Fairy Tales and Other Stories

One of my favorite people in the world was recently dealt a bad hand and is navigating the end of a relationship. Unless you’re one of those high school sweetheart couples who has been happily married for 40 years, we’ve all been there. And it sucks. Anger, depression, finally acceptance with maybe a side of personal empowerment, or maybe a few scars… or both.

It’s the reason for literature, for music, for the arts in general. I can remember laying on my living room floor in the middle of the night, listening to Evanescence and crying while my dog lay beside me, worried, but a rock. Looking back, it seems a little melodramatic. But at the time, it was a purge of everything broken. Most of us have been there, and like childbirth or a homeward bound flight long-delayed on the runway, we know it’s only eternal misery until it’s done. I’m grateful for other people’s stories, other people’s words and lyrics. It makes us feel better about muddling through our own chaos. We embrace them because it reminds us that we’re not alone in trying to make sense of it all.

Love is a tough game. We’re brought up on fairy tales – further compounded by Disney versions, rather than Brothers Grimm – and then we’re supposed to somehow navigate the real world with only the knowledge that true love conquers evil, dragons, even death.

And then it doesn’t. Then it fails. Or we fail. Or someone fails us. And we realize that Disney didn’t prepare us for this. We know we’re supposed to end up with a happily-ever-after, but we still stood there, eating the stupid apple in the first place.

In high school, my first love was my best friend. I’d recommend it, as an introduction to love and loss. At the time, it was dramatic, a roller coaster of highs and lows. Many tears were shed. My grandmother once called him a rat, which was undeserved, but appreciated at the time. But fast forward a few years, and I was a very happy bridesmaid, and now it’s all warm nostalgia. In college, I went to England and met a boy who was woven completely into the magical experience of being abroad. He was smart, and sarcastic and a little bit punk and a little bit sweet, and there was no one there who knew me to tell me that he wasn’t my type. But it’s hard to love across an ocean, and it slid into warm nostalgia, as well. He sent my oldest daughter a teddy bear for her first birthday. She loved it above all her other stuffed animals until we left it in a hotel room in Illinois and learned the valuable parenting lesson of never letting a first lieutenant of the toy world leave the house.

It’s hard that we learn so much more in retrospect than in the moment. Possibly the most formative relationship of my young life was the one that wasn’t. I was Eponine, Jay Gatsby, Katniss’s Gale. It was the age of Fiona Apple, Alanis Morissette and Natalie Imbruglia, and they served me well, as did my favorite poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Christina Rosetti. Promise me no promises / So will I not promise you / Keep we both our liberties / Never false and never true.

Out of that wasteland, I rebounded into my first marriage. Someone damn well wants me; just watch me walk. It’s funny, because in the end, that’s not actually the best reason to get married. And it turned out that in my haste to prove something to myself, I’d chosen very poorly. Don’t get married at 22. Unless you’re that high school sweetheart couple who is going to be married 40 years. Then you might as well get started. But at 22, don’t marry a slick con artist 7 years your senior. I feel like that’s advice you can take to the bank. You’re welcome.

And so, there I was. 23, bruised and humbled, already tumbled out of a first marriage, and really none the wiser about love for it. When you’re an English major, you have a lot of expectations. Elizabeth and Darcy, Rhett and Scarlett, The Thorn Birds, Anna Karenina, Pablo Nerudo’s sonnets. Wuthering Heights is an awful book full of selfish, horrible characters. But I’ve read it multiple times, because in the end, if love is a tragedy, that is its zenith.

Luckily, way leads on to way. Fairy tales end as soon as the real story is about to begin, and in both Russian literature and Shakespeare, a lot of people end up dying. There’s middle ground to be found. We live, we learn, we figure a few things out. Love is still highs and lows, even when you’ve found your match. Some days you can’t believe you could be so lucky, you dance in the kitchen and hum in the shower, and some nights you lay in bed, your partner’s warm breath blowing against your shoulder and you think there would be nothing like a solitary desert island.

And I realize, that maybe I have less angst these days, but I still really enjoy belting out broken heart anthems alone in my car, because we’ve all been there. And even when we’ve found our person, it’s not all roses. And that it’s perhaps unreasonable to expect one person to be your everything.

As an adult, I’ve come to realize that the love we need is a fairly complicated Ven diagram. It’s the person we’re hopefully lucky enough to find as a partner; that person who knew going in that it wasn’t going to be all minty breath and candlelit dinners, but signed on anyway. At some point my husband realized that I was never going to organize the thousand tubes of product and make-up and lotion in our bathroom, but that I would flip out if the forks were misplaced within the silverware drawer. And he’s at peace with that. I think. But with no disrespect to my husband, it seems one-dimensional not to embrace how much additional support, other love, we accumulate in a lifetime. It’s the friends who were there to see the initial heartbreaks. They know what we looked like when we were finding comfort at the bottom of a pint of ice cream, or forgetting with too many tequila shots. They listened to the same stories over and over and didn’t walk away. They didn’t say, “You’re right,” but they said, “I know.” And they did. It’s the family we were born to, and the family we create along the way. It’s the first five people you text with big news, good or bad, and the person you haven’t seen a decade, but who you still plan to share porch rockers with when you’re old enough to sit and remember all about when you were too young to know better.

And so we’re a mosaic of different experiences, memories, lessons and scars. It’s kind of amazing when we find the people who will not only accept all of that, but embrace it. And when someone we love is going through a valley, we know, we get it, because we’ve been there. But I’ve got to believe that every time we are failed, or we fail, we’re therefore a step closer to our share of the answers; we’re closer to getting through to the other side.

I mentioned in the last blog that Christmas break involved the 1980’s Anne of Green Gables movies. Anne would have definitely spent some time listening to late night girl anthems, had she been born a century later. She had an artist’s soul. “You don’t know love when you see it. You’ve tricked something out with your imagination that you think love, and you expect the real thing to look like that,” Marilla says in Anne of the Island, when Anne is convinced that she wants a tall, dark and handsome stranger who could be wicked, but wouldn’t. Fictional Anne may or may not have read of Mr. Darcy. But we all stumble over our archetypes now and then, and forget to appreciate that we’re still incrementally learning, whether it’s the ebb and flow of our own love story, or the friendships that saw us through when our love stories fell apart.

I’m still a sucker for a heartbreak anthem, and for Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy. But what Jane Austen was really selling was the search for a happy ending. Right after Christmas, the girls and I got the stomach bug. The girls first, and then, two days later, me. I was supposed to be taking our youngest to a daily basketball camp each morning, but about an hour before, on the first day, it became obvious that I wasn’t going to be leaving the house, maybe ever again. You forget how sick you feel when you’re sick. I called my husband at work, and he was home in 45 minutes, when work is 30 minutes away.

“Are you going back to work after you bring her home?” I asked. “No,” he said. “Someone needs to take care of you.”

And there it is. A modern fairy tale.