The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays

I need you to know: I hated that I needed more than this from him. There is nothing more humiliating to me than my own desires. Nothing that makes me hate myself more than being burdensome and less than self-sufficient. I did not want to feel like the kind of nagging woman who might exist in a sit-com.

There are worse things than not receiving love. There are sadder stories than this. There are species going extinct, and a planet warming. I told myself: Who are you to complain, you with these frivolous extracurricular needs?

For years, I have convinced myself that love is meant to be an act of extreme and transformative caretaking. And so I’ve been more savior than partner. More robot than girl. More nurse than lover.

People know how it goes. It’s harder to tell the story of how I convinced myself I didn’t need what was necessary to survive. How I convinced myself it was my lack of needs that made me worthy of love.

The point was that we both understood how easy it is to let your life pass along, totally in book, unless you take a risk, disrupt the expected patterns, and try to make something human happen.

How can we be surrounded by friends of many genders and still have people look at us and think that because we are unpartnered, we are alone? Sometimes even we forget.

If this man is in a band, and he often is, he is most likely the lead guitarist. If he is not in a band, he is still, spiritually, the lead guitarist.

We cruised past small islands, families of pink roseate spoonbills, garbage tankers swarmed by seagulls, blowing fields of grass and wolfberries, and I realized it was not that remarkable for a person to understand what another person needed.

What I understood on the other side of my decision, on the Gulf, was that there was no such thing as ruining yourself. There are ways to be wounded and ways to survive those wounds but no one can survive denying their own needs. To be a crane wife is unsustainable.

That I wouldn’t even let myself imagine receiving as much as I’d hoped for.

The average person, when encountering such a man, will think, Oh, boy, and keep a distance. They will not have figured this man out, per se, but the fact of the man seeming mysterious, seeming to have something up with him, is not a thing that is intriguing to them. They do not feel the need to find out what is up. They have a suspicion that, whatever is up, it will not bring them joy or peace to know about it. And for this reason, they go no further.

The Story rules are coming from inside the house. And the house always wins.

I'm starting to think that living a dramatic, story-worthy life and happiness are, at worst, mutually exclusive, and, at best, giving each other a run for their money.

It’s harder to tell the story of how I convinced myself I didn’t need what was necessary to survive. How I convinced myself it was my lack of needs that made me worthy of love. After cocktail hour one night, in the cabin kitchen, I told Lindsay about how I’d blown up my life.

In the driveway of the old house,I released my biological family from my unreasonable expectations of how much we could possibly be to one another. How much I expected them to teach me.Do for me. And this freed them to be what they actually are to me. Which is plenty

This wasn’t what I hoped he would say. But it was what was being offered. And who was I to want more?

Who would I fall in love with, who would I have sex with, if I wasn’t imagining that person as a parent to my someday child? If I took that off the table? Would I have dated the people I dated if I didn’t imagine them someday being part of my future life, in which I imagined myself being a parent?” “I think the answer might be no. I can’t decide whether this line of thinking is the most obvious thing in the world or if it is truly and deeply unsettling.

Because I wanted to keep my body full of possibilities. I didn’t want to risk defining what it was or wasn’t too specifically in case what I made of it wasn’t what someone, someday, wanted or needed from me. These imaginary lovers. These imaginary children. That my body is for me, is mine, that my body does not have to please others, has been a hard thing to understand. It is a thing I’ve been working on for a long time. My piercings and tattoos have helped. They are little flags I use to settle the land of my body. To claim it for myself. Mine, I say. I do with you what I please. Mine, and I don’t care what someone else thinks of this. Someone who sees me tomorrow. Some imaginary someone someday. This has nothing to do with them. I plant a flag. Another. This is mine.

For a while, having these sorts of “epiphanies” convinced me I was going to be okay. Because I knew things now. And yes, knowing how warped I had been in the past was important—but identifying a problem, and then knowing the solution, and then putting that solution into practice, it turns out, are not all one wholesale kit and fucking caboodle.

This is a sad story only inasmuch as stories about people like me, who delude themselves, are sad. So maybe it’s not so sad at all. I tried to help Joey because I thought that without the distraction of all his miseries—which seemed to me so easily solvable—he would finally love me properly. He would take care of me the way I’d been taking care of him. I would fix and fix and fix until he was able to notice that I was standing there, hoping to be loved. But of course it doesn’t work that way.

Meeting this kind of man activates an impulse. It is not lust. It certainly isn’t love. It’s the sense that someone has fallen by the wayside and I am the only Samaritan around who might stop. That perhaps by virtue of noticing or being intrigued by him, I am uniquely suited to helping—practically obligated, in fact. I can save this man, I tell myself. My method for doing this is by dating him. None of this is reasonable or wise or kind. These men have not asked for help. They have issued no SOS. I am a bit like the Defense Department, deploying troops to some new country I insist needs my help to become democratic and peaceful and free. I occupy the land. I misunderstand the local culture. I create new policies and systems no one asked for. I bungle things. I buy a leather jacket and put up a MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner and will later regret both. I stay too long. Only years later do I slink away in a defeat I refuse to call defeat.

How do we talk about the loss of a thing for which their is no word? The lack of a word implies that it was never anything. It was never real.

What were you told had to happen in a story for it to feel complete?

My father has always loved me in ways I felt and knew and could rely on, and if that doesn't sound radical to you, doesn't seem worth writing about, you're wrong. To have a person, any person, in this life, who offers you that kind of love is a goddamn miracle. It's more than most of us get.

I accepted these cheap placeholders for any kind of realer, deeper understanding of who I was or might be. You never got to choose freely. All you could do was pick from the options presented to you.

Lindsay said it was brave not to do a thing just because everyone expected you to do it.