Posts Tagged ‘divorce’
Friday, January 27th, 2012
“Am I doing the right thing?” I implored from behind sympathetic sunglasses, as tears streaked my already salt-stained cheeks.
She leant across the table. Her eyes turned to slits. ”What do you mean, Penny?” she asked – very slowly – certain she knew precisely what I meant, but not wanting to be presumptuous.
“Should I be getting divorced?” My lower lip quivered and I convulsed a little, deep within the lower parts of my soul.
She was bolt upright in a flash. “Are you fucken crazy!” That clearly was not! a question.
There are certain friends who should bill me for their time! And some who I’m sure would just like to medicate. Because, yes, I was emotional roadkill once again …
I have been working at the Chrysalis Academy (I need a whole blog post to expound on the magical synchronicity of that!) and taking hundreds of photographs to document the program. Well, one thing led to another and when downloading, I came across photographs of my (not-soon-enough) soon-to-be-ex-husband and myself. Already slightly emotionally unhinged – my usual state – I couldn’t help but slowly unravel, and when the above-mentioned friend called me for a drizz about her own emotional love affairs and despairs, all my seams popped open and I had to rush over to her place to merge with her river of tears.
The story goes on (and on) but I’ll take you on a short-cut to a long body-surf followed by the above-mentioned conversation – which clearly confirmed my momentary insanity – and a crack which needed mending … but not until I had found the cause.
And as the processing began and I started to run too much, work too hard, forget to eat … and then deal with a stuffed Achilles tendon and a fever blister that usually signals my body’s plea for help, a fragile Penny limped through the week, unable to fathom what exactly had mowed me down.
And then BAM! One more prescriptive look through the photos and I realized I wasn’t so much looking at Him … or even Us … so much as Me. And it wasn’t really Me at all. And that was it! That was the BAM! moment. I had been grappling with the notion that perhaps … despite the wailing and crumbling and running and borderline anorexia … I hadn’t yet mourned the loss of my marriage. But Oh, So Far! from it. I was totally and completely over my marriage, over my husband, over the branding and everything that came with the package. What I was really mourning was the Me that I couldn’t find in the majority of those photos. What I was really mourning was the fact that I had tucked so much of myself away for so long that I didn’t recognize Myself as Me.
And then I was back. The Me I had rescued had taken off another cloak. Where before, the moments of sanity were short and sweet, the lapses now form the blips on the evening news. I came back and I came back stronger. And stronger is good when you still have an albatross to rip off your neck. I am finally done with allowing myself to be punished for not being the Me that fitted His profile of the ideal Us. I am done allowing myself to be punished for not wanting to be married to Him anymore. I am done with the guilt.
I may still have the training wheels on, but I am Me. And that’s soon going to just have to be enough.
Tags: divorce, guilt, identity, illusion, marriage, perceptions, photos, relationships, roadkill, self
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Monday, December 5th, 2011
I have survived Buddha’s Boot camp only to find myself preparing for battle. I have gone from Meditation to Mediation, that one little ‘t’ representing two concepts that are worlds apart yet strangely complimentary. Mind over matter doesn’t get me what I want but it sure helps me not sweat it for more than a few minutes before letting it go … even though we have effectively turned Marital Art into a Martial Art and I find myself searching for an appropriate place in the divorce agreement to insert something that disallows shouting out of context. I also search through the division of assets and wonder where the column is that indicates the division of friends. It seems the wake of his contact with mutual friends is plagued with being snubbed, hung up on and, in one very puzzling case of hypocrisy, being excluded from the wedding guest list of a guy I have known for three decades who proposed to his now-ex wife while she was still married to another man.
It’s none of my business what anyone thinks of me and if my ex-to-be wants these people in the settlement, he’s welcome to them … I won’t defend myself to people who have known me for years yet make no attempt to find out how I am faring in this saga.
As Paulo Coelho says, “Don’t explain. Your friends do not need it, and your enemies will not believe you.” So I don’t. I just continue to be my authentic self and, through my own interpretation of the truth, I get to keep the friendships of real value while he gets the duds. In terms of the settlement, however, if I can just insert that extra column, they should at least weigh up nicely against a couple of pieces of furniture. There is still a chance the friends will discover the truth and neutralize their judgment. Furniture isn’t so fickle though – it’ll still be mine.
