Stupid is...

“I’m stupid,” she said, a question mark wilting at the end of her sentence.

She looked down to her hands. She had long, elegant fingers. I looked down to the baby in my lap. He was 30 pounds of dimples and cooing and intent on surrendering my fingertips into his little gobbler mouth. Still looking down at her hands, she was surrendering to the first slide of tears.

She showed up at 9am on Wednesday, just as she said she would. The same invitation had been extended a year ago, at her request, but she hadn't come. We’d had, let’s say, a “defining moment” when she pressed beyond my polite silence to ask what I really thought of her boyfriend. Now, she stood in my living room countering a son and a car seat with one hip. I walked over to her, lifted the diaper bag from her shoulder, and led her to the basement.

“You tried to tell me,” she said on the stairs. “You tried to tell me.”

I learned that everyone she knew shared my opinion of him, including his mother and immediate family, and we all had expressed concern about his recklessness and disrespect. I don't know what defense she offered them, but she told me about their connection. About how he revealed warmer parts of his character when they were alone. How freely he would talk and how easily they could laugh. She told me how she'd called bullshit on his gamesmanship at the very beginning and how he'd softened her with an exotic bouquet of access and earnestness. He'd opened himself to her like bait meat.  

Her connection to him forged powerfully and deeply with his shared tender patches. She described a sync between them too strong and authentic to be denied or destroyed. His palette of other women couldn't ruin their love. His public and gleeful disgracing of her name couldn't weaken their bond. His inglorious embodiment of unreliable parent could not shake them. Even after he defected to a new city and a new woman’s household, their special union could persist.

“I worked so hard not to be this," her arm carved a graceful game show arc in the space between us three. She finished the gesture with a disdainful tug at her worn and faded tee shirt. She talked more about her foolhardy attraction. She talked about the confrontations. About the screaming and the court dates. She talked about the disconnect from her own family and friends. She talked about crossroads and rocky bottoms. Dire straits and necessary next steps. 

I’d been gazing at their son’s face, inventorying which features came from whom. My hands were hooked under the boy's arms, holding him upright and balancing his wobbly feet on my knee. I’d been wishing more of her genes had won. I listened to her like an echo across all the humans I’ve ever known. All of us eventually pouring our grit into someone else’s unsuitable container and surviving varying degrees of corrosion. I handed her the baby. With one hand she settled him into the bowl of her lap, with the other she wiped at her slick and salted face. I took the hand wet with tears and held it.

 “You tried loving somebody who was undeserving. Having a heart like that didn't make any of us stupid,” I said. “'Stupid’ depends on what you let happen next.” 

That might have been harsh, but it was the truth as clean as I could offer it. I laid in front of her the same stark bones I’ve had to lay out to myself when Reality was staring down my most inspired and hopeless imaginings. “So, stop this,” I'd said to myself, simply and sternly, to bring myself back to the safer side of absurdity. 

"So, stop this," I said to her. "You don't have to figure out how. Right now, you only have to decide to stop."

We talked more about stubborn pride, ferocious love, calculated risks and freedom. We talked a lot about freedom. The baby had fallen asleep. She kept talking until it was time to pick up my daughter from camp. 

I hugged her tight at the door and reminded her to keep her head up so she could see everything in front of her. She nodded, smiled and pledged to sit down again soon. It’s okay if she doesn’t. It’s okay if she takes yet another ride on his crazy carnival. The capacity for that kind of devotion isn’t foolish; discernment is what complicates the gift. 

From the screen door I watched her strap in the baby’s car seat. She stood and waved before ducking into the drivers’ side and I imagined the future, resilient version of her. I pictured the future her starting the engine of her future car with a smile. She'll have stopped by to share all the updates of her new and glittering world and we'll have celebrated how today's turning point will have shrunk to a post script passage in her life.

I closed the door as she drove away. Both of us will have to wait and see.