True Love Stories
Nobody Remembers….
Do you remember the first true love of your life? I was thinking about this today…I remember a year before my mother died, she made a request to me…would I find out where Herbert was? He was her first true love. Her first husband. All those years with my father 40 years of marriage, and she never mentioned him once. Although, I did see some old photographs of him in his uniform with a lovely signature: To Janet, my love always, it said.
They were married…very young, and then the war broke out.
My father had been dead for over 40 years, so I was struck by the news, and the desperation she was in to find him. She never told me about him, but I could tell, she had loved him more than my father just by the way she mentioned his name. Like the old lady on the Titanic, Rose, she remembered, and never told a soul, until me, her daughter, until that night.
As she laid in her bed, wearing her flowered printed nightgown, holding her cup of ice, she told me the story of how Herbert had been injured in the Pacific where he served on a ship in WWII. He was in a hospital bed in California, and she was only 18, but she booked a train ticket to travel from St. Louis to San Franscisco where he was laid up. She told me how frightened she was. She was just a bit of a girl, only 4 feet 5 inches. Some of the soldiers were rather…rude.
It must have been scary for a young woman to travel all that way alone by train, but women have done much the same in history. John Quincy Adams wife, Louisa, traveled alone through Russia to get to her beloved during the winter, in a carriage. That’s a LONG trip, and back then for an English woman traveling alone, very dangerous.
Love will make you do that.
When she got there, a priest came out and took her aside before she went into the room.
“Whatever you do” he told her. “Do NOT give him a divorce. Don’t do it. He will push you, but don’t do it.” Mom told me the priest begged her not to do it. “No matter what he says.” The Priest was firm. And adamant.
When she went inside, her beloved told her he wanted a divorce, go home. Never see him again. He must have been very cruel.
She cried and cried, and refused to leave, but what she didn’t know, is that HER father had somehow called Herbert and convinced him to force her to divorce him. For some reason, maybe because of whatever injury he suffered, he thought, because he loved her, that it was the best thing to do for her.
My grandfather wanted MY mother to take care of him in his old age. At least that’s what my mother told me when she was 77. He was the real cause of the breakup.
So, to my surprise, I found Herbert. He had a farm in Southern Missouri, with a wife and seven grown children. He was still alive!
I left a message, but he never called back. I could tell, my mother was pretty sad about it.
True love. Sad ending. Most people have it as their first love.
In my case, I had a simple crush on a Priest’s son named Christopher in grade school. We were both five. In fact, the middle name I gave my only son was Christopher.
He hates it. (LOL)
We held hands in the auditorium during Christmas movies. He gave me a ring. I would look at it for hours. Back then, the teachers thought it was cute. Now? It would be considered some sort of crime. We sat there happy as little turtle doves. I felt so special, and surely God was blessing me. It was wonderful.
My husband that I am married to now, his first true love was his first wife. He joined the Navy Seals and when he was in Panama, she got together (had sex) with his best friend in Virginia Beach. This was when she had a small baby daughter in the next room by her husband who was away.
The devastation he felt was unbearable. His best friend, the wife he loved.
How did I know she was his first love? A wife knows these things. She was beautiful, young, and when we ran into her one day by chance. He fell completely apart.
You don’t do that…if you’re not still in love.
I was older, and got married, he used to come hear me sing in a hotel. He was looking for a way to take his daughter away from her, and I had a son, a house to live in, and the judge looked at me, gave us custody of his daughter, and said to ME…”Good luck.”
But the judge knew…he had seen this before.
We have been married now for 31 years.
But was he my true love? I ask myself now.
Was it mostly sex?
And what does true love feel like?
How do you know?
I will tell you…when you feel true love, you see their face everywhere. You think of them every minute…you cry, you laugh, and the most joyful part of your day is when you are near them. You hope, you plan, your dream…You only want the best for them, and if that would mean giving them up, then so be it. Your heart aches when you are not with them.
Herbert must have loved my mother very much. BUT he should have NEVER listened to her father. He should have told him to go to hell.
Of course, I would not be alive to write this, so..there’s that. But I would not have been born either, and I am now, only finding my real true love not too much younger than my mother when she remembered her husband.
And I met him online.
Life is cruel, but…
Sometimes, true love, means loving yourself enough to feel you are worthy of the true love that comes to you.
Grab hold of it with all your heart. Because…you only live once, and true love only comes once.
Am I right?
I hope you have experienced true love in your life, and even if my true love, never wants me, does a Herbert someday, at least I can say, I experienced the thrill of what it feels like to REALLY love so deeply another human being. And we did nothing wrong.
It’s written in the stars…some things are just meant to be.
Love is the answer. If you find it, grab it…and never let it go.
Or you’ll end up like my mother, lying in your bed late at night, with sadness you will carry to your grave.
By the way, I’ve told my husband, and he thinks…it’s just a silly…true love?
To him, it’s like a cold. It will pass.
(Now, If only I had a diamond necklace…I really don’t think I would throw it away. LOL)
About
I am a nobody. If the different classes of America were color-coded, I would be in the yucky brown, one rung up from the bottom. I grew up in Naples, Florida and live near the Mississippi River now with my husband and two dogs. I am part of the slowly disappearing middle-class. I was a musician most of my life: drummer/singer/keyboards—but I retired before the plastic surgery flu hit. I have no degrees, which could be a good thing…depending on how you view our educational system. I do have three patents…but that really doesn’t make me a somebody. The one thing that is constant in my life is my OPINIONS, which i have more than perhaps even Carl Sagan could have imagined…mostly political. (yes…my ancestors were crabby buggers)
Hopefully other nobody’s will put their opinions on my site. But, if you happen to be a somebody, you’re more than welcomed to help out.
It’s my Nobody Opinion that Nobody’s Perfect, and Nobody Cares, that Nobody Knows why Nobody Wins, and when that happens, Nobody Wonders, why Nobody Flashes, why Nobody’s Fooled, but then Nobody remembers that Nobody ALWAYS Reports the truth.
You can email me at joyanna_adams@yahoo.com
Joyanna Adams
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