What if Lasting Relationship is Dependent on the Quality of our Goodbye?

I can get lost in parenting while partnering.

Once my little two are finally out the door, after the chaos it takes to get to the other side, the last thing I think of is stopping midstream to say goodbye to anyone inside. 

But as always, this morning, there’s Chris…running to the door from inside the house, waving, looking right at me saying…”Bye Stac,” as he turns his wave into a blown kiss. 

I’m pondering this as I drink my morning latte while my daughter and I walk to her school.

In our quiet stroll she ponders the friends she’ll see today, and I ponder the friends I haven’t seen in a while. 

One’s I haven’t given a proper goodbye to. Which Chris’s multiple-times-a-day gesture, still after a decade of being together, demonstrates to me, the importance of. 

Growing up, after a separation from my family, one of two things happened. 

I got picked up by an overworked, overstressed mom who didn’t want to be a mom after a day being “watched” by an overstressed babysitter. Was hustled to the car, and remained silent in the tension within those glass windows. A tension I often blamed on myself. Or, I came home to an house that felt as dead as it did empty, with no stirring, no people, where the only close-to-comfort I had was in food. 

When we left, my internal-innocence would almost scream-beg, “goodbye, I love you…” like a shakespearean drama. But they didn’t seem to be longing like I was, and they never said it. Just like they hardly ever said hello. Just like they never said I love you. 

But I said it, all the time. Poetically, even. Only, I had to keep those kinds of sounds, within my silence.

Hello! Goodbye! I love you!

But after years of being mirrored those aren’t things we say, I stopped saying them. Within myself, and to other people in my life I love that may’ve happily received my romantic nature. 

Fast-forward to an intense argument with an ex lover about his family hugging at every goodbye and hello. It made my skin crawl, and I felt insanely fake rather than grateful, to be a part of it.

I didn’t understand….this.

What I understand now as Chris locks eyes every time. As if, if it were gonna be the last time, he’d never let me forget the look he gave me when his goodbye, was somehow simultaneously also scream-begging “Hello! I love you” in his silence, the way mine used to as a kid who wished these moments I have now, were normal. 

Not just for me, but especially for my parents. I didn’t know why they didn’t just give moments like this to themselves, let alone, me.

Older-me, though, would’ve barfed on the inside a bit at the level of unbordered, but totally boundaried intimacy I’m able to take in these days. Like relaxing where the waves wash up on the shore. 

I sometimes wonder what my neighbors think as they hear us, all, daily, ritually say goodbye on the porch and yell I love you as we leave. While to me, those words are just water, tickling my toes on a sandy beach, and I’m free to play for as long as I’d like. 

I can look back at what I know loves me, and meet that look in the middle of itself, and feel completely alive knowing that in this world…I exist. 

I’m looked at. 

I’m greeted and dismissed with the same enthusiasm. Which like I said, used to physically repulse me when I saw large family systems engage in this kind of vision. I literally didn’t believe it. 

Or rather, felt set apart from it, and felt like It didn’t believe in me because I’d never been given it (so I must not deserve it). Which was more of the same kind of existential rejection. 

Chris and I work because he brings my inner expression that’s been lost on me, out to meet the outer world in a way as a child, not a single person met me. He says good morning, good evening and goodbye. Every time. So simple, yet sewing sustainability in the cosmos somehow.

Those simple phrases that even in the sometimes-quiet that follows them say….”I see you. You exist. I am here with you. I exist. We are not alone. It’s a new moment to be glad in.” 

As a kid who longed to greet and goodbye people the way Chris does me, and everyone he greets and goodbye’s, which I’d grown to be repulsed by in the outer world, he reminds me of who I am in here. And he invites her to come out and play. 

I wonder, as the dew melts away on cars we pass under the waking sun, if the reason Chris and I are still madly together, but not even close to mad about it, is because of the quality of greetings and goodbye’s. 

I wonder if these little sparks of urgency to ensure the connection even beyond our doors, but also, within them, are the rights of passage we engage in every single day that make our relationship usually-remarkably easy.

Ritual. 

Sacred ceremony, right under our noses. 

More meaningful than words, and less noticed as a symbol of sustainability than should be. 

Hello!

I love you!

Goodbye!