There have been many situations in which I felt the pressure of the moment called for a specified reaction; case in point, when a man asks his girl to marry him, the desired response-which he hopefully assumes she will answer to- is of course "yes"; when a thinly-veiled critic comes from a close friend or spouse concerning our appearance, we assume the position that they want us to change and/or stay the way that we are -depending on the situation. Saying, "I like it when you wear your hair that way," assumes that the viewer intends for the viewee to continue wearing his/her way "that way."
This isn't anything new, we've been brought up this way and our culture reeks of predictability and subtly placed commands disguised as hints during interpersonal interactions. Society maintains at times that we remain detached from heart-felt feelings; maybe if we showed we had heart, we would be expected to fix the ache, mend the relationship, comfort the grieving.
My particular and personal beef has recently extended from maintaining a flat affect when in certain situations where expressed emotions might be more accepted or even appropriate. Flat affect is a term that describes a reduction in emotional expressiveness- in layman's terms, it's the person that keeps the stoic expression throughout a funeral or the one that remains straight faced during a a comedy routine. I know this is a feeble attempt at describing the term but it'll have to do.
Over the past few years I've all but reached the conclusion that I was heartless. This stemmed from an uncanny ability to watch or participate in emotionally heavy situations without allowing any heartfelt behaviors to show themselves;these situations included watching touching movies scenes without twitching one facial muscle; sitting through a relative's funeral without coming even remotely close to tears; having a dear sister collapse in my arms expressing nothing but grief about her current life situation...all this and more and still, I felt heartless.
Since I had already resigned myself to lack the feelings that the rest of the world seems to already have, I was unprepared for the situation which I faced today. The Coach and I are preparing to leave town for the weekend with other family members; we enjoy traveling especially since we can usually take our spoiled rotten 10-pound pekapoo along with us. We unknowingly have elevated him to "people status" in our family and he gets his name put in all the Christmas cards now- which is something I originally thought extremely silly and swore that I would never do.
For this weekend, we are going to be gone to a destination that is not doggy-friendly and we had originally planned on leaving him with friends. However, all of the usual dog-sitters that we occasionally leave our pup with are going to be out of town for the holiday leaving us with the only option to board our pride and joy with- yep, his veterinarian. After much deliberation, discussion and anxiety, I suddenly found myself driving to the vet this afternoon with my furry friend who is just happy to be with me even though he doesn't know where we are going.
It all happened so fast.
We arrived. They took. I left.
Walking out of the vet's office and to my car with thoughts of my poor puppy being alone and scared racing through my mind, I suddenly had a strange moment. While it was happening, I had had a sudden vision of Timothy Mouse on Disney's Dumbo, watching Dumbo's mother rock her baby from the inside of her solitary confinement cell. He looked with surprise as a larger-than-life tear appeared on his face and this is undoubtedly the way that I looked at the tear that sneakily appeared on my cheek.
It appeared that I do have heart after all, a misplaced direction of heart it may be, but just the same an emotion-filled experience. The tears lasted for about a mile down the road and throughout my insignificant but still sorrowful grieving process, I couldn't help but feel a small amount of relief and yes, even pride that I, Laura Moore, am after all, not heartless.
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