OKAY?

It came to me today that one of the lessons I learned from my mom in my youth was to always strive to make everything okay. Once everything was okay, you were safe and happy and the world was right.

Turned out not to be such a great lesson. The reason for this being that............. it is impossible. Life just does not go along being okay.  The better lesson, the one that has taken me to age 50 to get, is that you can be okay even if life isn't. Forgetting about trying to make everything else okay takes a lot of the pressure off.

I received an incredible email today from a friend. Her circumstance is right out of a soap opera and makes my story of husband runs off to a monastery down right common. This friend has been married for about 35 years to an incredibly handsome man, one who has not always been easy to live with but they had managed to stay together all this time, raise 3 kids and build a life. This handsome man was a little too hung up on his own attractiveness and had caused much pain for my friend in the past by engaging in another relationship. After marriage counseling that all seemed to be behind them.

Well, during summer holidays Mr Handsome suffered a brain aneurysm and was in a coma that lasted for weeks. His long term prognosis was hazy at best. My friend staked herself out at his beside and battled right along beside him for his life.  As miracles would have it, he came to last week and is relearning how to walk and can even talk in spite of various tubes, etc. His brain is working at such a capacity that he was able to admit to strange credit card charges that came in on the family Visa during his coma. Turns out that the charges were for various dalliances enjoyed with the "former" lover that were squeezed into his busy schedule just before his family holiday. Oh and by the way, my friend learned, all that marriage counseling had been a sham and the supposedly past affair has, in fact, continued up to the present. The list goes on, Mr Handsome had to spill his guts further by admitting that his secret high level business affairs of the past few years were in fact smokescreens for illicit trysts and he was not in fact dealing with foreign governments when he had often been unavailable for his son and his wife.

Remember the movie, While You Were Sleeping? That movie was a fun romantic comedy - my friend's surprises during her husband's coma were not quite so saccharine.  While Mr Handsome was sleeping my friend prepared their last child for college. With news of her new reality fresh in her mind, she dropped her son off at University, hired an attorney and wondered where to begin to rebuild her life.

This is where making everything OKAY is obviously a joke. Can't be done. But what can be done is ensuring that she is okay. That's the slow painful lesson that I have been learning these last few years. When I received her email this morning, that is one of the things that came to me........she will be okay, the gory details of what she is going through are not pretty and no amount of hang wringing or other more violent outbursts will make them so. Sort of like me and all the crying and sick stomach aches of last year. Didn't make anything okay. But I learned that there is another side to all of that and with enough swimming upstream the opposite shore began to appear.  I am okay in Paris.

My friend will be too.