The other day, on the way home from my Friday night shift, Diana Ross came on the radio, singing Touch Me in the Morning. I loved that song as a young, romantically idealistic girl lost somewhere in the cornfields of Illinois, and I realized with a tremendous wrench to my heart, that I loved it even now, and it resonated even more with me now. Somewhere inside I am still that lovesick, fresh-faced midwestern girl yearning for a love so real, so pure, so deep, so MUTUAL, that to find such a love would be the ultimate for me in this life----it would be the pinnacle, besides my children, who I consider to be my greatest treasures and gifts from God, but a love like this would be completely apart from that---it seems to me that all I've ever wanted was to love a man with all my heart, my soul, more than myself, more than my life, more than ANYTHING, ---A SIN TO SAY, but more than God, even. Such a sin, to make such a blasphemous statement. But to love someone like that wouldn't be good enough for me----I would want that man to love me with the exact same passion, need, and all consuming desire to own, as his and HIS alone. I realize that this is what all women want, regardless of age, race or nationality. Women want to love and be loved, protected and claimed.
On September 26. 2011, I will be married for 30 years, and I will have known my husband for 35 years. I realized when I was 32 years old that I had known him by that time for half my life. I have been with him basically all my life---all the life that mattered. But I never loved him the way I wanted to love a man. I married him for reasons that were known only to me, and reasons that were common to the era. What did you do after graduating from college, if you even did that, in 1981? You got married, usually. All of my friends did,---all of them. I was the only one in my small inner circle to get a college degree, and after that I knew I couldn't put it off any longer. I was never taught to think beyond home and family---to have any ambitions beyond that. I didn't know you could dare to go out into the big world and find a bigger life with bigger things in it. If I had known, I was too afraid to do it.
Well, after September 1981, I felt keenly and immediately the loss of my freedom and my options, and so began a pattern of small affairs---they say it is rampant today, That women cheat as much as men, maybe more so. Back then, it was unknown and unspoken of---but it was thought that only men were the cheaters. I sometimes think I was a pioneer in that regard----a bad, evil pioneer. But in every affair I like to think I was still looking for that love that I yearned for---something real, deep, mutual. My soul mate. My best friend, how I wanted that with all my heart. Joe was not my best friend, Sometimes I regarded him as the enemy---he was an angry man. His dad was an angry man---a smart, intelligent professor of political science, type A and verbally abusive to his wife and family, Probably physically and verbally abusive to Joe. All that anger came into the marriage, and I was blind-sided by this angry man. I came from a totally passive family. No one ever yelled at anyone in my family. My parents never fought.
Thirty years came and went---thirty years of fighting the good fight, hanging together through the good and the bad times, raising the kids, ---it all went by so fast, so fast. And before I knew it, the kids were grown and there I was, fat---conceding to old age, rudderless, and still longing for that great love that I was convinced was not ever to be, for me.
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