Marriage

I have gotten into the bad habit of reading old e-mails and/or surfing the web after S. goes to bed. I had planned for the one or two hours between my bedtime and hers to be my writing time—at least, when I didn’t have extra work that needed to get done. I haven't sent anything out for publication in over a year, and I’ve yet to return to the novel-in-progress--but I am finally writing poetry again, which feels good. Anyway, I digress...

Tonight was a web-surfing night—I couldn’t get my head clear enough to write, partly because my daughter refused to go to bed until she'd talked to her boyfriend. The house has thin walls, and I confess I have a hard time tuning out her phone conversations. So, although I tried to surf the web, really I ended up listening to one of many conversations that are always part heartbreaking, part hilarious, and part frustrating. For instance, today’s went like this:

P! Are you listening?
P!
What kind of wedding do you want, formal or semi-formal. P! P! Are you listening? What are you doing? Well, stop watching T. V. and listen!
I’m talking about our wedding, P! Who else's? Listen to me. What kind of wedding do you want, formal or semi-formal?
I'm talking about our wedding. Listen, P!

OK, I’ll stop there, but you get the picture.

S. recently cut off contact with her foster family—though I suspect this won’t be forever—after learning the truth about how they really felt about her. (This is a long story for another entry). Most of the time, she is happy to be here, and can recognize the incredible progress she’s made. But she’s not quite ready to completely separate herself from her past, and the way this manifests is through a one-sided relationship with a boy named P.

Well, maybe it’s not completely one-sided. I wouldn’t know; she tried to arrange twice for us to meet during my pre-adoption visits, and both times, he chickened out of showing up, or his family made the decision for him—or something.

Based on the conversations I overhear, he is as immature, if not more so, than she is. He's also an abuse survivor, and an adoptee, though he was adopted by a relative. S’s former therapist told me he was kind to her, able to calm her down, and that he did at least briefly consider her his girlfriend—though S. herself admits they only kissed on the lips a handful of times, and that she enjoyed it more than he did.

Sometimes, S. says she wants to marry him at 18 and start having babies--and becomes outraged when I explain why I don't think this is necessarily the best plan. Whether he has this vision—or thinks of her as a girlfriend at all now—is questionable. There were a series of conversations about the status of their relationship—yes, you can date other people, no, you can’t, etc.—and now, S. insists they’ve come to some kind of agreement to stay together forever, something I can’t verify, of course.

There was, however, the letter her wrote her, one sentence: “Have faith.” It may have meant "have faith that we will be together," or "have faith that your life will work out," or—most likely, he doesn’t even know what it meant. It was a response to a long, heartbreaking letter from S. begging him to be more engaged in their conversations, more attentive to his future. He sent her letter back with these two words, scrawled in giant letters on the letter’s reverse. Talk about cryptic--but it was enough to convince her that a wedding, babies, etc. were in her future.

When she’s not talking about marriage and babies, she’s talking about college, career options, waiting to have kids. Or else she’s talking about becoming a famous singer, and how P. will follow her everywhere and sometimes sing duets with her. The dog is also in this fantasy, and I’ve been told that if she ever gets that rich, she’ll buy me a mansion. The next day, she’s back to looking up colleges with horse programs on the internet, talking about what it would take to have a career working with horses, saying, “My good grades are definitely the first step, right, Mom?”

There seems to be no rhyme or reason to whether she is talking realistically or unrealistically about the future. I have noticed, though, that after a particular success she will often regress--return to fantasy talk, go from calling P. once or twice in a week to insisting on calling him every day. I am still negotiating how to limit their conversations—which are clearly not as interesting or important to him as to her—without making her feel as if I’m cutting her last lifeline to the past. Unlike her other fantasies/unrealistic stories, I am unable to give her a reality check because I don’t have a firm grasp of the reality.

So anyway, I was clicking through old e-mails, the mass-mail ones that I get at work, decide to read later, and usually end up deleting months afterwards, unread--and listening to this wedding conversation, frustrated beyond belief. "Why does this girl who is doing so well right now—who has lots of concrete, positive things going on in her life—feel like it’s to her benefit to spend time having a one-sided conversation about how formal her wedding will be to someone who has never showed any interest, as far as I can tell, in marrying her?" I asked myself as I clicked on yet another unopened e-mail.

And there it was—the photo that woke me up. There in the center of my screen were two old women—very old women, there's no better way to say it—getting married. The headline read, “Marriage in California.”

Now, I’d written the obligatory letters, made the obligatory calls—even with S. in my life, I’m able to stay politically active to this extent at least. I vaguely knew the California measure had passed, and of course I thought this was good news—but something about the photo made this reality concrete in a way that completely surprised me.

