“So…” I began awkwardly. “Do you like girls now or something?”
“No,” responded my 12-year-old brother. Then after a pause he said, “But I don’t hate them.”
I laughed.
He countered and asked, “What, do you like boys now or something?”
“No,” I said. “But, I don’t hate them.”
It’s true. After three years of being single, swearing off men and calling them the equivalent of the antichrist, I have come to a place where I can honestly say that I, Sharon Yi, do not hate men.
Well, of course there are many other words to describe how I may feel of them. Irritated, disgusted, appalled could be a few.
“We broke up,” she said.
I nodded, unsurprised. “When?” I asked.
The next hour was spent listening to the two weeks that led up to her, what I knew to be inevitable, relationship’s end. He was never right for her. He was never ready. And through twists and turns and one year, she finally came to the same conclusion and broke up with him.
She is 52 years old. She is my mother.
I used to believe that love was a work of fiction. That it, like it’s fellow fiction counterparts, lived and solely existed in worlds of unicorns, elves and fairy dust. I read about love in novels and saw it on the big screen as it made Kate throw that gigantic blue diamond into the sea forever gone with Leo whom she promised she would never let go.
Like love, I believed heartbreak was also fictional. A concoction created by the sappy dramatic Stephenie Meyers of the world. That is until I felt spasms in my chest feeling an acute deprivation of oxygen when clearly there was plenty, beating my chest in some intangible desperate attempt to stop the very real pain in what I could only describe as heartbreak.
And so it was real. Heartbreak was real. But love – could that be real too? Growing up under the remnants of a broken marriage due to an unloving wife and a cheating husband, the existence of love in all the definitions of the word seemed truly to only exist in Disney happy ever afters.
And with the “christian” relationships surrounding me I can only further build my argument, adding evidence upon evidence proving that relationships do not work and love does not prevail. Watching what seemed like the world around me each succumbing to a relationship I would deem less than desirable.
I felt that I was always strong in this respect. Independent, unwavering, adept at seeing boys as the luminous beast threatening to envelope me choking me into unclarity. I was strong – I withstood.
But perhaps what I thought was my strength was my weakness in charade. Maybe what I’m running from is not men, or pain, but my inevitable sin. As much as I judge and berate others who have disappointing relationships, I wondered maybe I don’t trust myself enough to carry through a perfect relationship either. And, if somehow I pulled it off and made it to my wedding day, the sudden lack of guidance and rules and the eternal (till death) commitment to just this one other man, I feel, would throw me into catatonic panic.
Panic.
If love was real, then what I was abstaining from – what I thought my strength was in – is effectively inverted. My strength now my weakness, turning my insistence on an actuality I dubbed to be fake into something very real and simultaneously out of reach.
As my mom finished relating the end of yet another failed relationship, she then talked about business, which led to money, which inexplicably led to the need to save for my upcoming wedding.
“There will be no wedding. I am not getting married,” I said, defiant.
She scoffed.
“Maybe I’m not meant for marriage, mom. Paul didn’t even want us to get married. Maybe I’m called to celibacy,” repeating my usual tirade of the blessedness of single-hood with Apostle Paul as my poster boy.
Then my mother, single again after ten years of single-hood post-divorce, said to me, “Don’t deny. Just pray.”
On my first day in Ghana I was homesick. I was homesick every night. I was homesick all the time. Homesickness though clearly a feeling, like heartbreak, is very much physical. It starts in your center and hotly spreads leaving an emptiness in its wake, making you cringe inside.
I’m homesick now.
“It’s cause your lonely,” my mom said.
You know, if fashion design doesn’t work out for her, she can always turn to therapy.
