Love

Love Never Fails: Part 1

September 9, 2020September 17, 2020 AmyLFarnhamLeave a comment

I want to tell you a story. Stories are how we see the unseen. Truth is something that is written so deeply in our hearts that we have to carve away chunks of ourselves to find it. It is something that we often uncover much more effectively through living and storytelling than through logic or a well-turned argument.

This post is part one of a story about a collision of love and beliefs in my life. Please check back soon for part two, or click here to subscribe to the Trivial Circumstances email list to get a notification when I publish it.

I have a dear friend. A great friend. The older I get, the more I realize she is a once-in-a-lifetime friend. (And that’s only if you’re lucky enough to have a lifetime that includes a friend like her. Most people aren’t.)

Vicky and I spent our preschool years joined at the hip. She was born six months after I was. She came home from the hospital to the little brick cape cod house across the street from my family’s white cape cod house.

I don’t remember meeting her. She was just always there–since before the beginning of memory–to play dress-up, to swim, to watch movies, to share bath-time, to write stories with me.

She is still my best friend, even though today we live thousands of miles from each other on opposite coast, in Boston and in Anchorage. She is never not there. Right now, this year, we text pretty much every day. We send each other memes and news articles. We tell each other stories about our families and reminisce about past years. There have been years when we’ve talked less frequently. Growing up, we faced new communications challenges each time we moved farther apart. From our neighboring cape cod houses, she moved to the other side of town, then I moved to another town, then to Guatemala and back. This was back before the Internet, when long distance phone calls were charged per minute and our parents wisely decided not to leave it up to two chatty best friends to determine how long was a reasonable conversation. We wrote oodles of letters, on actual paper. Those letters are now our prized possessions. Vicky keeps her half of the letters in her freezer because it’s the safest place in case of a fire.

There have been years when we haven’t shared everything with one another as openly as we did as kids or as openly as we do now. Even though we were born neighbors, we were born into a divided country and into families at odds with each other politically. We joined the world a few short years after the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision declared abortion legal. Her mother was an adamant and vocal supporter of abortion rights who volunteered at Planned Parenthood and at the Democratic Parthy. She inspired my mother to join the Pro-Life cause and to eventually found two pregnancy care centers focused on helping women find alternatives to abortion.

One moment in our childhood that our families still laugh over was me telling Vicky in 1984 (when we were 5), “It’s okay, maybe Mondale will win next time,” after he carried only one state out of 50 in his race against Ronad Reagan for the U.S. presidency. At 5, I couldn’t have known much about Democrats or Republicans or what they stood for, but I knew my best friend and I were at odds over something when we stood with our families.

We are from different religious backgrounds as well. She went to Catholic parochial school, my family had our butts in the pew of an evangelical church every Sunday morning and evening. Wednesdays, too, and often on vacation. I will never forget the look of horror on her face or my confusion when I grabbed her rosary for playing dress-up once. I never did it again. In a world where we are familiar with the ins and outs of so many religions all over the world, it’s hard to imagine the deep division we saw between Catholic and Evangelical in the 80s. It certainly wasn’t the level it was when wars were fought over it centuries earlier, but it was there. Many evangelical churches didn’t (and many still don’t) see Catholics as Christians.

We have both had our share of doubts over the years. How could we possibly have a friendship so close when our beliefs in the Things That Matter were so different?

This paradigm was reinforced by what I learned at church. As an evangelical Christian, the way to see the world around me had a clear division: people who knew Jesus, and everyone else (AKA my personal mission field). Everyone else, of course, included Catholics. We were built to go into the world and preach the gospel. The awesome responsibility of being saved was to help save other people.

I remember telling her at least one time (and I suspect it is more than once) that we couldn’t be TRUE best friends because we didn’t believe the same things. Jesus was my very best friend, and if you didn’t know him, how could you really know me? As a Christian, I knew the Truth in ways other people didn’t, and I was expected to fight for it. That was my Purpose. Other Christians shared that purpose. Close friendships with people who didn’t threatened to compromise my Purpose and Mission since they could not possibly understand or support my priorities. Worse, they might tempt me away from the Straight and Narrow path. We were called to love everyone, but friendship with people who also loved Jesus was what we aspired to most.

