Relationships Held Lightly

I used to think I could do relationships. I thought it was simple, a black and white equation. You love. You are kind. You give it everything you’ve got. You pop a doughy relationship into the oven and—voila!—half an hour later pull out a friend.

I am less self-assured today. I realize more deeply the depth and variety of human need and my own inadequacy in the face of it. I am not everything the other person needs. I cannot make the relationship. I will not be able to do everything, solve it all.

We are none of us enough. A relationship, in all its parts, is more than the sum of both of us.

When I am sad or lonely, I like to hold a little bear Ivan gave me, whom I call DanDee after the name on his tag. I like to look at the red heart on DanDee’s chest. When I place four fingers on his back and one on his chest and press gently, rhythmically, it looks like his heart is beating. 

That heartbeat to me represents something intangible I cannot explain. Ivan loves me. I didn’t work for it. I didn’t ask for it. The thing is fragile, but surprisingly strong—tensile like the strand of a web. Magical. Miraculous. 

Sometimes, in some relationships, that precious thing is broken. We have names for when that happens. We call it pain. Depression. Fibromyalgia. Bitchiness. Suicide. Regret. 

An acquaintance recently told me about her parents, who divorced when she was nine. Her dad walked out of her life then and never came back. It is an old old story, one we hear a thousand times a day, but with each new person, the pain is fresh.

People walk around with holes inside themselves, I realize now. Growing up blind, with two parents who loved me, I am only just beginning to understand what it means to have a hole.

I think of a story another friend told me. As a young man, his mom died. When his dad remarried, he hoped for a relationship with his step mom like he’d never had with his real mom. He picked her flowers from the field. The next day, they drooped in their vase. “Throw them away,” she said. “They’re just weeds.” And just like that, the hope of relationship died, withered with the rootless flowers in the sun. 

“Did you say anything to her about it?” I asked.

“No,” he said. But he still cried about it, years later. 

Relationships can be like that. It takes two to make one. It takes two to keep one. And maybe the thing that hurts the most—maybe the party that committed the hurt never knows. 

For this reason, I am humble when considering my friendships. In any breach of relationship, I may be the one who committed the hurt. My friend’s stepmom had no idea of the damage she’d done. In her mind, she was just cleaning the house.

I had a friend who died and left me a Christmas cactus. I watered it for a while, but then I put it in a back room and forgot about it. It’s not that I didn’t care about her—she had been my best friend. But I’m not a plant person, and that’s all.

The cactus shriveled in its pot. 

One day another friend—someone I trusted with all my heart—threatened to turn her back on me. Long days of trouble had come before. Now, seething with hurt and anger, I told God, “If you want me to forgive her, you’ll have to help me because I don’t have it in myself.”

Just a few minutes later, Mom said to me, “Did you see your cactus? It has two blooms on it.” 

I went into the back room to look and—miracle of miracles—two beautiful white blossoms grew on the cactus. It had never bloomed at my house before. 

“I started watering it,” Mom said.

If the heart on the bear represents something fragile and precious that is relationship, the blooms on the cactus represent something fragile and precious that is relationship regrown. 

I learned something through our rocky and broken relationship—probably the hardest thing I ever learned—about self respect and about giving both myself and my friends the freedom to be gone. Friendship is a gift given freely. Don’t grasp for it, don’t hold it greedy, or it will crumble in your hands.

But I do hold hope before me, a blossom in my open hand. Relationship is a miracle no human can produce. I cannot make it. I can water it maybe—but even for that task, I may be inadequate. But sometimes, after long drought and aching death, at the finger of God, deep in the soil of a failed pot, a miracle is reborn.

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Feature photo by Ivan Kinsinger.