What am I supposed to tell my children about love?
I guess, as usual, I’ll have to be honest about what happened to me. I’ll have to tell them straight up that every time it came, it hit me like a wrecking ball out of nowhere and knocked me out and I never exactly saw what hit me or how, exactly, it hit me.
“It’s just chemistry,” one older husky-voiced lady in a writing class I took said with a shrug about the deep love connection between two people.
Just chemistry. Ha.
Chemistry was my undoing in high school. The football coach taught it, and what I remember most was him teaching us how to bend your knees when you carried something heavy. He’d learned it in his summer job as a mover.
As far as actual chemistry went, I remember little about all those elements in the periodic table, those strange representational symbols of things that reacted together in all different ways. I never understood why they reacted differently, and that always really bugged me. I like to understand things, to explain things to myself and others. My husband says I make things sound very black and white most times, that I try to simplify things. Which is, I guess, why my fearless parenting is fairly in jeopardy when it comes to advising about matters of the heart: there is no simple answer.
I certainly had no control over how I felt or who I loved. Otherwise, in the seventh grade, I might not have broken up so quickly with Chris Wlasiuk, who was so sweet and nice and into me. I might have said yes to a few different boys who shyly asked me out. But no. I couldn’t get over my first kiss, the new kid who had come out of nowhere to my junior high and swept me off my feet, and then went on to kiss all my friends in seriatim as I stood back and watched.
He teased me in the hallway when Chris took my hand. I called Chris to break up with him that night. I couldn’t live a lie. I was stuck on this one guy.
In good faith, I should tell my boys to avoid situations like this. I should tell them to give up on the dreamers and just find a nice person who likes them back and will treat them well. But love isn’t always like that. It isn’t always responsible and mature. Sometimes you can’t help loving who you love even if they kick you in the teeth a thousand times.
Ugh. It’s going to be tough to stand back and watch, to hold my tongue. Unlike other things one might advise one’s children about, there is very little in the way of facts to impart about love. Emotion is instinctive, intuitive. You know it when you feel it and even though you often wish you didn’t feel it when you do, there is no denying it.
I went on to love other people. When I started high school, there was a junior with braces who ran his own business and drove a yellow Porsche. I dreamt about him one night, and that was it. We had a strange secret relationship that lasted on and off for years. Meanwhile, there were other people I actually dated — like a friend of a friend’s from another school, who had a Doberman named Duke and drove a cute red truck. Then a Swedish exchange student, who I actually said “I love you” to, and whose departure fairly wrecked me. I got back on the horse, though, and dated a guy from the ’50s diner where I’d worked. The Jesus fish on the headboard of his waterbed was disconcerting, but otherwise it was pretty diverting until I left for college.
But I digress. We were talking about my children. All my experiences are just that, mine, and I have to be careful not to conflate their relationships with my scary own.
I can share what happened to me if they ask, if only to try to remember and relate, but I have to let them figure their own chemical mixtures, even when, from my distant vantage point, they might look highly likely to combust.