I bought into it, sometimes. But in a way that don’t think I could have articulated as a kid, that dichotomy always felt a bit uncomfortable for me. Here was someone I was close to, who I trusted with my life (and more importantly, my heart). Yet the main purpose of our presence in each others lives was for me to teach her, to help her understand what I already knew so well… It felt weird, but it was all I knew. Every so often I would attempt to convert her, to bridge that gap. I was elated when she came to my church’s week-long summer Bible school with me two summers in a row. Her mother was less thrilled when Vicky learned about hell there at six years old.

Eventually, it wasn’t just beliefs that were at stake. When we were eleven, Vicky’s parents divorced. It was heart-rending, and it happened while I was thousands of miles away, helpless not only to stop the divorce, but without any way to give my friend real consolation. I heard about her family falling apart from Central America, devastated for her but separated from her.

My parents credited their faith with the success of their marriage. They had obeyed the rules God set forth in his law. The law was like gravity: when you followed it, your life fell into rhythm with the universe. If you tried to go against it, chaos and misfortune ensued. Of course, we knew and believed that everyone sins. But part of our freedom in Christ was ever-increasing freedom from the inertial pull of sin in our lives. Even though I wasn’t comfortable with that us/them dichotomy that seemed to go against the grain of my friendship with Vic, here was the truth of it playing out right in front of me. Here was sin hurting one of the people I loved most in the world while my own family remained happy and intact. Jesus was the only solution I knew. I continued to try to win her in what I thought were subtle and casual ways, and her devastation after the divorce cemented my belief in the way that only hard life experience can.

Our friendship persisted, year after year, and our love and appreciation for each other grew out of childhood into adulthood. I went off to a college known for its political conservatism, left a graduate program to get married, and followed my husband to California to support his career. Vicky went to a renowned party school, partied less than I did at my strict college (which wasn’t much), discovered her own feminist voice, and got a job as a journalist in Virginia. Our lives couldn’t have been much farther apart, or more different. We saw each other and talked to each other less in those years. Our letter writing slowed, but it was never really replaced by email or phone calls, even though we finally paid our own long distance phone bills. Even so, our love for each other continued into our new adult lives and we saw each other when we could.

One day, Vicky came to visit me in California. I picked her up at her friends’ house in San Diego, and before we got back to my apartment, she hesitantly told me that her classmate Jess who had moved to Virginia with her was more than a friend.

I wasn’t really surprised. I’d kind of suspected for years, the way I’d suspected her mom’s long-term roommate after her parents’ divorce wasn’t just a roommate.

What came next, though, shocked me:

She asked if she was still welcome to stay in my home.

To this day, every time I think about that moment, tears come to my eyes. For all of our differences, for all that I tried to casually win her over to loving Jesus the way I did, for all of the wondering how we could possibly be friends when our beliefs were so different, there was no question in my mind that we WOULD be friends. I didn’t always understand how it could work, but what was even more inconceivable was a world without our friendship. It had existed since before our memories began. There was no decision required to continue it. And there was certainly no question in my mind that she would always and forever be welcome at my house. After all, her friendship was more of a home to me than any place I could rest my head.

I reassured her. Of course she was welcome at my house. We tried to brush it off. We enjoyed each others’ company despite the awkwardness—we were used to disagreeing, after all. Our friendship grew closer again now that she felt like she could be open with me. Looking back, I’m not sure why I didn’t ask what made her think she would not find a warm welcome at my home. But I didn’t. I just wondered. I assumed she misunderstood me. And I sat in the pain of that for years.

I stayed in that state of self pity over the misunderstanding until life circumstances and my friend pushed me to look outside of myself for a better answer…

Note: I am publishing this story with Vicky’s permission. Well, not just permission. She helped fact check it (her memory is so much better than mine). And she has helped edit this and much of my other writing. She has yet to give me hard time for my poor grammar, considering I was an English major, but she certainly could. Any errors are probably things I wrote after she looked at it.

Check back soon for the next installment of the story. Better yet, be lazy and subscribe to my email list. I’ll let you know when the next post is up.

