For years I took refuge in being honest, but after being confronted by an anguished lover who insisted on integrity, the sanctity of honesty paled, and what was once a refuge now resembled a hideout. It was not a comfortable lesson but it stuck a chord of truth and was without resolution: I am still working at it. If it has gotten any easier at all, I suspect it comes as a consequence of aging. I hesitate to think I am much wiser. I try though. It is hard. I get lonely at times. I yearn to be close to someone. I want to touch and be touched.
Am I being honest? Am I acting with integrity? If I can intuit that someone will be hurt by my lack of commitment or inability to love in the way they are yearning for, is it fair for me to love them in my way, to give what I have to give even with well-intentioned disclaimers? Is it better to love and be hurt than to not love at all? What of fulfillment as sexual beings and of social needs? Could it be that I am making too much of things? Am I afraid of the unknown? Or of being loved?
During a time of crisis, years later, with these questions burning with relevance and demanding to be answered, I came to a realization that much of my yearning for sexual fulfillment was actually a yearning for something else. I was needing to express a tenderness, a soft heart, a wanting to love that I didn’t know how to express in any other way except wordlessly and naked. It was a powerful and palpable realization. I came away from it with a resolution to be more expressive of this soft spot of mine in everyday encounters. I understood how unfair I had been to place so much meaning and need upon my relationships with women, how unfair I’d been to the women, how so much need generated vulnerabilities and fears that were at the root of much strife. And seeing all this helped, and for a while I thought that perhaps I had resolved a lot of my questions, but I had underestimated once again the need to be close, to touch and to be sexual, and so, the questions remain.
I share this story with you. I’m not sure of the connection with what I’ve said above except that it reminds me that what we do and how we do it has consequences. While I don’t often have remorse for things that, in hindsight, could have been done better, I do for the things that I knew better of while letting baser emotions rule the day. This remains as one of the things I have remorse for.
Briefly, we had known each other as friends years before when we had remade our acquaintance. We were both uninvolved and welcomed each other’s company. I was 48 years old at the time and she was 38. We shared a lot of interests, had fun, and enjoyed the physical intimacy. While I had spent most of my adulthood as a father and husband, she had always been single and was childless. She believed that she was unable to conceive since she had never been pregnant in spite of not using birth control and sure enough, after some time, she became pregnant.
She was a very gentle woman. Sometimes she seemed timid, and sometimes emotionally frail. She had fought a lifetime battle with depression with the resolve to do her best and find strength in kindness and service. She knew well the lay of the land of the emotional self: there were good days and there were bad days, but always there was tomorrow. She did not ask much of others yet life was not simple for her. I think that just like most, if not all of us, the bottom line was simply the need to be loved and accepted. I liked her. I found her attractive. We had common interests and had fun together. I did not love her in a way that inspired commitment.
What dreams were awakened in her and what meaning and hopes pregnancy begot I have no idea. In hindsight I can imagine that she saw the love that she was always looking to give someone, of feeling needed and important, of finding that purpose/meaning to life that can be so fucking elusive. Could it be that she wasn’t destined to be always alone? Was there a family in her future? And because I did not try to imagine these things then, I am remorseful now. That’s why. Because I was too scared and selfish to give her vision and voice the space to be heard and seen and I am ashamed of this. I wish I had the courage then instead of this drivel now, but I didn’t. I argued that life was hard enough for her without being a single mom and I was not available. I had other plans; lofty plans of my own. Damn, I wish I would have at least listened, not just to her, but to my own heart and what may have been the voice of a higher being.
To be fair, I could have well ended up feeling that abortion was the better option anyway, that I really wasn’t available, and that she wasn’t strong enough and lacked resources, but the story would be different even if the ending would have been the same. She aborted the fetus with my encouragement to do so.
I think I had ambivalence about right to abort a fetus and as the years pass I probably tend more to the pro-life side of the controversy than the pro-choice side. It never has been a very popular stance among my peers. Regardless, the issue has always been characterized by ambivalence and uncertainty and when the rubber hit the road I became pro-choice. It is another point of remorse, that I didn’t really give voice to my ethical self, and by implication and circumstance, nor did I bear witness to the life within her womb. And again I cannot say if the outcome would have been different but I might have grown with the situation rather than be diminished by it. How we walk the path is what counts, and each step counts. This step could have been taken with more integrity because I knew better. I capitulated to small needs and fears. It was a lost opportunity to nurture something within myself and to be a true friend for someone, who even if I did not love, whatever that means, was someone I share days and nights with, and that, has got to mean something.
“But the thing is, my friend, that once you read it, it is no longer about me but about you.”
