A few months back, my friend Ray, after yet another “disappointing” blind-date where I had lots of hope beforehand, said to me: “Leya, you have to stop kissing frogs!” So on my birthday this year, Inge gave me the perfect frog, one that is just a frog, now and forevermore.
Frogs……….because of an innate restlessness that for too many years told me there had to be something better than what I was given, what I thought at one time was what I had wanted. I remember too often hearing my mother say that poisonous phrase: “if only” or “I wish.” How hard it is to be here, to accept, to see what is offered, to take and give what is needed.
Shortly before she died she told my sister “they treat their second wife better. Just wait and see.” And he did. And I know he regretted not having given her more of what she, my mother, would have wanted. I know my parents loved each other in the way people did when they did not consider divorce an option—there was respect, admiration, frustration, anger, all part of the decision to be married.
Damian understands about frogs. They are his favorite animal, his pals. He has a security frog he carries around most of the time. Just a mash of plastic that warms in his six year-old hand but he knows it is what it is even when he invests it with much more. Fantasy and reality blended into a pile of pleasure-loving-giving frogs. Just frogs.