A Tale of Two Loves (Part 5): A Love that Breaks

September 28, 2018 AmyLFarnham1 Comment

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts about two kinds of love. (If you go back to read the other posts, start from the bottom. They are in reverse order.) This is a process blog. In this case, that means I’m writing about constrained love in an effort to write my own way out of it. Because once I’ve seen it, I couldn’t live in it even if I wanted to. This post straddles the gap between the two kinds of love, Constrained and… unconstrained, for lack of a better word.

Today it has been exactly three years since my divorce hearing. Before I left for the courthouse that day, I changed my Facebook profile photo to one from our wedding day that I had always particularly liked. I posted it because it reminded me of what I was grieving, of the days when I remembered being happy together.

Facebook has done its Facebookly duty and reminded me of this photo every year since. I don’t remember which year I noticed—maybe last year, when I was realizing some hard truths about our marriage?—I noticed that Josh didn’t actually look happy in the photo. I’d already begun to notice sadness in more recent photos—the tense eyes and drawn lips in face I knew so well from thirteen years of marriage and five years of friendship and dating before that. But heavy photo documentation of our relationship only went as far back as Facebook, and, in my mind, only back to the point when things turned. I assumed he looked happier before that, although I don’t think I bothered to look. A story I’d told myself was that almost every marriage goes through the “seven year itch”. Some survive and some don’t. Ours had gone into a slow death spiral around then, and the photos I see all the time were a reflection of decline.

But here I am, year after year confronted with a photo from the very beginning of our marriage where I look happy and he does not. How did I not see it before? A lot of soul searching has led me to one conclusion—I didn’t want to. And, to be completely fair, I don’t think he wanted me to, either. He did propose, he did say “I do.” There were always assertions of love and affection and a desire for marriage (and physical chemistry that I thought backed it up.) Hindsight being what it is, of course I now see that there were other signs of his unhappiness besides his smile on our wedding day. But he did say that he wanted the same thing I did.

Sometimes I get angry about that. It was, after all, a lie to tell me he wanted something that he didn’t. I get mad that he let me continue to believe in a marriage long after he’d lost faith in it (if he’d ever had it to begin with). I get angry that he looked for ways to be happy outside of our relationship when I should have been enough without telling me the truth of it. But the fact is we both looked at problems in our marriage without seeing each other.

I faced the problems in our marriage by trying to make it a better place to be, by making myself into the best wife possible. I read all of the books. I did everything everyone said to do to try to be the thing he SHOULD want. I worked my tail off to help him through grad school. I learned to be a “keeper at home”, keep house better, cook better, be watchful of what he said he wanted. I built this artifice of what OUGHT to be, and squeezed myself smaller and smaller to try to fit in it, hoping to give him room to join me there.

What I didn’t do was learn to see him as a human being. To see his hurt where he was. To see when he was unhappy without fearing what it meant for “us”. To continue to be his friend even when I was his girlfriend and his wife. I learned a model of marriage built on “shoulds” and “ought tos” that ignored the person—the people–both of us, him and me. I built my palace of obligation and hoped he would come live in it with me.

He never did. It’s no surprise to me now that it wasn’t very enticing—I wasn’t happy there myself. He escaped in his own ways. And the end I burst through the shell I’d built trying to make myself into something I wasn’t, someone I thought would be more lovable. Ironically, burying myself more and more in my desperation to be seen.

In my fighting for marriage and his running away and hiding from it, we missed what should have been essential: We missed each other. Focusing on what the relationship was (or was not), neither of us saw the person right in front of us.

I have every right to be angry over things he did and how he treated me, and often I still am. But more and more, when I see this photo, I’m just sad. He was my friend before he was my boyfriend and then my husband. In trying to fit marriage into our relationship, we stopped being friends to each other. In trying to squeeze into a box that promised happiness and God’s blessing, we squeezed out our best opportunities to connect.

Unconstrained love is so simple. Love the person AS THEY ARE. No preconditions. Not based on what they do, but who they are. Love their motives more than their actions, believe in their best selves. Remind them that you still believe in their best selves even when they fail, but love the failed person as they are, where they are.

