Love, and Limits

Well, my kitty-cat has been found. Bijou, the light of my life, is home. Disgruntled, because she can't go out yet. I keep telling her "Soon, my sweet", and she glares at me. But the memory of her recent foray into the wilds of NDG haunts both of us, so she's not nearly so put-out as she makes out!

And I am beginning to believe in the miraculous once more. I mean, face it - how many times have YOU heard of cats actually making it home alive in an urban environment? "The Cat Came Back" is a horrible song about a shocking case of animal abuse, and it depicts a situation so far from the truth it's ridiculous.

But I digress...

While my heart was broken and I was busy sobbing about the loss of my kitty, and along with it, the loss of my marriage, home, parents, etc etc etc, I chanced to wail into Hubby's ear, "Why oh why didn't I just keep her inside? Why didn't I just stick with the leash?"

Surprisingly, Hubby came back with a very gentle and understanding answer.

"You hate limits," he said quietly. "On anything. You've always had a problem with limits."

And what food for thought that was.

I always thought Love knew no limits. I discovered over the past five years that it does. Because we're human. I still love Hubby very much, and he still loves me. But we each have our own personal limits we are not prepared to compromise, limits neither of us can "get over". These aren't arbitrary or stubborn decisions we've made in order to get our own way. These are fundamental aspects of our personalities that are simply irreconcilable, much to our dismay. We have each asked the other to keep to certain limits, and neither of us can meet the other's expectations.

We didn't know this when we started out. Either love was in truth blind, or there are some things you simply have to live through in order to understand your own preferences. In order to know what your own limits are. Nobody can see this kind of stuff coming - we are all, at one time or another, blindsided by life's experiences.

I recently participated in a research project. It was easy, I answered an online questionnaire and had a telephone interview. The student doing the research kindly sent me a copy of the thesis, and I was shocked to find out I was the only one of all the people interviewed who insisted on choosing my own pseudonym.

At the time the interviewer asked me whether I wanted to choose my own pseudonym or whether I'd let her choose one for me, I thought in the back of my mind "Who on earth would let anyone choose a name for them?!" and I said, "I have my own pseudonym."

But when I read that I was the ONLY ONE, it gave me pause for quite a few thoughts.

Just how hard-to-get-along-with am I, for goddsake?!

Maybe everybody else has been right, my whole life long! Maybe it has been ME....

Maybe my marriage failed because I was uncompromising. Didn't feel like it, but then, who among us is capable of that kind of objectivity in such an intimate setting?

Maybe I just am stubborn, argumentative, unyielding, difficult.

"You've always had a problem with limits," Hubby had said to me, and I realized, yes I have. I don't respect any limits that I don't personally agree with. Fortunately for me, speed limits, laws, most customs fall in that range.

But I have been a bit of a non-conformist, for all that. I guess it's the creative side poking through the holes in my reasoning. I did make up my mind quite some time ago to "Laugh, Live, Love" or something like that. I tend to find myself outside the mainstream of public opinion or behavioural norms most of the time. I've gotten used to being something of an outsider. To getting in trouble at work. I need to understand WHY. And if you can't make me understand, I've got no use for your rule.

No, I don't like limits.

And Bijou, my sweet kitty, is a good example of that. She was SO HAPPY, playing in the grass outside. Doing that thing that young cats do, that I call "teleporting", a cross between a jump and a hop. attacking one bug after another, oblivious to the rest of the world around her. She wiggled out of her harness and proved to me she would come home. Only then, one night, she didn't.

She was gone for six full days. I felt like I'd been cut in half. I couldn't do anything. I'd wander around, just missing her. And bemoaning the fact that I let her out. Why did I let her out?

Because I knew she loved being outside.

Why didn't I keep her on a leash?

Because I thought she could find her way, because I don't like leashes either. Because cats like to be free - as free to come and go as we are, in fact. It's not for nothing they end up being poked and studied in labs. Their brains work an awful lot like ours. We don't like being held captive, and neither do they. We don't like being commanded to do things, neither do they. And we love to be outside on a nice sunny day, just like them.

I didn't want to put limits on my cat. I associated it with putting limits on my love for her. And I want to love without limits.

Well, I am putting limits on her, for now. For now, no going outside on her own for a couple of weeks. Harness and leash, and boy, will they be tight!

And gradually I'll let her ago again, after she's become very familiar with our new home. Right now though, I have to protect her from her own inexperience. I must impose limits on her, to keep her safe, long enough for her to be able to find her own way.

And one day, there will be no more limits.

And it's the same way with our children. And our partners. We can't just dive in assuming we'll be able to swim, to navigate treacherous waters. I dove in, in my recently-broken marriage, and so did Hubby. And we made a pretty good go of it, for fourteen years. I don't look on that time as a failure. Lots of it was great fun. It wasn't all sad.

But with 20/20 hindsight, we might not have married had we taken the time to experience the beginning stages of a relationship, had we moved a little slower. We didn't, we were a couple of love-struck fools, and we rushed in where angels fear to tread, yada yada yada... With 20/20 hindsight, we might have found the points where our hard limits clashed, had we given ourselves a little more time before moving in together, becoming a blended family overnight. It might have made it a little easier on both of us, and on the children.

Well, you can't tell young couples anything, can you? We were in love, we weren't thinking. Had we "put on the brakes" - had we even TOUCHED the brakes - we might just have been able to overcome our difficulties differently, and maybe we wouldn't have spent 14 years together, or maybe we'd be spending 50....

But there is no turning back the clock. And that's a hard limit.