The Grand Gesture

There's a movie, Say Anything, where John Cusack's young character stands outside his sweetheart's house with a giant, 1980s boombox held over his head, blaring the message of his bleeding heart out of its speakers. I don't remember the song. I don't remember the reason for the soul-searing lack of propriety.

There's a scene in 10 Things I Hate About You where Heath Ledger's high school character utterly humiliates himself by performing karaoke in a football stadium to win back his sweetheart's affections. I don't remember why they needed winning back.

And there's a part in Jerry Maguire where Tom Cruise walks into a house full of male-bashing divorcees. In front of of them all, he tells his estranged amore, "You complete me."

The list goes on and on. Some of the guys are old, some are young. Some of the the movies are classics and some are newer. But they all contain the motif I like to call... The Grand Gesture.

The grand gesture is the total surrender of pride for the sake of love. It's making a fool of yourself and exposing all of your vulnerabilities for the purpose of saying, "I made a mistake. I am a moron. Please, please forgive me and come back to me." I've been obsessed with the grand gesture for a long time. I think because it's so iconic. It's depicted throughout Hollywood's vast cinematic history, and yet no one in real life actually does these things. I often think that men could learn a lot about women by watching romantic comedies. Like Jerry Maguire, 10 Things I Hate About You, and Say Anything. That's what women want. They want the grand gesture.

No one does things like that anymore. I remember I waited weeks for my first serious boyfriend to rent a white horse and come riding up my street after breaking up with me. That looks totally delusional when I write it out, but he was the one in a million who would do something like that. Only, he didn't. Despite his chutzpah in other areas, he waited until I was dating someone new and then emailed to say, "I want you back."

Note: email, texts, phone calls... none of these are a grand gesture. These are all exceedingly ordinary gestures of "I'm testing the waters to see if there's any hope. If not, I'm not going to humiliate myself."

The grand gesture demands vulnerability. It's the extreme risk that makes it meaningful... the fact that you cannot know if it will be accepted, but you're willing to do it anyway because it might, it might be.

I made a grand gesture once. It was agonizing. But I'm a better person for having put my heart out there. All in all, I think women are looking for grandness. Too much of our lives are composed of minutea. We are all waiting to swoon.

New Day

I'm gonna sing this song To let you know that you're not alone And if you're like me You need hope, coffee, and melody So sit back down Let the world keep spinning ‘round For yesterday's gone and today is waiting on you to show your face

That song always makes me think of my old church. They used to sing it there a lot. It feels very apropos. I miss that church, but I don't miss it too much. Mostly, I miss having a home.

I'm a lucky girl. I've had a pretty okay kind of life. I managed to work my way through college and graduate school to earn a decent education, despite a rough start in life. I have a working car, no loan payments, no mortgage, and a steady job, even if it doesn't inspire me. More, I have 2 sisters who always soothe my battered heart.

Yet for all that, I've never had a home. It's the one thing I've yearned for my whole life... a place where no one could kick me out or threaten to leave me. Maybe a little brick two-bedroom house with a magnolia tree in front, some place I could buy pictures for and modestly furnish, but mostly just know that I belonged. An oasis of peace and rest. I've been looking for such a place my whole life long, but it has always been just out of reach for me.

Since leaving college, I've moved 9 times in 8 years, all within the same city and suburbs. I've bought and lost all of my furniture in the moves. I've wearied my friends into non-existence through my humiliated pleas for help loading and unloading the various pieces of my life. I've lost 4 different jobs and relocated or downsized repeatedly to suit whatever employment I find. And I've survived. Like I said, I've been lucky, in this economy, to continually work and live. And I am very grateful for that.

But my heart still yearns for a home, someplace to belong. A home church. A home in someone's heart. Just a home. One of the reasons I was dating Derek was because when I kissed him, it felt like coming home.

Friends recently asked me if I hadn't any more clue why Derek and I broke up. Didn't we have the "closure" talk?

No. I don't need closure from this relationship. I am much calmer now than I was in my earlier years of dating. Much more pragmatic. What I have learned in my years of dating is that when someone wants to break up with you, you ought to let him. Why talk it out? Why reason and cry and engage in drama? Oh, I'm not saying you oughtn't to cry about it on your own. But I see no point any longer in asking "Why?"