Unconstrained love is simple, but it is not easy. It sticks its neck out beyond the safety of convention and social norms, beyond what I want out of the relationship, pushing everything out of the way to see the person as they are. It doesn’t shy away from the pain that’s inevitable with relationships because it knows the the love and true knowledge of the person there is worth it. Unconstrained love looks absolutely treacherous until you know that once you get past the fear of what could and maybe even will happen, real life begins where love flourishes.

When I look at that picture, I remember that it comes down to this: unconstrained love for my husband would have meant setting aside my fear that our marriage would end so I could see him where he was. He was hiding, but I could have seen it anyway if I’d wanted to. (That’s the beauty and the curse of marriage–you really can’t hide.) I couldn’t handle that, I kept pushing what I thought ought to be, and it did end. Now I’ve been through it: I sacrificed relationship to feed my fears, then I saw my fears become reality anyway. Next time I hope I can do better. Next time and every day.

A Tale of Two Loves (Part 4): The Ghost in the Gap

August 27, 2018August 27, 2018 AmyLFarnham1 Comment

There was another divide I believe prevented my ex from hearing my hope. Sure, I didn’t speak hope often enough. But even when I did, there was often something in between us that filtered what I said and did before it got to his heart. That thing was the story he was telling himself about our interactions.

My ex was in grad school for most of our marriage. I remember once when I was frustrated by how long it was taking him to finish, he told me, “But I’m doing this because YOU WANTED ME TO.”

Now, I never once dreamed up a scheme for him to go to grad school. I have no recollection of wanting him to get a PhD. Or, rather, I wanted it because it was his dream. But it was never something I would have dreamed of asking for myself or for us.

They are strangely strong, the stories we tell ourselves about what people think. As a deeply spiritual person, it makes sense to me that these stories originate from an entity the Bible calls the Father of Lies and the Accuser. If there is someone out to destroy our souls, what better way to do it than by whispering lies into our minds about ourselves and each other:

“You are not enough and this person knows it.”

“You’ll never be enough until you can [fill in the blank: Lose more weight. Keep your house clean.]”

We are really adept at repeating those lies to ourselves ad nauseum until they become part of our identity. I never really recognized my own negative self-talk until my life hit the skids during my divorce. I mean, as a good, supposedly self-aware citizen of the 21^st century, I was aware of the concept. But I didn’t recognize it in myself. One day I began to notice that I told myself stories about things people would think of me that almost never became reality. “Better sweep up the dust bunnies or your dinner guests will notice and have a bad time because they won’t be able to think about anything else.” Or, “Everyone is noticing that stupid thing you do at work and thinking about it all day.”

I kept track once and I had a thought like that every seven minutes on average. That’s nearly ten times an hour, every waking hour of the day. And of course 99% of these thoughts never amounted to anything. But that 1% is a bitch. It’s enough to make me feel like the other 99% is right. “I was SO RIGHT when I suspected Joann would hate my hair. And that’s just the one time she happened to SAY something. I bet she’s thinking it all the friggin time. And I bet Jim-Bob and Matilda are too.” Suddenly, being right 1% of the time makes this self- talk essential to my survival. I learn to lean on it to anticipate bad things people might say and protect myself from them.

If I see my negative self-talk as a worthwhile protective instinct, I’m bound to use it to protect myself in the relationships closest to me. And it’s in my closest relationships where I are more likely to have it reinforced by the occasional snippy comment or “constructive criticism”. If I’ve already talked myself into believing people think I’m worthless, any negative comment can send me reeling.

I’ve heard that it takes seven positive interactions to make up for one negative one. And it’s no wonder. Most of us are working overtime to convince ourselves that we’re not enough. We’re operating at a deficit before our loved ones even open their mouths.

I never asked my ex to go to grad school. But the facts of what I actually wanted don’t matter that much. He told himself a story that I wanted him to go to grad school, and he heard everything I said on the subject through that filter. Every complaint, every criticism, anything I did that touched on this sore spot for him was augmented by this idea that he was only trying to do what I wanted him to do. There’s a gap, and then there’s the inadequacy-whispering ghost who lives there, telling us lies about ourselves, lies about our loved ones, amping up our insecurities until they’re the only thing we hear.

