2 Daughters
Yesterday brought the birth of a beautiful baby daughter for one of my dear friends from D.C.
Yesterday also brought the sudden death of a beautiful barely-turned-teenage daughter of one of my classmates in Pittsburgh.
You can tell me all you want about balance in the universe. But I still, after staying up all night arguing with the universe, don’t quite grasp everything yet.
After all my soul-searching, this may sound strange, but maybe there’s a reason to envy both.
I’ve spent my whole life married to my job, putting up walls and boldly declaring that the things “everyone else” wants don’t matter a whit to me.
I figure by saying I don’t want a husband or a family, the universe will give me one. Since it always seems to, when I say I “can’t take one more thing,” pile a whole bunch onto my just-about-to-break plate.
So, I envy them that they have something to love … something to lose. Something worth dropping everything for, to nurture and protect as their own. Something to worry about and, yes, sadly, something to grieve.
I do fall in love an awful lot. The timing is never right, whether it’s mutually shared at different times, or else they want me when I want someone else (or vice-versa). Never once have I felt I “had” anything worth fighting for.
And nobody feels sorry for me when I grieve things that, let’s face it, just weren’t real to anybody but me.
Anyway, please send love to Angie on her new baby girl, and to Cindi on losing Alyson in a car accident almost a decade after they lost Alyson’s dad in the same manner. And if you could spare some love for someone who’s never known any, well, I would appreciate that, too.
March 8th, 2014 at 12:06 AM
I don’t have to say that carma is real. My best friend’s dog died the day his daughter was born. Yeah, the 10 year old dog you got as a freshman in college was there thill the end. Weird. But’s it true. Love, Angie, Alyosn, Cyndi and dad. I love everyone I don’t know as well. Carma…..
March 10th, 2014 at 9:41 AM
AMEN. I’ve been in the place/space you have been traveling and where you are right now. The idea that if you say you want something else the things you really want may come to you? I don’t buy it. I don’t think you should either. It is important to both KNOW and SAY what you want from life, partners, family, friends, and even from the J.O.B. But it takes more than saying what you want. It takes action. I floundered in and out of love. At 37, I answered a City Paper ad. We dated for 18 months. Move in together. I married her and I had just turned 40. I was going to give up. We are deeply in love and adopted a daughter AND a number of dogs. GO for it! Feel me?