A Childhood Want

Suntop, Skywise, Cutter, Leetah, and Ember all sleeping

If I was to think back to when I had my first experience with poly in any form, I would have to say that it went back to when I was in middle school. My friends were just getting into Elfquest. It was something so very new. My mom wouldn’t let me read comics when I was a kid because they were evil or something. In all fairness, I have no idea why they were considered so bad. The storylines at that point were still fairly simplistic.

There were three characters that shared a loving V relationship. They are Cutter, Skywise, and Leetah. The connection point between Leetah and Skywise is Cutter as he’s the one with the intimate relationship with the other two.

I didn’t realize how profoundly the image of the three of them sleeping was for me. After all, I never had that closeness when I was younger, despite how much I wanted to feel like people wanted to be close to people.

There was something comforting about the relationship between the three of them, that just made me feel… I don’t know… comforted. I think that would be the most accurate, especially because at that point in my life, I didn’t even have a good place when I was home with my birth family.

It’s funny, because I’ve always wanted to know what it felt like to have a warm and loving family. I didn’t really have that experience when I was a child. A majority of my childhood was chaos and anger and fear. It was everything that you would never want to have as a child. Looking at a picture of Leetah, Cutter, and Skywise sleeping peacefully with Leetah and Cutter’s children…

It’s something that I desired when I was a child. It’s never something I really experienced nor do I have a conscious moment of when I was younger. There was a lot of anger, pain, and fighting… but never a sense of peace of serenity. Never a sense of what I hear is supposed to be what it means to be in a family. The strife that I dealt with when I was younger has made me a bit more standoffish than I think anyone should be.

Life does seem to have a way of righting itself some of the time. While chaos will always be a part of life (as much as I dislike it), It is possible for things to right themselves. The peace that I saw in that picture, the love that I saw in that relationship… that seems to be within reach. I keep hoping and waiting patiently to have that an image like that of my own… and it’s possible that maybe I can have that family. It’s certainly something that I want more than anything. I want to have in my adulthood all the things that my childhood never presented me. I want constancy. I want a warm and loving environment. I want people who will actually love me, make me feel like I’m loved regardless.

All it took was a simple picture of three people sharing a loving moment…

A Painful Virtue

Patience is a virtue, right?

I must not be virtuous because for some reason, patience and I have always been strangers. It’s not something I do well at… you might say that I tend to view the world with a short lens. I feel like time is fleeting and that everything needs to be done now.

I can’t quite explain where this feeling of immediacy comes from. I can’t even begin to guess…

OK, that’s not entirely true. I can wager a guess. I’m willing to bet that it has more to do with my childhood.

Regardless, I’m no good with patience. I would like things to happen right now… and that’s just not how it works.

The sad part is, knowing that doesn’t make it any easier. In some ways, it makes things more frustrating.

While other people are allowed to go and play and do whatever they want, I have to sit and wait. I have to be patient. I have to wait out some arbitrary clock with a time limit that I can’t even see.

Maybe that’s the problem. If I know a timeframe, I can wait it out. Even if it’s something that hurts me, I can wait until it ends. That’s not necessarily the problem (though if it is something that hurts me, I will be sad about it). The problem is not knowing. Knowing something is going to come, but not when isn’t exactly comfortable…

You might say it’s the opposite of that. It’s frustrating. It’s annoying. It makes me want to do any number of things but be patient.

Yet, here I am. Needing to be patient.

So, how do I fix this?

I honestly don’t know. I would like to think that I can try to fix something that’s been a life-long problem. I know I can’t. If I could, I would have done so a while ago.

So, how does one learn patience when it’s never been a strong suit? How does one learn to wait when we live in a have it now society?

This is the real conundrum. One in which I believe answers are few and far between and will become increasingly more so as we get to a more immediate gratification world.

After all, there are things worth waiting for in this world. Careers, people… they are worth waiting and working for. It’s just a matter of learning how to do so.