Tag Archives: love

They'll learn that love stretches like a rubber band, bends backwards like a yoga pose. That love is like waiting in the DMV.

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I’ll be perfectly content with my life if the word “divorce” never settles in my stomach. I’m not sure I’ll ever be adequately prepared to handle the idea of it, not the way half of this nation is able to step into line with stepbrothers and halve down the middle to merge with half sisters.

Those strong souls were experts in maneuvering between houses on the Sunday nights when I settled down to watch an episode of ‘America’s Funniest Home Videos’ with a mug of mint chocolate chip ice cream in my lap. Fleece patterned pajama pants kept my tiny legs warm as November crept up on October.

That is what I remember. That is what I want for my children, my nonexistent little girls with wild wispy hair that looks like a hairdo Pebbles might wear on The Flintstones. I want them to stand up in front of a crowd of 60some people in 60some years and give a speech about Mommy and Daddy.

Mommy and Daddy, didn’t they love each other so much more than anyone else we knew for the last 50 years?

I want their tomorrows to be blessed by a today that taught them how to love. And I want that to be because I was taught well, because I was told that love comes in many shapes and sizes, but none of them are too small to fit inside a little apartment building in the heart of New Jersey. Or a combined annual income that doesn’t fill the perimeter of the Christmas tree. Or a box of graham crackers that breaks into fragments fit for a bowl with milk that’s breakfast.

I want them to learn about love that stretches like a rubber band, love that bends backward like a yoga pose, love that stays strong in the middle of a summer downpour or a winter blizzard when it’s easier to stay safe inside and away from all the elements.

The world doesn’t like to teach us things like that. It likes to tell us how to tie our shoes and recite our ABC’s, how to line up in height order on picture day or count to one hundred in Spanish, French and German.

We have the option to get the Dixie cup with chocolate and vanilla on our lunch trays but we can’t choose if Mommy and Daddy fall out of love and split the house right down the middle, leaving us standing in the rubble, hoping we’re smart enough to pick a side before a side picks us.

My grandparents celebrated fifty years on Friday.

“I can’t believe I’ve been married to you for half a century,” my grandpa said to my grandma.

He means it in a good way. He means it in a “it-doesn’t-feel-that-long” way, like he’d been waiting at the DMV for one too many hours and didn’t mind the bustle around him, didn’t notice the crying baby with colic in the corner or the nervous teenage boy cracking his gum over and over, waiting to take his permit test so he can drive his friends down to the local convenience store for slurpies.

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All I know is that she saved me.

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via weheartit.com

It’s been thirteen years since I last saw her lose herself. But that was before she was a mother, before she had to hold the world like she knew how to spin it her way.

I didn’t start out knowing what to say to the women who worry their lives are ticking clocks, that each day they become less and less loveable than the one before it. I didn’t start out knowing the right words for the moment when staying feels easier than leaving—even when those invisible prison walls build like skyscrapers reminding them of big strong lives they fear they’ll never lead.

No, I used to think I’d shake my head and frown a bit, touch my hand lightly on a sunburned shoulder for a moment. That’d be enough.

It’s not.

If you’ve ever felt that shoulder ripple beneath your fingertips like the beginnings of an earthquake, you’ll quickly change your mind.

Because ignorance might break our hearts but holding onto a cold, bitter heart will damn near kill us.

The battle seemed far away, in another country even, but then someone drops a bomb and suddenly you’re Hiroshima when you thought you were Tokyo.

I don’t want to sit with my hand on her shoulder for an indefinite period of time, itching to bury away the silence that fills the heavy air in the room.

I want to know how to make her smile last for more than a few moments, a few hours after I’ve gone home for the night or my voice isn’t on the other end of the line.

I want to know what she needs to hear to make tomorrow a little easier than today. I want her to know she’s stronger than I ever was and that she’s more beautiful than most of the women in my life.

And if someday I grow up to be half the woman she is, my kids will be just as proud as hers.

I want to talk to her about love because I don’t think she’s felt it enough lately and those rings around her eyes from all the tears she shouldn’t cry when the kids are in bed or over a friend’s.

I want to remind her that superhero status is a sliding scale and she’s much nearer to the top than she might believe.

And I want to know if coffee really does work wonders because God does she perform miracles if she sips on a cup before the sun even comes up.

I want to tell her it’ll get easier but I stop myself. Because I know how it feels to fall when you’re just a kid but I’ve never felt that same love last a lifetime and surely never watched it crack straight down the middle until the fissures fill with poison and the end looks nothing like the beginning.

All I know is that she saved me.

So I’ll pray to God to know how to save her, too, because a hand on her shoulder just doesn’t do enough. It might never be enough for me anymore.

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I'm an equal-opportunity lover.

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My mother didn’t teach me how to love suburban-style or warn me about falling in love with a boy for whom English was a second language.

Oops.

I’m concerned we’ve watched one too many movies set in the 1950s where everyone’s skin is the color of Wonderbread.

Is racism is now a chemical additive in our Skippy and Welch’s jars so that when we make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, all that bad stuff sticks to the inside of our mouths and lines our stomachs and eats away the acid?

