David wore terrible shoes. And lived in his mother’s basement. And liked his dog more than he liked people. And used a sleeping bag instead of sheets. And hated kale.
“He wears terrible shoes,” I told my friends. “Shiny fake leather car salesman shoes with little tassels over the toes.” I laughed, partly pleased with my own good taste, mostly delighted I was dating someone, anyone, at all.
I never planned to be single for so long. Like tummy flab or credit card debt, it just sort of accumulated, the result of a thousand small decisions, until I looked up and realized I’d passed five romance-free years.
So David—bad shoes, Buffy the Vampire Slayer collection, sweatpants and all—was just right for a first time back in the pond. I enjoyed his misanthropic, passionate Italian company, his lovely legs and gorgeous eyes. Everything with him was fun, strange, and light-hearted, a perfect warm-up before I started looking for a more serious man.
Three weeks after our first date over pulled pork and fries, David called me from the parking lot at the newspaper where we both worked. He asked me to come outside.
“My mom has pancreatic cancer,” he said. We stood next to his silver pick-up truck. “I’m telling you now, I don’t think I’ll have anything to give to a relationship.” He was shaking. He was wearing the tasseled shoes. “If you want to get out, I don’t blame you. If I were you that’s what I’d do.”
David’s mother, Josie, was the hub of his family’s wheel; I knew that and I’d only met her twice. She’d been in severe pain for two years, David had told me, but she still hosted all the annual family celebrations, still taught her daughters-in-law how to make the apple pies her sons loved, still colored with her grandchildren on the living room floor. When David brought me to Josie the first time, her skin was clammy and pale, already shrunken around her cheekbones and eyes; yet her touch felt like a benediction. Around her everything would be tended and safe. For David, she was home.
I put my arms around him. I said, “I’ll hang in there with you.” This was the middle of June.
By September, when Josie had withered into morphine hallucinations and one gaunt working eye, I still cradled David. Deep in the night of September 14, exactly a month before Josie died, he swore and wept that he’d have no family once she was gone. “I’ll be your family now,” I said, and the hidden tectonic plates of my self collided at last. I became the continent of David’s Family Now.
The months lurched past once Josie died: Thanksgiving, Christmas, David’s birthday, the dog’s birthday. Our workdays were split by sudden crying jags, David shaking with sobs he didn’t want the others to hear as we leaned against the building’s brown corrugated walls. I miss her, I miss her, I miss her, he’d weep, in a tiny gasping voice he hated to hear in himself. I know, I know, I'd say, and rub his back in a long, slow arc. I know.
The deeper David collapsed in grief, the closer I drew to him. We were a couple now, inevitable. I had witnessed him in his mother's death and was seeing him through the final gasps of his long adolescence and recovery. I was utterly faithful and encouraging. I paid for therapy sessions. I even, after six months, loved his aloof and growly dog.
But there is no blue ribbon for such self-sacrifice, no safety—no matter how much we are taught as women that the more we give, the more we will be protected and cherished and seen. Or, if there is a prize, it is razor-edged and cuts at the fullness of ourselves, the freedom to be loved without condition, the power to choose yes or no.
David didn't love me. This was the truth I ignored as passionately as I could for an entire year after Josie died, until he said something stupid and cruel enough to smash my hope that he ever would. He appreciated my steadfast care; he was my friend. But he didn't want to kiss me or marry me or read novels aloud in bed to me or plant a garden together. He didn't want to be with me. He didn't want me.
The September night I became David's Family Now was the most important day of my life, and the scariest: out of ignorance and love, I signed myself away. I didn't see any other choice then, with David crying so hard in my arms and the dog yowling along. I couldn’t predict the misery and exhaustion that comes from loving someone at your own expense, believing despite your own good sense that he’ll have to love you back. I didn't understand the fundamental lack of care I showed myself, as I gave my soul to this beautiful wounded man.
For his rejection, I am grateful to the core, though didn't feel it until my second, months-later most important day. I cried a lot in the interim, and hated my body and ate too much as women will do. It was a plain and quiet morning, just me weeding kale and mulling over life in the middle of June, when it hit me so hard I accidentally pulled up half the row. I don't think I'll have much to give to a relationship, he'd said. I remembered how scared and calm he looked, readying for the battle he dreaded and couldn't escape.
He knew himself, and he knew he'd have to devote everything to taking care of that self. I sat back in the garden, landing in a dollop of compost. David hadn’t ever really needed me, or the consolation mother I tried to be. I may have been a comfort or crutch, but he was always, desperately, and only trying to grow into the Josie-shaped emptiness inside him. He was learning to mother himself. I started to cry through the sweat and dirt around my eyes. In never wanting the soul I offered, David loved me better than he knew, because he gave me the chance to take it back.
David and I are still friends; he helped me cope with a scary period of unemployment and I helped him buy new shoes.
I think about dating again. I wonder if it will hurt and teach so much every time. I wonder what I’m still willing to do for another person’s love. I won’t find out until I try.
For now, though, I’m learning to enjoy the passionate, pensive Jewish-Swedish company I wake up with every day. I explore this rediscovered country, tend its flowers, keep it warm. It is important work, curious and open-hearted and strange. I’m laying claiming to the continent of me.
