The Age of Miracles (9 page)

E
XCITEMENT DOESN’T KNOCK AT YOUR DOOR
any less when you’re older than when you’re younger. It’s just that when you’re younger, you’re more likely to open the door and let it in. With age, you start growing
ambivalent
about excitement. You might say that you want it, but at the same time you’re not sure you have the energy for it. Yet a surefire way to diminish your energy is to deny the ultimate energy pill, which is participation in life itself.

My father lived to be 85, and he was exciting his entire life. He used to always say, “You’ve gotta have a sense of adventure!” And boy did he. It wasn’t just evidenced by his dramatic adventures traveling the world; it was evidenced by his approach to everyday life. The way he rode in a convertible even when it was raining because “Only sissies put the top up.” The way he taught his small children Stanislavsky acting exercises as a substitute for normal games. The way he wore a Greek sailor’s cap around, although we lived in Texas, just in case the Greek navy might call and say they needed him! My father was like a male version of Auntie Mame. Whatever he did, he was
into
it—fully, passionately, and with total vigor. A man like my father wasn’t looking to vitamins to give him more energy. He looked to
life
to give him more energy, by giving it so much of his own.

In the Russian Orthodox Church, there is the concept of the “passion bearer.” I think that’s what midlife makes us: the passion bearers of life, people who have been through enough to have felt the passion of life’s pain as well as its triumphs. To whatever extent we can demonstrate the joy of standing forth in the space of our own resurrection, to that extent we make space for uplift and victory in other people’s lives.

It’s a role of the elder to lead the tribal celebrations. We’re the holders of the excitement factor. When a woman 20 years younger than I am announces that she’s pregnant, I feel I’m fulfilling some primal function by letting her know I think it’s the most exciting thing in the world. It’s as though I’m representing the opinion of something larger than myself. A teenager gets on a sports team or enters an essay-writing contest; a young woman gets into the managerial training program at the company she’s been working at for years; a young man starts his own company or makes his first business deal—in every case, an older person’s enthusiasm could be a memory someone holds for a lifetime. People need to know that the world is on their side, and for a younger person, the “world” is often represented by whatever adult he or she is speaking to at the time.

Celebration isn’t passive; it’s an active energy mover. I’ve heard young people denigrate something I know in their hearts represents a dream come true, saying something like, “Oh, it’s not that big a deal.” But if I say with determination, “Oh,
yes
it is!” then their entire attitude shifts.

I do this for them, and I do it for myself. Once you’ve lived enough, once you’re cried enough tears, you know how blessed it is to have something to smile about. People who are passionate about life don’t have a positive attitude because they don’t know any better. They’re often positive because they
do
know better. They know that heartbreak could happen any day. If it’s not happening today, let’s give thanks.

I used to have a bottle of good champagne in my refrigerator. It remained there for months, as I kept waiting for something to “celebrate.” Finally, someone stole it. I got the point. I had waited too long.

Dear God,

I give You

praise and thanks

for the blessings in my life.

May they not be diminished

by my lack of appreciation.

Teach me how to receive my good,

and support others in claiming theirs.

Amen

ONCE
I
WAS RIDING ON A TRAIN IN ENGLAND
, having just left my daughter at a high school program in Oxford. Before I left, she showed me her favorite spots from her trip there the summer before: the crêperie where she and her friends stayed up late at night to discuss capitalism and Marxism
(“Yes, darling, your mother was young once, too—I have
so
been there and done that!”); the Christ Church rebuilt by Henry VIII in 1532 (my daughter and I have an ongoing conversation about Anne Boleyn, in which I insist that whichever way you view it, beheading
is
spousal abuse); and our conversations that morning about philosophy and love were mixed with my reminders to do things like remember to floss.

As I rode back to London, I cried a bit. My little baby wasn’t a baby anymore. She’s not even a little girl anymore. She’s in that age group Louisa May Alcott so exquisitely termed “little women.” Soon enough, “Mommy, may I?” will disappear completely, replaced more often, I suppose, by “Mom, please send money.”

