Hard Shelled Happiness

In my writing class yesterday, we were given a poem to read:

Coconut
By Paul Hostovsky, from Bird in the Hand. @Grayson Books

Bear with me I
want to tell you
something about
happiness
it’s hard to get at
but the thing is
I wasn’t looking
I was looking
somewhere else
when my son found it
in the fruit section
and came running
holding it out
in his small hands
asking me what
it was and could we
keep it it only
cost 99 cents
hairy and brown
hard as a rock
and something swishing
around inside
and what on earth
and where on earth
and this was happiness
this little ball
of interest beating
inside his chest
this interestedness
beaming out
from his face pleading
happiness
and because I wasn’t
happy I said
to put it back
because I didn’t want it
because we didn’t need it
and because he was happy
he started to cry
right there in aisle
five so when we
got home we
put it in the middle
of the kitchen table
and sat on either
side of it and began
to consider how
to get inside of it

After reading the poem and checking in, the teacher passed around a basket of brown, hairy coconuts, with something swishing around inside, and asked us to write about it.

I loved the poem, but it didn’t inspire me to write about the fruit, it inspired me to write about my children, my boys, which was its intention to start with.

Since I have stopped focusing so much attention on finding a mate, and started paying more attention to the young men already a big part of my life, I have been consistently happier than I’ve been for years. My eleven year old seems more willing to talk to me about what’s inside his head rather than just what’s for dinner. My middle son, ensconced in a romantic relationship of his own, seeks my council on how to deal with the eccentricities he finds in himself and in his girlfriend as they wend their way over the high wire of romance. My oldest son, away to college for the better part of the week, has assumed an air of polite respect for my opinions, even seeking them out, clashing starkly with the distinct disdain he displayed all through his senior year of high school.

We worked outside on Sunday. I cleaned the fish pond, and the older two raked leaves in the back. I reminded them once, and then….they did it. They bustled past me on the stone path, dragging the tarp filled with fallen treasures from the trees. I heard them working, no yelling, no complaining, just….laughter, and the sound of rakes encountering rocks and the swish of the leaves being hurried into formation. They worked together, and they laughed…about nothing, about remember when, about their friends, and underneath it all, I realized that my deepest desire for the two of them had finally come true. As different as night and day, as complex as algorithms, after years of bickering and backbiting and tattle telling, my oldest two sons were finally friends.

And that made me happy.

Morality

I have a fish pond in my yard, where during the spring and summer, I sip my coffee most mornings. I am the lucky recipient, if I am quiet, of the entertaining antics of the birds, the bugs and the squirrels, not to mention the domestic animals of our society who often perch themselves close to me. As my soul communes with nature, my thoughts drift to the dance within my own life. I watch the animals and wonder about their romantic lives. How does the hummingbird find a mate? What does a female cardinal look for in a guy? Squirrels, who look so much alike to the rest of us, how does the male squirrel pick the female squirrel? The things I look for....compassion, intelligence, humor, life force....do the animals look for the same such qualities? Is it simply a reproductive process or do animals seek good companions as well as sexual partners? We have made it so complicated in our society. Seems like it should be simpler.

It is these complications that have turned so many people into the moral icons weighing down the spirit of our society. It has evolved, certainly, and the strides we made in the sixties have had a trickle down effect, but not in the way that anyone planned. It seems that instead of blanket mores for everyone of no sex until you are married, we have blanket mores for everyone else, but not necessarily for ourselves. A society of hypocrisy is what has evolved. I agree, much of that has risen from the tides of the Moral Majority, the Christian Right, the pundits of God the Father. Ironically, Allah, deplored by the Right (or the Wrong for some of us) has even stricter guidelines.

This is my biggest beef with Christian morals: If Man was created in God's Image, and Woman is simply a byproduct of man, then why is the sexual moral mantle placed solely on her shoulders? If Man is so much less able to withstand the temptations of the flesh, making Woman the gatekeeper of sexual moral code, then why is she considered the less perfect of the pair? To me, that makes her the stronger of the two.

