MaryElise.com :: Modern Woman > This Too Shall Pass

He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not:
This Too Shall Pass
By: Andria Cole
Posted August 2007

"If I were a man in a world that says I am validated only by the number of women I gather in my pockets like change, if I were a man in a world that says I should resemble a block of stone more closely than I should flesh and emotion, maybe I wouldn’t be strong enough to go against the grain and love a woman whole."

How then, did I recover? Let me continue on this honesty kick and let you know it is beyond difficult and never ever complete. If I added all the days together, I can’t imagine I cried less than two years. And ooh, I’m plain ugly after a good night sobbing. My eyes swell so that I resemble a frog and I turn an apple red that does not fade for twelve hours or more. If I counted the days I knew I wouldn’t make it, if I counted how many cookies eaten to dull the pain, the number of missed opportunities to hug my daughter and I tell her I love her, the number of shots of old man liquor, the number of hours I never moved from beneath my sheets because I didn’t want to reach over and not feel him, surely I’d come up with some obscene number. Surely, I’d be embarrassed that so many years were spent so sad.

How do you get up from under rotten love’s boot, then? Because it’s not the man’s boot you lie beneath. He may seem the winner in this, but he’s not. Toni Morrison taught me that. “If you’re going to hold someone down you’re going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.” Our culture said Mike was not to concede to how relaxed he became in my presence. How everything seemed all right with the world ‘long as he was with me. When he felt like running up on me and kissing me all over, like I was honey and he a fat bumblebee, he couldn’t. He was a black man and losing himself in a mere woman was silly at best. So don’t think for a minute he doesn’t know misery, or that that man you’re gray over doesn’t know pain. Terrible love, like the good kind, is a partnership. You share the wonder or the shame.

The first thing you must not expect is that visits with friends and family will get your mind right. Who are they? They’re mere mortals themselves. And unless they are shaped like him, stand like him, touch like him, breath life into you like him, any joke they tell cannot totally repair your spirit. If you’re saying, “I was in love once and my girlfriends saved me,” then you don’t know the love I speak of. More than likely you were in a sugar sweet love, or healthy to begin with. For those of you baffled at this backward love I’m writing about, I ask that you just sit back and enjoy, laugh at if you need to, the rest of these words.

Girlfriends are only a factor. An ingredient in the soup. They supply minutes, sometimes hours or days, of relief. Sometimes they are all you have. But they are not the cure. The second thing you don’t do is play the victim. Every crime he committed against you, you either ignored or allowed. Own that and see how many muscles you build. Once you’ve decided not to feel sorry for yourself, make a decision not to take it personally. Believe it or not, he did not sit home with his mad scientist goggles on and say, “Here’s how I’ll destroy her.” And even if he did, a psychiatrist somewhere can explain that motive away. He, like Mike, and every other human being on this planet, operates out of his own pain. It’s not all about you. Dr. Alsaker, who I know nothing about beside the sheer genius of the following quote said, “We should be lenient in our judgment, because often the mistakes of others would have been ours had we had the opportunity to make them.”

If I were a man in a world that says I am validated only by the number of women I gather in my pockets like change, if I were a man in a world that says I should resemble a block of stone more closely than I should flesh and emotion, maybe I wouldn’t be strong enough to go against the grain and love a woman whole either (not that these revolutionary men do not exist…they do). Possibly more important than all these “don’t dos” together is this one: Do not run from the pain. Welcome it. It is as much a gift as lacy underwear or $400 shoes or rain. Pain tells you, as my good friend Michael Miller once told me, what’s wrong with your life. Without it, we wouldn’t know what to change. Welcome the pain as if it were wrapped in bows and smelled of jasmine. Get some courage and face it. You are not the first woman to experience this. You’re one of an immeasurable number.

Let your insignificance both humble and rejuvenate you. Really, this next bit of advice might be superior to the one I just claimed unequaled: Don’t seek yesterday. You will never be the woman you were. You will never see things the way you did. You are forever changed, and for as long as you search for the you you were, you will be miserable. Say good day to her and get busy living. You are different, but you are stronger,

If this article were for men, I would have to construct another paragraph on what to do. But we women are so good at making love from dust, I know you’re capable of taking each of the above admonitions and fashioning them for your life. I leave you, then, with quotes from a wide range of women—young and experienced; black and white; bitter and not—who have survived a nasty love. The first is from my mother—I hope you gather from it exactly why she is half the reason I exist. It would not be conjecture to suppose the reason Mike is the other half is because he is the governor of the above lessons. He taught me the depth of hurt so that I might recognize and fully appreciate joy. He taught me nothing, including pain, lasts forever. And that no matter the emotion, I can say with certainty that this too shall pass.