This transitional time is as profound for me as it is for her. I’ve been good at some aspects of mothering, average at others, and probably rotten at some. I’ve never baked a brownie in my life. I keep buying cookbooks, but I just read them and then say, “Nah.” Yet we all have our gifts, and the ones I do have, I’m eager to pass on to her.

Our children are more than our charges; once past puberty, they should be our students in life’s deeper lessons, our apprentices at living life well. I don’t want my daughter to feel that she has to leave my side in order to learn anything
truly
important. I want to be more than the
cleavage
police, for God’s sake! I want to be her mystical mentor.

Raising children is an advanced spiritual practice. Holding them close when you’re all the world to them is sometimes emotionally overwhelming; letting them go when they’re ready to move away from you is overwhelming as well. And keeping the lines of communication open is often much easier said than done. It’s very different than it was when they were just cute little kids in their cute little outfits playing on cute little playdates. I see people with adorable babies, blissfully unaware that the day will come when they’re so not in control, and I think,
Oh, honey, you wait.
But I say nothing. I just smile. Let them enjoy this while it lasts. Sooner than they think, they’ll lose the unconditional adoration to which they’ve become accustomed.

Every parent meets the moment when a look in their child’s eyes says, “Now I get it. I’ve figured you out.” They’ll have to learn to respect the unfolding life of a child whose ultimate destiny is his or hers alone. A fiery life force moves from us into our children at a certain point, and it’s only when we allow this to happen that a new fire begins to burn within us. We can’t hold on to the fire that used to be ours when it no longer is. We have to let go and watch with mixed emotions as it ignites within our sons and daughters.

Still, that doesn’t mean that they gain something but we lose. On that day, as I rode away from Oxford, I was crying but I was smiling as well. My daughter was free now in that way that only the young can be free. But I was free, too, in a way only someone who has raised his or her children to a certain age and watched them grow up can be. She
and
I had earned new wings.

We both need to go on to the next stage of our lives and enter a new set of magic years. Everyone must follow the trajectory of his or her own soul growth. On the one hand, I can’t imagine how I’ll feel when I don’t get to look at the clock at 3:15 in the afternoon and say excitedly, “Oh, she’ll be home soon!” (There’s such a fantastic way teenagers slam the door behind them when they come home from school, bellowing “I’m home!” with such confidence that it’s the biggest news anybody’s going to hear all day.) On the other hand, I know there will be new experiences in the future when we’re no longer based in the same city, different from the ones we have now but just as wonderful.

Only when you allow someone else to grow do you get to grow, too. And sometimes, of course, that means they grow away from you. Counterintuitively, the more you allow people to take the distance they need, the closer your bond with them becomes. The more I let my daughter go, the more she lets me in.

I will never forget when my little girl was so tiny that I propped her up between pillows on my bed as I sat next to her and wrote. I think of that often when she’s lying across the same bed now, chattering on after school about homework and history and life. These are the good old days, and believe me, I know it. Watching her one day, I began tearing up at the thought that she’s growing up so fast; we won’t be having these daily mother-daughter-plop-down-and-discuss-everything sessions after school each day for that much longer. But then my momentary sadness was interrupted by a vision just as beautiful as what was in front of me. I saw us plopped down right here again, but this time with another baby, as a new mother comes over to visit Grandma. The baby is gorgeous, the mother is ecstatic, and the grandma’s pretty cool herself. Or so I saw, and so I pray.

Dear God,

Please take care of my precious child

as her path now leads her away from me.

May angels surround her,

and may she find her way.

May my love for her

be as a light that surrounds her,

for all her living days.

Amen

I
W
ILL
S
URVIVE

A
while back singer/songwriter Rupert Holmes had a hit song about a married couple who both took out personal ads, trying to find someone who wanted more adventure than was offered in their marriage. What they didn’t know, of course—and found out when they answered each other’s ad!—was that both of them wanted to do more exciting things than they were in the habit of doing together.

Years ago, I knew a man whose wife died, after which all he could do was just sit there crying, “I never took her on the trips she wanted to take. I didn’t tell her often enough how much I loved her. There are so many things I should have done with her and didn’t… .” It was tragic to see his eyes so open at a time when it was so too late.

