It was interesting, hearing my boyfriend talk about one night when I fell asleep in his arms. He described it as holding someone in a total state of tenseness. And, little by little, limb by limb, my body slowly relaxed until he knew I'd finally drifted off into a peaceful sleep.
I remember the feel of him, pressed up against me - warmth and safety wrapped around me with arms and legs in a calm, quiet strength. I could feel his breath on my neck, and as I listened to him breathe, I remember feeling my body slowly let go of whatever it was still clinging to.
Nearly a month later, I had lunch with a friend. We talked about what it was like to go to bed at night when we were kids. I don't even know how the subject came up but it did. We came from vastly different backgrounds yet had similar memories of feeling a heightened sense of insecurity.
In my house, it wasn't that I feared for bodily harm or violence. It was the palpable silence, the quiet in my house that I felt deep in my core.
You see, I grew up around a lot of quiet. A lot of silence. A lot of tense moments, strung together so often that it felt normal. And I learned to live in the silence, even as much as I couldn't embrace it.
By the time I have really any memories of my parents, they were already unhappy in their marriage.
My dad was incredibly unhappy at his job.
My mom was trying to earn her college degree and balance being a present parent.
My brother struggled with depression.
I lived in a house that was simply unsettled. The kind of quiet that feels heavy. All the time. And the only time the quiet is ever broken is the random argument or disagreement between parents or kids or parents and their kids.
Sure, we took vacations, we ate dinner together, we went fishing and sailing. But even in all of those memories, there's mostly just quiet. Not a calm quiet, a tense quiet.
This is what I remember the most about growing up in my house. Don't rock the boat. Don't do the wrong thing. Do your best. Don't ask for more than you need. Be good. Don't share your feelings or your emotions. Just. Be. Happy.
I know it probably wasn't always that way. It is, however, what I remember the most about our day to day lives. And then it's no surprise that I learned to fall asleep with every muscle in my body as tight as it could be. Just waiting for the other shoe to drop.
As an adult, I found myself in a 22 year relationship (20 of those married) with a very kind man. I can't, and won't, disparage his character - there is nothing to disparage. It takes two people to make a relationship work, just as much as it takes two to make it not work. I own my part in the ending of things.
Both of us came into the union with our own baggage, our own hurts, and our own communication styles. And as I reflect back on those 22 years, now I see that I sought out a partner that gave me what felt familiar: silence.
I was well accustomed to not asking for what I needed by the time we got married, and due to his experiences he was also used to the silence too. Years upon years piled on, the silent stretches grew longer and more frequent.
The familiar, yet unsettling feeling of sitting in that silence and knowing in my core that something was wrong, someone wasn't happy, someone was upset or angry or didn't want to talk to me settled deep into my bones becoming its own kind of marrow, refusing to leave and becoming a part of me like my brown hair, freckles and gangly limbs.
I find myself now looking back on a lot of my formative years, trying to understand the woman I've become. Outwardly, I appear to be a strong, competent, confident woman. And I am. Yet, on the inside, I'm still a little girl. I still wish everyone could get along. That I could make everyone happy.
And even still today, I fear, more than anything else, the soul-crushing, eerie, yet thunderous sound of silence.
It is probably one of the hardest parts for me about dating in my 50's, and probably, in dating me. I need more checking in and communication than a normal person should.
I've been blessed with an overthinking brain and an incredibly overactive imagination. Coupled with everything else I've disclosed, it's a recipe for extreme anxiety. I tend to over-analyze every conversation, every date, every text when the silence closes in around me.
And, when I don't hear from my boyfriend for a day or two (which is not unusual with his incredibly busy and demanding grind of a work schedule) every self doubt I have, every silence filled moment, every deeply hidden yet waiting in the wings belief that I have that I'm unlovable floods my brain.
I worry that maybe I said the wrong thing and he's upset. I think maybe my neediness is too much. I start to believe that he's going to walk away.
Because that is what 50 years of living in the silence has taught me: silence means something is wrong. Even much as the silence feels familiar, I'm no longer willing or able to live in it.
From the first time we met when I played one of my "crazy" cards, as I call them, he showed up.
As I drove away from our first date, a long walk on the greenbelt beside the river, the smell of fresh rain and cottonwoods surrounding us, I heard that little girl inside of me whisper quietly and cutting through my fearful, overthinking silence "he was the calm in your storm today."
I don't have a crystal ball to know what my future holds, with my relationship or my job or anything else for that matter. But what I do know is that I am learning more about myself through all of this.
And I am (slowly) learning how to sit in the stormy silence just as much as I am slowly learning to share what I need with someone I trust to meet me halfway.
I hope someday I can start to trust the silence too, to quiet my soul and just breathe in the gratitude I feel for a life well-lived and for the incredible circle of people that surround me every day.
But for now, I'm going to embrace progress, not perfection (something else my boyfriend once remarked) and appreciate that I will, always and forever be, a work in progress.
And I will learn to sit in the silence and trust that it doesn't always mean something is wrong.
