I feel as if I’ve been brutally honest on this blog. I’ve spilled my guts and given any reader a real and true appraisal of my feelings, good and bad. There are certain topics or events in my life that I’ve shied away from. Not in violation of the spirit of authenticity I’ve wanted to cultivate here, but rather because I wasn’t ready yet. I’ve said a million times over and will continue to share that I am the furthest thing from an expert on any of the topics I cover here. Rather, I am just a human who is having human experiences and I am sharing my feelings and thoughts. My hope is that maybe just one person (or ideally more than one) feels a little less alone, or a lot heard, or perhaps even guided with and by my words. My desire is to remove embarrassment, shame, and self-deprecation, to celebrate our rampant sameness when it comes to the art of relationships. Sure, we are all unique in our own way but there are feelings and understandings and life lessons that are universal. I truly believe that.
One topic that I haven’t really touched on is my maternal grandmother. While I am getting there and I believe I am just on the precipice of ‘ready’, this post will not be about her per se or her struggles or the impact of such on me and my family. Just know that I love her. I always have and always will. We share much in the way of passions and flaws and through DNA and her actual physical presence, she has been a major force in my life.
I am also choosing not to get into the more twisted weeds of family dynamics (at this time) and events that have happened in the last few years that challenged different familial interactions and relationships. I think we all know that families are complicated entities. No surprise there, right? They are comprised of humans and humans are delicious and difficult. Thus, I am going to hit the fast forward button and tell you as a factual matter that the man who effectively became a grandfather figure in my life during my teenage years passed away a few weeks ago. One day I will address so much surrounding that point but for now, that is enough.
What I do want to address is the nature of relationships as it relates to this man, Burt, and my grandmother, Harriet. I want to discuss this idea that the concept of a relationship is a fluid, subjective, and entirely malleable concept. I want to share my thought that if we can let go of some preconceived notion of what an ideal relationship looks like for us while maintaining our boundaries and standards, we might welcome exactly what we need.
My grandfather, the orig, Fred Heller, was larger than life. He was a force to be reckoned with and the funniest person I’ve ever met. These are not the thoughts of a delusional child who lost perspective because he left my life too soon, when both of us were too young. I was and am aware of his faults. They are irrelevant. I don’t ignore or overlook them. He was like all of us, a little good and a little “bad.” The thing is, his good FAR outweighed his bad. By a long mile. So you can imagine that after Papa Fred passed and when my grandmother met Burt, he had significant shoes to fill. But he didn’t, not really. It didn’t take long for me to like Burt but it took many years for me to fully absorb and appreciate how “different” a relationship can be and how that difference doesn’t diminish its value in the slightest.
My love for Burt did not make smaller the memories of my grandfather. The fact that I cherished his role in my life did not dull all the warm and fuzzy feelings I have when I look back on my too brief time with Fred. I did and do not compare and contrast. I mean I did for a hot minute but then I realized it was an exercise in futility. That would have been so unfair, to my grandmother, to Burt, to Fred, and even to me. I couldn’t have the fullest and most honest relationship possible if I was constantly looking for the parts that didn’t fit.
I am not suggesting that we don’t use our past relationships as a foundation for exploring our current relationships. I am also not saying you should settle for whatever presents in front of you. God knows I’m not preaching that old tune. I am simply saying that we can learn and grow from everything we experience without unnecessarily tearing down someone who fits a different mold or fills a different void or adds something unexpected.
When I teach yoga and I have my students supine (laying down), I ask them to pay attention to where their bodies are touching the floor and where space exists. I encourage them to explore where they believe space should be and that space that unnecessarily presents as a result of stress or tightness. The same holds true for relationships. It behooves us to pay attention to the lessons that we need to extrapolate to grow and disregard those differences that are basically representative of how fundamentally different we are as human beings.
Real time application? I can recognize that I want to feel loved by someone filling a grandparent-like role without dictating what that expression of love looks like from the other person in the equation. Fred was warm and mushy and silly. Burt was more conservative and reserved. Both made me feel loved in their own way. I had to learn what that looked like with Burt but it was well worth the exploration. Had I discarded him because he didn’t fit the “Fred” mold, I would have missed out on so much. I wouldn’t have had Burt share so many things in my life like graduations, birthdays, holidays, and plain ol’ quality time.
We do this a lot with relationships. We idealize a relationship we’ve had or someone else’s relationship (sometimes even one we’ve witnessed through media) and we hold new relationships up against that paradigm and determine it worthy or unworthy. You can do that. You can fruitlessly search to have each relationship fit a mold that you’ve created based on real or imagined standards or you can embrace something new that expands your mind and heart. You can recognize that love is boundless and comes in some many different shapes and sizes.
The same holds true for my grandmother. There was so much good and yet so much that was deficient in her relationship with my grandfather. Perhaps she was propelled by a need to staunch her grief or fueled by other unnamed forces but she opened her heart in a meaningful way to a something new and different. She explained on many an occasion that he was a companion in the best way possible. She even joked that she was able to be the funny one in the relationship for once (debatable point). She never wanted another husband or even to share her home with another man but she wanted to relinquish her heart and life to the possibility of something else. It wasn’t desperate or needy, it was beautiful and somewhat radical. The easy bit would have been remaining alone and leaning on the family or maybe even rushing forward and getting remarried (the offer was certainly there). She chose a more challenging but admirable in-between. She chose to cultivate something beautiful based off what she valued in her relationships. She wanted someone to share her passions with, someone to talk to, someone to spend quality time with, and someone who respected her as an independent woman. Burt also moved across the emotional miles to come to the place where they ended up. They compromised. They fought. They talked. They leaned-in. They loved. They were friends. Good friends.
There is so much more to this that I want to touch on but for the purposes of this post, I suppose that I have really made my point. So many people get stuck (myself included) in the mindset of some fanciful version or notion of a relationship. If you don’t know what that sounds like, let me educated you a little and perhaps you’ll hear your own words or thought bubbles in what I share. It sounds like this: “I should feel like this when I’m around him….he should be at least this tall….he should be able to take care of me financially…he should want to buy me flowers for no reason at all…she should be extraordinarily close to her family…she should never have had kids/been married…she should eat healthy all the time…” I am not suggesting that you shouldn’t have wants or standards. I am suggesting that you explore who someone really is and what they have to offer you in a substantive way. Burt loved cats, plain food, and non-fiction. My grandmother despised most animals, seasoned the shit out of everything she made, and loved a good fictional tale. They ate different foods, travelled differently, and even digressed politically. They weren’t frantic and clinging to whomever they could “get” because of the stage of life they were in. Rather, they were appreciate of what each other had to offer in spite of their differences. They were willing to look outside the rigid confines of their past relationships to welcome in something that had the potential to be beautiful and satisfying.
And it was beautiful. He stuck with her as long as he could and when he left, it was not his choice. She was deeply loyal while she could be and he was loyal for as long as he could be. It was “through sickness and health” in the most real way. It was sad but also deeply romantic and really, the best kind of love there is in my humble opinion. That part of the tale, my friends, is a story for another time.
Many years ago, I decided to embrace a new kind of grandfather and Harriet decided to embrace a new kind of companion. We discarded our prejudices, preconceived notions, but stayed religious when it came to the love we expected. And boy were we loved.
Imagine a life where you let go of expectations and you allow the universe to give you the most basic goodness you’ve asked for. What does that look like for you? Can you get there? Are you willing to do the scary work of letting go to embrace the possibility of what if? I was and I probably will again. It isn’t easy but the rewards are plentiful.
Think about it. Love comes in so many forms. Are you going to limit yourself to just one?
Until the next…
L.
thepathtoworthy.com 