Many people, for many reasons, resist the grand adventure that love can be. It’s one of those brass rings that is often right in front of us, yet we don’t grab on. It’s one thing when we just don’t feel the energy, when it’s simply not the right person. But sometimes it
is
the right person—there
is
the energy—but we don’t give the relationship the time or space or attention it takes to cultivate what’s already good and turn it into something great.

Once you’re a certain age, the idea of wasting any opportunity—particularly the opportunity to love—is seen as the blasphemy it is. You might as well just spit at God as turn away from the chance to really love. And that’s why love burns brightly at midlife; you’re no longer under the delusion that the sparks that are flying here fly along every day.

A friend of mine said to me once, “I used to be so afraid of committing to a woman for the rest of my life … but ‘the rest of my life’ doesn’t sound like so long anymore!”

Many of us have wounds that keep us from loving fearlessly. And fear, while rarely justified, is often understandable. Letting go of fear that has accumulated over many years, in order to be able to experience the love standing in front of you right now—that challenge is the romantic call of midlife.

Dear God,

Please melt

the walls in front of my heart.

Remove my fear

and restore my joy,

that I might love again.

Amen

O
NE OF OUR BIGGEST FEARS, OBVIOUSLY, IS THE FEAR OF ABANDONMENT
. Clearly, it hits a primal wound when someone whose love has meant so much to us then changes his or her mind.

Metaphysically, what happens when we separate from a beloved is that we reexperience our original separation from God—or at least the illusion that we could ever
be
separate. In fact, such a separation would be so shattering to the entire universe that the universe could no longer exist were it to be true. The truth is that our oneness with God, and with each other, is a fundamental, unalterable aspect of reality.

Not consciously realizing any of this, we displace our hunger for conscious contact with God onto our search for a romantic partner. Connection with a lover is intoxicating because it reminds us of our union with God; separation is so devastating because it reminds us of what it feels to be separate from Him. And a terrible catch-22 develops: Feeling separate from God, I’m more hungry for you. But also, feeling separate from Him, I’m not in a whole state. Being not in a whole state, I’m fractured—and thus more likely to
blow
it with you.

So it is that love can be hell. And so it is that love can be heaven.

Both are worthy of investigation… .

S
OMETIMES IT’S THE ONE WHO TAKES AWAY ALL OUR PAIN
who then piles on even more of it.

I once had the most beautiful romance, or at least I thought so. Then one day it was simply gone. I had heard stories of people suddenly walking out on their families, never to return. But I always thought there must be more to it than that; surely it wasn’t that simple. No one just got up one day and said, “It’s over,” and that was it. Or so I believed until it happened to me.

I’m one of those people who needs to
talk
… to process, to understand, to give and receive forgiveness if nothing else. But some people find all that talking at the end too much to take. Or perhaps the talking might expose too much. For whatever reason, it seems better for them to surgically remove the other person from their life, burn the bridge behind them, throw a bomb into a beautiful garden that could have been a friendship that lasted a lifetime.

This man had given me a gift. With him, I’d had the experience of a love that didn’t conflict with my larger sense of mission for my life. For once there seemed to be no competition, no split, between my romantic life and my career. I didn’t feel I was neglecting one in order to best serve the other, and for me that was new. Instead, I felt his love like a raft beneath me, on which I could just lie back serenely. Often before, I had felt as though the different elements of my life were like plates clanging against each other in a too-crowded dishwasher. Yet while he was there, there was no clanging. Things that usually seemed difficult weren’t so hard to hold together after all. He’d meet what for me were the most stress-producing issues with some line like, “Yeah, well, so what should we have for dinner?” and I would melt.

But then it ended, in an abrupt and unkind way. I, of course, had a choice to make. In the words of
A Course in Miracles,
I could be hostage to my ego or host to God. I knew that there is no letting go of others—the kind of release that frees not only them but you as well—without giving them your genuine blessing. It wouldn’t be enough to just say, “I release you.” I had to be able to say, “I release you and pray that you walk with angels. I release you and hope your dreams come true. I release you and wish you happiness.” I resisted, as I was filled with resentment. But I prayed.

