On meeting my wife as a child again and again

Christl and I met for the first time in our 30s, but after a decade together, I had known her since she was 3.
How is this possible? I’d like to explore how you can come to know someone before you even met them.
When we married and I began to learn more and more bits about Christl’s early life, I found myself looking at little girls who were the age Christl had been when something or other happened to her — using what I could see in that little girl to imagine what Christl was like at that age — and, incidentally, imagining what that little girl might be like at Christl’s present age. This habit of imagining how everything changes over time is something I formed during one of my many attempts at meditation.
Follow me as I review what Christl was like at various ages when growing up, and how that led to a different view of how people age.
Christl at 3
When I saw a girl of 3, I would remember what Christl had told me about herself at that age. I watched the girl and imagined how Christl might have moved, and looked, and reacted at that age. I thought of Christl with those little arms, those puffy cheeks, the direct, open look in those eyes — bold, open, stong, vulnerable.
I imagined a girl like this one living in the normality Christl knew then — a child walking hand-in-hand down streets of bombed-out buildings where old women dug in the rubble. Passing with her father through sidewalk military checkpoints run by Russian, British, French, and American soldiers. Breathing an air thick with fear, want, the terror of uncertainty. Those receptive eyes looking up at adults who were stunned, incomprehending.
She grew up around people, as she put it, “made crazy by war.” I imagined her sponging up the emotions of the adults around her — people huddling past, either not seeing this 3-year-old, or else bursting into an inexplicable joy at seeing a healthy child, a joy intermixed with an unutterable grief over those they had lost.
This was the time Christl’s parents divorced, and a stepmother stepped in who had no children, and who raged at having to compete with the power this little girl had over her father’s attention. I looked at the girl before me and tried to image what it might have been like for Christl, that age and size, to shoulder the burden of that time.
Christl at 6
When I met 6-year-old girls, I imagined Christl at 6 — lanky, a bit gawky, confused by being shunted off to Catholic boarding school, with her Dad visiting each Sunday, then some Sundays, as the months and then the years went on.
I saw her as trusting, open, innocent, taken in by young nuns who valued these qualities and protected her by giving her a world that had order, safety, authority. There were rules, and there were ways to know when you were doing them right. I imagined Christl settling into a routine that was executed as if it were the order of the universe, laid down by God, sternly unquestionable, yet comforting, safe. Inside these walls, the chaos of a crumbled city was replaced by a daily schedule, a set curriculum, the round of rituals, surrounded by the infinitely ordered Cosmos those rituals reflected.
Christl said that being hustled away from home and off to Catholic boarding school “saved her life,” and she was forever grateful to the kindly young nuns who helped her there and gave her a place that made sense to a child.
Christl at 8
When I got the chance to observe a girl who was a little older, around 8, I imagined Christl at recess, as she had told it, in a corner of the yard by herself, finding an inexplicable solace in studying — bugs!
Watching the preternaturally intense concentration of an 8-year-old girl, and how naturally it came, with the sense of wonder it opened, I saw Christl at that age, in tender fascination with tiny creatures on the playground, holding one delicately, genuinely surprised that another girl would squirm and squeam at the sight of something alien to her — but not alien to Christl.
We had been married several months before I discovered that she loved bugs and was unafraid of spiders. When I found this out, I thought I had won the lottery! This spontaneous attachment to nature and creatures became one of the delights that bonded us, and critters crawled joyfully through both our sons’ upbringing — snakes, a rat, birds, a baby grackle, a ferret, cats, dogs, and a flying squirrel, and innumerable moths, beetles, spiders, roly-poly bugs, and fish. All thanks to an 8-year-old girl on a playground at recess, finding solace in watching bugs.
This was also the time her estranged mother, now clean and sober, started arriving on Sundays, so Christl got extra competing visits, and extra emotional confusion.
Christl at 12
Just before adolescence, many children reach a kind of perfection. They become masters of childhood. They fully and exactly inhabit their bodies, and many of them move with an acrobatic ease, a dancer’s grace.
Early in our marriate, when I saw children around that age, I thought of Christl hurling herself effortlessly through space, hand-standing across the floor, cartwheeling through recess, dancing in her seat, in one of those special periods when a free spirit moves with perfect freedom.
Christl danced, and the years she spent in dance floated her through life, no matter how much her body changed with age. Simply moving brought out the girl in her and brought her joy. In some way, she was always that 8-year-old girl on the jungle gym.
