Love is Where You Find It, If You Hang On Long Enough

I found a new love.

Hunts makes this lemon pudding that comes in three-ounce cups. You get four to a pack on sale for a dollar, and it's so creamy and tart and tasty that on the days we buy some when I wake up all I can think of is that there is another pudding cup in the cupboard.

Love is like that. It takes over our thoughts and makes us a little crazy. Sometimes a lot crazy. The loss of love can make your heart hurt so bad everything else seems numb and pointless. You can get to a point you don't care what happens to you, or you almost hope for something bad.

Of course my pudding infatuation is relatively harmless and transparent. I can get over that easily enough. I can move on to chocolate milk or moon pies, or drown out the craving in my head with a movie or a book. Or I can stock up the next time it goes on sale. Ultimately it's just a hook to get you into the story. But there's no doubt about it. Love can hurt like nothing else. It can make you crazy in the head, for real.

My wife knows a young woman who is having a baby alone. She liked the guy and got a little uncautious, thinking that hey, this is cozy and he loves me and maybe I get pregnant and maybe I don't and if I do maybe he'll want to be with me and have the baby and we can stay happy like nobody's business with our little family. It's the white picket fence fantasy that has seduced many young women, the longing to be held and loved forever, the thinking that this time everything will come out right. She wanted to give fate a little nudge ahead, but what she got instead was a huge disappointment.

The guy panicked and dumped her. Turns out he just wanted a few laughs and a girl who was a fun tumble. The idea of settling down and giving up his apartment and big screen and refrigerator of cheap beer didn't sound so good at all. At first he said he'd be there and see her to the end of it but then he started missing the appointments and then he stopped returning calls and then he got rude and hurtful to make her go away. He just wanted the whole thing to go away. He was ready to move on.

Now the baby growing inside her is no longer a tender connection to someone she wanted very much, but a painful reminder that she's alone and no one wants her much at all. She tries to get excited about holding and loving the baby, giving her life to being a good mom, but she feels cheated and betrayed and unworthy. Her hormones are all over the place and she'd like to drink or get high and just be numb for a while. Only she can't. She shouldn't. But it hurts so much. She doesn't want to be inside her head anymore. Who would want her now, fat and pregnant with somebody else's kid? If she didn't have Marie to talk to she just doesn't know what she would do. And Marie is going away for the long weekend, to see her mother and brother and sister in Crescent City.

When I was a young man I loved someone very much, and the time came when the relationship went a little sour and I was sick with worry over it, not ready to feel that much feeling, depressed and blue and full of hormones, and I bought an eight pack of Miller High Life in the six ounce bottles and I got in my gray Chevy Chevette and drove it too fast on a rainy highway. I wasn't trying to hurt myself or anyone else I just didn't care what happened. It was a twisting two-lane road with a high rock cliff on one side and a steep ledge on the other that looked down to the Willamette River. Pouring rain pooled on the road surface cracked with age. I pushed the speedometer to eighty.

The car hydroplaned and I fought for control. Too late. It spun out, careened toward a wide spot on the left and hit the rock wall. It tumbled over and landed back on its top, the windshield smashed. I crawled out the driver's side window with just a scratch on my forehead. I had no business being alive. A hundred things could have happened at that speed on that corner, and only this one did. I've been by there a hundred times since. There's no logical reason for me to be alive, except I am. Another punk kid being stupid, just lucky to be alive. I walked to the police station to report it, and the cop gave me a ride home. Some people I knew helped me turn the car over on its wheels. It was totaled, a crumpled mess. I bought an old beat up white Ford pickup with the proceeds from the insurance company, something sturdy and slow.

A few months later my daughter was conceived. I was with the same girl and it was the morning before she went off to college, and we were feeling blue and sorry for ourselves and had sex. Ridiculous clumsy sex, our first time, over in two minutes, but enough that she was having a baby. At first I tried to hide from the reality of it. We planned to get married but at first we weren't going to tell anyone about the baby. We were in love, and we were going to make this work out right. How can I make the same mistake my parents made?

I was a clerk in a small-town grocery store with no prospects, just 22, woefully immature. I had undiagnosed bipolar disorder, the source of the depression and moodswings that sent me into the tailspin on Old Willamette River Highway. Stephanie came on the first day of June. She was beautiful and pink and perfect. But I couldn't have been less ready to be a father. And I didn't do a particularly good job of sucking it up.

Life overwhelmed me, like it does a lot of people. I didn't have a purpose or a plan or the sense to look for guidance. Before I knew it I was thirty and then thirty five, and the dim hopes I had for myself were long gone. At one point I was living in a cardboard box on Swan Island. I didn't think clearly. Things would get out of control.

I stabilized a little and found better work. I remarried, unsuccessfully, and again, unsuccessfully. Now I am old and wise. But I wish I could crawl back into that car with that young punk kid, and tell it that tomorrow is another day. Calm down, have some lemon pudding, and trust yourself to find the place where you belong.
Not that I would have listened to The Time Traveler or his wife. I probably would have had to punch the punk out and toss the keys. It doesn't matter now.

So many babies are born in panic and haste, in a forlorn hope to make life more like a fairy tale or a dream. So many mothers to be cry themselves to sleep. If you meet one of those young mothers today, don't lecture her or judge her. Don't scorn her or look the other way. Take her hand, buy her a cup of tea, hear her story. Give her a reason to hope, knowing someone understands. Make the beginning of that baby's life a lighter and safer place.