Loving the light, accepting the dark

I finished Twilight on Monday.  I probably could have completed it Sunday had that day not been Father’s Day and my parent’s anniversary, but I have to admit I was hooked.  I was reading in the car every chance I could and I never read in the car because I always end up feeling like I want to yak afterwards.  And I kept on reading even though I already saw the movie because what I was reading was the literary equivalent of crack. Damn you, Stephenie Meyer.

Now I’m not saying the book was without it’s flaws, but when you’re on crack you don’t really care if it’s bad crack or good crack, just that you’ve got some crack and it’s several hundred pages long.  I did, however, have enough presence of mind to not head directly to Barnes and Noble to pick up the sequel when I was done.  The university has a copy of each Twilight installment on hand and I’m second in line for New Moon.  So that means I’ll have enough time to detox before getting hooked again and it won’t cost me a dime.

After I finished the book I felt satisfied that I finally had the whole story.  For some reason I really loved Alice, her back story and the bond she eventually formed with Bella (Can nothing be done with Rosalie? Is she going to be an eternally angry bitch?) and thought the book better explained why the Cullens so easily accepted Bella in spite of her human imperfections and luscious blood.

But one thing nagged at me, and I suppose it’s only something a mother of a daughter would find bothersome.

Bella is so young.  So young.  By the end of the book she’s so completely in love with Edward that she’s willing to give up her mortal life to spend eternity with him.  As a mother it scared the crap out of me because, wow, that could be my kid some day.  I highly doubt vampires will figure into the mix, but it happens, this all-consuming I’ll die if I can’t be with you type of obsessive love.

It didn’t happen to me.  Not at sixteen, and maybe I’m too far removed from sixteen to remember what it feels like to fall in love for the very first time and realize he’s just as crazy in love with you.

So last night I went back to my journals.  I went back nineteen years to just after I graduated from high school and read on through the next three years of my life.  I found out a couple of things; that I was a very tiresome and emotionally erratic young woman who must have driven her mother crazy and that I never found real love until I met my husband.

Oh, I thought I had found love.  I thought I found it with a guy who wound up completely disappointing me, but before the disappointment came the euphoria and this is what I wrote about it:

I think I’m in love.  I know I have said this before, but the other times I was just talking about a crush.  I think I’m falling in love with —–.  When I see him at work I want to hug him and kiss him and when I’m not with him all I can do is think about him.  When I’m close to him I’m in heaven.

When I read this I really do want to yak because I know how things ended with this guy.  He didn’t love me.  Not one bit and for the entirety of our brief relationship I never quite knew where I stood with him.

And I guess that’s the part of Twilight so many of us find appealing; that the love one gives is returned without question.  No partner is more invested than the other, each one declaring they would die before parting.  It’s a very dramatic Shakespearean kind of love.  I still don’t think that kind of love is possible for a teen, but I do get how being appreciated and desired in spite of our imperfections can be so intoxicating. When we are desired, we have a hard time seeing past our own perceived flaws and wonder how it is this other person can find us so fascinating.  The real test, however, is when the other person starts to see the flaws we didn’t know existed and sticks around in spite of them.

That, my friends, is how you know it’s love.  It may not be dramatic or fraught with angst and longing, but it is real and definitely not something you’d want to lose.