Everyday Canvas

Stages of Love & My Earliest Years’ Effects on My Writing

Prompt: Do you think people can change as to how they view love as years go by? And how do you think they perceive love and romance in different stages of their lives?

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Yes, people’s assessment of relationships and love and romance can change as they age. In the earliest stages, humans are usually influenced by hormones, but is that love? I doubt it. I think true love happens regardless of the body’s needs.

Later on, the quality of the love-relationship becomes the issue. For the lucky few, it is a give-and-take situation. When it is only give or only take, the relationship loses its power and dies. Midlife is the most stressful time with all the offspring, work and money problems, and commitments outside the relationship.

Luckily, in old age, people settle down and value their feelings and hold an appreciation for one another, despite the changes in health and other problems. At this time, their views of love have matured just like the ways they look at life.

Love has these components in general: obsessive thinking of the loved one, craving for his/her nearness, euphoria or romantic sadness, increased or decreased energy, and the feeling that life is just that. People in love, at times or always, feel as if they have uncovered the meaning of life completely, and nothing else matters all that much.

I think everyone’s view of love is different. I see it as being comfortable with each other’s company, feeling respect for and trusting the other person. This may be because I am in my seventies, although I can still recall the earliest feelings of love, the heartbeat, the excitement, and my dwelling over every action, incident, and word, when my beloved showed up at my door.

Prompt: What impressed you the most in your earliest years that you believe may have had an effect on your writing? I mean things like the neighborhood you grew up in or the fairy tales and stories you came upon before you were in your teens.

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My earliest memories are of newspapers, writings hung on the walls, and books in the house. All these things might have urged me to pester my grandmother to tell me the sounds of letters that were all around. So, it is no wonder that I learned to read at age 3.5 practically on my own.

Another major effect on me was my mother’s spirituality. She kept telling me parables and fairy tales that changed according to her moods, and I loved the changes she made in her storytelling. Who’d think that Cinderella not only had her stepsisters to deal with but a scary person huge in size, living in the attic, who then mellowed and helped her with her prince? My mother would tell me her stories with all the theatrics she could muster, which impressed me even more.

She also read to me, not only the fairytales but Rumi’s stories, too. Rumi’s stories are not linear; he looks at situations from all sides and sometimes the stories do not have a clear ending, which is usually on purpose. This did bother me, and I recall arguing with my mother over those stories. One of them involved a rabbit, and although the story had a great moral, the ending was left open. I kept insisting, almost in tears, “But what happened to the rabbit?” No matter which explanation my mother gave me, I didn’t grasp. Then, she said, “What do you think should happen?” So, those stories and her reading to me took on a different route. After she’d finish the reading, we’d make up our own ending, according to my whims.

There were other things in my life that had an effect on my love of reading, writing, people, and all living things. We had lots of people coming and going into the house, and not only guests but the people who came to work for different things, gardener, cleaners, street vendors etc.

I was very much interested in other people’s lives and in the lives of the animals. My aunt--who lived with us before she married--was a cat person. She’d take care of the street cats, and if they had kittens, we’d keep the mother and the newborn kittens in a spare room. She also had three cats as her pets. Then, we went to visit the many farms in the area since my grandfather was the only doctor within several miles and everyone loved him because he’d take care of the sick on a credit basis and sometimes he’d forgo their debts altogether. Those farm owners let me roam in their farms among the animals. I also loved the beach since the town we lived in was by the water. All these things and others that are too many to tell were happening before I had turned seven.

So, when I turned eight, I began to write; however, later on, when my road gained many forks, I went many other ways.