By Catherine DiMercurio
I keep thinking about Carl Sandburg’s poem, “Fog,” which opens with the lines “The fog comes / on little cat feet.” In the very brief poem, the fog arrives, hovers briefly over the city, and moves on. I’m thinking about those little cat feet because it seems like some of the best things come into our lives this way, quietly and softly.
Sometimes when you’re starting something with someone new, life feels disrupted in a loud, jangling way. This is not always a bad thing and sometimes that’s what we’re hoping for: someone to shake things up, knock us off center, sweep us away. But once we’ve learned who we are and how to center ourselves, once we have come to understand our own person and the value of being centered, the storminess of off-center relationships feels a lot less pleasurable and a lot more threatening to our sense of peace.
Though, maybe the images of little cat feet and fog are not quite the right ones either. Dogs have always been such a big part of my life that I’m imagining what sort of weather might come in on dog feet. Maybe a day of boundless sunshine, maybe a cloudy day that’s made for nothing but snuggling. Maybe that’s how this new person has entered my life, softly and gladly. The sunlight padded in on friendly dog feet. . . .
I wrote a poem once about an ex, about the way he seemed like a stray cat, showing up sometimes for a scratch or a bowl of milk, the way he knew that he’d not be sticking around and the way I believed I could keep him. And the way I showed up like a stray dog, content to misinterpret affection for love. Now, in this new relationship, the energy is different. It’s mutual and earnest, playful and affectionate. And I don’t feel like a stray; I feel like I belong. I may still get a bit wary sometimes out of habit. But I also have the sense that everything is entirely genuine.
Sometimes I have to remind myself that it is okay to let people in, to accept care and hugs and kindness. I went from not knowing how to provide such attention for myself, to relishing in my ability to do so, to wondering if I had to do so all the time now, and no longer knowing if there was something wrong with wanting and needing it from other people. It’s hard to find the right balance.
There was a moment a couple of weeks ago where I very much felt as though I was standing at a crossroads. I was having a bad day, wanting a hug, feeling like I wanted to crawl under my desk and hide from the world. All the defense mechanisms kicked in—the walls, the isolation, the I-will-just-handle-it-myself. The man I’m dating had offered to stop by and give me a hug. I was worried that it was too out of his way and he didn’t really have much time. I didn’t want to be an inconvenience. But he said “I’d be happy to stop by and I’d love to give you a hug.” On my lips were the words “no” and “I’m fine” and “thanks, anyway,” but there was a voice inside saying it was okay. To say yes. To be hugged and comforted and cared for.
Do you ever have that feeling that you are poised between two worlds, and a small decision feels much bigger than it is? There’s the world in which you know are fine on your own and another one, the one in which someone is trying to be there for you, the one in which you let yourself have the comfort they are offering. It is a long moment, and you swing as if dangling from a pendulum between the two worlds.
Many thoughts flash through your head. You think of all the times people who promised to be there for you weren’t, or, the times the person who was coming through for you kept score, metering out how many times they had to show up. Or the times showing up for you was a tool they would later use against you. But this is a new time, this is a new person, you are a new person. We are.
The pendulum swings and you take a deep breath and say, “That would be nice. If you stopped by.” And they do and it IS nice, it is better than nice, and you feel the victory in letting yourself have this, a hug from someone who wanted be there for you.
It is one of the hardest things to do, letting someone be there for you. We are praised for our independence and chastised for our “neediness,” and experience teaches us that we simply have to be able to handle so much on our own because sometimes that’s all we have. We all want to be capable and confident in our own abilities, and those are good things, but so is being able to accept help when it is offered. Or being able to ask for it. That, too, takes incredible strength.
I am thinking too of how wonderful it feels to show up for someone else. Recently my sister needed a favor, which is a rare thing. She’s the oldest of the five of us siblings, and she’s independent in such a thorough and awe-inspiring way that I was completely delighted when I offered my assistance and she accepted. All I did was drive her to pick up her new car and help get the license plate off of her old car, but it gave me a lift all day to have been able to do that for her (and to be in possession of the universal socket wrench that got the stubborn bolt removed). It feels good to be able to return a favor when you have been lucky enough to receive so many.
Since that moment a couple of weeks ago when I accepted the out-of-the-way hug, things have progressed with my new person in promising ways. I’m looking for old anxieties and not finding them. I seem to have found someone who, like me, is not truly capable of being someone he is not. In my last relationship, I wanted things to work out so much that I tried to be very accommodating. I attempted to pretend that uncertainty and unclear communication didn’t bother me. In that way, I was being disingenuous, and it felt terrible, so as things progressed, I tried to be more of who I was instead of who I thought I was supposed to be. I tried to be clearer about what I wanted, though that didn’t really work either, because we wanted such different things. In this new relationship, after two years of focusing on myself, I find the only thing that feels right to me is to be exactly who I am, and I am discovering how delightful it can be to be with someone who appreciates that, who respects not only the action of being me being who I am, but the actual person that I am.
I have had such trouble writing this and I’ve been trying to understand the nuances of why that is. Certainly, part of it is that this new person will likely be reading this. How strange to read about yourself and the way your new relationship is unfolding in someone else’s blog. It is challenging to write about something that is ongoing instead of something in the past, but writing always helps me process, and writing for an audience is an exercise for me, in elevating that processing in a way that reveals something of the way hearts work (not just mine). I think there are universal properties to the way people love and I am always attracted to writing that I connect with, where I can see a little bit of myself.
What do you see of yourself in this? Have you found joy in being able to show up for someone—a partner, a family member, a friend—who usually seems like they don’t need it? Can you recall a time where being your true, full self did not feel safe or appreciated? Are you learning who you are and being who you are, and at the same time continuing to learn to love yourself while learning to love someone else? I think that is what’s happening to me. In this new relationship, it feels very different than the ways I “fell” in love with people in the past. I feel like I’m growing into it, learning it as I go, as I learn more about him. It is as if we are sight reading the relationship, ourselves, each other.
[Until my children were in orchestra, I had no idea what sight reading was. In a competition, the whole orchestra gathers to play a piece they’ve never seen before. As a group, they briefly study a new piece of music, are guided by their orchestra teacher, and somehow manage to play something they’ve never seen or heard before. This is an oversimplification, and I don’t play an instrument, so my understanding is limited, but the magic in that music, in that collaborative, focused effort, is breathtaking.]
So, though I am often made uncomfortable by new things, any discomfort in the “new” of this relationship is being diffused as we go, as we learn this new music together. And I’m grateful for that.
Love, Cath
Chronicles of the Open Hearted 