 As we roll towards fall, shorter days, longer and colder nights, my thoughts are of gratitude for the partnership I have with my husband, the sense of ‘twoness' that means snuggling in at night, a shoulder to cry on, a hand to hold, a “have you read this” over the breakfast table and a sharing of news and ideas. I was bustling around the kitchen last week pickling the last of the green tomatoes and making fig jam with an over abundance of that crop too. “You’re chipmunking again”, he said, “storing away the harvest, glad to know we’ll never run out of pickles”.
I smiled at that image…'chipmunking'…busy preparing for the cold season, filling the shelves, making sure we’d be snug. I thought about it in terms of marriage and long-term relationships. My friend Lois did end a six-month relationship very recently, one that held promise. “There wasn’t enough history to help us weather a rough patch”, she explained. “We didn’t have anything to fall back on that gave us a sense of hope.”
Nothing in the pantry I thought…apt comparison.
In most relationships, starting out means planning ahead, thinking of saving for the first house, kids, paying for college and then retirement. We make adjustments in the way we think of money, decisions become joint ones; priorities change. We’re sowing the seeds for the harvest of financial security down the line - But what about emotional security? How much of the little nuances of daily contact do we preserve, store away for cold winter. Things get rough, what do we have in the emotional pantry, what reserve of kindness and understanding have we put away? When he seems distant, cold even, is there a little jar somewhere with a lovely memory captured…pulling that out, sharing it can be the beginning of a conversation that leads to unraveling what’s going on.
Very recently, out of nowhere, I received an e-mail from my first husband…he of the adulterous affair, bitter divorce, abandonment of children time of my life. A man who 22 years ago served me with a court order forbidding me to mention his name in any of my writing. And there on my computer screen a message. He asks for the dates of our children’s birthdays and were there any grandchildren? Yes, that’s how far apart we’ve been. He wrote that he knew I must despise him and think of him as being selfish, unfeeling, callous, but could I overcome my feelings and help him connect with the kids. He wrote that it is “probably too late now to make up for time lost” and what did I think.
I took a long walk and then a drive and I wrestled with the memories foremost in my “pantry”…the anger, the unbelievable hurt that I felt, the tears I shed for my children, the begging letters I wrote to him asking him to please not discard them. And then I thought about my four. My three sons who were raised without the benefit of a “dad”, my daughter, old enough to see much of the cruelty fear and pain allowed us to inflict upon one another as the marriage was torn apart. When I came home, my lovely man took one look and held out his arms. “Tell me about it” he said. And instead of dredging up the ugly I told him about the young lieutenant I fell in love with, the man who made me laugh until I cried on a first date; the man who affixed a papier-mâché horse head to the hood of his little sports car, donned a rented knight costume and “galloped” his steed to my work-place and asked me to marry him. I told him about the bedtime story hours with the kids, the camping trips that got washed out. Good memories in the back of that pantry. Such good memories. For the first time since that divorce I could remember good things about him.
“And are you going to write back?” Tom asked.
I did write back. I gave him birth dates and the names of spouses and grandchildren. I told him that it was not too late and that no one should live a life filled with regret. I made clear that I had no idea how the kids would react to contact from him but that they were fine adults and if he wanted to, he could try to get to know them as such.
This morning he responded, thanking me and adding, “I am ill and I am scared; can we be kind to each other once more or is it too late?”
I don’t think so. Knowing that I have finally tossed those memories with a limited shelf life and moved to the front of my "pantry" those good ones, I find my harvest preserved. I don’t think it too late at all. |