Without any warning, I was sobbing. It was sudden and fierce, but there was something so raw and beautiful about the photo—how the woman on the right, the one with white hair, leaned forward, her smiling cheeks a sea of wrinkles, her eyes straining to see her partner. Their hands clasped together. Her partner, lips pressed together, eyes closed, weeping. The witnesses were weeping, too—two middle-aged women whose identities, like those of the marrying couple, are not revealed on the site. The minister, a young man, smiled ear to ear, a little awkwardly.

S. came down then, saying something annoying like, “Well, you can’t stop true love, it always means long conversations. P. and I were planning our wed....”, and then, she saw my face. She sat down beside me, read the screen. “I want to see more,” she said, and so I kept clicking. We watched a video of a stream of couples walking through the courthouse door, old, disabled, young, together for 12 years, 18, 40—and I kept weeping.

“It’s so beautiful,” Lisa said, and that would have been enough, but she went on. “I don’t understand how anyone could hate you, Mom,” she added, kissing my head.

“They’ll try to take it away,” I heard myself say. Immediately, I regretted it. I’m trying to raise a hopeless kid into a hopeful life—and here I am, already thinking ahead to the inevitable barrage of hatred that will follow this moment.

“Have faith, Mom,” S. said. “They’d better not, or I’ll kick them in the balls.” But I didn’t hear the second sentence; instead, I saw her boyfriend’s messy, giant letters scrawled across the bottom of the letter she’d written him, which he’d sent back: have faith.

For whatever reason, I understood something then as I hadn’t earlier—that S’s need to stay connected to P. has everything to do with faith. She wants to believe she can change her life without fundamentally changing who she is. A part of her is proud of how she’s matured in the last three months—another part of her is terrified. She's terrified because when she thinks back to the Boys and Girls Club, where she spent most of her time because her foster family agreed to keep her only on this condition, and where she and P. met, she remembers having one other outsider who truly cared for her there, one other person her age who understood, more or less, what she had been through. It was a good feeling, but it's in the past--and she can’t connect the person she is now with the person she was then.

This is, of course, a terrible comparison, but I know the feeling. My life has changed drastically multiple times, and occasionally, I feel this pull toward the past, this need to reconnect with friends who have long since left my life or to talk with someone who “knew me then,” even if she doesn’t know me now. It’s why I had an inexplicable urge to call my ex, with whom I barely speak, the week I was going to meet S. for the first time—I didn’t do it, but the urge was there. Unlike S, though, who is able to convince herself that a one-sided conversation is actually a positive sign, I knew any conversation I initiated would have ended with me disappointed, sad--something a 14-year-old girl can't be expected to understand.

Even now, years later, when I see the photos of those couples getting married, finally, legally, after so many years, I am partly weeping for joy, partly for what I know I could have had if I'd been willing to stick it out--but I wasn't. And for good reason, let me add--I would not have been happy.

But these couples are--truly, undeniably happy. This is all S. wants, really, some kind of assurance that the future will be secure for her, that she'll be loved.

"I said I'll kick them in the balls if they try to take it away," S. repeated, clearly wanting to make me laugh, and the second time, I did.

"Explain how it works again," S. said, "how gay people can be married in a church but not really. How does that work?" I explained the difference between a church wedding and a legal wedding--and all the privileges that go along with it.

"It's so unfair," S. said. "I'll kick 'em in the balls," she repeated.

“Kicking them in the balls won’t help,” I said. “But there are other ways. We can write letters...”

“I know, Mom,” she interrupted me, rolling her eyes. “It was a metaphor.”

And immediately, for some inexplicable reason, I saw my own handwriting at age 14, scrawled on a tiny piece of paper I’d taped to the side of my bed, read every night—a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, then my favorite poet:

To a Young Poet

Time cannot break
the bird's wing from the bird.
Bird and wing together,
go down, one feather.
No thing that ever flew,
not the lark, not you,
can die as others do.

When I was 14, I instinctively understood the bird metaphor--I wanted, like S., desperately to fly, to feel the rush of wind in my wings, but also, I wanted my life to matter. My vision may have been different than hers--I wanted my writing to change people's lives the way Millay's had changed mine--but is that really any less selfish than wanting a big wedding, to be loved completely in the fairy-tale way by the first boy who ever showed you a little kindness? OK, maybe it is less selfish--but considering that all S. has ever wanted or needed is to be loved--considering that the idea of making an impact wasn't even in her frame of reference until recently, as she was focused primarily up until this point on survival--her desire is really the foster-care-kid version of mine.

S. leaned over me then and pressed "replay" on one of the U-Tube videos we'd watched. There they were again, all of those couples walking into the courthouse, joyful, grateful, changed. I wept again, and S. rubbed my back and said, "It's OK, Mom. It's real."

My daughter may not always have a concrete sense of what is real and what is not, but in that moment, she was so, so right.