Baby Steps (29 page)

Or maybe I just don't want to put a label on myself. Maybe I don't want to be called “wife.” Maybe there is a color to that word I don't care for. Yet, I don't really believe this because I've always wanted to belong to someone. When my mother died, one of my first thoughts was,
I don't belong to anyone!
and then one of my next thoughts was,
Of course I do. I belong to my daughter!
And where is Ron in all of this? He's right there beside me. I belong to him, too, even when I resist the notion.

I'm really not sure why I resist. Why don't I want to belong to a marriage? Am I too rebellious? Am I spitting in the face of convention? Defying authority? Shutting the door on hope? Opening the door to something more significant than a wedding license?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. I'm a pretty unconventional broad. Always have been.

But then sometimes I feel like an outsider looking into the lives of all the people who have taken the plunge, including both my parents, multiple times each. I'm still haunted by my complicated childhood. Like I said, my answer to why I haven't married depends entirely on when you ask me, but I do know this: I love Ron today. I love him very much.

I also know that nobody will ever be everything you want. You still might decide that you want someone anyway. Lasting love feels different from new love. I know that, too. New love is exciting and full of fantasy and passion, but lasting love holds you in a deeper embrace, with a more meaningful sense of peace, tenderness, acceptance, and, yes, passion, too. I think I like that. I almost
know
I like that.

So I say, encourage love! Fall in love! Have tumultuous love affairs! Love your family! Love your friends! A friend I'd recently met said
something I thought was charming, and I said to her, “I love you!”

She looked taken aback. “You can't love me,” she protested. “You don't know me well enough.” But I did! I do. I don't need to
know
in order to love, and neither do you. You just have to love. You have to give it, and accept it back. There is so much love to spare, so much love flowing over the surface of the planet waiting to be breathed in and embraced and exhaled and experienced with every atom of your being. Ache for it. Pursue it. Long for it. It's one of the great perks of life as a human.

And it's the work of a lifetime, as we introduce each other to ourselves every day, week, month, and over the course of years. We find new love within old love, and we keep looking for inner love even after we've made countless mistakes, hurt people, done stupid things, failed, grown old. We are constantly reintroducing ourselves to ourselves through the lens of love, looking at the people we love and saying, “I'm going to love you better than I did yesterday,” or “I'm going to love you again now because I haven't loved you enough lately.”

Of course, I can't think about love without thinking about my mom, the object of my most lasting and long-term affection. Even though she's gone and I suffer the loss, I still feel my mother with me, near me, hovering close by, like an angel. At times I even feel a slight breeze from her wings. That's how I get through those times when I need her.

My newest and most passionate love is my daughter, who courts me for my attention and affection, whose natural innocence and pure flirtation is an hourly invitation to love her.

I am bolstered by the love of family, as well. My Aunt Laurie always stood in for my mother and gave me permission to be who I am by loving me unconditionally. I love my mom's best friend, Nancy, who helps me to look back on my past and say, “Who cares? It's in the
past. Be happy now!” Her motto is
Hakuna Matata,
from the Lion King.

My cousin Jamie is like a sister to me. We hold each other's lives like treasures. My stepsiblings, Lucas and Olivia, have been siblings in so many ways that I needed. My dad and Jess have taught me how to forgive and to choose family above all else. Every single person I've ever loved has contributed to the evolution of my ability to love myself, and I guess that's where I've been heading the whole time.

And as for Ron and me, we are in a very loving period, more in love now than we ever were before, because we are basking in the glow of loyalty, of staying together, of time. We always know where to find each other, and I always know he'll be waiting for me. Maybe we'll get married after all. And maybe we won't. But I'm all about the now. I'm all about
today,
and today, I can honestly say I am in love—with him, and with everyone. With life itself.

So this is the story of love. You love your parents. You love your childhood friends. You love your siblings, if you are lucky enough to have them. You love the people who come in and out of your life, all ages and sizes and measures of people. You find lovers and you seek those who love you and you try to make them prove they do. You fall passionately in love with your own child and you learn how to be not only the lover but the beloved.

Then at some point, one by one, your parents are likely to leave this world. Your child will grow up and move away. Friends come and go, lovers leave or pass away, and being loved by them and loving them back makes you feel real, like the Velveteen Rabbit. But after they move on, what do you have left? What do you have, when you are all alone in your room in the middle of the night, having your dark night of the soul?

