Tiny Beautiful Things (19 page)

A beautiful young woman named Belle lives with a beast in a castle. Belle is touched by the beast’s grace and generosity and compelled by his sensitive intelligence, but each night when the beast asks Belle to marry him, she declines because she’s repulsed by his appearance. One day she leaves the beast to visit her family. She and the beast agree that she’ll return in a week, but when she doesn’t the beast is bereft. In sorrow, he goes into the rose garden and collapses. That is how Belle finds him when she returns, half-dead from heartbreak. Seeing him in this state, she realizes that she truly loves him. Not just as a friend, but
in that way
, and so she professes her love and weeps. When her tears fall onto the beast, he is transformed into a handsome prince.

What I want you to note is that Belle loved the beast when he was still a beast—not a handsome prince. It is only once she loved him that he was transformed. You will be likewise transformed, the same as love transforms us all. But you have to be fearless enough to let it transform you.

I’m not convinced you are just yet. You say that people like you, but don’t consider you a “romantic option.” How do you know that? Have you made overtures and been rebuffed or are you projecting your own fears and insecurities onto others? Are you closing yourself off from the possibility of romance before anyone has the chance to feel romantically toward you? Who are you interested in? Have you ever asked anyone out on a date or to kiss you or to put his or her hands down your pants?

I can tell by your (articulate, honest, sad, strong) letter that you are one cool cat. I’m pretty certain based on your letter alone that a number of people would consider putting their hands down your pants. Would you let one of them? If the
answer is yes, how would you respond once he or she got there? I don’t mean to be a dirty smart-ass (though I am, in fact, a dirty smart-ass). I mean to inquire—without diminishing the absolute reality that many people will disregard you as a romantic possibility based solely on your appearance—about whether you’ve asked yourself if the biggest barrier between you and the romantic hot monkey love that’s possible between you and the people who will—
yes! without question!
—be interested in you is not your ugly exterior, but your beautifully vulnerable interior. What do you need to do to convince yourself that someone might see you as a lover instead of a friend? How might you shut down your impulse to shut down?

These questions are key to your ability to find love, sweet pea. You asked me for practical matchmaking solutions, but I believe once you allow yourself to be psychologically ready to give and receive love, your best course is to do what everyone who is looking for love does: put your best self out there with as much transparency and sincerity and humor as possible. Both online and in person. With strangers and among your circle of friends. Inhabit the beauty that lives in your beastly body and strive to see the beauty in all the other beasts. Walk without a stick into the darkest woods. Believe that the fairy tale is true.

Yours,
Sugar

Dear Sugar
,

I was sexually assaulted at seventeen. I was naïve and I didn’t understand it. Anxiety became a deep part of my life, and it almost pulled me under. Trudging onward was all I could do. I’ve made peace with it
.

I have been dating a great guy for about a year and a half. How do I tell him about my sexual assault? Do I need to? It doesn’t affect my relationship or my day-to-day life, but it was a formative and intense thing and therefore played an important role in shaping who I am today. We’ve been through some emotionally intense events, so I know he’s capable of hearing it. I would love your advice
.

Signed,
Over It

Dear Over It,

I have a friend who is twenty years older than me who was raped three different times over the course of her life. She’s a talented painter of some renown. When I learned about the rapes she’d endured, I asked her how she recovered from them, how she continued having healthy sexual relationships with
men. She told me that at a certain point we get to decide who it is we allow to influence us. She said, “I could allow myself to be influenced by three men who screwed me against my will or I could allow myself to be influenced by van Gogh. I chose van Gogh.”

I never forgot that. I think of that phrase “
I chose van Gogh
” whenever I’m having trouble lifting my own head up. And I thought of it when I read your letter, Over It. You chose van Gogh too. Something ugly happened to you and you didn’t let it make you ugly. I salute you for your courage and grace. I think you should tell your boyfriend about your sexual assault and I think you should tell it straight. What happened. How you suffered. How you came to terms with the experience. And how you feel about it now.

You say this terrible experience no longer impacts your “day-to-day” life, but you also say it played an important role in shaping who you are. The whole deal about loving truly and for real and with all you’ve got has everything to do with letting those we love see what made us. Withholding this trauma from your boyfriend makes it bigger than it needs to be. It creates a secret you’re too beautiful to keep. Telling has a way of dispersing things. It will allow your lover to stand closer inside the circle of you. Let him.

Yours,
Sugar

Dear Sugar
,

My two grown sons, ages thirty-five and twenty-three, have returned to the nest, my home. They didn’t ask. They simply showed up
.

My younger son is going to college, but he hates it. He wants the financial aid money. He drinks, blows weed, watches daytime TV, and plays computer games. His eighteen-year-old girlfriend and their baby are going to move in soon, to fill out my already crowded spare bedroom. (Since the baby is my new grandchild, I’m kind of excited about that.)

My older son is also enrolled in college and is taking it seriously and getting good grades, but he drinks and is very moody and sarcastic to me. I’ve cleaned out my savings to make his car payments and cover his bills
.