Tags: assets, divorce, friends, judgment, marriage, mediation, meditation, Paulo Coelho, truth, Vipassana
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Sunday, October 2nd, 2011
I had a flashback to a scene from When Harry met Sally … Carrie Fischer’s character was divorcing her husband and they were sitting in the living room sorting through who gets what and I seem to remember a fight over … uh … was it really a wagon wheel table? My memory may be playing tricks on me for the purpose of this blog post but … at the end of the day it all boils down to Stuff. You want it even if you don’t want it. I’m not terribly sentimental about stuff but there are certain things that belong to me; they are part of me and part of my story. If they went up in smoke I probably wouldn’t miss them but the idea of them being in someone else’s house out of spite is not a place I care to go. I’m used to my buttons being pushed but it feels like they’re being pushed with an electric probe these days. I’ve felt a fair amount of spittle fly into my face lately, but since learning a new use for my word, Trust, I can let the hostility slide over me. I can Trust that I will be bombarded with verbal, email and sms abuse about anything from the state of the garden to the friends I hang out with but I can now also Trust that an apology isn’t far behind. For most things…
“I think what I am doing is very different from what you did.” The sms glared at me from my Nokia screen and I glared back until the screensaver came on. Like so many things these days, the ‘conversations’ tend to end right there, requests for elaboration futile.
“I hate to generalise,” a male friend of mine said, “but it’s weird; it’s just a guy thing. Ego maybe.” I was telling him about my husband’s big Secret about having a Girlfriend. I knew of course – small world that it is, my people know her people – but it was still just a rumour until he told me himself months later … and only because I inadvertently prompted it. I had, after all, told him the moment I met My Guy even though we were already separated. I was relieved by the news and felt smug about how he can no longer be self-righteous about my ‘affair’ and I threw my head back and laughed at his hypocrisy about not being able to move on until the divorce was final. None of it really matters you see – it is such a tiny blip on an antiquated radar – our relationship has been over for years and I want him to be happy in the same way I found life after death … albeit temporarily. But playing the guilt and blame card still? … trying to absolve himself by comparing? … hmm, it just doesn’t sit right.
Is that really just a guy thing? Does Ego really excuse hostility, hypocrisy and self-righteousness? I hope it’s just a phase. Like my great-grandmother, Dottie, used to say, through her cracked lips and crooked teeth, “This too shall pass.”
Tags: affair, communication, divorce, Ego, hostility, phase, relationships, trust
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Friday, September 23rd, 2011
As far as watersheds go, today was a biggie. I closed the doors on both the men in my life … for good.
I went on a silent retreat at the beginning of the year and was told – not for the first time! – that I need to walk away from both my (soon-to-be-ex-) husband and my (then) lover and be true to myself so I could lead the life I’m meant to. Today, after a traumatic year of having listened neither to outside advise nor inner wisdom, I finally presented a divorce agreement to my husband and I broke off all contact with the man I subsequently fell in love with … the timing of these two cataclysmic events falling on the same day, a total coincidence.
Still waiting for the thunderbolt response to the first event, I concluded the second in a fittingly rushed Skype call to the other side of the world. But as soon as the guillotine came down with the click of the red button, I fell in a heap with a spike of adrenalin coursing through my veins … it felt like my heart was the only organ in my body and it was about to blow a hole in my chest. It wanted out! and who can blame it in such a hostile environment. But I lacked inertia for either fight or flight. Although tears finally failed me, it felt like I might be stuck in that position until someone found me there days later.
And then I smiled … like only I can when it looks like the sky might fall down. I saw in an instant that all is exactly as it is meant to be. I remembered something I vowed many months ago … to myself and to whoever was listening at the time. I swore that I would not stay with my married lover once I was divorced, not even knowing then why I had said it … whether I had hoped he would leave his wife or whether I was afraid of ‘officially’ becoming the mistress, thinking that perhaps I couldn’t take that label while I was ‘officially’ still married. So in terms of fate, the day went rather well.
Perhaps it’s because he has broken my heart and made me cry so many times in one year that the end of our final contact caused neither breakage nor spillage … not even the ‘I love you’ penetrated my new shell now that I know the love was never real and a true depth of feeling simply non-existent. I turned off my projector and I was met with a blank screen. I have fallen out of love with someone I thought would make me whole and, ironically, it is the first time I have begun to feel complete.
Being stronger and wiser this time around the circle won’t by any means ensure my heart stays intact for always, but it will make my choices wiser and my intuition more fine-tuned to act according to my best interests and my greater good. The next time I turn on the projector, I’ll choose a different plot and a happier ending and characters that are more compatible with the roles they need to play. For now, I will listen to one of the songs that didn’t make it onto any of his mixed CDs; something I have kept just for me … a little something by Gloria Gaynor because, just like she says, “At first I was afraid, I was petrified, kept thinking I could never live without you by my side, but then I spent so many nights thinking how you did me wrong and I grew strong and I learnt how to get along … ”, I (too) Will Survive!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBR2G-iI3-I
Tags: divorce, fate, heart, intuition, love, marriage, relationships, Zen
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Wednesday, August 10th, 2011
I met a woman at a bar – The Bombay Bicycle Club in Cape Town. I was wearing a big red bow on my head – I found it weaving my way back from the bathroom; a friend was speaking Swedish to anyone who would listen; her boyfriend was inhaling his Fettucini Fantasia, and this new friend and I were playing a divorce ditty on the bell above the bar.
