A Purpose That Includes and Exceeds Me

Desires and distastes as metaphor for how to love better

When I am bored, and also when I am lonely or feeling empty, I open up my laptop and settle into a favorite chair. I get comfortable. Kick off my shoes. Roll up my sleeves. I may even loosen my belt.

I open my internet history and click the page I most often visit. It loads, and I scroll through images as they populate the screen. I’m not looking for anything in particular, but I know what I like when I see it. And when I do, I click on it to expand the image.

I look at the photo and imagine my life somehow braided with it. We join energies. Come together. We follow the natural ebbs and flows of our busy lives. We take long walks to get better acquainted. Spend time on the couch. The floor. The bed. Each day growing a little bit closer.

But I’m a fool—because this narrative is futile. Just an impossible and useless fictional dream I repeat over and over and over even though it consistently amounts to zero.

The conundrum—I want but I can’t want. I don’t want to want. Because I simply can’t do it.

My reasons: It would upend my serene life. Compromise my comfortable, single, middle-aged existence. I’m too set in my ways to make the necessary space for something new and unprecedented. Something full and wild. Interrupting my habitual routine sounds more like a detriment than an uplift. I’m too tired to start over.

I trace these fantasies—these rich dreams of want and connection and companionship—all the way back to my childhood. They’re always a mere thought away, generally triggered alive by my various states of discomfort—loneliness, desire, possibility—all of which have been prevalent, if not thematic, in my life thus far.

Even though it pains me to do so, I shroud my desires for love and togetherness and companionship with impossible dreams of unlikely futures. I feed the facade while solidifying ways to keep wishes eternally at bay.

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Barely a day before we eventually left Montana, we still had no plan. The prospect of being stuck for weeks was a logical reality: My mom couldn’t bear full weight on her left leg; We were still awaiting acceptance into a rehab facility in her hometown; No flights had been booked; And the hospital advocate still couldn’t assure me that my mom’s emergency stay was covered by insurance. “It should be,” she said with a big smile. “All we know for sure is that she can’t do rehab here—she needs to get back in-network.” Which is to say, in order for my mom to access a proper recovery, she needed to fly back home to upstate New York many weeks before her body is truly ready to do so.

I had a feeling that when the wheels finally started turning, we’d have very little time to formulate an exit—and I was right. In a span of barely three hours, we got word of an available rehab bed and shit hit the fan. The hospital quickly agreed to discharge saying, “She’s ready to go,” which was bullshit. Because she most certainly was not ready. She still couldn’t stand up without assistance.

I secured wheelchair accessible flights while two of my siblings dropped everything to hop on a last second flight and come help. The myriad moving parts were dependent upon each other. Everything balanced precariously and any deviation could, and would, disastrously muddle the flow.

On the morning of my mom’s release, I felt like we were breaking out of the place. I was all business while my mom was all smiles, filling the stale room with colorful thank-yous and I’m-gonna-miss-yous. The sort of verbal emojis she’s so good at. She insisted I take a photo of her with her favorite nurse, Cherelle. I relaxed for a moment to indulge her.

8th floor rockstar nurse

My stress was justified. The day needed to work perfectly and with clockwork accuracy. Of all our days in this Montana hospital, today I needed to remain laser focused until we finally secured my mom’s on-site admission at St. Anne’s rehab facility. To do so we’d endure more than twelve travel hours, three flights, multiple lengthy layovers, and more than 1900 miles of total distance.

We vacated her room in a scattered flurry. The various shelves were left chaotically strewn with superfluous bandages and gauze rolls, a mountainous stack of adult pull-ups, the heavy leg brace my mom left the operating room wearing, assistive straps with metal-toothed buckles, wonky photocopies of helpful exercises, inexplicable tubes of vaseline, a laminated menu of all the food my mom had grown sick of, and way too many replacement pads for the bedsores that had recently developed on her backside. “Aren’t you going to take all this stuff?” the nurse pleaded. I told her no. We already had everything we needed.

The first of the day’s dozen wheelchair transfers happened when the hospital’s medical transport team arrived to haul us to the airport. We managed it fine, but it was unpracticed and cumbersome. My mom gritted her teeth and made a little yelp as we helped her stand up, then rapidly exhaled in shallow breaths as we eased her down.

At the airport I tried a different method. I wide-leg straddled her wheelchair and positioned my feet widely outside of hers. I then told her, “Now push yourself up and wrap your arms around my neck.” She did as I instructed and I pulled her in tight, locking my arms around her quivering body so that even if she lost her grip, I would not. I engaged my quads, positioned my back straight, and squatted my mom upward to stand. She whimpered and I asked if she was in pain. “No. I’m just afraid,” she said.