I’m a recovering alcoholic and have my own moods. I’m supporting the household with the dollars I can eke out as a writer, which is to say, not much. But I’m resourceful; I use coupons and shop at thrift stores
.

My question is how do I get these men launched in life and out of my house? I want to write in privacy, pace the room in my underwear working out dialogue, research, sing, shake my ass, practice yoga, read, find my things where I left them the night
before, enjoy a fragrant guest bathroom where the toilet seat remains down, eat tofu and oranges, drink green tea—not chips and hoagies. I don’t want to have mayonnaise spilled down the front of the kitchen cabinet. I want to cry over romantic movies and hear Mozart’s greatest hits, pay my bills, buy some bangle bracelets
.

I’m stuck, Sugar. I love these kids. Their father, my ex-husband, died last year and I understand the loss and confusion my sons feel about this. I know the economy is hard. I recognize that building a life, finding someone to love, enjoying life’s many pleasures, is hard work. But I’m afraid my sons are failing in the job of getting on with it. I’m afraid I won’t be able to cover all the expenses. I’m afraid that what I want as I prepare to enter old age won’t be attainable. I’m afraid my sons will never launch. I’m crowded with fear
.

What do you think I should do?

Crowded

Dear Crowded,

One of my earliest memories is also one of my most vivid. I was three and enrolled in a swimming class at the local YMCA. On the first day, I, like all the three-year-olds, was issued what we called a bubble—a flotation device that buckled on around the shoulders and waist and featured an object about the size and shape of a football that was pressed up against my back. This would allegedly keep me afloat. “Don’t worry!” my mother assured me over and over again. “Your bubble will hold you up!”

She said this same thing in various tones, with various degrees of patience and exasperation, week after week as
I clung to the side of the pool, but her words meant nothing. I would not be persuaded to join my peers in the water. I was terrified. I felt certain that if I let go of the wall, I would immediately drown, bubble or not. So each week, I stubbornly stationed myself there while watching my classmates kick themselves around the pool. “See!” my mother would point to them excitedly when they passed.

But I would not be swayed.

On the final day of the class, the parents were meant to swim with their children. My mother put on her suit and sat beside me on the side of the pool and together we dangled our feet in the water, watching the other kids perform the techniques they’d learned. When it was nearly time to leave, she said to me, “How about we just go in the water together? I’ll hold you.”

I was fine with that. That’s how I’d always gone into the water, clinging to my mother, who might gently splash me or bob me up and down until I laughed. So into the water we went. When we got out to the middle of the pool, she convinced me to let her hold only my hands while dragging me through the water, and though, while she did this, I repeatedly begged, “Don’t let me go, don’t let me go,” and she repeatedly promised, “I won’t, I won’t,” in one sudden burst of power, she swirled me around and flung me away from her.

My memory of how it felt to glide through the water without my mother is still so fresh, so visceral, even though it was forty years ago. The sensations were both physical and intellectual. How strange and glorious it was to be anchored to nothing, to be free, in some particular way, for the first time in my life. How quickly I shifted from the shock of my mother’s betrayal to the terror of my new reality to the pure delight of
how it felt to swim. My mother had been right: my bubble held me up.

Of course, I didn’t want to get out of the pool then. I swam around and around, circling my mother, as we laughed with joy and surprise, both of us wishing we’d known sooner that all it took for me to do this was for her to let me go. I swam so long that my mother got out while I swam to and fro, from where she sat on one side of the pool all the way over to the other side of the pool, which seemed then impossibly far. When I got there, I’d look back at her and yell, “I’m on the other side of the pool!” And she’d smile and say yes, there I was—all the way over on the other side of the pool!—and then I’d swim back to her and do it all over again.

I think you need to do a little something like my mom did after her weeks of patience, Crowded. You need to fling your sons away from you so they can learn how to swim. You must tell them to move out. They are not ill. They are not in crisis. They are not children. They are two adults capable of providing for themselves. Their bubbles will hold them up. You must demand that they trust that.

When you tell your sons you will no longer allow them to live in your house, it will probably come as a surprise to them. It is a shock to be flung away from the very person to whom one has clung to for so long. But I’m quite certain it will turn out to be a healthy shift for all of you. Much as your sons no doubt love you, it seems clear to me that they don’t see you as truly separate from them. Your needs matter little because it barely occurs to them that you have any. They moved into your house without asking you because they don’t really consider that house yours—they believe it’s theirs too, that they have a right to it because it belongs to you, their mother.
Theirs
.

They have not separated themselves from you on a fundamental level. They want you to leave them alone and to refrain from telling them how to live, but they have not yet perceived that you have a life of your own too, one that their presence, at this point, thwarts. They don’t yet see you as an adult with a right to privacy and self-determination.

This is not because they are bad men. It’s that they need to go through that final stage of development—one in which the child truly separates from the parent—and it seems they need a push that only you can give. Remember when they were toddlers and everything was “Do it myself! Do it myself!”? I’ve never met your sons, but I’ll guess that like most kids, at a certain stage of development it was important for them to perform tasks that you’d once done for them—opening doors, buckling seat belts, zipping up jackets. Children demand such things because they must, because their very survival depends on their ability to learn how to be self-sufficient.