OOSOOM or AMTHGF?

That is to say, Out Of Sight Out Of Mind or Absence Makes The Heart Grow Fonder? (Credit must go to Rogers for these acronyms.)

I experience the summer as a period of absence, with people away, doing their own thing, getting on with their own lives and (in this job, supposedly) their research. Before my relocation I experienced loss more regularly, each week containing a period of separation and reuniting with my colleagues and - in my mind - with my work as well. To be entrenched here in housing terms is also to feel mentally more involved with the job.

But still I experience lack. I'm taking Big Boy home today. He's sad about it and so am I, but I have to try and teach him that separation is not always sad, even as the tears in my eyes will show that I don't believe there can be a happiness in this particular separation. I'll be with him and Little Lad all weekend, but then I have to leave them both with Posh, leaving them (BB is my particular concern) to Her control. Meanwhile, I've been thinking about IQ most days for some time. It's been a while since she was in contact, and although she is not Out Of Mind, my sense of urgency is lessening gradually. But, as with the other times I have felt this way, I know there will be a resurgence when we meet again. Perhaps there won't: perhaps my emotions are not always that predictable; perhaps they don't have to be subject to such recurring cycles. I am prepared for the worst nonetheless.

Almost certainly not, but what is intriguing to me is the frequency with which I experience what I described above...Out Of Sight; frequently On My Mind; but no Growing Fondness. With IQ, with the boys, when Posh and I were first seeing each other, living in different cities...in each situation I have missed someone, and wanted badly to see them again, but there is no continuing sense of the desperation that comes immediately after the separation. It plateaus out, and is easily manageable. Is this really different though? Is there not a sense that I have been creating some imaginary version of the person, a version more desirable (in whatever sense of that word)? In between seeing him, I certainly blot out the terribleness of Little Lad's 6 o'clock wake up call; and I suspect I have turned IQ into more agreeable a person in my mind...the aloofness and disdain will be there all the same next time, and I know this, but I can't feel it in the absence of it happening. So in that sense, there's a layer of OOSOOM: no actual disdain or no actual 6 o'clock crowing from a toddler equals no sense of the reality of the impact of those things. And while that process is going on - the mental erasure of the occasional pain of interaction with an other - the by-product is one of AMTHGF, since the idea of the experience of interaction becomes more pleasant in the mind, and thus these two heroes of loss, the two modes of relation to absence, are co-dependent.