In my childhood bedroom I find the note my mother slipped under my bedroom door, almost 11 years ago now. It’s written on the back of an emptied envelope from my car insurance company. It’s short, and it’s sweet - it’s to the point of that moment. “Don’t be too sad about X. He has growing up to do. Love, mom.”
At the time of that missive I had likely flung myself on the bed in agony over the final admission by my longtime college crush that he just didn’t see as more than a “very good friend.” And I had all that evidence, so I thought, all that carefully noted behavior: drinks in a darkened bar, long hugs, messages on Facebook that began at 9am and ended at 5. I was so sure and so tired of waiting, of praying, that I finally asked him, sitting in the late afternoon light at that one restaurant in the plaza where the Dunkin’ is that I went to in high school - do you have feelings for me?
And he said no.
The disappointment curled in my stomach, steam rising from a cup. At the time I didn’t know how glorious this could be: not the no but the clarity of it. You walk through the fog and it feels clammy on your skin, the not-knowing, but it’s also safe, because the disappointment is at bay and so is the hope.
Oh, but Hilary, the clarity! When Preston tells you what he wants is you, you can believe him. When someone tells you that they want something, or they don’t want it - you get this remarkable gift: you get something you can actually respond to. You get the gift of a choice.
All this life you’ve built is the result of the gift of disappointment. You aren’t one, my love, though when I read through your eyes I know the words are synonymous. No, you are built from the clarity of disappointment: when your anxiety overtook your joy in the classroom that hundredth time. When your whole motherhood changed in a scan. When you could not make him trot, and you could not keep the canter. This is the stuff of it. When we are disappointed we begin to see things clearly - and what we will do in the aftermath is where the stuff of it begins. When you are thirty two you’ll get on a horse and a bit disappointed - as ridiculous as it sounds as I type it - that you weren’t a prodigy discovering her hidden talent. But after you face down the fact that you won’t just “know” how to do it - cue with the inside leg into the outside rein, or balance without your arms, or lean back when everything tells you to lean forward - you can begin to practice.
When the boy tells you no, in that bar in Hamilton, you are gifted the space for the later yes - a yes that has resounded through ten years of marriage and will resound, I think, ever more.
When you are disappointed - when the “appointment” is missed, is unmet, why, there the spontaneity that our life is made of blooms. You apply to a bookseller job. You read again. You let philosophy be as wild-grown as the bluebonnets that even now bloom along the highways that you call home. And you call them home because of a disappointment from graduate schools you didn’t belong to, appointments with history or theology you missed.
Where you are, receiving the note from mom about the disappointment of the boy, you’ll ask yourself what about you is wrong. You’ll offer yourself a thousand things and I won’t wish them away, even if none of them are true. You aren’t too much, too intense. You aren’t un-pretty or un-intelligent or un-loveable. And someday you’ll have lived through enough to be the me who gazes at the disappointments and says, thank you.
For the gift of the clarity. For the gift of the choice.
What a lovely life it is, my love.
I loved the younger you and the you that you've become. May you continue to become what God made you to be. Remember he is our Creator, outside of time, who made us free to choose.
Beautiful.
Thank you.
from
Joanna