Soon after, I was reading
A Course in Miracles
and came across truth that I needed to hear. I was reminded that all of us are equally holy in God’s eyes … that whatever grievance I hold against another person has more to do with my own need to find blame than with anything they have done .
. . and that regardless of what mistakes have been made by anyone in the past, in the present I can choose to see love. Reading such things had the miraculous power to alchemize my emotions, to remove the painful impurities that, after all, weren’t ruining
his
day—just mine!

The ego feasts on all this pain, like a scavenger dog delivering endless evidence of other people’s cruelty, wrongdoing, injustices, and so forth. It’s so tempting to monitor someone else’s issues, leaving out of the equation what we ourselves might need to learn from a situation. One of the most important gifts of any relationship is the gift of self-awareness. In the final analysis, that is the reason for love: that one day we will
become
love. And everything that ever happens will be used to show us how we’re doing so far.

One morning I woke up thinking about him. I found myself saying a spontaneous prayer, no longer that God help me through this experience but that God help him. I’d known intellectually, of course, that this man’s behavior at the end of our relationship was not that of a cruel person so much as that of a wounded one. The intensity of my own pain had made me unable to see beyond the wound he’d inflicted on me to feel true compassion for the wound in him. Yet that was my lesson, clearly: to feel deeper compassion for someone else’s wounds so I could then be healed of my own. And finally, on that particular morning, I could. I could imagine how much pain he would have had to be in, on some deep level, to so casually throw away the kind of connection we had had. I thought of Emerson’s words: “Whenever you meet anyone, remember they are going through a great war.” I could see that about him. I prayed for him, and I wished him healed.

Then I could see what perhaps had been the agreement forged between our souls. Like so many women, an anger at men—from unavailable fathers to unavailable lovers—had left a toughness in my heart that did not serve me well. Forgiving this man, praying for him, really wanting in my heart for him to be happy, I felt a shift inside myself. He stood for every man who had ever made me feel dismissed. Forgiving him helped me forgive them all. And then, in a deeper way, I was free.

The blessing was simply that I’d had the experience, and an experience cannot be possessed. It’s there when it’s there and it’s gone when it’s gone. Ultimately you come to realize that everything is yours and nothing is yours. As Helena says about her beloved Demetrius in Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
“And I have found Demetrius like a jewel, / Mine own, and not mine own.”

When you’re young, you hold on tightly to love in the hopes that it will last forever. When you’re older, you know you don’t need to hold on because it
does
last forever. People come and they sometimes go. But love remains, if it remains in you.

People often say, “I’ve been hurt so bad. How can I ever trust again?” But faith in love doesn’t mean faith in someone’s personality; it means faith in the changeless nature of love itself. Faith in love isn’t faith in another person; ultimately, it’s faith in ourselves. It means faith in our capacity to discern and in our capacity to forgive. It means faith in our capacity to love fiercely, yet with the full understanding that who and what we love today might be gone tomorrow.

True love is always a risk, in that sense. But the universe isn’t invested just in giving us what we want. It’s invested us in teaching us how to love. And if we bless others when they’re with us, but withhold our blessing if and when they leave, then we ourselves have not yet received or become the blessing. A blessing that isn’t constant is not a blessing.

What we trust is the will of God. We’re brought into each other’s lives on divine assignment, spirit working through the subconscious mind to draw us to people with whom we have the greatest opportunity for soul growth. But that doesn’t mean that the lessons will always be easy. In fact, someone might have been brought into our lives in order for us to master the lesson of discernment—in other words, to teach us what to turn
away
from.

Sometimes it’s an experience of what you do not ultimately want that teaches you what you
do
want. Sometimes it’s the one who shatters you who releases you to your truest love. Something didn’t turn out to be what you hoped for, but perhaps that was the point. It was a relationship that released you to you, thus setting you on a higher path. True love can’t come until you know yourself, and you couldn’t know yourself until certain appetites were blasted out of you.

