sometimes i said something i wanted to be heard...to read the poem of which i speak, Bitterness

07-02-00
an email inspired by a response to my poem "Bitterness"

in my life i have loved more than once, and even more than one man who did not love me too. so it goes. just like 40 came and went, accompanied by (what i believe to be) extraordinary circumstances, lifestyle changes, catastrophes, disasters, loss...coming on the tail of eight or so years of divorce during which my primary concern was the raising of people and the best description i could fit to my "romantic" life came from ABC's song "The Look of Love:" strange arrangements.

"Bitterness" represents perhaps more than anything, in terms of my personal development, the first acknowledgment of its parasitic, growth-stunting qualities. practically speaking, i had been living under the thumb of "bitterness" for quite some time, and it not only did not make me happy or make me feel good about myself, it precluded me from experiencing the greatest joy, pretending it was saving me from being hurt again. when in reality for someone like myself, that translates to forever daily hurt, half life, pretensed numbness that was never real enough for me to say, "I don't care," without knowing that i was lying.

eventually i began to regard it as a mortal enemy, and i could see among many of my women friends how it had truncated their capacity for happiness - but, i thought, they let it! because other of my friends had suffered too, even at the hands of men (nah! not men! lol), yet they maintained their openness. through many ups and downs and ins and outs, fits and starts, loves and losses, i observed that the bitter-infected ones were plain miserable, even when they were happy - because bitterness had convinced them that their happiness would never last, while the women who had managed to beat bitterness in spite of the facts still, it seemed to me, had a chance to achieve happiness - to love and be loved with so much feeling that it seems to demand the recognition of a different plane of experience. in other words to really love and be loved. and this love i knew was what i wanted and what i believed would represent the fulfillment of my purposes...allow the completion of my growth.

it may not happen in my life - it may yet. i have my children and my grandchildren and my life is better minus bitterness with or without someone to love who loves me too. not that it doesn't threaten and tease, not that i haven't experienced pain so gratuitous that it made bitterness seem like a sage and a prophet, just that i know its true character and have resolved never to kowtow to it again. love is the antithesis...

- posted by barbara @ 4/19/2002 08:43:00 PM