But in general, Nancy said she had too much to do and too little energy to carry anyone who could not meet her exactly where she was and the way she was.
It’s a matter of honor to cite the authors of my favorite quotes, but this particular quote was passed along to me without its source by a friend who has since fallen away. (The relationship, more precisely, not the friend, though that is truly one of the insights of maturity for me – that friendships, no less than forests, can be utterly deracinated. Astroturf where verdant density once breathed.)
Her loss notwithstanding, the quote itself seems most aptly both a license and a pardon for many of the inevitable endings we find ourselves deciding to initiate. A colleague was recently describing her 87-year-old mother’s decision to divorce her 89-year-old father. She laughed, utterly mystified by it and utterly understanding it simultaneously. But why not? we both concluded. Why shouldn’t one have the right to do exactly what one wants in the very few remaining years of one’s life? How can all the constraints of duty, contracts, and the (largely unmanageable) emotional needs of others be allowed to usurp one’s deepest instinct about what one needs to survive?
This tension between the rights and needs of self and the rights and needs of others is a minefield most conscientious adults labor in all their lives (leaving out the psychopaths and narcissists, of course). But isn’t tipping that balance in oblivious favor of oneself close to defining a narcissist or, worse, a psychopath? Is it ever really one’s “own” life? Or is “me-first” a hard-won right earned across a lifetime of self-deferral, not to mention self-sacrifice?
In the very least I like to think that at near-sixty I’ve earned the right to declare my permission to leave – job, friendships, home, marriage, persona, party, religion, committees, housework, therapy, plants, maybe even existence itself - whatever binding constraints I’ve chafed at believing it was my duty to endure, like it or not. It isn’t a lack of commitment to anything other than my own ornery self that is guiding me, nor is it a wish to abandon all that I love and support and benefit from. It’s an insistence that I count myself in the equation of relationship, and if my own rights and needs are being disproportionately diminished, it’s permission to make the choice to peel off the damn girdle.
Of course now all those constricting undergarments are called shapewear. Well, frankly that sounds to me like a euphemism to keep us striving to be other than who we actually are. I think we should get to choose the terms of our existence. And like that unaccounted-for Nancy quoted above, I rather like the idea of insisting on being met exactly where I am.