Realization: I am, without a doubt, just a plain old human being. I know. Devastating, really.
Tonight, I’m thinking of “the drift.”
The drift occurs when the emotional space between two people expands at a seemingly infinitesimal, yet constant rate. It is what begins as forgetting to return a phone call and ends in a faint memory of someone you knew quite well a very long time ago. The drift is painful, hopeless and, 99% of the time, permanent. There is no “un-drifting” once you’ve drifted.
When you walked in, I felt a peaceful knowing in my heart that we were going to have great adventures together. You looked shy. I knew you had no idea how beautiful you were. I was going to show you that.
I mean, for me, my life is full. I have to make room for everything, anything. If I want to breathe, I have to look at my to do list. I have a space between 11:45 and 11:50… I can breathe in those five minutes or I can make an awkward phone call. I barely have time for the people with whom I have relationships that are not awkward and forced, so who needs that?
As I convinced you that you were just as beautiful on the outside as you were on the inside, you taught me to believe that I was brave, wise and strong. With you by my side, I no longer had to pretend to be that. I was that… because you saw that when you saw me. Your eyes made me real.
People will say things.
“Make time to fix this thing.”
“Friendship is important.”
“Hold on.”
“Don’t let go.”
And other lyrics from “.38 Special.”
Others understand. This is who I am. My life is this way because I want it to be this way. I seriously don’t have time for this kind of thing.
Even when there were oceans between us, we were inseparable. Two thumps in one heartbeat… blood rushing in, blood rushing out. Absent from the day to day of each others’ lives, one phone call would cascade in a blanket of reassurance. You are loved, blood in, you are perfect, blood out.
We’re all grown ups here and while I realize that some people prefer their reality sugar coated, I’m more of the “hold the sugar, give it to me straight up” kind of woman. My heart is too full and my life is just too busy to harbor a silly, childish hope that we can just pick up right where we left off. There is now only time for picking up socks and groceries and kids from practices.
You loved, accepted and admired me without any reservation or envy and, most importantly, without any expectation. You are the only person I have never feared I’d disappoint. If I am honest with myself, no one had ever loved me like that, nobody has loved me like that since, and I suspect that nobody ever will.
When the drift happens, it happens because it’s what both of the people want. People will fight to protect something they need. People let things that are no longer relevant to them fade away. Either way, it’s important to note that everyone in the situation is making a choice.
Conscientiousness optional.
I looked up one day and you were simply not there anymore. I was hurt, alone and, yes, a little angry. Babies have been born, rings exchanged, people buried. Suddenly, I realized that I couldn’t even remember the last time I looked in your direction. I also realize that nobody seems to ask whose fault it is when a book ends. This isn’t much different.
The drift itself, while painful, is not the excruciating thing. The real pain shows up when it hits you that there will probably be more drifts and that everyone is a potential drift candidate.
You will never be replaced. I cannot move on. There is no “letting go” of you. There is only an ache in my heart, a lump in my throat, and the horrible realization that there is nothing I can do. I don’t know you anymore and you don’t know me and we are past the point of pretending with any degree of credibility that this is not the reality of who we are to each other. I cannot pretend this is not happening anymore.
The drift is the best reason to hold the people still in your life a little tighter today. Because those moments after a drift, you’ll find the certainty that all this won’t last forever firmly, if not tragically, renewed. Sometimes, you’ve got to just take a deep breath somewhere between 11:45 and 11:50 and pay attention to right now. This minute. Here.
Goodbye.
An interesting article posted by my friend Fatima on Facebook:
“Spanking Kids Can Cause Long Term Harm: Canada Study”
TORONTO (Reuters) – Spanking children can cause long-term developmental damage and may even lower a child’s IQ, according to a new Canadian analysis that seeks to shift the ethical debate over corporal punishment into the medical sphere.
The study, published this week in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, reached its conclusion after examining 20 years of published research on the issue. The authors say the medical finding have been largely overlooked and overshadowed by concerns that parents should have the right to determine how their children are disciplined.
The initial reaction to this post on my part was, well, duh because it’s a conscious parenting choice on my part not to spank. I feel a strong need, because I realize this is a sensitive topic, to strongly emphasize that my choice doesn’t make me a better parent. Simply put, though, I believe that emphasizing that you’re stronger or taller or older than someone is not the best tool to teach them what’s right or wrong. One day, we will not be stronger and bigger and taller. Principled living results from a person intellectually accepting something because they believe it to be right. There’s a line in the Quran (this is probably going to surprise our friends who believe in a vast conspiracy to force Islam on everyone) : “There is no compulsion in religion.” Put another way, you can’t *make* someone believe something is right.
I don’t think you can force someone to believe something, and I believe that physical punishments are an act of force.
I hear this a lot: some kids need to be spanked. I disagree. I just disagree. A child is a person. A total and complete person that just knows a little less about the world than I do. To drill down to the simplest explanation: I don’t spank children because I don’t spank adults. Shut up. Perverts.
I also don’t spank because I remember what it felt like to be spanked, both in an educational environment and at home. It was ineffective, shaming and made me resentful of the people who used those methods to assert authority over me. To this day, the adult in my life who has the most impact on me is the one who never laid a hand on me: my mother. All my mother had to do was tell me she was disappointed in me and I would straighten up. I cannot recall a single second of my life where I did not respect my mother. Not even when I was extremely young. And I’ll tell you this, kids aren’t born respecting their parents, their parents earn that respect. My mother earned her respect from me somehow without every laying a hand on me.
(Okay, there was this one time that she slapped me when I was sixteen, but I totally deserved that. And, also, she apologized for losing her temper. It’s just that she thought I was lying dead in a ditch because she didn’t know where I was for eight hours and I was supposed to be at school).
People who disagree about this seldom change their minds or find compromises they can agree on as evidenced by a discussion I had on the show CYR (episode 20) a few years ago.
All of that up there was my initial reaction to the Canadian study. My second reaction was far more philosophically based than controversially based, and I’m hoping you latch on to this part instead of the first. How can we as a society, dare I say, species consider eliminating the use of physical discipline when it permeates the highest levels of our society? I feel like that’s pretty hypocritical.
Spanking your kids is supposedly bad according to this latest research, but dropping bombs on country because you suspect that they have nuclear capabilities is okay? See, if we accept that spanking kids is definitely, absolutely not okay… well, we’d have to reassess paradigms that allow us to push the boundaries of what we believe are appropriate responses to international situations where we feel a particular nation or people need to be “taught a lesson” for a perceived or real threat.
You know what I mean?
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