The Best Love Of All

Looking back over my life I’d had this wish to sing with a male partner most of my life.

For the most part music could be made on the spur of the moment, but realism always got in the way of ideal whimsies.

When younger I’d put ads in the paper for this musically inclined male and gotten my share of the strangest assortment of musicians parading through my door you could imagine. I’d thought musicians were somehow special beings. I was wrong. Musicians were just ordinary people who practiced making music. Music was business to me and love was love. I separated these two items in my mind, remembering it made good sense not to date the clientele or the guy you shared an office with. It complicates the work at hand.

Somehow music and love though, cannot really be separated that easily. As while a musician is building their repertoire they are also building love relationships to write about. People essentially sing about their love experiences.

I soon found out music was my first love. I didn’t have a song to write, but I sang other people’s love songs and this was satisfying to an extent. This being so, if you married a non-musician you naturally would run into problems. If you had a music partner, if you should be so lucky to find that compatibility, and he was married, then he also would deal with problems if he was married to a non-musician as well.

When you share the deepest parts of yourselves through making music, subsequently, your non-musician mates begin to feel uneasy and/or jealous that their losing something here. Whether there’s hanky panky going on or not, in their minds they’re certain there must be a threat to the security of their marriage commitment if polarities are making music together.

So I looked for single mates insofar as making music. My ideals of maintaining my marriage and having a music career were jinxed when I became pregnant by a man who claimed in error that he must be sterile or have a very low sperm count because his previous wife of 8 years had children, so that proved she was fertile, and yet in all that time she had not conceived in their marriage. It sounded logical at the time I needn’t use contraceptive. To both of us, then imagine the surprise we shared to produce unplanned twins. There went his theory of being infertile.

He was easy to marry because he was easy going. I didn’t see a problem with pursuing my musical ambitions down the road and maintain a family at the same time. It didn’t quite work out as planned. So far as I can see, man’s best laid plans here are supposed to go astray. Builds character I suppose.

Love was something that was shared. You could never share a grievance. You could only share love. His grievance was that I loved music more than him and all my time was taken up with this love of music and naturally, he felt neglected. He wanted, like all of us do for the honeymoon phase to continue forever. He didn’t see the need for deeper communication and/or working to improve the situation. For my part, much later in life, I saw how my musical career planning was only subconscious and I didn’t communicate these buried aspirations to make music from the start.

He might have seen me working on my guitar licks late at night and also I’d barely look up from the table when he came home from work I’d be so entranced with some little chord on the guitar I’d just discovered. He might have put two and two together and understood I would never be content being just a wife and mother and be putting up new drapes in the living room the way he wanted me to. He might have noticed. But he didn’t. Marriage seems to be based on assumptions only.

Nothing much mattered to me when I was practicing a song. The twins were fun to watch growing up, I’d even make up songs about them and though I loved Mike and thought we’d grow older together I didn’t like that he focused on me to make him happy and we could have lived together forever in our basic compatibility if we hadn’t gotten married. That was the way I thought. That marriage was a trap, an obstacle in the way of what you really wanted to do with your life. Your mate would either help you get there, or hold you back if there was this legal paper you kept in a file somewhere, that said here’s how things should be and now it’s written down so it must be so. That’s the way our world thought. Your mate was supposed to make you happy.

Years later as I matured somewhat I read in ACIM what relationships were for. Listen carefully as it’s such a subtle idea you can completely miss the inference: Relationships are to make happy.

Like music. Love was like music then. We couldn’t share the music because he had no proclivities in that direction. The thing we were sharing was grievances, and ACIM said sharing a grievance is not possible. That’s commiserating. Commiserating is making misery, it’s not making love.

So as time went on I conjectured I needed to find a partner to begin my music career, to get past the stage fright was a worthy goal as well. I had very little confidence in myself so I would have to just go get some. I was like a Cher type without a Sonny by my side.

Needless to say my marriage busted up after 5 years. My ex had walked into a tiny, nearly empty little bar and discovered me singing there with the guitarist I’d found by sheer luck. He’d been shocked that I’d taken the music this far and finally, he’d put 2 and 2 together, that I wasn’t just plucking my guitar late at night to piss him off. I’d been shocked as well that he hadn’t known I wanted to make something of myself outside of the marriage through music. I’d been close-mouthed about my aspirations and I now had that guilt on me, but at last seeing is believing, for him.

