A pattern I made all on my own

The first time I fell in love was especially dramatic, your classic Romeo and Juliet story. At the age of 5, I announced to my mother that my kindergarten class mate Toby and I were moving in together. I wasn’t asking her permission, just making her aware of my plans.

Toby lived two blocks away, so I packed my Barbie school port and headed out to the side walk, but having not long ago moved into town from a farm, I was too scared to cross the street on my own. Returning to the house, I flung myself on my bed in a manner which would have put Liz Taylor to shame, and said to my mother, “This isn’t over you know.” The pattern begins to take shape.

My next great love was (and still is) gorgeous, smart, funny and talented. He also had his own hit TV show, which seemed important at the time – I was 11. Someone had to pay the bills until I became an award-winning journalist.

My mother was a smart and caring woman, who had learned how to deal with her temperamental daughter. She gently explained to me one night over dinner that given I was already 5’9” – and wasn’t done growing – and the charismatic star of Family Ties, Michael J Fox, was 5’4”, we might look a little odd at the school dance. I was convinced my mother was wrong. Little things like height, geography or the fact that the current love of my life was 26 and could be arrested for even glancing in my direction weren’t going to stand in my way, so I would wait. The pattern continues to emerge.

After wearing out the tape on my copy of the classic 80s movie Some Kind of Wonderful, I made a classic teenage mistake – I fell in love with my best friend. ‘Love’ might be over stating it as I’m not sure you can be in love all on your own, but dammit I gave it the good old college try. It wasn’t like in the movies. He didn’t chase me down the street with the diamond earrings he’d suddenly realised in a moment of clarity were for me. Our version was going to second base in my hammock. It’s almost the same thing – they both happened outdoors.

He taught me a lot in our time together. If a guy says, “Gee, the weather is nice today,” what he means is I’m going to make out with ALL of your friends and everyone is going to know about it but you. So that was handy. In all fairness to him, we were having a relationship that was way too adult for our chronological ages.

Every time he did something nasty or unkind, which happened a lot, I would say to my long suffering mother, “No mature man would carry on like this.” She would give me a look which I didn’t understand at the time, but I now know could be translated to mean, “That’s because he’s not a mature man, he’s a 16-year-old boy. Being insensitive is practically in the job description.” It ended the way most teenage relationships end, in a blaze of childish awkwardness, as much on my part as his. I naively thought that meant we’d go back to being friends, but we didn’t. We went our separate ways and that, as they say, was that.

This seems a convenient time to mention that I had now officially become a cliché. I was an only child, with no father to speak of, and a failed relationship under my belt – therapists of the world were rubbing their hands together. The pattern was formed.

The rest of my teens, and my 20s for that matter, were a blur of incredibly bad choices. A series of long-term relationships with either decent guys who just ‘weren’t for me’, amazing guys who were just as damaged as i was (in their own way) or guys with moral compass of a pirate on crack.

All lasted longer than they had any right to, because as soon as there was any sign of trouble I would morph into my favourite cartoon character, Co-dependant Cheerleader. A people pleaser with abandonment issues. Instead of saying reasonable things like, “Sweetheart, I really like you but I’m not sure this is working out” or “Darling, I’m not sure it’s healthy that every time we have a fight I need to duck to avoid being hit by flying household furniture”. Co-dependant Cheerleader would swoop in and save the day.

I wasn’t insightful enough to realise it at the time, but many of my choices were guided by what I thought other people would think. Somehow, if I could make it work with the current disappointing relationship, it would validate me and make up for the fact that my daddy didn’t love me and I didn’t end up living happily ever after with my 16-year-old boyfriend. That’s right people, if you held my self-esteem to your ear you may even have heard the ocean. Unlike the John Hughes films I watched with my friends as a teenager, it didn’t sort itself out neatly in an hour and a half.

The pattern I had worked so hard putting together without realising it, came undone stitch by stitch over a particularly bad year. An awful break-up with a guy in the ‘amazing but just as damaged as me’ category, an incredibly stressful job and a couple of personal losses that left me totally crushed. Not until I was on the other side of it did I realise this was actually the best year of my life.

Two years after our split, I spent some quality time with the guy who I thought had broken my heart for no good reason. It turned out he’d left for a very good reason. He liked me but he didn’t love me. Two miscarriages towards the tail end of the relationship also strengthened a position which he had always told me he’d held.  He didn’t want to have children.

By the end we were both miserable. I wanted to make it work so badly, I would have clung on like a crazed rock climber until it came to its eventual end and resented him for it. Although it was painful and heartbreaking at the time, It turns out that leaving when he did made him the good guy.

I’d also lost what I thought was a close friend, only to realise that good friends are supportive when you need them and not just when it suits them. It turned out I had plenty of the former.

As for work, I discovered it wasn’t the job I didn’t like, it was my boss. That year I opened my own company and I’ve never been happier. Now, many years on, with a gorgeous baby girl, a thriving business and a healthy relationship, I often wonder what I would say to my 14 year old self. Mostly, I wonder if the stubborn little drama queen would listen. But if my former love Michael J Fox showed up at my house with Christopher Lloyd and the DeLorean, heading back in time would be really tempting.

As for what I’d say, it would go something like this: “Don’t spend the next 15 years thinking that your happiness is less important than everyone else’s, that having a boyfriend is nowhere near as important as having a life and leaving a guy who is a jerk or even a nice guy who just isn’t right for you isn’t giving up or failing, it’s moving forward. Oh, and I know bubble skirts are in fashion at the moment but they look ridiculous on you. You’ll regret it when you look back at photos 20 years from now – trust me, I’m from the future.”

As a little epilogue to this story, towards the end of “the best year of my life” I ran into Mr Some Kind of Wonderful at the after party for a play that I was working on. While he was sitting across the room talking to my friends and drinking my free beer, I was at the bar thinking how mature and cosmopolitan we all were until a friend of his relayed something fairly nasty that he’d said prior to our arrival.

Now, the old me would have been livid, there would have been tears in the bathroom and people coming to check if I was OK, but not this time. I air-kissed everyone as the night came to a close, I went upstairs to my hotel room with a bunch of friends, drank a lot of Bailey’s and we laughed our asses off until 4am. Now, I was a fully-developed independent Cheerleader and he was still the boy I’d known all those years ago. The pattern was officially in the bin.