Of course, I don't believe any of it, but when I have loving discussions with my Mormon sister, this is my favorite argument, and it does frustrate her. (g)

I was raised in a Christian home. My mother considers herself Christian. My father bible thumped with the best of them, when it suited his purpose, but behind closed doors, he had no morals, other than self serving ones. I have written extensively about my own struggles with the hypocrisy in which I was raised. It's difficult to cultivate a moral code of your own when what you are taught is in such stark contrast to what you observe around you.

I married a loving and kind man, with whom I was deeply in love. We had a beautiful partnership, a balanced relationship that worked well for us. We were the couple people pointed to and smiled. When we danced together at work functions, we always ended up necking on the dance floor. My marriage was an oasis. I felt safe and loved, respected, honored and appreciated. This is not to say that it was perfect, we squabbled about division of labor, and priorities of finances and child rearing, but we communicated well and fought fairly and at the end of the day, enjoyed each other's company in and out of the bedroom.

Truth be told, I've never been in a jealous relationship. I've never been a jealous partner, nor have I ever had a jealous partner. I see it as a condition in our society, not just through romantic relationships, but in the acquisitive disorder to accumulate material goods in order to "have what she's having".

That being said, when my ex came out of the closet, disclosing that he had been exploring his homosexual orientation over the past two years, I was caught completely off guard. I'm an auditor by trade, and although I hadn't been looking, I scratched my head as to how I could have missed the signs, which I later found scattered around like bread crumbs in the forest. Chalk it up to simply not being a jealous person who would even think to look.

For four months, we tried to figure out how to acknowledge his needs and stay married. I opened my mind and my heart to the possibility of adding a third person to our relationship, and possibly even a fourth. Being married to an accountant has its drawbacks, because balance is important to me.

I struggled with that idea for a long time. I was out walking, rounding the corner and the sun was just coming up. I had an epiphany. As the sunbeam emerged from behind a cloud and focused on my face, I realized that the only thing keeping the door closed to what my ex was suggesting was my own mind. I’ve always been capable of independent thought. I’ve never cared what the neighbors thought, or even what my friends or co-workers thought. I’ve always prided myself on being able to formulate my own code of ethics and honor. Why should this be any different? Why would I insist on a traditional view of monogamy when I was perfectly capable of defining one of my own?

It didn’t work, in the long run, because my ex’s partner was not able to accommodate the continuing romantic relationship between my husband and myself. And, as we came to realize, my ex needed the freedom to explore this new and exciting part of himself without the binding ties that marriage and children bring to the table.

For a while, I became one of those sad, depressed and hurt people that comes to mind when one thinks of "divorcee". But jealous? No. Bitter hatred? Just the opposite. I think I loved him more in those four months of complete honesty than in the prior sixteen years of our marriage. Of course, to survive after our separation, I had to let that go, but now I can look back at that time in my life and smile, grateful for the capacity for compassion I was gifted.

But….

Our society is not designed for such compassion, unfortunately. Instead, we try to define what is a “right” relationship, and legislate who can love. I have always been a proponent of gay rights, but now even moreso than before. I don’t believe that people choose their sexual orientation. They may choose to live a gay lifestyle, but attraction is one of those nature things that is hard to comprehend, but we all know it when we feel it. My ex always knew he was gay…from when he was a little boy. He tried oh so hard to let the love he felt for me overcome what was innate inside of him, because society told him that was the “right” thing to do. Nature wins over nurture, though, as well it should. If society wants to strengthen marriage, then let nature pick partners instead of the fundamentalists. The sooner society accepts gay relationships, the sooner the institution of marriage will not be damaged by the failed marriages of people trying to be something they simply are not.

This is just the tip of the iceberg on my thoughts on society’s moral judgments. Don’t get me started on corporate conscience and the lack thereof, on immigration, on this blasted war that has no moral basis whatsoever, but is touted as only such.

And then there’s the promiscuity issue and how our society has evolved in that debate, with the feminists losing bigtime, again.