Somehow surrounded by people who have all been going through divorce – one guy as young as twenty-eight! – it was polled that the grief and heartbreak you experience when getting divorced or splitting from your significant long-term partner is nowhere near the broken-hearted mess you become after the person directly afterwards leaves you. And my new friend decided, after talking to me, that she just might want to avoid falling in love again altogether … and with my manic grieving process who the hell can blame her!
It ultimately all boils down to those choices. I had choices when breaking up my marriage. I could have let go immediately but I chose to fight for years before realizing I was never going to be chosen and my stubborn side refused to believe it for so long that I delayed the inevitable and caused myself (and probably my whole family) a hell of a lot of unnecessary trauma in the process. We’d been together since god was a child; he was my best friend, and I kinda thought it would look bad if I had a failed marriage on top of having recently thrown in my career towel when I couldn’t come to grips with how depressed I was being a mother. I was attached and, yes, maybe the attachment was to several too many of the wrong things. The relationship had, after all, been fizzling out for a few years when it became all too clear that the power had shifted and I was not as significant an Other as I desired.
In an attempt to let him go, I wrote, I partied, I ran (and then some), I rang the bell and I slept out at friends more often than at home.
I have come full circle, except this time the heartache is more acute, having broken up at the explosion of love rather than in the smoky aftermath. It took a friend of mine recently to point out that I just don’t do things in half measures – all or nothing – and a little retrospective look revealed how I had been trying to squeeze myself into little spaces he had created for me in his life. My life, in contrast, was wide open to him and he chose not to fill any of the space.
So I have just repeated the pattern: I chose a new man to love who had tiny spaces in his life which I just never fit into … You think maybe it’s because my wings just got too big? 
Maybe I just want to be picked for the team or maybe the reason I run is because I don’t want to not be picked.
And, having come full circle, I repeat my process with the exact same coping mechanisms: again I write, I party, I run (and then some), I ring the bell and I sleep out at friends as often as possible in an attempt to wrap myself in the love I am perhaps recognizing finally as the more sustainable and worthwhile reflection of love there is. My coping mechanisms may have stayed the same but the grieving process is happening far quicker … no doubt because my lover is halfway across the world with his family and Absence does not, in my case, make the Heart Fonder … especially under the circumstances.
A friend said it was time to fall in love with myself and the rest would follow. It’s all about practice. You learn what you can handle, you learn what’s in your best interests and you just ‘lite’n up. Am I learning to let go easier or am I simply recognizing that when others let go, I need to accept defeat and walk away. It hurts to walk away from bliss … but when the split happens, it’s time to acknowledge that the bliss is now simply living in yesterdays that no longer exist. There is a time when all romance has to make way for reality.
The journey is all I have now to remember … it’s all I have and it will have to be enough. The destination may not be the one I chose but it’s the place I’m meant to be.
Tags: Bombay Bicycle, career, choices, divorce, friendship, love, marriage, relationships, running, spaces
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Friday, August 5th, 2011
“After we made love I knew it was over. Did I ever really love Big or was I addicted to the pain? The exquisite pain of wanting someone so unattainable?” – Carrie (Sex & the City)
So, in the interests of having a new blog post, I put myself on the couch yesterday to find this ‘Pain Body’ Eckhart Tolle and a friend of mine speak of … trying to figure out if indeed it has something to do with my attachments and my reluctance to let go.
The astrologer who last year predicted not only the demise of my marriage but also the end of my romance, suggested I document my grieving process photographically. But my rawness seems more appropriately exposed in my words rather than my image which, as my life takes a new shape, manages to conjure the joys of life even as those closest to me throw me safety ropes and pull me out of the gaping holes in the earth beneath my feet.
It took three years, a separation and a love affair before I could make a tiny bit of sense of why my marriage failed. It is only now, during this current grieving process over my Mr Big, that I have come remotely close to gaining clarity and a path back to the knowledge I was nowhere near ready to harness previously. It was only once I managed to disengage from my husband that I could access the parts of me that could grow from the experience … and it wasn’t so much the disengagement from the man that was so difficult as the disengagement from all the stuff that eighteen years naturally brings to a relationship.
