One of my boys called me late last week, to continue a prank he’s pulling on me. We got a good laugh and I asked what was new in his world.
He told me about his ex-wife’s latest shenanigans and we bemoaned the fact he will never truly be rid of her. I said she must have been really damn pretty, since I have yet to hear a single redeeming quality about her.
He said, “Goddess, I got married because I was lonely.”
And it put so many — SO MANY — people into perspective for me.
I often say I’m married since I work hard and provide and do all the errands and the driving and am basically not allowed to go out and there is hell to pay when I do.
One of my D.C. boys said to me, tangled up on his couch in front of his fireplace late one March night and drinking wine from countries I’ll never visit, that it’s “codependance.” With the “a.”
It’s a dance. You HAVE to provide and you HAVE to take care of them to some extent (and there are boundaries) but you can’t completely lose yourself in the process.
And it got me to thinking, once we get Ebola and the enterovirus cured (oh God we need to stop these epidemics), we ought to cure the most-universal malady of them all …
Loneliness.
We all do crazy things in the name of it. Some get married. Some of us decide not to go to a vintage pinball party on a Saturday night that we have been looking forward to for six weeks because we can’t take another argument about the Life Choices we make to stave off the loneliness. And some of us occasionally — and just occasionally — lay themselves down to sleep and say “You know, it wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t wake up.”
Alas, we do rouse from our slumber. But I don’t think we ever truly awaken.
And in that, we we are not ever alone. And that’s what really makes it sad — that we can’t reach out and just be together in that.