You might have had an appetite for the less than committed because you weren’t ready to be committed. Now, having been run from, you are ready to stop running. Now, having been stung, you are ready to stop stinging. And now a true love—someone who neither stings nor runs nor is attracted to pain—is on their way to meet you. In the words or the Persian poet Rumi, “Out of a shattered open heart springs a fountain of fiery sacred passion that will never run dry.”

Don’t skip a beat. Perfume your soul. Make ready your house. Prepare your heart.

Perhaps you were let down by a love of this world, so you would learn at last to lean only on God.

Dear God,

I surrender to You

my past relationships.

Teach me how to forgive,

dear God,

that I might be weighed down no longer.

I release the ones who have wounded me:

may they now find their joy.

May I be forgiven

for the wounds I’ve inflicted.

May all of us find true peace.

Amen

T
HE PROBLEM WITH
NOT
YET LEANING ON
G
OD IS THAT WE THEN TEND
to lean inordinately on other people. Failing to embrace a love that will always be there for us, we become vulnerable to ones that won’t be.

I remember a television show that was very popular when I was a little girl called
Father Knows Best.
Every time the teenage daughter walked into a room, her father gave her a huge smile and exclaimed, “Why hello, Princess!” Being so deeply adored by her father at that age, a girl’s brain would be imprinted with an emotional propensity for men who treat her in a similarly adoring way. Healthy male attention would feel natural to her; she’d grow up knowing what it looks like and how she should respond to it.

But if male attention is missing, then the girl grows up in many cases to be a woman who either deflects such a comment because it’s so alien to her, or goes in the opposite direction and practically turns it into a marriage proposal! Either way, there’s a void where a genuine sense of her female self should be. And boy, is an inauthentic person a sucker for an inauthentic person.

A woman like that would be particularly vulnerable to emotional charlatans—the “charmers” who say exactly the right thing and know a fair amount of poetry, but from whom there’s rarely a responsible follow-through to their protestations of adoration. He too was almost always a wounded child. Something made it necessary for him, when young, to learn performance as a survival skill. For whatever reason, he came to feel at a tragically early age that deceit rather than authenticity was a normal mode of being. Conscious connection to his own deeper truth was superseded by a need to find whatever words or behavior would help him survive a traumatic moment. Life taught him to behave falsely—not how to present himself as he truly is, in touch with his honest feelings and deeper truth—but rather to display with lightning speed whatever behavior gives him a short-term emotional advantage.

Someone who learned the subtleties of human manipulation at an early age tends to be very good at it by the time he’s an adult. Such a person simply lacks integrity; not because he’s a bad human being, but because he was knocked out of his spiritual center as a child and hasn’t yet learned to reclaim it. As a child, he was a victim; as an adult, however, he’ll be held accountable for his behavior one way or another. As a friend once said to me, “The universe keeps a perfect set of books.”

How many times have we excused someone’s unacceptable behavior with lines like, “But inside, he’s just a wounded little boy”? To which a girlfriend of mine once responded, “So was Hitler.” The fact that I have compassion for you doesn’t mean I shouldn’t delete you from my BlackBerry.

Damaged people damage people. They’re also attracted to other damaged people. So we should all beware.

Those such as the man and woman described above would easily be drawn to each other, as their neuroses form a perfect fit. He’s a performer extraordinaire, and she’s easily taken in by a great performance. Their egos’ intention is that they trigger each other’s wounds, but God’s intention is that they
heal
each other’s wounds. Which it will be is up to them. Whoever is willing to do the work in a relationship, seeing it as their own opportunity for self-healing, w ill receive the blessing whether the other person makes the same choice or not. And, ultimately, all of us will get there; lessons we haven’t learned will just keep coming around until we do.

Healing can hurt—whether it’s the healing of having to face the shame of our own humiliation, or the pain of having to turn our backs on someone whose patterns are unhealthy for us to be around though we love them still. Either way, the pain of the healing is far preferable to the pain of remaining at the effect of the neurotic pattern.

The woman will find, if she searches, that while her worldly daddy wasn’t always there, her Heavenly Father is there for her always; never fails to adore her; and has created her whole, which she will always be. The man will discover—if he continues his spiritual quest—that the patterns of deceit that he learned so early, and have now become forces over which he seems to have no control, can and will be healed as he acknowledges them and prays that they be lifted.

