Last year I started using the phrase "love of my life." It had never occurred to me to say it before. I had been in love plenty, and at various points felt like I would have been ready to make a life-long commitment to those different women. Still, I never would have thought to say one or the other was the love of my life. It's an ugly phrase to me. It's written on greeting cards, said in shabby television shows for very special holiday episodes, and scrawled into high school diaries with dizzy abandon. I'm sure I don't know myself well enough to speak for what will happen during the remainder of my life. I can't predict where I'll be in the next few years, so how could I expect to honestly say I know how I'll feel? How could I come to such a conclusory statement, speaking for an entire lifetime?
Parents allegedly form the romantic model that we're instinctively bound to pursue in our lives. Some people want to replicate mommy or daddy to continue the peaceful domesticity of their childhoods. Others fall in obstinate love with their parent's diametric opposite as an extension of developmental anger and personal autonomy; to reject the unhappy models of their upbringing.
I was wholly in love with my mother when as a child. I swooned over her, found her scent in clothing and furniture, clung to her indulgently, romanticized her into soap operas so that all the faceless actresses in tight clothes and red lipsticks became ciphers for her.
I think I was twelve the first time I told her I hated her. I was trying to impress on her the fact that I needed to be driven across town to a friend's house and spend the night there. She was sitting in bed reading the paper and barely paying attention to me. I don't remember her reasoning, but she stood firm. I wouldn't be going. I felt betrayed. How could this woman stand in the way of my momentary happiness to such an unreasonable degree? I needed fun and play, exotic foods from the pantry of my friend's house, the luxury of his unfamiliar toys and videogames.
Instead I was shackled with the tedium and monotony of my own room and my own things. I could feel tears coming on the more I thought about it. I remember spitting out the words in a last gasp of brinksmanship to show how painfully serious my need was. I stormed out and sat on the floor of my room feeling spurned and abandoned. My dad followed me in and tried to mediate, explaining her position in some rational terms that I didn't pay attention to.
When I was in high school I fought with my mom like an entrenched solider. My parents' marriage was failing and she hammered against my father, bending every personal shortcoming into a metaphor for how he had stopped caring. As this was happening, I followed right behind, bending back the responsibility for their onset fighting so that it pointed back at her. She was the one picking all the fights, creating all the conflict.
When I was seventeen I saw my mother cry for the first time in my life. I was driving around with her one gray afternoon, running errands when she started talking about why we had started to fight all the time. She started explaining her side of things, the sense of isolation and of not having a partner who cared about her. I pounced on the rhetorical opening, describing at length what a faithless and selfish partner she had been to my father.
Those arguments were rote by that point, they were thoughts I had let fly at her before. They always seemed to bounce off her impenetrable hull like foam pellets, becoming less and less impactful the harder I tried to hurl them. This is the part where I want to stop writing; where the memory starts to taste like battery acid, becoming shameful.
When I was finished talking, I saw her face soften in a way I hadn't seen before. We were stopped at a red light on Shaw and Palm in Fresno, CA. She was staring straight ahead at the stopped traffic in front of us. "It would just be nice to know that someone was thinking about how I feel," she said. Her face pulled against itself, something cracked in her cheek muscles. Her eyes looked wet and I saw the first line of a tear fall down her cheek, like the trace of a small finger.
When you fall in love with someone for the first time, you get swept away on a wave of your own emotion. It feels like you're being filled with thoughts and feelings that weren't there before. It animates you and it's something you can see in someone else. It's like being doped together. You feel the warm high spread through your body and your thoughts, and when you look beside you and see the same glazed over look on your lover's face, it feels like you've arrived. Watching my mother cry at a red light, knowing that it was because of something I had done, I felt like I was at the far end of that narcotic tunnel.
When the dim shape of those words, "love of my life" began taking shape in my head, it wasn't on the upslope of some ambrosial high. It wasn't the gauzy idealism of looking at a new lover and feeling surprise at having wound up with them. If there's one thing you learn from your parents it's that you can't ever walk away from them. You can cut them off, stop talking to them, tuck them away into a mental lockbox and pretend they don't exist. But they're always there, the whispering voice you hear when you're alone and defenseless.
I was in the hospital last week with my mother. We would walk laps around the 5th floor as part of her recovery routine. In one room we kept passing, a woman with white hair was lying flat on her back. She was crying out someone's name, over and over again. "Ben! Beeeeeen!" She would arch her hips upwards and push her chin towards the ceiling with each call. She sounded like she was in trouble, had fallen and wouldn't be able to rise again on her own.
The love of your life: the person you miss most when there's nothing else left.
Previous Posts:
Love Machine: Thanks But I'll Pass, or Handling Rejection
Naked Machine: Buying New Underwear, or Sex in a Dressing Room
Date Machine: Look Ugly in a Photograph
Love Machine: On Your Own, or Moving On
Love Machine: Going to Bed Angry
Love Machine: The Hooker on the Corner
Sex Machine: Having Sex on Inauguration Night
Sex Machine: If You Can Get Me Hard I'll Show You A Good Time
Date Machine: Tool Academy, or Watching TV with Your Girlfriend
Sex Machine: Getting Laid
Love Machine: I Was a Six Year-Old Virgin, or Is There A Happy Ending?
Date Machine: Getting Pierced on a Date
Love Machine: Hitting Snooze on the Morning After
Date Machine: Let Me Seduce You With The Cardigans
Date Machine: I'm Too Sexy For Your Blog
Love Machine: Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, or Leaving Home
Date Machine: Super Macho Man Slumber Party
Sex Machine: Having Sex in Your Parents' House During the Holidays
Date Night: Trying to Behave on a Boring Coffee Date