Friday, April 02, 2004
*nurul
immune system really bad this year i realise. DAMN DAMN bad. sick very easily. and now even worse, not only sick larh. its BITES. MYSTERIOUS bites. hahhax. dammit lor. its damn damn damn itchy. cannot take it. since tues morning. *@&$@&#*@&#*@&#* tty was horrified. wahahhax. damn wacky. realise how damn messy and packed my life is compared to other pple in other skools. damnnnn. darn crescent. bitter abt everything to do wif crescent except for crescentians and the sch surroundings. will miss it. but NOT the tchrs, principal, DM or VP -spats- i'm just friggin bitter abt crescent. cuz of dem i haf a phobia of sch. DAMN. aniwaes, dat aside. !IIAWAKOSSIFAHS cannot take it! wahhahax. too kawaii ler! dammmmmnnnnn.
// - * charming. kewt, sweet. can stay away from me nort?! you're a hazard. bwahahahx. - \\
Sunday, March 28, 2004
*nurul
Building Love
By Marnell Jameson
Mum's in the hospital. Nothing huge - just a knee replacement. She's 78, the same age as Dad, and the joint has just plain worn out. But our small family frets. We worry about the small odds that something might go wrong, which will someday happen, but we hope not just now.
After she was wheeled into surgery, Dad and I headead to the hospital lobby. "How are you doing?" I asked him, trying to jump-start a conversation.
"Lousy," he said.
"We have a routine," he continued. "I slice the bananas; she pours the cereal. I gather the laundry; she runs the washing machine. I don't know what kind of soap to put in."
All this time I'd been worried about Mum, but I realised Dad was in the hospital too. The laundry soap was just the beginning. He was alluding to their daily dance, finely tuned after 53 years of marriage. She cooks. He gardens. He turns down the bed, she makes it up. If the roles were reversed, she'd feel the same desperate way.
What happened to their indepence? I imagine it was a slow surrender. As in most marriages, couples either wear each other out or break each other in. It happens by degrees. You have to give to gain. Intimacy required dependency, which required vulnerability. It's a package deal. And the deeper the love, the greater the risk.
When we're young, we often look at our parents' relationship and think, How dull. We naively compare it to adolescent love, with its erratic pitches of hope, headiness and heartbreak. As a teen, the feelings seemed real to me in a way that my parents' love didn't. I confused intensity with genuineness. Genuineness takes time.
Mature love picks up where romantic love leaves off, and while very different, it's also in many way better. Yes, the sun sets, taking its flames, but the moon, more magical, rises. Romantic love delights in novelty, while mature loves revels in consistency.
With our matriach down, Dad had caught a glimpse of how much he needed Mum. How she's the zig to his zag. Dad also knew the two things Mum would want most when she woke up from the surgery were her glasses and lipstick. So he had them there for her.
Mature love is the payoff for investing in romantic love - which we all know doesn't always pay - and for doing the work of mature love, the giving to gain. My parents are no longer beautiful, though they were in their day. But they're clearly beautiful to each other.
"I miss her," Dad tells me a couple of days after her surgery. Though he sees her every day, I know he means he misses her beside him in the bed they've shared for half a century. He misses their routine. And I know, after she has recovered, after he's once again slicing the bananas while she pours the cereal, that as a result of all this they will have moved yet another degree closer.
romateeq lurfe, mature lurfe. HRMSX. love sighh.