Will the man and woman above get past their wounds? Will she grow strong enough in her sense of true self to lose all attraction to false romantics, preferring authentic love before the ersatz version? Will he at last feel bad enough about the hurt he causes others to ask for God’s help in changing his behavior? Each must choose. The one who learns and grows will mature and ripen with age. The one who doesn’t will just grow old… .

Dear God,

Please heal my romantic wounds,

that I might give and receive true love.

Teach me how to let love in,

and how to let it stay.

Amen

I
N ACTRESS
E
LLEN
B
URSTYN’S SUPERB MEMOIR
,
L
essons in
B
ecoming
M
yself
, she describes how, after a dramatic, decades-long string of husbands and lovers, she found herself taking a 25-year break—repeat:
25
years
—before ultimately finding the healthy, wholesome romance she’d always wanted. She didn’t even date during her romantic hiatus, so sure was she that any liaison she developed would be just another reflection of the same painful patterns she’d played out in her relationships until then.

I call this a “sex-and-love fast.” Few people think of it that way when they’re going through it, of course. While we’re experiencing it, we just feel it’s a “dry spell” or even the “end of all that”; we might think it’s happening because we’re older now, so we don’t attract lovers as easily anymore. But the truth is often that we declared a halt to romance on a subconscious level, regardless of how much the conscious mind protests that “we’d love to meet someone.”

Why? As a middle-aged friend of mine once responded when I asked her if she was seeing anyone, “No. I can’t stand who I become when I’m in a relationship. I’d rather not even do it.” Once you see that in every relationship you’ve encountered the same demon—your
own
—you realize that until you deal with that demon, you’ll never find true love. For the demon blocks it. This demon takes various forms in your arsenal of self-sabotage: insecurity, lack of boundaries, jealousy, dishonesty, anger, control, neediness, or whatever other form of personal inauthenticity that leads you time and time again to either attract the bad ones or blow it with the good ones. It is naïve to underestimate that demon’s power.

After one of her romances went desperately sour, a friend once told me, “Another one like that would kill me.” I understood what she meant, and so can most people. There comes a time when you feel like the high of romance isn’t worth the pain of its demise; when the risk of a romantic disaster outweighs the thrill of the ride. And that time is … you guessed it .
. . more often than not around midlife.

Why? First of all, because it often takes that long to have experienced enough disasters that you’d do anything possible to make sure you avoid another one. Also, you’ve reached a point when you don’t have as hard a time overriding your hormones. Your body isn’t so upset anymore to hear you say that you’re taking a break. It rather welcomes the chance for some downtime.

The yearning for love is still there, but the yearning alchemizes into something less personal. Not less personal in the sense that you don’t love an intimate conversation or having a warm body hold you close; just less personal in the sense that life has forced you to see beyond the illusion that any human being can erase all your pain. You realize the romantic mythology we were all brought up with is like a computer file that has been corrupted. Until that file has been removed and replaced by another, no matter what we do, our ultimate outcome will be tainted.

This doesn’t mean you don’t still crave love—the craving itself never stops. As a matter of fact, at just the point when you’ve had enough, the very fact that you
have
had enough is what causes your breakthrough into the awareness that sets you free. As it’s said in Alcoholics Anonymous, every problem comes bearing its own solution. It’s often when love has hurt you the most that you come to see how and why you set yourself up for all that pain.

So you go on a fast. All of a sudden, your phone stops ringing. Like Ellen Burstyn, you’re forced to cleanse your palate.

Burstyn came to understand that her negative relationship patterns were reflections of her childhood wounds, which she’d have to reenact until she healed them. So do we all. Until that work is done on some level, there is no getting off the wheel of suffering. Our subconscious minds aren’t wrong in cutting us off from love and sex for a while, as the work is being done and deeply absorbed into our system. The fast isn’t something we do to isolate; it’s something we do to survive.

