“Oh Laurie, will you please just go get a boyfriend!” My Mother, Suzy pleads, wringing her hands right there on FaceTime. 

Thank goodness for Suzy. She always supplies me with such perfect material when I’m scratching around for a blog post. And here I was going to write a sweet little piece about the sea turtle who crawled onto the beach to lay and bury its eggs in Baja last week.

 We’d been having a conversation on why I’ve been so bone dead tired these past many months. It’s not your run of the mill kind of exhaustion either. This is different.

 “Oh Laurie, will you please just go get a boyfriend!” 

 I love how old fashioned she is. For my Mom, born in Hollywood’s Golden Age, love is the answer. 

But then, this is the woman who, at 74, and on her third date with Ralph – who would become her boyfriend – describes how one minute they were dancing in his living room, and the next minute all their clothes simply fell to the ground. She has no idea how that happened, but will tell you that Ralph made her feel like a woman for the first time in her life.

 Her directive for me to get a boyfriend is honest; In the world she comes from happiness had its coordinates: Smile, stay upbeat and slim. Find a man, and you’ll be set for life. 

 Her wish for me, cloaked in this funny request is code for I love you. I don’t want to leave this world with one worry that you will be sad or sick.

 I know what that feels like; when I imagine my own children unhappy or unwell when I’m gone, I’m heartbroken. Mama wants to fix everything.

 Not that Suzy entirely believes that a relationship will be a Cinderella’s dream. 

 On the first night of her Hawaiian honeymoon in 1959, she cried because my penny-saving father had taken her to a tacky shack on the beach instead of the champagne-filled hotel up the coast where her friends stayed

 And when she found out about my father’s affair 35 years later, she left town and went fishing for a month to clear her head. That was before cell phones, so she was completely unreachable, unless you were a fish in the lake she rowed around everyday. I never asked her what she was thinking about that whole time, but she worked a few things out because when she came home she decided to stay with my father, get into therapy and take back her life. To her credit, she said the two of them had been sleep walking through their marriage, and unconscious as it was for my father to reach out to someone else, it had woken them up. 

 At least it woke my mother up. She realized that she’d assumed her job was to make my father happy, to be a good wife and mother to his children. Now it was clear that his priorities lay elsewhere – at least in terms of how he felt about her. 

She wasn’t bitter, but she did take her life back. She joined strangers on bike rides in Europe, and took pride in being the oldest woman on the AIDS ride in 2003. She did a million other things that were in service of taking care of herself, a self she hadn’t considered before.

 And when my dad got sick 10 months before he died, she didn’t abandon him. I’ll never forget the day I got a call from her phone while I was in the middle of Ikea. It was a butt call, but I heard them in the car talking on the way to radiation, chatting about what they thought Thanksgiving would look like. “Mom,” I said into the phone, thinking she’d hear me. “Dad,” I said, but they couldn’t hear me, so I stood there in the Ikea lighting department, listening to my parents talk until the line went dead.”

 Sometimes when my friends ask me if I long for a romantic relationship, it takes me a moment to answer. I told my friend Ben the other night, “I’m not so much longing for a boyfriend. If I’m longing for anything, it’s a kind of tenderness you get when the walls finally come down – with all people, really. For me, this is intimacy. 

 In my dream last night I was walking a path alongside a man I barely knew, and our tiny pinky fingers graced the others as we walked. I woke up aching with the sweetness of it. How little it takes, sometimes, to feel seen.

 ****

In Baja I learned that female sea turtles generally return to the same beach where they were born to lay their eggs, a behavior known as natal homing. It’s believed that there is a magnetic signature that they get imprinted with as hatchlings during their first journey to the ocean. They use the Earth’s magnetic field as an internal compass to come home. It’s an instinct for survival.

 My Mother just wants me to be happy, she urges me on in the only way she knows – through love and a fantasy of security.

 I understand, as an evolving human being that there is more for me to learn about romantic love. In some ways it feels like I’ve only scratched the surface when it comes lowering those walls – though it’s true that I have had a deep connection with a handful of loving men in my life. 

 Even writing this is my way of honing toward something, finding my own way home, my Mother cheering me on from the beach. 

Wild Writing Small Group Classes

We have two Wild Writing small group classes open for the Summer Session. 

If you’ve been curious about what it would be like to be in a small, devoted group of Wild Writers, who not only write together every week, but who read their work aloud to one another, please consider joining one of our classes.