SoulMates: The Blessed Few

I was blog surfing among the widowed recently and came across a very touching, heartfelt post about soul mates. As my regular readers know, I don’t really believe in the concept. The idea there is just one perfect counterpart for us in all of existence as we suppose we know it just seems ridiculous especially in light of the fact that many people lose partners go on to happy and fulfilling relationships.

My great-grandfather lost his first wife in childbirth after ten years of marriage. He was crushed. He literally gave away their five children and wandered like a Hebrew for over twenty years. Never settled anywhere for long. Went into and fell out of numerous careers. Spent years on end so out of touch with his family that no one can say for sure where he was or what he was up to for at least half of the twenty years he spent on his own before meeting his second wife, my great-grandmother, and the mother of  his six youngest children. When she died of breast cancer not long after their 19 year old daughter also died of breast cancer, Granddaddy simply allowed himself to be shuffled between my grandfather and his remaining sisters*. Her death snuffed the spirit she’d rekindled with her love.

Who was Granddaddy Christie’s soul mate? Based on his reaction to the losses and my understanding of the term, I would have to say both women were. It flies in the Disney princess theory of soul mates so heavily marketed in our society, the notion that we have just the one shot. It defies the reality that many, many people never mate at all. The numbers of single people who have never married have never been higher and are increasing all the time. Is there a soul mate shortage, perhaps? Does the creator play favorites?**

The blogger, and one of the commenter’s, seemed to think that only a very select group of people are blessed with soulmates, leaving me to wonder what they think the rest of us have in terms of relationships. Are we simply filling voids with warm bodies? Settling? And does this mean that people who never marry at all are lesser beings in the eyes of whatever god they espouse? Is there an unworthiness factor in play?

Not wanting to pursue remarriage does not confer special status on one’s former union, nor  does it mean that, if one chose, one couldn’t find another mate who fits seamlessly – and I understand from experience the difficulties in play. It simply means that, for whatever reason, a person isn’t interested in a future that includes marrying again. It’s not mystical. Why the need to dress it up with soul mate mumbo jumbo? And by doing so make assumptions about other people’s relationships? Is it just the grief talking? Or a Queen Gertrude thing? Protesting too much because maybe the soul mate thing is just a Madison Avenue invention and it’s too hard to go there after a loss?

I am touchy where this topic is concerned. When this “soul mate” thing is bandied about, it feels like judgement. The same way the second class widow status conferred on remarried widowed people by so many of our small peer group is judgement. Either Will wasn’t my soul mate at all or Rob is me just settling, and it’s so much more complicated than that. And it doesn’t take me – the person I was or the person I have become – into account at all. I become a passive princess. Snow White. Sleeping Beauty. Life assesses and assigns based on a mysterious set of criteria that have nothing to do with who I am.

And it also judges Rob and I in terms of our commitments to Shelley and Will, questioning them at best and nullifying them at worst.

I don’t think anyone means to denigrate other people’s choices or lives when they bring up the soul mate topic or go on about being unable to “replace” perfection. When one loses a mate, one wants to feel there was meaning and a point to the other’s life and that their union counted for something more. It’s natural to latch onto ideas like soul mates and heaven. It’s comforting. But the soul mates idea limits and denies and it seems like cold comfort, but that’s just my opinion.

 

*By this point the breach caused by his abandonment of his older children had been healed, in a large part due to intervention by Johanna, my great-grandmother. She made the effort to include them and saw to it that her children had unlimited contact with the children of her step-children (some of the older boys were actually older than Johanna and married with kids by then). Some of my dad’s best friends growing up and as a young man were his uncles’ children and grandchildren. Odd, I suppose, but this is my model and probably why I don’t find remarriage and blending as abhorrent as many seem to. Nothing is impossible where good parenting, respect and love are concerned.

**I actually think that he does. And if you believe in the “created in God’s image” thing, I wonder how he managed to pull off such a image of perfection because a perfect God couldn’t possible create imperfect beings. But then I also don’t believe that perfection was what he was going for.

John Cusack or Are Romantic Comedies Evil?

My husband pointed me in the direction of a recent study which asserts that romantic comedies aka “chick flicks” are more than just the bane of his existence.

“Why do I always let you pick the movie?” he asked, the thin air really, when I chose Must Love Dogs out of a stack of mostly John Cusack movies last evening.

