idea of falling in love and marriage when I was sixteen.  Everywhere I looked, I saw long term love and marriage as something hard and heavy and wearying.  I had already told my mother that there was no way I was ever going to get married. It just seemed like way too much work and totally tied you down . . . not to mention children.  They were WAY too much work. 

I was going to travel the world (I already had the perfect backpack and hiking shoes and clothes that were perfect for travel) after college (which I was going to finish as quick as possible).  I was going to dig wells  and teach people how to read and fill my arms with beautiful babies and then at some point . . . in my late thirties . . . I would move to Paris for a year, find myself a beautiful younger lover and conceive a child.  Then come home and raise her (I knew it was going to be a girl) in Deep River.

My mother, oh bless her heart, I can still see her face (huge eyes and pale face), calmly said, Well, do you have any idea how hard it is to raise a child?  Let alone by yourself?  (I love that she didn't even talk about all the other crazy ideas).

I'm sure it is, I told her.  But that's why I'd come home.  You and Dad would help me . . . of course, Mom!  I wouldn't have the baby all by myself.

Lots more blinks and open and shutting the mouth from my sainted mother, and then, shaking her head she said, Ok, Mary. Let's see what happens.

I was sixteen.  This was the spring before I met John.  I knew, as all sixteen year olds know, EVERYTHING about everything.  

Fast forward three months.  I meet John.  He's lanky, blond, and near sighted (literally can't see ten feet in front of him.  I thought he was ignoring me for weeks, but in fact, he didn't see me).  He was pretty much everything I didn't know I liked.  In fact, I didn't like him.  At least that's what I kept saying to myself.  I had a boyfriend at home (I was at Hill Cumorah Pageant for three weeks).  I did not like him.

Pageant, 1991

Only, every time I saw him, literal butterflies everything slowed down and simultaneously sped up.  I remember reading something about the air being charged around a character and that's exactly how I felt.  It was like if I got too close to John, I'd get shocked.  So I kept away.  Only every time I turned around, he was there, next to me, talking to someone right by me.  I'd move away and he'd follow, talking to the next person beside me.  

I don't think he actually talked to me, addressed me, until I somehow found myself under the stages with my cousin and he was there right where I was trying to avoid him.  He reached out his hand and took mine and said, Feel my nails.  They're so odd.  I had to trim them with scissors.  

I was so mad at him for taking my hand because I could not forget how it felt.  Just holding my hand, my heart went crazy and I felt stupid dizzy and I literally wanted him to NEVER let go.  Like ever.  

1991

I can still feel his fingers, his hand, and see his eyes in the dark, his glasses glinting.  I remember a thunderstorm, lighting flashing and rumbling of thunder in the distance, but I think it might have been my mind and the storm I knew was coming thanks to John.  

He ruined all my plans.

Every single time.

I wanted to live this life of my closed, small, and quiet.  Instead, he's blown my plans to bits.  He woke up this wild creature inside me that I thought I'd stuffed so deep down that no one would ever know.  But he saw that wild creature.  And he wanted that . . . the me that sometimes screams and yells and falls wildly stupidly in love at sixteen and isn't ever remotely the same after.

1992, John shipped his bike and himself to Connecticut

I spent the first ten years of our relationship/marriage mad at him.  Really.  I promise, I tried to break up with him like five different times and he wouldn't let me.  He'd stop me from folding up and away from him.  He'd literally hold on to my arm or hand and make me talk through everything I was feeling.  He'd dig out the fear and worry that he'd leave me or hurt me like I'd seen so many people hurt or abandoned.  I wanted none of this strong, quicksand, addictive love.  I wanted safe.  I wanted lukewarm.  

He didn't.  He wanted every single bit of crazy, jealous, angry, hurt, scared, bitter, skeptical, realist, dreamer, overconfident, ignorant, awkward, carefree, happy and confused me.

He saw me.  ME.  

And I'm telling you, there is no force on this good earth more compelling than being seen.  Well, ok, maybe there is . . . being seen and wanted despite and because of it all.

I was pretty much sunk.

And I still am to this day.  I sometimes look at John and think, we really are so different.  How did we get together?  I swear he has radar for this because he seriously finds me and he does his magic voodoo on me (I'm telling you, I don't know exactly what he does but . .. it works every single time) and I'm sunk yet again.  Twenty-seven years later and he still gets me and wants me.

My professor in one of my final undergraduate literary theory classes said (or something like it), Marriage is the great void of unknown.  You can look at it with fear and loathing or with fascination and curiosity.  One leads to a full and good marriage, the other leads to chains and unhappiness.

There have been some close calls.  You can't live with one person for twenty-three years and be in love for twenty-seven and not have some close calls.  But each time, when we are gazing into that void of each other, we both have chosen to see the fascination and curiosity and I would add forgiveness and acceptance and give our love another chance.  

When Chloe gets her travel visa, she is planning on going to China to see her family for two months.  I know this is tradition and I know she will probably be fine and so will Henry (ok, he won't be fine, he'll be happy she's with her family and miss her every single day).  But my heart hurt a little for them.  It is so good to be with family and your people and land, but she'll learn, as we all have, that at some point, your people, your land, your compass becomes your heart.  And your heart . . . that belongs to someone else now.  And though you are fine, you are only partially there.  You find yourself missing your heart.  As the days go by . . . you miss it more and more.

When I heard Brandi Carlile's song, "Wherever is Your Heart, I Call Home," I smiled.  Wherever John is, he is my home.  We have lived all over the place but it's all felt the same because my home is with me.  He is there to pick up the pieces and hold me together and laugh and explore and sometimes fight and be cranky with me, but always, always, there to make me feel like I'm home.

How I got so lucky to have such a warm, generous, forgiving, inquisitive, hard working, dedicated, goofy, crazy, picky, cranky, hysterical, gentle, humble home I have no idea.  I'm just saying, Thank you Universe.

And thank you, John, for ruining all my sixteen year old plans and making my life.