I go to college in the south, where 80% of last year’s freshman class was white. My roommates don’t know about diversity. They never had the option to fall in love with a boy whose skin glows golden in the summer. Tanned arms wrapped around them on a breezy summer night like a blanket.

They might not think twice about cutting someone down because of the color of his skin or the love threaded into his mother’s cooking.

For the record, she made some of the best lasagna I’ve ever had in my life.

We’re not together anymore. Me and him. It had nothing to do with the way his mother says his name, a breath of air easing off her tongue in a way I could never master. Nor did it have to do with conversations between the two of them, while I stood on the other side of the staircase while they fought—her yelling in Spanish and him in English, just to drive her crazy.

It’s called code-switching.

And it doesn’t matter that he answers her in English, because she retorts back in Spanish.

That’s how love works, too. It happens to each of us differently, but we all know what it is. We all know the other person’s falling even if it feels like they’re speaking a different language.

I’ve been living with my grandparents for a month now. We don’t see much of each other except at dinner, and we generally get along. But sometimes, the generational gap creeps up on me from behind and pulls a sack over my head. Leaves me stuck in the middle of their kitchen with no words to defend someone else’s story.

My grandparents believe everyone in America should speak English. I never met my ex-boyfriend’s grandmother, even though she visited that whole first summer we dated. She doesn’t speak English, but I don’t think she needs to.

Because it doesn’t matter.

“If you live in the country, you should learn to speak the language,” my grandfather says to me. I try to find the words to tell him about the Hispanic families I drive by on the way to work in New Brunswick each morning. The mothers who push strollers and walk their antsy sons and daughters to the front steps of the elementary schools lining the road.

No words come. We are speaking different languages—me, the advocate for those with less money and more love, and him, the consummate logic-abider who does not budge for anyone.

I wonder how he would’ve reacted if my ex-boyfriend didn’t speak English. If my grandfather knew he isn’t technically an American citizen; that his mother sometimes stumbles over words and his cousins will probably always speak Spanish.

“Castilian Spanish,” my grandfather says to me. “That’s real Spanish.”

As if the rest of the dialects are fake imposters lined up in a county jail, waiting to be identified. Slapped on the wrist for trying to be a language. For trying to communicate amongst people, and share life and love and compassion.

If he weren’t from Madrid, should I have loved him any less? Should we cut someone else down because they came to America and didn’t have the resources or the brain capacity left to start learning all over again?

I wonder, if my grandfather moved to Spain, what he would do. I wonder if he knows that you cannot choose how you fall in love, but that you simply wake up, well after you’ve said your goodbyes, and realize the song “Forever Love (Digame)” by Anna Nalick will always freak you out.

Because my mother never taught me about the proper way to fall in love. For that, I can only thank her.

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They merge in the middle to exchange bits of accumulated knowledge like tokens collected during a video game.

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I’m the little sister my little sister never had.

“You need to do something with your hair,” she says. “It’s too flat.”

I tell her it’s dry, that there’s nothing she can do, and she shakes her head.

“No it’s not. Come here.”

I fold over into her own personal ragdoll and tense up, waiting for the hot air to scald my scalp as she scrunches my hair and diffuses my curls.

“Don’t even complain that it’s hot,” she says. Like she’s my mother. Like she can see the way my face scrunched up when the heat crept along my hairline.

She makes me stand up to examine her work. Starts scrunching the bottom of my hair. I squeal.

“I’m not even touching your neck,” she says. “Chill out.”

She drags me into the bathroom on a hunt for a bobby pin—the finishing touch.

Earlier, walking the streets of Philly, she asked if she could dress my daughter some day. Give her some curly brown pigtails.

“How do you know I’ll have a girl?” I asked her.

She didn’t.

It should bother me, being 21 and led around my own house by my 18-year-old partner in crime. But it doesn’t. It feels like learning backwards, starting with the important things like navigating us from our home in the suburbs to the center of Philadelphia and remembering to pay both my credit card bills on time.

And then I backtrack to everything else. Shopping for a top that doesn’t hang lifeless from my skinny frame. My first pair of skinny jeans. A dangerous addiction to summer sundresses.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I think I’ve figured it out. Sisters start on two sides of the spectrum—one black and one white—until they merge in the middle and exchange bits of accumulated knowledge like tokens collected during a video game. One grows up fast so the other can meander through childhood like a lost soul in a drought-ridden field. One travels to the big city in the north so the other can hide out in the sweet southern hills that keep her skin glowing and her smile big.

She makes me over so I’m beautiful and I steer her away from the streets where she faces dangers greater than just a dirty look or a muttered curse under smoke-caked breath.

We have each other’s backs and fronts and everything in between. And we line up our defenses, dumping out the contents of our purses and tote bags and letting the treasures carry us through life while we’re apart for five months at a time.

Because when we come together, when we meet in the middle, it’s like we’ve never been apart.

By the way, every month I send out a short + sweet newsletter brimming with cool finds related to the monthly theme. It'd be stellar if you subscribed. If it's not worthy, it doesn't go in the newsletter. That. Simple.