Kate

The Little Prince is a children's book written in a different era. Like so many children's books, it has remained popular. There is something about it that makes parents want to pass it along to their children. I came upon the Little Prince as an adult and read it in disbelief. It deals with love and loss like few adult books do. 

I painted the Little Prince on his planet for my ex-sister-in-law many years ago. When I gave it to her, she started crying; I guess the Little Prince resonated with her. I'm a terrible painter, by the way, so I'm sure my skill or lack thereof had little to do with her emotional response. 

Everyone has their favorite quote from the book. For my ex-sister-in-law, it was, "You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed." That has stuck with me for many years. 

For brief moments, I feel I tamed my ex-wife. She was a different person when I met her. She became something else over the years. She was wild, staying out all night with her friends, smoking in the rain, getting into fights, hanging out with who-knows-who. I didn't know where she was or who she was with most of the time. By the end of our marriage, she only wanted to be with me in a suffocating, dreadful way. 

I could say I tamed her. But I did not. All the love in the world wouldn't have made any difference. She chose who she loved and how much she loved, and, often, I got the short end of the stick. In the midst of one of her emotional affairs, she came to me in tears, and it was obvious what was going on. She said she loved another man, and I told her love is just a choice. You wake up every day with a choice of who you are going to love. I told her she had made her choice, as she had many times before with other men or women. 

Did I tame her? No. She made a choice to belong to me. As I pulled away, she chose harder. As I respected her decisions to love others while in a relationship with her, I have to respect her decision to love me when we are no longer in a relationship. It's sad and perhaps ironic it turned out that way. You can't change how someone feels about you, which is possibly the saddest thing of all. A children's book can't be your guide for love. I tried to make her love me all those years. Try as we might, children's books often don't apply to adult relationships.