Unexpected Truths - Unexpected People

My friend, Anne, recently shared this quote by Carl Sandburg, “Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected, unplanned by me.”

Some of the things I have discovered in more recent years have to do with “unexpected truths” and “unexpected people”.

When my dear daughter found out that she was pregnant, we felt like the world had come to an end.  At the time, she wasn’t married and, although she was working full time in Daycare, she was not making a living wage.  (It never ceases to amaze me that we live in a society that pays such minimal wages for the most vital, important work, that is, caring for other human beings.  But this is another story for another time. )

Anyway, in the course of her pregnancy and my feelings of despair, people shared unexpected truths with me.   It amazed me that people cared enough to ease my heartbreak that they would share such intimate details from their own lives.   I do not intend to disclose their identities but there stories made me realize that there are many “unexpected truths” and many “unexpected people” in the world.      People had “illicit” sexual relations which resulted in the creation of a real, live human being. 

Is that the ideal way to “co-create” a human being?   In many instances, this type of “forbidden” sexual relationship complicates things for the co-creators and the newly created human being.  So, my answer to this question is -  it is probably not “the ideal.”  Then again, I guess, in certain circumstances, it works out just fine.  For example, Dr. William Carrington, my childhood-family’s physician, use to say that a couple’s first pregnancy usually only requires a 6-7 month gestation.  I am certain that many, many marriages were prompted by this reality.    Now-a-days, couples openly co-habitate before marriage and, if TV and the movies are in any way realistic, premarital sex is a given.  A person has sex with his/her “main squeeze” and when this relationship breaks up they have sex with the next “main squeeze” or possibly more than one main squeeze at a time.   I do not hear a lot of criticism of this behavior – the stigma has longed disappeared.   So why is it such a shock to some when they hear that a child was conceived “out of wedlock” in years past.   Human beings were and always will be (at least as long as they are on this earth) – human beings.  They are imperfect and make mistakes.  They have sexual relations for many different reasons.  Sometimes a person loves a person and wants to be “one” with that person forever and ever.   Sometimes sexual relations have little or nothing to do with love.   Sometimes a person wants comfort in grief and heartbreak (check out the movie “The Summer of 42” for an example of this scenario).  Sometimes, they have too much to drink or simply “get carried away” with the physical feelings and can’t stop what they possibly shouldn’t have started in the first place.     And what about the instance when the person having sexual relations with someone is actually married to or in a committed relationship with someone else?  Don’t I think this is the worst of the worst?   Surprisingly I guess I do not.  Remember in the movie, “Grease”.  In this movie there is a song sung by a girl named “ Rizzo” ( played by Stockard Channing).  The title of the song is “There are worse things I could do.”  I guess I believe that sex and love are extremely complicated issues and that a person can have sex with someone while still very much in love with someone else.   I guess I believe there are “worse things that people can do” and I have a tendency to forgive sexual indiscretions.  Sometimes -  although totally unexpected and unplanned- there are absolutely wonderful, marvelous people who were created from sexual unions that were never suppose to happen.