First there was childhood, and the wounding that occurred then. Then there was young adulthood, and all the disasters that occurred because of your childhood wounds. And then there’s midlife, when it’s time to deal at last with what happened in childhood
and
in young adulthood. Midlife is the time to heal, so our hearts can finally be delivered from the past and released to the fullness of what love can be right now.

When you see a lot of middle-aged individuals at personal-growth seminars, it’s not because they’re done with love and this is their only entertainment now. Often, they have memories that might shock the younger people around them. Whenever you see an older person, you might want to subtract 40 years, and that will tell you how old he or she was in the ’60s. But the new midlife is not a time to simply dwell on our memories of love and the demons we encountered there; it’s time to develop the skill to send the demons back to hell.

Sometimes you wonder if you missed your window. Ellen Burstyn writes that she remembered feeling,
Now that I know I am ready at last to love well, I fear it is too late.
With that sentiment, she echoes the fears of many. Yet that’s just a typical, last-ditch effort of the demon to deter us, a common pain that often pops up in our heads in that one minute before the miracle.

Once your mind and heart are realigned—when the broken self you became in childhood is no longer manifesting broken relationships—then you’re ready at last to love again. Compassion, integrity, truthfulness, generosity, and graciousness become key elements in your new romantic skill set. You come to see what you did wrong in the past and to forgive yourself, to understand other people’s actions and, where necessary, forgive them, too. You are humbled at last into your purity and grace.

In the Epilogue of her book, Burstyn describes how she finally met the man of her dreams, and I finished the last page thinking,
Now I want to read the sequel!
I’d read hundreds of pages about the horrors of her past; now I wanted to know what finally getting it right would look and feel like.

Just as certain foods need to marinate, our romantic skills need years sometimes to come together in all their richness. I asked Burstyn what it’s like now, to finally feel that she loves and is loved well. “What’s different?” I asked her.

“For starters,” she said, “there is much more respect and much less judgment. Conversations don’t escalate into arguments, and arguments don’t escalate into violence.” She paused. “And now I know how to let a man be.”

So in our youth, we often had love but didn’t know what to do with it. Then sometimes, after what can be a very long time in the romantic wilderness, we find love again or love finds us. And this time, we
do
know what to do. That wilderness—that fast—was not the end of anything. It was our romantic salvation.

Dear God,

Please reveal to me

the glory of manhood,

the beauty of the masculine,

and the greatness of men.

Amen

I
ALWAYS HATE IT WHEN
I’
M ASKED TO FILL OUT
an official form of some kind that includes the options “single,” “married,” or “divorced.” I always leave that section blank, as my way of saying, “That’s none of your damn business.”

I think I feel that way because it seems too personal. It feels like an emotional identity theft, giving someone permission to make assumptions about me based on such external categories. (Calm down, Marianne. This is a
dental
form.)

Which is not to say, of course, that whether we’re married or single doesn’t matter. It’s just to say that the deeper issues of love are not about form but content. The problem I see most often blocking the romantic impulse is a stifled sense of self: Many men aren’t really sure how to be men, and many women aren’t really sure how to be women. Our generational detour into an ambisexual wasteland was part of what emotionally stunted many of us for years. When a woman thinks that she can overdo her “masculine self” and a man will still want her, or a man thinks that he can overdo his “feminine self” and a woman will still want him, then all manner of confusion leads to all manner of pain. That delusional trend has begun to self-correct, but the generational wound is not yet fully healed. It’s one of those many areas where our parents sometimes had it right—for the wrong reasons, perhaps, but in ways we didn’t realize, they had it right.

My mother was a broad. If she had an opinion, you knew it. If she didn’t like something, she’d let you hear about it. And my father never seemed to think that he had the right to stop her from expressing herself. He never seemed to want to.
However
… there was a limit that he sometimes set, not to her self-expression but to any discomfort it might be causing him.

My father never called my mother by her name, ever. She was always just “Sweetheart.” But every once in a while—not frequently, but at those rare times when something she was going on about was stirring tension he was not okay with—my father simply looked at her and said simply, “Sophie Ann.” And my mother stopped. That was it. She grew silent. It took me many years and tears to understand what a lucky woman my mother was.