Once she was standing, my sister quickly swapped the hospital transport wheelchair with the United Airlines chair. I then asked my mom if she was ready to ease down. I lowered my squat until her legs felt the chair meeting her body. She loosened her grip around my neck, let out a big sigh, and gave her weight over to sit. I released my hold as she scooted around to settle in. “I did it!” she said, looking at all of use for some recognition. We were all too focused, or perhaps relieved, to offer much.

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My family as a whole isn’t afraid to hug. But our embraces, to me anyhow, are more of the obligatory ilk than they are intimate. Our hugs, generally speaking, are not very warm. They are mostly forgettable. A benign acknowledgment. Like a handshake.

Our prescribed hugs accurately reflect the detached aloofness of our shared emotional past. Taken at face value, they probably make us seem more tightly knit than we actually are. They likely give the impression that we are the sort of family who has a well-practiced capacity for emotional expression. Our hugs, however, are one of the countless strategies we collectively deployed to feign a level of Leave it to Beaver-type togetherness. They didn’t tell the truth.    

First on, last off

As a young boy, through such reinforcing behavior, I subtly learned that being anything except neutral and easygoing was damaging to the family’s status quo. To feel was to rock the boat. To be angry or sad or frustrated or distant or anything but content and happy was to trigger self-exclusion. I wanted to fit in, so I fell in line. I kept my gamut of real and complex and confusing feelings to myself until I stopped feeling them altogether.   

Never in my adult life have I held my mother as close as I did on our return flights to Rochester. I did it so many times, in fact, that I got good at it. Really good. So good that by the fourth or fifth time I began protecting it. I aptly bossed around the United Airlines team of three wheelchair staffers because none of them, I believed, could ever care for my mom like I could. Ultimately I would tip them, but basically I greased their palms for watching me hoist the terrified weight of my fragile mom into my strong chest while telling her, “I got you.” Every time I said this she replied in an exasperated whisper, “I know, Tom. I know.” Her words inspiring a spectrum of conflicting feelings in the new muscles of my heart.

I am fully dedicated to caring for the needs of my mom. But I also want nothing to do with it. Lately, however, what keeps me focused is a newfound understanding that intimacy, and care, and tenderness, and all these gorgeous attributes of love, require not only thoughtful intention, but practice. And since it’s only been in my most recent years that I’ve actually given a second thought to love, I’m still trying to navigate how this practice feels in my body. I’m still figuring how to fit it into my life.

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Evolving is probably the best word for my understanding intimacy. Intimacy as something that takes and gives. Not just takes. I have always been good at taking. At self-serving. I’ve built myself up at the expense and pain of others. And though this is regrettable, I embrace my folly with sincere gratitude. For it’s precisely my mistakes that have propelled me to where I am today.

These days I want to give with equal vigor as I might receive. I want to satisfy as much as I want to be satisfied. To care as much as I am cared for. To nourish and be nourished. I yearn for such a balance in all areas of my life. Is that too much to ask?

Caring for my mom—both in this wonky moment of injury, and in general—offers me some of that practice that will benefit my ability to be authentically intimate. Caring for my mom is helping me identify the latent stores of grace hidden in my numb skin.

Yet still I sit here, terrorizing my inquietude by staring at a soulless machine and tapping the mouse. My face transfixed, illuminated blue.

When I finally turn off the computer, the screen goes blank and the thrill quickly dissipates. I feel even emptier than before. I become a fraction of myself.

I’ve lived so long in this aching cycle of desire and unmet needs that it now feels automatic. I’ve normalized yearning, regret, and guilt so well that it’s become a comfortable place. This is what I am actively evolving away from. I’m doing it slowly, but slow growth is the best growth. And I am patient.

In these darkest of moments, I could very easily distract myself and get on with my life. I could move along to something else and put the heaviness of reality behind me. But instead I stay. I take a moment to breathe in the dark air. The difficulty. I remain in the funk rather than remove myself from it. And when I do this, my most agonizing needs become crystal clear—I long for a bigger purpose. One that includes me, yet exceeds me. I want community. Companionship. Togetherness. I want to love bigger than I ever have.

I return my attention to the computer and go back online, back to the page I visit so doggone often. I look even closer this time. On this pass I take a moment to read the photos’ descriptions and am struck by this one:

Hi there! My name is am Deuce and I appear to be male. I am a medium sized, strong, and curious fella. I enjoy being outside and learning new things. I am a great running friend and am food motivated. I am a good boy. I like car rides. I like adventures. I am smart. I am sometimes unruly but in a loving way. I have been at the shelter for more than 150 days and really want to meet you.

I get off line, and for the first time ever, I make a plan to visit the shelter when I get home. I am ready for my heart to break open.

“I am a good boy. I like car rides. I like adventures.”