I suppose if I have any wisdom gained in this life, it would be to say, it’s not what you say or don’t say to others, it’s the doing of the deed that says the most about who you are.

Seeing me pursuing a musical career this way might have taken a little of the burden off his shoulders for our failed marriage though, and he might have started thinking how we could have done things differently to make “us” work. So it was good he had come here. I didn’t remember inviting him, but I do remember inviting my kid sister and she must have invited her ex-brother-in-law. At any rate, it was good to see him. Surprises in life are a bonus factor.

Neither one of us held grudges, we were both basically, easy going but stubborn types. In many ways we were mirrors to one another.

Immediately and quite off the wall it seemed to me Mike asked me if the guitarist and I were together? Perplexed that he would think that, I told him the guitarist was married.

So? He’d responded. Lots of people cheat on their spouses. I was thinking I don’t. I get a divorce first, then I don’t mess with my sister’s spouses. I respect the plight of women too much. We women must stick together. There’s enough love affairs out there to get, we don’t need to steal someone else’s chance for getting it right.

My loyalties lie with my values. He didn’t know I had this kind of value about not stealing love.

Of course this is all in the subconscious. I’d not say these things. It was more like I just lived these things. Even though Dave, my guitarist was madly in love with his wife, a non-musician, he too was having trouble holding the marriage together because of his activities and love of music and soon he would run to me for comfort when his wife packed up and left. Dave and I were pursuing music and experiencing the same thing; the jealousy and insecurities of the partners.

And that’s how I concluded maybe the secret to longevity in partnerships meant you had to share the same love of something else, like music, in order to really communicate, otherwise there was only a grievance to share; and you can’t share a grievance ACIM said.

It was only much later I could understand fully what ACIM was saying because I was in the midst of youthful aspirations whereby I was getting my experiences, whether I understood them or not.

I loved Mike. He just didn’t enthrall me the way music did. I loved him based on my prevailing awareness at the time. He loved me based on his prevailing awareness of what love is supposed to look like. There is no baggage of guilt I carry over the way things turned out. As Mike had a great love too, just like I loved music, he loved the comfort of the way alcohol made him feel that nothing mattered, that there were no problems to face.

After the divorce I’d tried to get us back together and he’d explained he didn’t want the kids to see him drinking, and he was not giving up booze just to live in the same house with us.

Just the same way I’d chosen to express music over making my marriage work, he was now choosing booze over a wife and family. It was tit for tat then. I respected his choices as I’m easy going right? I didn’t think the booze would kill him as rapidly as it did. And, the type of man he was, nagging him to quit was an impossibility. So I accepted he was in my life for better or worse and in some way, even after a divorce, you still feel married.

We all can find our innocence if we’re looking for it. My innocence was found in the fact I’d suggested marriage counseling. Since we were having trouble communicating what we wanted out of life in general, I thought the only recourse is an objective observer pointing out how we could make this thing called marriage work and still pursue our outside the marriage aspirations.

He hadn’t even thought about it and immediately vetoed such a suggestion that we seek guidance outside the marriage. Counselor perhaps, was not in his vocabulary. He was shocked when I told him we had no recourse but divorce if we couldn’t get advice. I was not about to give up my career aspirations.

So I’d concluded, booze was his mistress even before I’d showed up on the scene with those stars in my eyes when I’d seen him walk into my life.

Much later, I would learn when I had Mike, that was as good as love was going to get. And I’d slowly move to the gratitude part, with the help of ACIM and meditation. Lovers come and they go, you love them as they are, not as you want them to be.

And although he’s gone from this world at the young age of 42, we WILL meet again. There will be no need to apologize; none whatsoever on either side. That’s the glory of love. He never really left me, he just changed form. We have talked after his death and I’m grateful for that contact.

Getting to the gratitude part is very important. When you go, you want to leave your grievances behind because where you’re going is to the place where Relationships are to make happy and happy is all you know how to make.