Please love me very much and always and take care of me Small Friend the way Small Friends take care of Big Friends – high in the sky and shining and beautiful.
Ernest Hemingway in a letter to his fourth wife, Mary.
Several years ago, before I first accidentally read the words ‘Daddy Dom’ on Instagram and fell headlong down the rabbit hole of CG/l; before I ever imagined polyamory could be for me, I worked alongside a young lady I will here call Jenny.
Jenny was in her early twenties and about five years younger than me. She was conscientious and hard-working, but also gentle and very playful. We slowly became friends as we began to recognise each other's qualities. Her sight was not brilliant, and in the winter months when we would leave work in the night-time dark, she would wait for me so that I might escort her to her car. At my desk, she would throw scraps of paper at me when I wasn’t looking, and she would pull a face and laugh as I gave her a mock-stern look in reply. I would smile as she would talk of her love of Fluttershy from My Little Pony or recount her favourite Disney film (Hercules) and sing one of the songs. In summertime we would take our lunch outdoors alone, sit in a shady spot on a grassy embankment and have a sort of picnic.
Truth be told, I adored Jenny. But I would not, and indeed did not, make any romantic or sexual approach towards her. I had my own relationship at that time and she had hers. And I felt no bitterness about it. Her fiancé was a wonderful match for her. It was perfectly charming to hear how she liked to look after the house because he worked so hard in the week, and how she would love to be a stay-at-home wife and mother. It was adorable how, each morning when she arrived at work, she would quickly text him to let him know she had arrived safely; how she always sought his blessing before agreeing to see her friends (something he always gave without question); to see how she deferred and clung to him when they would both come out together. I would later learn, when reading about poly, that my feelings towards Jenny involved compersion. And I derived comfort and happiness knowing I could look after her to a small extent when her husband-to-be could not be around.
Only later, after we had eventually lost contact and I had discovered a name for the feelings I had had from a young age, did I consider that Jenny was perhaps a little. Though we were good friends, it seems unlikely that she would have felt comfortable admitting such feelings even if it had occurred to me to ask. But if I could be a Caregiver for all those years without having any understanding of what that meant, surely she could be a little.
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| Ernest and Hadley Hemingway, 1922 |
While listening to the audiobook of A Moveable Feast, I was struck by the almost paternal tenderness of Hemingway's reminiscences of his first wife, Hadley. Author Bernice Kert has said that Hemingway saw a childishness in Hadley even though she was several years older than him. I wondered if there was anything of the CG/l dynamic in their relationship and if the man who would later prefer to be known as 'Papa' had the kind of ‘Daddy feelings’ recognisable by any modern Caregiver.
When those summer lunches with Jenny come to mind, I stop to consider all the other couples of Small and Big Friends who are unwittingly leaning toward CG/l, and about how excited they would be if they discover its name and follow us down the rabbit hole. It is not an unpleasant thought.