What's the best answer you could get?

"I met someone else."

"You exhaust me."

"I don't love you in that way anymore."

"I have erectile dysfunction."

It doesn't matter what he says. None of the answers he could offer will make you feel any better, and a good many will tempt you to start defending yourself.

That's why I didn't ask Derek "why?"

I loved Derek, he's a good man. But his fatal flaw was always, always believing the worst in me. Whenever he became upset with me, his mind would fly in a million directions, all of which led to him jumping to conclusions and villainizing me. Inevitably, I would ask him leading questions, I would point out obvious discrepancies, and he would calm down and then apologize, admitting that he had no grounds for his accusations.

But every time he did it, it left a wound... until finally, last night, I didn't want to defend myself anymore, I didn't want to point out the obvious anymore. I realized that all of his wounds had made a deep impact on me. I didn't want to be with someone, amazing as he was in many, many ways, who looked at me and constantly found me lacking, constantly saw me as bad.

One time I asked Derek, "Why would you want to be with someone who is as awful as you've just accused me of being?"

He responded, "I guess because I don't think that's the real you. I think the real you is still somewhere under all that."

I submit to you, jury, that the real me is the one I've always been. The false me is the me that Derek created in his mind, and flung mud at whenever he was hurt. I will miss Derek terribly. I will miss the daisies he spontaneously bought me and finding all of my pillows smooshed up into unrecognizable shapes. I'll even miss running out of clean coffee mugs. But if we hadn't broken up, I would have missed Myself more.

I'd never find my home as long as I was someone else's bad guy, right? And that is more important to me, even than Derek.

It's a New Day, blog world! It's a new day.

A New Year, A New Day

Happy 2011, blog readers. It's a new day.

I went to get my hair dyed yesterday. I took someone else's cancellation and got in to see a master stylist at an upscale salon. I was therefore shocked to find her a chain smoking, redneck-talking hick. But she was magnificent.

"Sister!" she said, "you need a good hairdo for New Year's Eve! You gonna go out and party? Lemme' just tell you about the time I ran into my ex at a party!! Why, I was out at a bar in Lake of the Ozarks. My parents had brought their RV down there and we were all just hangin' out. Well, I hadn't seen that bastard in 15 years, since he broke off our engagement! Suddenly, I feel a tap, tap, tap on my shoulder and BAM! there he is! I'da recognized him anywhere."

"What did you do, Renee?" I asked her.

"Well, I'd had a few to drink already. So I yelled, 'You broke my heart!' And then I ran to the bathroom and took a Xanax. Oh yes I did! And then I cried all night, Sister. That shit's hard to get over."

It is, indeed. That shit is HARD to get over. And no matter how you plan for it or prepare for it, you are never planned or prepared enough for the eventuality.

Last night, I went to a New Year's Eve party, with my newly minted boyfriend. It was weird being someone's significant other again. It was weird hearing people ask us to pose for pictures and tell them how we met. It was weird seeing these pictures turn up on facebook within a matter of hours. I thought, "Wait. Why am I in pictures with this man?"

Nothing was quite so weird as seeing Max's picture turn up on facebook with his new girlfriend/fiancee/wife (I don't know which).

I want to be "normal." I want to be okay. I want to be like Allison, whose boyfriend of 4 years dumped her and then introduced her to his new girlfriend before the year was up. And she was okay with it! I saw her cry one time, the night Z. first broke up with her. And then after that, she bounced back, she was fine. She talked to the new girlfriend, she talked to Z., she wasn't fazed.

Why can't I be like that? When I see Max pictured with someone else, I think, "WHAT!? Max's supposed to be GAY!!!! That was the only valid excuse for someone breaking up with me! What happened to that plan!?"

But now, finally, after years of crying, there is a little, teeny tiny voice in my head. It sounds a lot like trailer park Renee. "Sister," it says. "It's your choice to be devastated. It was a chapter in your life. It didn't work out. Do you wanna spend the rest of your life bitching about a guy who didn't want you?"

"No," I admit to the voice glumly. "I don't want Max to have that power over me anymore... but I really loved him. How do you move on, when you made a commitment to someone?"

"You show Grace, sister. You realize that he was young and stupid and he shouldn't have asked you to marry him if he didn't mean it. And then you let go."