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May 12, 2004
Love Song to Kathy
I grew up sandwiched between two brothers, scrappy boys who adored sports and cars and video games and those terrible rubber-band guns built from plywood and clothespins.
I never had a sister, but I was content without one. Sisters were too much trouble. They stole your clothes. They borrowed your makeup. They picked the lock on your diary and read it aloud to their boyfriends over the phone.
When I married Tom, I got my first taste of sisterhood. My family grew to include his two older sisters, Kathy and Kim. Kim lives in faraway Texas, and I don't know her too well, but Kathy lives with her family in Windermere, Florida, and we get to see her pretty regularly.
The older I get, the more I see that marrying into this family was a lot like that scene at the beginning of The Beverly Hillbillies, where Jed Clampett aims his gun at a jackrabbit in the underbrush and instead strikes oil and becomes an instant millionaire. That's certainly not the most graceful metaphor, but the idea holds. Not only did I get a cool sister-in-law out of the deal; I also got an amazing friend.
How amazing? you ask. Well, let me tell you. Back in 1998, Tom and I were dating but not yet married. We had been together for about a year, and the relationship was at a crossroads. We had run up against on some problems and were having a hard time moving past them. We were staring at each other from across the table, thinking, do I really want to be married to this person for the rest of my life? For one horrible, horrible week that fall, I called into question everything about our relationship, and thought that I might end it.
But one day during that horrible week a thought hit me like a tidal wave: If I let go of Tom, I have to let go of Kathy, too. And that thought was so dreadful that I snapped out my funk, and we figured out how to move forward.
Four days in New York with her last week reminded me that that was a great decision. She's my sister-in-law, but she's one of the first people I want to talk to about my biggest questions in life. Do you have a friend like this? The kind of friend that listens to you so carefully and unselfishly that it makes your eyes well with tears — just to be so deeply heard, so deeply cared for?
She is one of the most gifted and generous listeners I've ever met. She's not concerned with being clever our outlandish; she could care less how many laughs she gets. She doesn't rehearse what she's going to say while you're talking to her. She actually listens to what you're saying, and then responds in a way that lets you know that she has heard you with her whole heart.
She has a gift for discovering what makes someone special, for asking perceptive questions that make someone spring to life. She believes the best about you, and when you finish talking to her, you walk away believing some of those good things about yourself, too.
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Inside the sandwich shop at Columbus Circle. |
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When she smiles, I am reminded of this passage from F. Scott Fitzgerald about Jay Gatsby:
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He had one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced, or seemed to face, the whole external world for an instant and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself.
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It is an enormous gift to have this kind of friend. It makes me want to be that kind of friend in return.
I have been keeping this journal for more than three years now. I use a pseudonym; I like keeping this journal separate from most of the people I know in Real Life. I like not having to answer to all my co-workers and friends about what I post here. It's easier to write knowing that my family is not reading and weighing my every word. So for three years, I've managed to conceal this journal's existence from almost all of my family, including Kathy and Tom's parents in Florida. It hasn't been hard, really. This is just a part of my life that they don't know about.
Until today. I found out today that Kathy discovered this journal. Well, she didn't discover it, really; she was guided here a couple of days ago by Tom, who didn't realize that she didn't know about it until after the fact (did that make sense?).
It's actually fine with me that she found the journal; I'd thought about sharing it with her before, but had never found the right time or the right reason to do it.
Just the same, I wanted to talk to her about it. So I called her just a few minutes ago. I wanted to tell her that I was writing an entry about her, and I wanted to make sure it was okay that I post her picture online. Second, I wanted to ask her to keep this URL private. As I dialed, I prepared a little soliloquy about why I wanted her not to share it with the rest of the family.
She picked up the phone, and after a bit of small talk, I said, a little nervously, "I wanted to talk to you about that whole journal thing of mine..."
She said, "Oh, yeah. I wanted to talk to you about that, too. I was going to call you. I was looking at it today, and I really enjoyed it. But then I stopped, and I realized that this is a really personal and private space for you. And you don't need to have family looking over your shoulder and judging what you write. So I'm never going to visit it again. I will just forget about it. You can just say whatever you want to say on your site, because I am never going to look at it again."
I was stunned. And delighted. I never even spoke my dopey little sermon; she understood what I needed better than I did myself. It sounds funny, but it's true: My sister-in-law is so wonderful that she refuses to look at my website.
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