As I now try and let go of my One, I see that there was nothing outside of the intense connection; the very core of knowing I was Destined to be with him. The purity of this attachment to only the Man somehow makes it feel harder. But I let go of him in the knowledge that there was nothing in the relationship other than a hope of a future that was never real and the fear of losing someone who was never mine. I have learned that being Destined to be Together does not automatically make it so, but comes with Choices that Enable it to happen. I fell in love with the unattainable. But, like Carrie, I was probably just addicted to the pain of not having the One thing I truly wanted. After all, I get to keep the love and just let go of the man.
But there’s something inside of me that just doesn’t want to. And this is perhaps the ‘Pain Body‘ I have been trying to figure out … that part of me that aches to feel the pain just a little bit more; that part that doesn’t want to forget how it felt to rest my head in that perfect place on his chest; the part that wants to remember the feeling of safety when wrapped in his arms; the part that hoped unrealistically that I would be his One too. As I torture myself over photos, emails and text messages, the pain speaks to me and feeds off the agony of not being chosen.
Would it be too easy to let go and move one? Or would moving on and letting go of the pain, also liberate me from the joy of having known such intense bliss? Can we even have the one without the other? Like the pendulum, the left is countered by the right … back and forth with moments of balance at the centre point. Grief and joy need not necessarily be opposites but conspirators to a fulfilled and balanced life.
I’m deleting photos and emails one by one. The journals and notes get gradually burned on the fire and I again sit down with Archangel Michael in his skimpy shorts, and seek the assistance of his big sword to sever those ties that connect my heart so steadily to that of my One. Once I have disengaged I will be in a better position to assess what this is all about. Who says you have to stay friends with ex-husbands and ex-lovers anyway?
Penelope van Maasdyk, you need to lie down on the couch again …
Tags: addiction, Archangel Michael, attachment, balance, choices, disengagement, divorce, Eckhart Tolle, grief, hope, joy, love, marriage, Mr Big, pain, Pain Body, relationships, Sex & the City, the One
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Saturday, July 23rd, 2011
I don’t read fiction anymore; I haven’t even been able to watch TV this year. Romance mocks me, drama fuels me, and the gratuitous violence is becoming something of a temptation. Reality seems more than I can bear. But lately, I have been chasing sleep and the books piling up beside my bed on higher worlds, Buddha and wild women archetypes are beginning to feel as much of an escape as Mills and Boon for all the grounding they promise.
So I have reverted to watching downloaded episodes of Grey’s Anatomy and lapping up the often startling insights that have me clutching my heart or holding my head, thinking they could not speak my heart more clearly.
“There’s a reason I said I’d be happy alone. It wasn’t because I thought I’d be happy alone; it was because I thought if I loved someone and then it fell apart, I might not make it. It’s easier to be alone because what if you learn that you need love and then you don’t have it; what if you like it and lean on it; what if you shape your life around it and then it falls apart. Can you even survive that kind of pain? Losing love is like organ damage. It’s like dying. The only difference is death ends. This … it could go on forever.”
Divorce is like a slow amputation and losing love is like organ damage and I seem to be the only fool in love going through both a divorce and a break up at the same time. I wake up every morning gasping for air and choking on the heart that went places the head warned it not to go. It feels like dying but perhaps if we could speak to the butterfly we would find out that that’s the way transformation is meant to feel.
Tags: break up, divorce, dying, Grey's Anatomy, heart, love, transformation, TV
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Thursday, July 7th, 2011
I’m still living in the family home. Some say I’m lucky. Some say I’m spoilt. Some say I should be grateful that I still have a beautiful house to stay in and that it’s a good thing the divorce is taking so long …
But that’s not my reality.
Yes, there’s no doubt that I am lucky – I have a superb life in the spaces between the angst, the drama and the hopelessness. My reality is that I am living in my wrecked marriage and that the boundaries I have to keep putting up revolve around the fact that my space is still steeped in everything to do with my husband. There isn’t a place I sit, a cup that I pick up, a knife that I use or a pot that I cook in that hasn’t been bought together, used together and touched by him. But so much more relevant than that – and even more damaging – is the enormous element of outside control that comes with staying here … a sense that I am expected to remain the obedient wife, a feeling that I still have to put the needs and emotional well-being of my estranged husband above my own. And the sense that somewhere in this inability to disentangle, lies a child who has security issues around where he is likely to be living.
