Cherchez la femme

There is a crushing loneliness that comes with being a widower in your forties. It isn’t like anything I expected.

I live in this small town, the town where she grew up and that is a constant reminder. I moved here to be with her. When she died, our son was six. Her other children were just reaching the end of high school or were well on their way to it. My son knows his grandmother (her mother) very well and she stepped in to care for him in her daughter’s absence. I was faced with a choice.

Leave here to go live near my own family, which is sparse and distant….or remain here, where everything my son had known all his life still resides.

I had a job, I had a life here. So, I stayed.

Today, I say a young mother in the store, pushing a basket that contained a baby seat. She reminded me of my wife as I thought back to how she grew up in this desert town, as poor as you can get in a first world country, struggling with marriage and kids and most certainly money. It is the noble part of her I loved so much. I drive through the desert sometimes, thinking about how, since I grew up in the south and in Texas (two totally different places, let no one tell you different), she will always haunt me here. It was and still is, her place. She made me aware of it, she drew me to it, she lived with me in it.

A simple act of hitting a store for some necessaries for your son can turn into heart wrenching thing. I used to go to that store all the time, with her. For her. For her children, for things I’ll never remember. Tights for dance classes, baby wipes, diapers, school supplies, clothes and on and on. Then, there is the simple truth that, when I’m done there, I don’t take these things back to her. She’s not there. No one is.

You take everything for granted, see. I would have given anything today to be standing there next to the basket, totally bored, waiting for her to find the right size underwear for our son on the rack. I would have given anything to be able to drive with her out of town, make a trip to the book store we both loved and spent an hour showing each other books we liked.

I grew up thinking that women were some kind of redemption. It is a dangerous thing to believe, I know now. But, in many ways, I still believe it. I still believe that loving a woman can make me more than I am. I write about it all the time, in fiction. To feel this emptiness all around me is like a muzzle on some deep seated part of myself I can’t let go. The woman I loved is gone. Either I will find a new woman to love, or I will find a way to live with this empty space.

I want what everyone wants in a relationship, but have I lost the chance to experience it? I analyze my motivation constantly. I live in a world that alternates between optimism for the future and agony for the past. That’s why I write here. A huge part of me wants to leave the agony in the past, but as long as I am alone, it will gnaw at me.

And then we arrive at the topic of sex. Sheesh, don’t get me started.

No sex for three years. I don’t think people in the general sense can truly understand how difficult that is for a dude. I hate to sound callous, but this is a large part of the reason men get married in the first place. Access to the body of a woman. When that is gone, I am not ashamed to say how much that fucks with the male brain. Back when I was younger, doing things a younger man did, my friends and I developed a term for the male condition when he has gone long enough without. We called it The Mad Desert. I believe it was a year without sexual contact, and you could consider yourself in this mystical place of deprivation, where you wander like a thirsty nomad and have awful hallucinations of evil gnomes mocking your lack of getting any.

It’s very much like my last entry where I talked about paying a woman just to be nice to me. That should exist, by the way. There should be kindness whores. Women who have no expectation of sex placed upon them, but sit there and talk and be nice to you. The male brain, I believe, equates the kindness of a woman, with the idea of her being a sexual prospect. I hate to burst bubbles if any exist, but it’s true. Just that much can make a man get off his ass and do productive things, rather than wallow in what he lacks.

And sex itself is the best gift a woman can give a man. It is the driving force of practically everything that happens in humanity. When a woman gives her body over to a man, he is no longer a wanderer. He receives a kind of purpose. And purpose is everything to a man.

I frequently feel, these days, like I have no purpose other than being a father to my boy. Maybe that’s plenty, but my own sense of myself is lost in that circumstance. I have life to live yet. I have things to do, that I want to do. It may be that I have to find a way to manufacture them without the company of a woman. But, the task feels much more daunting.

There’s a line in one of my favorite books ….’cherchez la femme’….follow the woman. Look for the woman. It means follow the woman to find the answer to the mystery. Wherever that takes you. It can take you to dark places and I have been to them. It also motivates the male heart like nothing else. It is one of the keys to his feeling alive.

We may have had a stormy, often dysfunctional relationship…but she made me feel more alive then than I do now without her.

I want to feel that way again…even if it hurts.