The Journey of My Soul

I met Susan at the bed and breakfast she runs with her husband while Rob and I were on our recent honeymoon trip to the States. She is hoping to retire to soon to Montana. Her favorite place in the world is the area around Boseman. As I listened to her talking, I wondered what it would be like to be attached to a spot/location as she was. Rob’s spot is a bit less fixed, but he yearns for the mountains and the solitude that lets him recharge his inner reserves. Many of my relatives on my mother’s side seem to have an affinity for Arizona around Mesa. My late husband Will loved the Boy Scout camp in New Mexico where he spent his teenage summers, hiking and camping. My daughter’s favorite spot right now is my parent’s home where she can run in and out freely and play with neighbor children. I haven’t any place where I feel affinity or miss when I am away. My home perhaps but I have lived in many apartments and houses over the course of my life. Wherever I was living was my base, but I didn’t miss the structures terribly when I moved on. I have a fondness for my first real house. The one I bought myself, where eventually Will and I lived for a time, but I don’t long for it. I love our house now, but I could move to another location and be just as happy. My blog friend Tanja wrote a piece about leaving her home in the U.S. for her home country of the Netherlands and how difficult it was seeming, and while I intellectually get what she is talking about, I didn’t feel any great loss for the house or the Des Moines area. A few people there truly matter but house is just wood and cement and probably a whole lot of PVC materials.

 

I wonder if this makes me odd? So many people have places they cannot leave. On Easter Sunday I listened to my sister, aunt and brother-in-law discuss a situation involving a cousin and his wife. His company is pulling up stakes and relocating in Mexico. They offered him a position and practically speaking he can’t really turn it down with only 6 years to full retirement and the economy being what it is. She won’t move. She has lived her whole life in the small Wisconsin area that most of her and my cousin’s family has called home for generations. Even for six years. Even when financial security for their not so far away old age is at stake. She refuses to think about. My brother-in-law saw merit in her choice. Snapped at me for suggesting she should “suck it up” as six years in not much time in the grand scheme. But my brother-in-law is also of the vein of those who cannot leave their roots.

 

I left home at 18 for college and never came back but for visits. I felt the initial homesickness of someone that age, but honestly preferred what I found away from my hometown. When the time came to decide where the relationship Rob and I had was heading, I knew that it was with him and in Canada. Relocating outside the U.S. was disorienting for a bit but ultimately there was never a question of not doing it. And though I feel more at home in Canada than I have anywhere in my life, that is Rob and not the geology.

 

Perhaps I find my place with the people I am most connected to? If so, I have scarcely ever been connected. Will and now Rob. My daughter. My niece Julie who I have seen since a family adopted her at age two and taken far away and out of my life. Which brings me to my journey. I have felt for most of my life that I was in a holding pattern, waiting. And while I waited I was there for someone else. My mother as she struggled with her marriage to an alcoholic. Certain friends along the way where my primary job was to listen. Teaching was certainly about others because as good as I was and as fulfilling that it could be at times, there was always a sense that I had another and more personal calling. My life with Will was about him. Being his happily ever after. Protecting him. Ensuring that he wouldn’t suffer at the end of his life. Katy, I think, was sent to help me – give me purpose and comfort in her own little girl way. She was told me that she chose me to be her mother twice, once before and now.

 

Rob is a reconnection. I feel home in him and a sense of union that seems to have been lacking in my life since before I could name it. What our twining of paths means is yet to be fully discovered and the place that will be most significant in our journey is still to be found. Will that place be THE place? The house I will long for when I am away from it? I don’t know. I think I am a people person, which is ironic given the dearth of people to whom I am close and even interact with beyond the most superficial of levels. Rob and I are the same in that way. We really have no friends. Well, I have a couple but he has no real friends – he tells me this often. In the Journey of Souls, it talks about younger souls needing to be greeted after death by many of the souls they were closest to in their lives – current and past because it helped ease the initial shock. Older and more advanced souls had fewer and eventually no one to great them. Does this carry over into our mortal time? The numbers of fellow travelers is in proportion to where we are on our soul journey? Maybe we lose our sense of location attachment. As we progress we begin to focus mainly on those who are important. People are more important than things be they possession or places.