It’s amazing how quickly this inadequacy-whispering ghost travels from person to person. Nothing trips feelings of inadequacy like feelings of inadequacy being directed at you (or even blamed on you). If I see a loved one hurting, I immediately blame myself: Was it something I did? Something I said? And if they’re up in my face telling me it was, that seals the deal. The only thing that will get me spun up faster than suspecting I’m not enough is someone TELLING me I’m not. I don’t know about you, but this is the source of the majority of the arguments I’ve had with friends and loved ones. It’s not about the toilet paper roll facing the wrong way, it’s not about whether you called when I wanted you to, it’s about what it MEANS about how you feel about me. I start voicing that, the person I care about says those things don’t really MEAN what I think they do…And around we go.

The lying ghost in the gap is adept at pitting us against each other when our fight is not against one another but against the lies he is telling us. (Ephesians 6:12)

Was it fair to me that my ex thought I was the reason he was in grad school? Not at all. And I put most of my energy into arguing with him about how unfair it was. But his belief in it was a fact I needed to face when I related to him. And it’s that belief that I butt up against over and over in my relationships with other people. I can focus on the unfairness of the story they are telling themselves, or I can help re-narrate the story. Constrained love insists on my right to be understood (which is a real thing. And valid.) I believe unconstrained love can set that aside and fight the ghost in the gap alongside the person I care about. Which do you think is easier in the moment? Which do you think is more powerful? And ultimately, which do you think most effectively paves the way for me to be truly and deeply heard, anyway?

It is NOT WRONG to insist on what you know to be true, to defend yourself. In some cases people’s self-deceit is so strong that you cannot come alongside and help them re-narrate the story. There is a time for digging in your heels. But that is a final battle time, when you’ve realized that the person is so lost to the ghost in the gap that you cannot pull them back. It is not the the starting point, and it cannot be the day-to-day operation of relationships. Day in and day out we are built to fight the ghost together, side by side.

A Tale of Two Loves (Part 2): Love in the Age of Fear

August 13, 2018August 12, 2018 AmyLFarnham1 Comment

This is the second in a series of blog posts about two kinds of love. I’m currently writing about the first kind, constrained love. (If you go back to read the other posts, start from the bottom. They are in reverse order.) This is a process blog. In this case, that means I’m writing about constrained love in an effort to write my own way out of it. Because once I’ve seen it, I couldn’t live in it even if I wanted to.

A few weeks ago, a friend recommended a New York Times Op Ed called “Motherhood in the Age of Fear.” She describes the constant fear that mothers are expected to live under, fear that any little thing could lead to catastrophe for their kids. Or fear that they’ll be judged for their lack of fear. The layers of fear over motherhood are thick and complex.

Two things stood out to me. The first is the label, “Age of Fear”. It is such an apt description of our era that I went looking to see other people using it—they must be. But apparently they’re not, or at least not yet. So let me be the first to echo it. I think that phrase “Age of Fear” will resonate far beyond the scope and moment of that OpEd.

The second is that fear is seen as a facet of love. And not just a biproduct or a sadly necessary part, but something so critical that if it’s not therein sufficient quantities, people call child protective services. ‘I don’t know if I’m afraid for my kids, or if I’m afraid other people will be afraid and will judge me for my lack of fear.’

I think the Age of Fear and what I’m calling Constrained Love go hand in hand. When I first read the phrase the Age of Fear, it resonated because I recognize that I’m a citizen of the Age of Fear. I’m a born and bred citizen, not naturalized. It’s not something I adopted deliberately, and it’s not something with its roots in the last few years. When I first read about the Age of Fear, I thought, “well of course—9/11. This is the result of the constant threat of terrorism.” But I don’t think that’s it. I remember the roots of the Age of Fear being there when I began having thoughts of my own, back around the time the Berlin Wall fell, when the Internet was being born. If anything, it should have been the beginning of a more optomistic, hopeful time. But hope with a grain of fear in it is a different animal.

I remember my dad (who spent a year in Germany in the 70s) reminding me every so often that if the Third Reich could happen in Germany, it could happen anywhere. I remember arguing with Vicky (my childhood best friend) about whether people are inherently good or evil. Vicky loved the optimism of Anne Frank, “I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.” How could she think that, after what people had done to Anne Frank? Anne and my friend both seemed naive. Whatever peace we found seemed tenuous, fragile, in need of protection from evil empires, maybe even from ourselves.

