❤️

Even in a language as rich as English, we often lack the precise word to describe particular feelings.  Words like "love," for example.

A friend mentioned recently that we Americans over-use the word, and we do.  We might say we "love" pizza or  pie, yet we use that same word to describe our feelings for the people closest to us.

Is the ❤️ we feel for our friends the same as the ❤️ we felt for former spouses or partners or the ❤️ we feel for our parents, our children?  Is what we feel for a certain food really ❤️?

Robert Earle Keene's song comes to mind:  "Love's a word I never throw around--and when I say I love you--I mean I love you til they throw me in the ground."

When a man says "I love you,'" the whole sentence, often adding phrases like "more than anything," it's tempting to believe it because who doesn't want to be loved like that?

In Elizabeth Strout's book, My Name is Lucy Barton, three words keep surfacing throughout the novel: love, desperation, and ruthlessness.

This unforgettable short novel grapples with the meanings of these words.  Strout--through the voice of Lucy--brilliantly captures the subtexts and layers of feelings. By the end of the book, I felt like I'd been entirely inside the psyche and naked heart of Lucy Barton.

It's a universal dilemma: how to describe a particular love?  is ruthlessness ever justified? what causes despair and desperation?

Lucy grew up in poverty.  Things happened in her house that tinged the rest of her life with shame.  She remembers being locked in a truck, crying desperately, feeling abandoned.  Her brother dressed in girl's clothes, her father did something shameful that she never actually named, her mother was unable to show real affection.

As an adult, with children of her own, Lucy writes (not in a writerly way but more like she's telling this to someone in person) about the blurry and crooked lines of love and desperation and ruthlessness. She writes about her love for her mother and the happiness she feels when her mother gives her the tiniest scraps of affection.  Like a woman talking perhaps to a friend or therapist, she often questions what she actually remembers and what she might have imagined.

While  reading the book, I heard on the news the voice of a Central American child crying  desperately in that way that children can cry when everything and everyone they know is taken from them.  I feel, hearing this voice, what Lucy felt when she  heard a child on a subway train crying like that--as if she could hear the sound of her own heart breaking.

We don't know the name of that child on the news, we don't even see her face, but her plaintive cry goes to the core of me every time I hear it.  She could be my granddaughter, or yours.  She is somebody's beloved child and what is happening to her at our border is a trauma that will impact her forever.

Lucy Barton's name I know.  She could be me, or you, or any woman you know--struggling forever to understand the lines where certain loves went wrong, or desperate to make a quilt out of the thin, threadbare scraps she was given.

Page 190

"Do I understand that hurt my children feel?  I think I do, though they might claim otherwise.  But I think I know so well the pain we children clutch to chests, how it lasts our whole lifetime, with longings so large you can't even weep.  We hold it tight, with each seizure of the beating heart: This is mine, this is mine, this is mine."