Adolescence
But this time is also the cusp of change. That perfect child’s body and the child perfectly aligned with it — both begin to disappear into something else. With this change comes a great beauty, and a great challenge — the adventure of growing up. But also there comes the grief of losing the perfect girl she was, in order to blunder through years of becoming someone you do not know, and must learn to live as. It is the age of no longer being who you were, and not yet being who you are becoming.
Around 12, Christl was poised in the middle of that change — with womanhood rounding out in her such a sweetness, and the detached certainty of a girl’s glance modulating into the tender entanglement life will soon ask of her. Somewhat puzzled, she begins a time when people respond to her so differently — men, especially — that she tries to see through their eyes what she is becoming. It becomes a time of being constantly seen, constantly shaped by the gaze and amaze in the eyes of others. This I learned by piecing together bits of her life then as she occasionally told it.
I wrote about this period of life in “At the Nude Beach in Vienna,” and I’d like to repeat it here:
Christl said she developed late, a year or more after her schoolmates had grown breasts, discovered boys, and bled. But by the time she reached 16, men grew silent when she walked into a room. By 17, she had silky hair and eyes that made color melt; her elegance caused women to sit upright, and her form made men forget to breathe. She gave off an ease and happiness that made everyone think, “I want to be part of that.” She was mountain air, high meadows, and brilliant sun.
When I saw young women of high school and college age, I imagined Christl at those ages — a creative spirit surrounded by tradition, a rebel with deep roots, an individualist who identifies with all womanhood, an artist gifted at math, a visual thinker with a huge vocabulary, a woman who could be almost anything yet wanted foremost to be a mother.
The years between college and the time I met her at 32 are easier to account for, because she entered them more fully formed. Although she had a short first marriage, then spent a few years as an artist in a free-spirited hippie world, by then she was already who she was, with the museums and monuments and Mozart and mystique of Vienna inside her more vivid than anything in California, except the redwoods and sheer coastal cliffs.
Age as Adding Ages
Normally, we think of people, and ourselves, as arriving at one age — say, 6 years old — living at that age, then leaving that behind to live at another age — so that we successively live each age and leave it, remaining only with the present age we inhabit. The rest becomes the past, just memories.
But I came to think that people may not so much grow from one age to the next, as stay one age and add the next age to it. A 3-year-old does not entirely change into an 8-year-old: Inside the 8 year old, the 3 year old still lives, and both live inside the adult.
Perhaps you never leave childhood and youth, perhaps you just add later ages to them. Perhaps there is a place inside us where time is not sequential, where past, present, and future coexist, simultaneously, interfused with each other, and all our actions in the conscious world of clock-time rest on the layered simultaneity of dreams.
I came to see this as I pieced together Christl’s life history. As I learned more about her earliest childhood, I came to see that there were times when that 3-year-old girl burst out of her with helplessness and rage. Some of these times were almost shocking, when this very capable adult woman reacted to something the way a toddler would. The toddler continued to live inside the woman, and so did the past: There were moments when to her the year seemed to become 1947 again.
It’s easy to imagine this inner child in terms of trauma and unresolved emotions — there has been much good therapy done in this area — and some of that is certainly true here. But I think it is true in another sense.
There were many times when I thought I could detect inside Christl (when she was in her 30s) that 8-year-old girl on the playground studying bugs, as that girl rose up in Christl and quite happily filled the woman with the clear, simple concentration of the girl, with that girl’s ability to become immersed in the galactic details of some tiny portion of nature — or, later, a painting. Inside that very capable woman and mother, that schoolgirl lived, and that girl’s bright, clear engagement with the world could, in an instant, step right into the adult woman’s form. What that inner child contained were not just unresolved emotions, but also the skills and aptitudes and bright intelligence of the girl, uncluttered by the concerns of a grown-up’s life.
This came to seem true of the other Ages of Christl — how, inside the mature woman, each girl of her girlhood still lived and breathed, looked out at the world, performed the music of those emotions, contained the skill and grace and sensitivity of that girl, moved in that girl’s rhythms and spoke with some of the inflections of her voice. And yet, at the same time, Christl was one — whole, herself, a woman and mother and person. A complex whole, to be sure! But how single is anyone’s self? How definite are we?
One of the joys of a long marriage is the privilege of knowing another person deeply. And being deeply known. Even knowing how that person is, in a sense, many people — all the people she has ever been, and even some she wanted to be. Lasting love is founded on this ability to learn to know someone.
It may not sound so strange then, to say that Christl and I met for the first time in our 30s, but after a decade together, I had known her since she was 3. Because those different, interesting, indispensable people she had been since she was 3 still lived inside her, and, little by little, I had been able to meet them all.
Gerald Grow is a retired journalism professor. More at longleaf.net.