Like so many people in my age, I looked to ideology to protect me. To protect me from myself and from other people. So much of my faith and the way I interacted with life was shaped by the compulsion to acknowledge the evil at our core and to fear it.

Fear does strange things to hope, turns it into something different. It makes hope conditional. I hope that if I do things just right, I can avoid or eliminate the things I fear. I can shelter myself and my family from crisis by avoiding the mistakes of the past. We can put up a fence so high that the creeps won’t get to us. When Faith, Hope, and Love change to Fear, Hope, and Love, they all end up warped. Fear is the little bit of sand in the shoe that can drive us to take the wrong path. The leaven in the dough that I’ve seen wreak destruction in my own life.

When fear is the root, we protect ourselves from our selves and from each other. Last week I read a book by Rebecca Manley Pippert, who in some ways was before her time when it came to acknowledging vulnerability. She was all about recognizing our faults. It was published in 1989, when I was 10. But looking back at the book through the lens of the last 30 years, I can see the grain of fear. It’s worth quoting Pippert at length because she captures the spirit of the time in a way that I can’t do retrospectively:

“There is something truly wonderful and remarkable about us all. We have a capacity for love, an appreciation of beauty, and moments of genuine courage. But unfortunately, that’s not the whole story. We want to believe that the essential ‘us’ is who we are in our best moments, when everything is going our way, when nothing is thwarting or threatening us. We want to believe that we are what we project to the world: nice, respectable, competent people who have it all together. Fortunately or unfortunately, life doesn’t let us get away with our charade. Sooner or later, whether through a difficult relationship with a berating boss, a demanding spouse, a difficult child, or simply through overwhelming or infuriating circumstances, we are confronted with our darker side.

“Has it ever struck you as odd that, for all our sophistication, we modern people have a remarkably naive understanding of human nature? Living at the end of history’s most murderous century, we flatter ourselves that we are basically good people who occasionally do bad deeds. The founders of our nation were not so naive. The very political institutions they contructed for us, founded on concepts like ‘checks and balances,’ are testimony to their assumption that human nature has a root of evil that unchecked can grow to terrifying proportions. People with power cannot be trusted too far. History hardly indicates that our problem has changed—rather, that it is we who have developed short memories. We are struggling the the symptoms of an age-old disease, which we have lost the capacity to diagnose.”

Do you see what I see? The idea that to get to the good, we have to contain the evil? The idea that our bad selves dominate and that our main line of defense is fierce PROTECTION? I hardly mean to pick on Pippert. Honestly, I may be reading fear into it because it had such a strong mark in my own life. It was a view so pervasive that 10-year-old Amy unquestioningly and enthusiastically repeated it. It’s really subtle. So much so that it may just be me displacing my own thoughts onto what Pippert is saying. But I see the idea that the answer to this darker side of ourselves is in our institutions and our traditions. And while they certainly need to protect us, I think we (I?) leaned on them entirely too much. And I suspect this: that there is a bright and direct line between what I remember (and the subtle thing I see in Pippert) and the Age of Fear we find ourselves in 30 years later.

Think about the Late 80s. We were decades past the world wars and Vietnam. We were inches away from winning the Cold War. The Berlin Wall fell the same year Pippert published that book. We had used the power of our military and our culture to dominate evil in the world. The world never seemed brighter than in the late 80s and early 90s. But I think in our victories, we were scared. Scared of one another and of ourselves. Frightened of the creeping immorality in our neighborhoods, in our homes, in ourselves. We had seen the end result of letting the evil in human hearts run rampant, and it was terrifying.

We kept looking for the seeds of evil so we could protect ourselves before the problem got dangerously big. We became proactive. Preemptive.

The news outlets built for war turned the same camera onto car accidents, kidnappings, plane crashes.

The government institutions that had helped us battle evil on an international scale were repurposed for pre-emptive war. And for war on evil within our borders—The War on Drugs. The War on Crime. The War on Poverty.