Posts tagged handle with care
Maggie May
"Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.”
Just finished Handle With Care, By Jodi Picoult. What I like best about Jodi Picoult as an author is that every chapter in her book is in a different characters perspective. This book was about a little girl who has osteogenesis imperfecta, aka brittle bone syndrome. Her whole family is dramatically affected by this, and even her family’s friends. A courtcase evolves around the child’s sickness but one you don’t expect and you don’t expect the defendent to be who it is. Having read previous Jodi Picoult books, I expected a death to finish the book. But I felt like this death wasn’t even a significance to the book, and it would’ve been fine without that ending. Overall I really liked it. I cried at several parts towards the end, but that’s what makes a good book. You get emotionally attatched.
But love wasn’t about sacrifice, and it wasn’t about falling short of someone’s expectations. By definition, love made you better than good enough; it redefined perfection to include your traits, instead of excluding them.
What we all want, really, is to be loved. That craving drives our worst behavior: Charlotte’s insistent belief that you would one day forgive her for the things she said in court, for example. Or my mad chase to Epping. The truth was, I was greedy. I knew that my adoptive parents wanted me more than anything, but it wasn’t enough. I needed to understand why my birth mother hadn’t, and until I did, there would always be a part of me that felt like a failure.
Some guys at the station, they said they knew what they were getting into when they got married. Well I didn’t. it was an adventure and I was okay with that. See, you’re it, for me. You let me take you skiing, and you never mentioned you were afraid of heights. You sleep curled up against me, no matter how far I move to my side of the bed.You let me eat the vanilla half of your dixie cup, and you take my chocolate. You tell me when my socks don’t match. You buy Lucky Charms, because you know I like the marshmallows. You gave me two beautiful girls.
Maybe you expect marriage to be perfect — I guess that’s where you and I are different. See, I thought it would be all about making mistakes but doing it with someone who’s there to remind you what you learned along the way. And I think we were both wrong about something. People always say that, when you love someone, nothing in the world matters. But that’s not true, is it? You know, and I know, that when you love someone, everything in the world matters a little bit more.
The world would be a much easier place if, instead of handing over superstuffed syllables all the time, we just said what we really meant. Words got in teh way. The things we felt the hardest — like what it was like to have a boy touch you as if you were made of light, or what it meant to be the only person in the room who wasn’t noticed — weren’t sentences; they were knots in the wood of our bodies, places where our blood flowed backward. If you asked me, not that anyone ever did, the only words worth saying were I’m sorry.
It was one thing to make a mistake; it was another thing to keep making it. I knew what happened when you let yourself get close to someone, when you started to believe they loved you: you’d be dissapointed. Depend on someone, and you might as well admit you’re going to be crushed, because when you really needed them, they wouldn’t be there. Either that, or you’d confide in them and you added to their problems. All you ever really had was yourself, and that sort of sucked if you were less than reliable.
But how could you forget that this particular “friend” had seen you naked? Had carried your dreams when you were too tired to? You could paint your history over any way you liked but you’d always see those first few brushtrokes.
Part of what I loved about being married to sean was the ease of it — letting him see me when my hair was Medusa-wild in the mornings and kiss me when my teeth weren’t brushed yet, knowing which television show to click on when we sat down with mutual sigh on the couch, instinctively recognizing which drawer housed his underwear or T-shirts or jeans. So much of marriage was implicit and nonverbal. Had I gotten so complacent I’d forgotten to communicate?
But mostly I wondered why the head could move so swiftly while the heart dragged its feet.
They weren’t on my wrists, don’t think I was trying to kill myself. I just wanted to hurt, and understand exactly why I was hurting. This made sense: you cut, you felt pain, period. I could feel everything building up inside of my like steam heat, and I was just turning a valve. It made me think of my mother, when she made her pie crusts. She’d prick the little holes all over the place. So it can breathe, she said. I was just breathing.
Here’s a news flash for the ladies: for every one of you who thinks we all want a girl like Angelina Jolie, all skinny elbows and angles, the truth is, we’d rather curl up with someone like charlotte — a woman who’s soft when a guy wraps his arms around her; a woman who might have a smear of flour on her shirt the whole day and not notice or care, not even when she goes out to meet with the PTA; a woman who doesn’t feel like she’s an exotic vacation but it is the home we can’t wait to come back to.
I did this for five minutes, until I went totally numb. Until I understood why you didn’t cry, even though it hurt: there are kinds of pain you couldn’t speak out loud.
