Retrospect

I was cleaning out my basement the other day and came across a whole bunch of stuff from my university days.

Flipped through a number of my term papers, some of which I now realise were complete and utter horse manure. No wonder I got so many B plusses during my academic career. Well, what could one expect given that I would be frantically pounding the conclusion out on my typewriter at sunrise on the due date?

Two things I found that made me realise I've come a long way since my early twenties:

Firstly, I unearthed a file folder containing copious amounts of correspondence from an old boyfriend. We were together initially for a year, spent a year apart and then got back together briefly. He used to write me notes quite a bit, both when we were together and when we were apart. Sentimental person that I am, I kept each and every one of his letters. I flipped through and read a few of them as I stood in my dimly lit furnace room. It was hard to believe that there was once so much love professed between the two of us, and so much pain involved around the extricating of one from the other. I remember when we first broke up, I felt as though a part of me had been wrenched violently away. It took me years to get over this man.

Now, re-reading his letters, I felt strangely divorced from both him and that part of my life. It was as though I was reading something belonging to someone else. I wondered if I should dispose of the file lest one day my kids come across it and realise that there had been someone else before their dad. Would it crush them to know that their mother had once upon a time contemplated marrying another man?

As I continued to root around in the box, I also came across a couple of my journals from university. I flipped to the pages which contained my thoughts before I began first year, as well as those from the early months. It was weird because a great number of entries dealt with my feelings about this one guy that I'd had this on again, off again pseudo-relationship (polite term for random sexual encounters). I spent hours ripping my hair out trying to decipher what he was feeling and thinking when he would insist that he really cared about me, but that he wanted to remain just friends (this after we'd slept together) and didn't want to get tied down with a relationship. He kept telling me that he was seeing other girls, but would get upset when he would see me with other guys. Stupidly, I took this to be a good sign -- evidence of his feelings for me, instead of some stupid male territorial issue. The journal entries are rife with paragraphs devoted towards analysing what his fear of commitment denoted and how I should just be patient and show him how much I cared. As an older, wiser and far more experienced woman, I had to resist the urge to shriek scathing recriminations to my younger self. "Just how stupid were you to let him treat you that way?"

The crushing blow came when, without warning, he suddenly acquired a girlfriend -- nice girl with all the right credentials (i.e.very unlike me, i.e. virgin), and I was therefore forced to come to the conclusion that he didn't have strong objections to relationships in general, but that he just didn't want one with me.

It was moderately painful reading some of this stuff as it was proof positive that I'd once been either naive enough or insecure enough to allow someone to jerk me around for a prolonged period of time. I also couldn't believe that I was so stupid as to bill it as being patient and perseverant, as though what I was doing was an act of virtuosity rather than one of complete idiocy.

It's very difficult when you have to stop and consider how much crap you've taken in your life that you shouldn't have. During the course of my yearlong relationshp with my letter-writing boyfriend, I also endured certain things without complaint or comment which I now wouldn't even put up with on a single date.

So where does this propensity for being the grateful recipient of ill treatment come from?

While I don't have regrets about much in my life (even the fact that I had those two relationships), since all of what we experience is what brings us to the point where we are today, and I wouldn't want to trade on where I am today for anything, I still worry about why it is that I didn't consider my needs to be as important as those of others. Given that I have this kind of a past, how do I teach my kids? What if one day they let someone walk all over them because they don't feel secure enough or good enough to demand better treatment? How can a fish teach a fledgling to fly?