It was perfectly appropriate that we were spending Christmas day with my friend, Elaine, because one could easily describe her as the personification of that holiday!
She’s joyous, beautiful, life-giving, festive, and always full of good cheer. Her husband is a man that Lou thinks of as a brother, and, her three adult sons are incredibly beautiful and kind to be around. I’ve known Elaine for nearly as long as I’ve been married to Lou — which gives us some solid history as friends. But it wasn’t until this visit that I fell madly in love with her.
Something prompted Elaine to “see me” on that visit; and, something in me trusted her enough to let her.
Elaine is this Italian beauty from upstate New York. Her dark eyes and smooth skin make her quite a head-turner — but it’s her confidence that makes her the most attractive in my eyes. She’s always up for anything, and she reads people really well. The minute I walked into her kitchen that day, I noticed that she was taking me in differently than ever before.
Obviously, my weight loss was a pretty big tell that something was up with me, but Elaine waited for her moment to talk to me. She didn’t hit me right away with what she saw; instead, she graciously loved up on me, fed me delicious food I simply couldn’t resist, and, she filled the whole house with the sound of laughter.
Later that night, after I put on my pajamas, Elaine was in the kitchen puttering around. I wandered in so I could thank her for such a lovely day, and she said, “Want a cuppa tea?”
The way she asked me that question — while she shook her head up and down very encouragingly — made me want a “cuppa tea” more than anything in the world. So I slid into one of the two chairs that were always open and waiting for people to belly up to the busy kitchen island, and I watched my friend make me a cup of soothing hot tea.
At first, Elaine kept it light.
She mentioned my weight — but not in a way where I felt like I had to defend myself. She didn’t make me feel ashamed, or like I had to explain anything to her — rather, she drew me out a little bit at a time into a place where it felt safe and warm. Before long, I was telling Elaine about how I was falling to pieces, and how I didn’t know what to do. I told her how much I hated Utah, and how Lou and I were barely on speaking terms. And then… I told her about Sam.
I spilled my guts to her about how frightened I was by the fact that Sam was making me feel something I thought I wanted to feel, but I didn’t know what to do with those feelings because they were obviously so wrong. I remember babbling like a fool while Elaine looked at me with those soft brown eyes or hers, and drank in some of my pain for me. It felt strangely freeing to admit to her how conflicted and confused I was about my fiction and my reality, and how deeply gone I felt inside. I told her I was afraid that I was losing my feelings for Lou.
Once I started, I couldn’t stop.
I told Elaine about our argument in the car, and about how all of a sudden, I was struggling with these terrible old feelings I thought I could erase in my heart about the early days with Lou, his sons, and me… And, I told her about how gutting it had been to try to overcome the loss of all of our money, and, how Lou’s health issues seemed to be taking over our lives while we’ve been in the middle of this desperate and never-ending search to find some kind of job that would keep us from being everybody’s burden…
Well. It was a lot coming out of me all at once. But, I remember looking up at Elaine and telling her that I felt like maybe our life had finally completely broken me…
And. I was fearful that I was the kind of broken that no one could ever fix.
Elaine let me go to that very dark place, and she didn’t rush me back with trite words filled with empty encouragement. She let me wallow while she held my hand so that I knew I could find my way back. She also joined me in my defeat in a way that didn’t make Lou or me seem wrong for being so far gone, or for the way our past and current struggles had wound up defining our marriage. She told me things happen in a marriage, and it’s very dark when you suddenly see things the way they really are for the very first time. But I needed to go into this gloomy pit before I could pull myself out. It seemed like it was necessary to hit this kind of bottom so maybe at some point, I could push myself back up.
Elaine comes from a family of musicians, and music is most certainly the family passion — and so in many ways, I think she inherently understood the Sam situation like no one else could. The vulnerability that naturally has to come out of you when you attempt to make good art is a rare and specific thing, and it can be overwhelming the first time you feel it. So she just stayed in step with me as I unpacked my confusing feelings with her. When I cried, she wiped my tears, and when I expressed my anger, she didn’t stop me.
She only shared a few important insights from her own life, but she mostly let our chat be about me. She let me totally unwind, and then when she said good night to me, she seemed to give me an unspoken reassurance that she could help to knit me back together with her unconditional love. I was going to be OK… And, Elaine was there to prove that to me.
The next day, Elaine kept me busy. We went shopping, visited a little art gallery in La Jolla, and met up with the guys for margaritas and Mexican food. She never let me out of her sight — and, she hovered nearby as a light and beautiful buffer that was protecting Lou and me from our mutual pain for a little while.
Elaine said things to me like, “You just need to give yourself a break,” and, “Stop fighting against yourself. You’re only human!”
I needed to hear that more than anything at that point in time because I wasn’t sure if I was human or the product of my fiction most of the time. So far, every time I tried to be who I thought I used to be, I felt void. And at that point in time, I was too afraid of who I became when I was living in my fiction…
So I pretty much felt… Lost.
Throughout the five days I spent in La Jolla, Elaine kept showing up for me in little mothering ways that gave me the exact comfort I needed. She gave me Light and life that was lacking in my world, and I knew I could always trust her to carry my honesty in her heart while I tried to figure out for myself who I was becoming.
Lou decided to fly to Mississippi right after Christmas to spend a week watching college bowl games with two of his best friends in life. And even though things between us were amicable, his departure felt like a relief for both of us, I think.
