He had a thick chestnut brown beard as soft and luxurious as his body hair, a smile delightful enough to lift the spirits of the dead, and the most spectacular sparkling brown eyes I’d ever seen.
While I would deny it for weeks to come my heart instantly knew what my brain would not permit me to consider: I was looking into the eyes of the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.
Like most people, my personality is the byproduct of the struggle between the two driving forces that govern most of our lives, my heart and my brain. The problem, in my case, is the extreme disparity between these two forces.
I’m intelligent, very intelligent. I have a Mensa level IQ although it hasn’t done me a whole lot of good. Most people confuse being smart with being intelligent when in fact you’re only as smart as you’ve been taught to be good at something regardless of your innate level of intelligence.
My parents, themselves products of highly dysfunctional families, hid this fact from me for decades. They had been told it would be best not to inform me so that I might “fit in” better with the children around me, it was the 50s after all, when in fact exactly the opposite occurred.
Higher IQ kids are by nature more inquisitive and prone to being bored easily by a one size fits all curriculum that does little to challenge them; that 50s thing again. Couple that with a lack of mentoring for more active minds and you get a child with an undisciplined intellect prone to overthinking everything, who becomes increasingly frustrated with being unable to understand why he’s different from nearly everyone around him.
If my mind and thinking lacked a solid developmental background, my emotional well-being and maturity were even less equipped to face life’s challenges.
My parents were functioning social alcoholics. My mother had serious emotional and mental problems her entire life. Obsessively concerned with how she appeared to the world, she could only see her children’s emotional needs as reflections of her own self-worth and appearance in the eyes of others.
And, my dad, who in addition to his drinking also harbored his own dark secret, was as emotionally distant and remote to his first two sons as one could possibly be. My brother and I used to say that even when he was there he wasn’t there.
Between the two of them, all I ever learned was how to assume, or more accurately, wildly imagine, what other people were thinking and feeling, and then to judgmentally react to those baseless assumptions.
It fell to me early in life to not only care for my mother during her bouts of mental distress, but act as a referee during many of my parents heated arguments and to look out for (and protect, as best a child could) my younger brother and sister from the chaos and insanity that so often surrounded us.
Needless to say, I was woefully ill-equipped to carry out these tasks with any measurable degree of success.
It took twelve years of group therapy recovery for people from “toxic” families for me to regain a semblance of a reasonably sane life of my own.
I came to find myself in the company of a heart with the emotional maturity of a fourteen year old girl.
I tell you this not to evoke sympathy. I know we all have our own demons of one kind or another to deal with. It is my way of explaining how I came to find myself in the company of a heart with the emotional maturity of a fourteen year old girl, complete with braces and braids, who I call Griselda and a mind with the thought processes of a Vulcan-raised-by-Klingons who I call Brain—not real original, I know—while trying to figure out what to do next now that I’d met this handsome, charming man from Canada.
One thing all my previous relationships had in common was that the men I was involved with were as emotionally unavailable as my father. Don’t get me wrong, I had some wonderful times with these men but in the end, our individual needs and inability to openly express those needs doomed each relationship in much the same emotionally wrenching way.
And, in each and every case, my heart yearning to love and be loved had overwhelmed reason and led both Brian and I to the same dead end time and again.
Since coming to the understanding that I/we’d been emotionally handicapped for years, Brain, fearful that Griselda would lead us back into the same painful abyss we’d been in so many times before, worked diligently and relentlessly to keep us from ever having to experience that type of pain again. As far as love was concerned, I’d formed a thick lair of sarcastic cynicism and Brain kept a very tight rein on Griselda, which is why he didn’t react any too favorably to her fondness for the writings and images of our new Canadian friend.
“Get her away from him,” Brain angrily snapped noticing the increasingly warm glow in Griselda’s cheeks as she stared at Jon’s message and pictures.
“Come Griselda,” I said in my most supportive tone of voice while trying to pull her away from the images we were all staring at. “He’s a very handsome man but we’re interested in him for other reasons.”
“Is that all you can see?” she asked quizzically as we headed to a quiet corner of my mind. “Can’t you see him? Can’t you see Jonny Bear?”
“Jonny Bear?” Brain and I stared at each other blankly. “Who’s Jonny Bear?” we asked.
“The beautiful man behind those lovely brown eyes? Can’t you see how much like us he is? Can’t you feel the warmth and joy coming from him?”
She’d already given him a pet name and she was beginning to get to me. I looked at Brain who, with a stern look, arms folded, and left foot impatiently tapping the floor emphatically said, “NO! You cannot listen to her. She has all the wisdom and insight of a child. We’ve been down this road before and we are NOT going there again and that’s final.”
And with that he began replaying a series of disastrous scenes of yelling, screaming, shouted recriminations, and weeping from my past, all of which occurred every time I followed what I then believed to be my heart’s desire instead of listening to my logical mind.
The evidence was overwhelming and Brain was absolutely correct to remind me of this. After all, we’d only just met this man.
Griselda shot back that all of our previous unsuccessful relationships were “prerecovery” and that she/we were different now.
Brain responded by asking in a bitingly bitter tone of voice, “Are you any less lonely now than you were when we met all those other ‘emotionally challenged’ men?”
Crickets.
“I thought as much,” he said with an air of smug self-satisfaction.
I told Griselda it would be best for all of us if we tabled consideration of any emotion above the waist for the time being.
Griselda continued to insist there was something different about this man she continued to call “Jonny Bear,” which she clearly did just to piss off Brian.
Stepping between the two of them I admitted that Brain had made a solid argument against becoming “involved” with anyone, especially from a “hookup app” this early in whatever type of relationship might develop.
I told Griselda it would be best for all of us if we tabled consideration of any emotion above the waist for the time being. “However,” I conceded, we would remain open to getting to know this man better.
“And NOT as Jonny Bear,” Brain added mockingly.
Next Up: Jonny Bear
Support For The Storyteller Cafe
The Storyteller Cafe is supported by modest ad revenue and the generosity of readers like you.
Please “like” and “share” TheStorytellerCafe.com with your friends and family on social media and anytime you get together, it can make for some scintillating conversations.
Additionally, your direct financial support is greatly appreciated. To support the kind of storytelling we offer click the button below to our PayPal account. Your contributions, in any amount, are welcome.
Thank you once again for your continued support of TheStorytellerCafe.com. We’re looking forward to sharing many more stories with you in the near future.
