There Are Three of Me

There is the me that wants my relationship to work. Who wants to be “Mom” to the “Dad and Son” she has built over the last long decade and a bit. She wants to want to be here, in this place. She wants to be a family in whatever way she can make that work. She wants to break through the angry and the bitter. She wants to swallow her pride and hurt. She wants to see “him” again as she saw “him” before and remember why she started all of this in the first place. So, she finds yet “another way of saying it”. So, she doesn’t say the thing she knows will start another fight and she listens instead. She waits for things to get better. She tries not to snap. She tries not to remember all the chances already given and wasted. She tries to forget all the love offered and rejected. She tries and tries and tries.

Then, there is the me who doesn’t really believe my relationship can work. She steadily builds a life without “him”. She cultivates community and friendships that she only barely tries to share with “him”. She brainstorms ways to make money – ways to pursue her dreams while she makes money. She worries that no matter what she does she will not have enough money to leave “him” and maintain her quality of life and be the kind of mother she means to be and she’s not ready to give that quality of life up just yet so she watches from the sidelines as the me who tries to make things work does her stuff. She puts one foot in front of the other and bides her time and tries to imagine her life without “him”, a life where she and her son do things in the day-to-day without “him”. Where there might not ever be another “him” because she – like all the “me”s – is reclusive and fairly solitary and frightened and cannot imagine anyone else wanting to be with her.

Then, there is the me who waits to be swept off of her feet. She is the one who remembers a dream she had about her son. A dream she had about her son before she was even with “him”, before she’d even had a son. She remembers this dream and sees that she now lives in the house that was in the dream. That she has the beautiful brown-eyed, strong thighed boy that was in the dream but that the man in the dream is not the one with whom she shares this house or this son… The man in the dream was never seen. Just heard. Just his voice calling up the stairs. Calling her name. Our name. And it was as though she had never heard her name before the way it sounded in that voice, in that moment, in that dream. And so she waits for that man. For that voice. Sometimes she can almost see him in her mind, she thinks, see and hear him and feel him sweep her off her feet as she watches the other “me”s try and work and struggle.

Together, the three of us are a mess. A mess of hope, determination, steadfastness, weariness, coldness, calculation, guilt, fear, sadness, longing. Longing and pining and dreaming… We are all waiting. Waiting for something to give. To snap. Waiting to hear our name called so that we know how it’s supposed to sound. Waiting to be loved the way we deserve to be loved.