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Saturday, March 4, 2023
Do you remember your second love?
Maybe, maybe not, but I’m certain that everyone remembers their first.
First love, of course …
First date, first kiss, first car, the first day of school, first marriage, first job – who could forget or would want to?
I am jumping around – and I expect everyone has a list like this, not all inclusive, not in priority, and not in sequence.
Our lives begin with birth.
After that, everything is sequential for them, their path alone …
But, everybody takes their first step after their first bite of solid food and long before their first day of school.
My point that we all remember a lot of firsts is that we call them all firsts until they happen again in the case of good memories, great ones too. When a second happening of something eclipses the previous best experience, the second love replaces the first by a factor of X. After that, all those superlatives we previously felt about the first diminish in most cases, but for many others, never.
Readers, be warned, this is a one-sided view, my view, of the positives and strong feelings – not ignoring the existence of mistakes that I’ve made, hurts I’ve caused, and many failures to live up to what was expected of me, or needed from me at which I failed …
As I am most days, I’m focused on the positive here.
For example, my first love came with a first kiss on a third date, and lots of other firsts followed, which then eclipsed my first date memories.
And that first break-up was hard to get over. Eventually, I did. Pleasant memories from way back when linger – not from long ago angst when youthful stupidity, poor judgement and hormones drove every semi-sweet choice.
Fast forward a life, is a highlight reel with screaming sound effects, and the firsts and seconds of things, many of which we revere and treasure in our memories, in my many-flawed life, are trumped by the one-off events that stand out and the consistent things that endure, no matter what.
Like being there, at the first moment, when your first born arrives alive, safe, well and warm. That movie plays in my head without effort. As did the birth of the second. I only have two such memories, though I know people who have more, and they boast proudly of remembering each one as if it was yesterday – because it was.
It was only ‘yesterday,’ which is not a song cue for remembering what we’ve loved or lost along the way, but because of the importance of the memories that stand so proud in hindsight. But none of those memories stand as proud as we are of the result – the endurance of, the power of, love we hold over time for our firstborn, our second born, and so on for those who have more.
Life for parent and child becomes a blur which we see clearly in the immediacy of each day as it happens. In hindsight, the highlights are a blur of intermittent photographs in our heads – the trip here, the ah+ha moments, the laughs, tears, births, deaths, marriages, divorces, mistakes, and triumphs of our lives, their lives, and the lives of all those who’ve been close to us in some intimate ways of friendships, loves, collaborations, mentors and mentees – their remains, our first love and our second love.
Wouldn’t that be so simple?
To boil everything down to mom’s apple pie and rich vanilla ice cream. Or the first step, their first day of school. What is first in one person’s head is forgotten in another’s – nothing diminished. We are all the same recipe: flesh and DNA, nearly identical in so many ways, but distinctly different like each snowflake, not standing out from the crowd, but unique and precious in our uniqueness.
Not knowing what to say in the most important and most significant of situations, is like not knowing how to construct the perfect sentence to express the perfect sentiment of magical imperfect first love.
On this day 45 years ago, I became a father for the first time in the exact moment as my first born of two daughters took her first breath, which spawned her series of firsts. The most stunning of many memories for me is not the flood of memories, anecdotes of amusing bits, but the appreciation of – the understanding of – the most precious thing to witness in life, which is otherwise a simple two-word term we’ve read many times with significantly different meaning on a page, which is the beautiful precious of being there to witness the billions of times repeated mammalian essential, watching and being a participant in a live birth.
To C _ _ , Happy Birthday.
To every parent who ever had a child, and to every child who ever had a parent, keep that precious memory close and tight more than any other treasure that comes your way in life; it is yours to have and never lose, no matter what.
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