More Love Doesn’t Equal Less Pain

By Maria Padhila

I’m listening to moans of pleasure coming from the next room: “Mmmmmmmmm… hot water… mmmmmmm… water pressure… mmmmmm…”

Chris is taking his first real post-Burning Man shower (not the tepid motel trickle), and as I can hear, it’s a near transcendent experience. He can have it alone (his shower’s a one-manner), and after three weeks in the desert building scaffolding, pounding rebar, and facing into whiteout dust storms (fierce and frequent this year), he deserves to.

In an odd way, I feel I’ve spent almost two months alone. It’s been a summer of missing, for all the enjoyment and time together. What it made clear is something poly people find hard to get others to understand: that those you love aren’t interchangeable parts that fill in for each other when another is gone.

Recently, the Dr. Drew show (an American physician who has a talk show about sex issues on CNN) did a piece featuring the quad from the Showtime polyamory show. An ‘expert’ brought on to talk about polyamory posited that some people use poly as a dodge, “a way to avoid intimacy and a deeper relationship.” The sense is that if you’re deeply afraid that someone will leave or abandon you, or if you’re afraid to open up and be truly close, you’ll play partner games, assuring yourself that if one leaves you, you’ll always have a ‘spare’.

It doesn’t work that way. It might be easier if it did.

No one seems to have trouble understanding that I would miss Tobi (Isaac’s and my daughter). She was gone for six weeks, going to camp and staying with relatives, although we saw her for two weeks during that time, as we traveled to visit those same relatives. In fact, we’re kind of sickening about how we miss her. We text to each other: “I miss Tobi!” “I wish Tobi were here!” “I want to hug Tobi!” She had a phone and would text to us and talk with us as well, daily, but we still missed her like the worst helicopter parents ever described in a New York Times Sunday Styles white-privilege-fake-trend piece.

I know it’s great for her to be away. Her camp is a very simple, rustic deal that Isaac’s family has gone to for years, and she loves being in the all-girl environment, doing crafts, kayaking, singing campfire songs. As an only child in the city, she soaks up the experience of visiting her big-family relatives in suburbs — the houses with lots of bedrooms, big meals together, backyards, riding bikes in the cul-de-sacs, wrestling and goofing, bickering about who sits where in the mini-van.

It’s an exotic world to her — the “typical home” as defined by the Disney channel and tweener paperbacks. (When they visit us, her cousins get to do things like take the city buses and subways, shoot baskets in the park, see street musicians, and learn how not to be impolite and stare at people who live on the streets.) I know how lucky we are to have the chance for the families to meet and spend time together. I would never think of not letting her have these experiences. And I even feel a lot of joy knowing she’s out there exploring her world.

And I still miss her and want her with me.

I’m missing Isaac, although he hasn’t gone anywhere. His work schedule has changed for the foreseeable future, and we’re now ships passing in the night except for on his days off. We talk and text on the run. I can steal time from work and sleep to spend time with him, but that’s not going to do anyone any good. I miss having time to hang out together, just share his random observations, have sex when we’re not half-asleep. We have one day when we can be together more, but I’d like two, a weekend, like the ‘normal’ world has. (I know how few of us are ‘normal’ — many of us are working more than one job on top of child care.) My only other day available to spend good time with him? On the day that before this had always been designated as Chris’s day.

I haven’t figured out how to work that out yet.

And Chris has been in the desert. At first he could text me little messages and photos, but as more people came onto the playa, the cell service became unreliable — and besides, what’s the point of going out to that environment if you’re going to keep checking in on the default world? So there was a certain silence there, and it was pretty hollow. As I worked at night, I’d tune into the live video feed and BMIR, the Burning Man radio station that broadcasts live during the event. Chris had a DJ shift there, and Isaac had lent him an old iPod full of tunes. I tuned in late at night on my phone, with only a few hours’ sleep, and I heard him play some of my favorite songs.

It was magical. I grew up listening to a little portable radio hidden under the pillow. I was a victim of night terrors when I was Tobi’s age (thankfully, something she didn’t inherit), and the independent FM radio of the time was a lifeline. I was a rock geek, studying and comparing musicians and writing about them (something I managed to grow into a small part of my professional career).

I gave music an inordinate power — or is it a deserved one? Like many in rock world, sometimes I felt like rock and soul music were the only things that could keep me alive. Hearing the music, so late, took me back to that place. I felt how powerful music can be — how the messages and the tones can alchemize an entire space and travel across time zones to pull emotions out of all who hear them. This lifted me up out of all proportion — I turned to Isaac, half-asleep, and hugged and kissed him, saying, “Thank you for helping make my dreams come true.”

One of the songs was George Harrison’s “Beware of Darkness,” with the simple words: “Beware of sadness. It can hit you. It can hurt you. Make you sore, and what is more: It is not what you are here for.”

It can be tough in the middle of a cold, nearly lifeless stretch of dust, far from those closest to you, as everyone around you celebrates and dances. Even in a comfortable bed with someone you love, there can still be sadness. I hope someone who needed to heard those words that night. We’re here for something more.