Every single act of love, from the newborn's first glance into the mother's eyes, prepares you for the day when you can finally look inside
yourself and say, “I love you” to
you.
Every person you've ever loved is a rehearsal for that moment when you no longer have to seek love from outside, because it radiates from within. You won't need a parent, a partner, or even a child to find it. All you will need is a good long look at your own soul to recognize that you only really belong to yourself, and that love only exists inside you, where it never dies. Where it is a wave. An ocean. Everlasting.

There is always one moment in childhood
when the door opens and lets the future in.

—Graham Greene

 

B
efore she was born, I dreamed about her all the time. She was al
ways there, an infant, or more often, a little girl, holding my hand, running ahead of me, looking back to see where I was, waving, smiling, sitting on my lap. My pregnancy dreams were vivid, with saturated colors and long epic plotlines, as I slept for ten, twelve, sometimes fourteen hours at a time. Sometimes she was there, somewhere along the edges, or she was right in my lap. She populated my dreams with her manifestations.

We'd decided to call her Grace, before she was born. It was the only name, out of thousands of names we'd suggested to each other, we could agree on. Grace August Anthony, because August was a family name on my side, and the month of Ron's birth. In my dreams, I called her Grace. I knew her.

Then one night, I had a dream that my friend Tasha was babysitting Grace. I went to pick her up, and Tasha pulled me aside. “It's the funniest thing,” she told me in the dream. “All day, she's insisted that I call her ‘Easton.'”

“Easton?” I said. “Why?”

“I don't know,” said Tasha. We turned to look at the familiar little girl, playing in the dream sandbox.

“Grace!” I called to her. “Mama's here. It's time to go.”

She didn't turn to look at me.

“See what I mean?” said Tasha.

“Grace!” I called out again. “Come on, honey. We have to go now!”

Suddenly, she turned and looked me directly in the eyes.

“My name isn't Grace, Mama. My name is Easton.”

“Oh!” I said. “Okay . . .”

I went over to her and she climbed out of the sandbox and led me over to a bench.

“I've figured out a lot of things about myself today, Mama,” she said.

“Really?” I said, sitting down. “Tell me.”

“Well,” she said, taking my hands and playing with my fingers. “I learned that I like to hang around grown-ups. I like to talk to them.”

“Maybe that's because you spent the day with Tasha,” I suggested.

“No,” she said, thoughtfully. “It's just the way I am all the time. I'm also very serious about things. I've been around for a while, Mama.”

“Really?” I said. She went on and on, telling me about her revelations in her little-girl way, until the dream faded.

When I awoke, the dream was still vivid in my mind. I called my mother and told her about it.

“You met her!” my mother said. “You just met your daughter. And she told you her name.”

“I dream about her all the time,” I said. “And I don't think I really like that name.”

“Easton. I love that name,” my mother said with conviction. “It's a strong name. It's a beautiful name.”

I went downstairs to tell Ron about it.

“I guess that's what we have to name her then,” he said, as if it was the most obvious conclusion in the world.

“Really?” I said. “You like the name?”

“I love the name,” he said. “And in any case, whether we love it or not doesn't matter. That's obviously her name. You met her and she told you her name, so there's really no discussion.”

I was surprised. Ron wasn't usually given to such a mystic sensibility. But how could I argue with both my mother and Ron? I did feel like I had met her. From that moment on, her name was Easton August Anthony. Because she said so.

The moment I met Easton in my waking life, I knew we really had met before. Maybe I'd even known her in a past life. And as she grew
and I got to know her more and more intimately, she turned out exactly the way she described herself to me in that dream. Even at four years old, she likes to hang around adults, and she is a very serious girl. She has that air about her, of having been around for a long time.

But these are the things I've learned from experience. At first, when she was born, all I really thought about, all I really knew, was that I had a baby.

A baby! A baby! Finally, a baby! I wanted to shout it out to strangers all the time: “The baby is here, the baby is here!” I wanted to climb up on the roof and sing it: “God gave us a baby, the baby is here!” This was the ticker-tape parade I'd been waiting for. Those first weeks and months with Easton felt like a party, like every day I was waking up to Christmas morning. No, it was bigger than Christmas morning. Every day was like the best day of my life.