I sit here on my balcony pinned between two magnificent mountains, while my child tears around the garden with his friends and plays rough and tumble on his trampoline, and I am grateful for my home and my time alone. And I know that when I am sitting in my apartment with a view of the adjacent building through windows that don’t allow the sunlight in, I will chastise myself for ever wanting out of here. So this is my reminder when that time comes … my reminder that wherever it is that I move to, it will contain me as me and not me as we.
Tags: control, divorce, environment, home, space, stability
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Sunday, May 15th, 2011
“What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls the butterfly.”
- Richard Bach
Just over six years ago I found out I was growing a son. And, in an instant, it was as though the personality slate was wiped clean … my life split in two – I went one way and the person I was before that moment, went another.
Parents say their lives change, they gush about motherhood and how they wouldn’t want it any other way, and they give childless people a tough time when they make a conscious choice not to go that route. They sever themselves from the people they were and blindly take on a new role and a new personality. A brave choice? The only way to survive? Who can say? … we all have our self-preservation tactics. But I have never been able to sever myself from the knowledge – and, yes, occasional envy – of that parallel dweller who took my life at the crossroads and left me with a stranger in the shape of my baby; my husband in the shape of a stranger, and no manual on how to deal with either.
And that diversion led me to the next intersection.
Divorce Ahead, the sign read. But no one was paying attention. Usual story – one person is texting and the other is changing the channel on the radio … you lose concentration and before you even look up, the ten-ton truck has mowed down the SUV and no one knows what’s hit them until they’re in ICU figuring out who’s going to pay for the mess.
But then you start the rehabilitation part … and you get a chance to nip and tuck. You get rid of pieces and you find bits to fix, and you discover all the parts you were always told you had to fix … well, they actually weren’t broken at all.
I have been to so much therapy in the post-baby years – I’ve been to counsellors who have told me to guard myself by donning cloaks of protection, I’ve seen healers who have told me to shed said cloaks and live with truth, I have been to therapists who have told me to live with authenticity and those who have encouraged me to compromise myself for the sake of my relationships. And at the end of that road, the only real choice I had was to just shed it all and emerge openhearted … and with a lot of raw nerves. Not fragile, just exposed.
So who is this parallel dweller I wonder and would I even like her, now that I see her from this perspective? I can tell you she is obsessive, controlling, fixated on money, job and investing for the future. She works hard and long, trains to the point of obsession and never compromises on her desires. She gets what she wants, when she wants and is incredibly lucky because she gets away with it all. She is so guarded that she takes life’s knocks like spandex and is unaffected by the attitudes and opinions of others. She doesn’t take compliments because they make her weak and she needs no one … ever. She is a stand-alone deal and she is invincible. She’s got a huge bitch button and it’s dangerously close to the one that sends her out of control. I’m not sure I like her but I miss her sometimes because she’s so much stronger than the person she left behind, a person I recognise so vaguely since it is all so new.
You can’t stay a caterpillar forever. You have to trap yourself in a cocoon for a while in order to emerge one day as a butterfly. I have stripped away the parts that were there for others, I have exposed the parts that were locked away because others couldn’t handle them and I have taken off the protective cloaks that shielded me from the parts in others that threatened to damage me. All the shielding, guarding and pleasing has been replaced with authenticity and trust that the people who love me are the ones that can handle this bare truth that lies within. The relationships I keep are those that allow me to expose the parts of myself that scare even me.
I’m just waiting now for my wings to unfurl and then I will see if I can fly.
Tags: choices, cocoon, diversion, divorce, parallel life, parenthood, rehabilitation, therapy
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Monday, May 2nd, 2011
I was speaking to a friend about long-term relationships. We got onto routine and how it’s supposedly normal for a couple to settle into something that feels comfortable for both of them and it’s fine to just accept this as it is and allow the boredom to creep in.
We all live within the confines of social boundaries and I can’t help thinking that the branding that comes with marriage, child, house, dogs, car, etc. is what drove me to divorce. Did it have less to do with wanting a divorce and more to do with wanting freedom … freedom from this cramped box of conformity that’s wrapped up in the illusion of this family vibe? Lately I’ve been taking a look at families from a different perspective. I see the way people in a couple fold in upon themselves … they buckle to pressures that require them to be something different for their partners and their children and their friends. They give up little pieces of themselves in order to be accepted by the people in their lives who help define them.
Where I disagreed with my friend was in the breaking of the norms. Sure, couples settle into a routine and sure that is a socially acceptable norm and one that brings so much comfort to so many people. But what if you are the type to doggedly resist that by trying to break the seemingly unbreakable mould of social conformity?
In the same way I backpack (wanting to move as soon as I have settled into a new place), I resist settling as soon as things become too normal. Getting married, having babies, buying houses … these are all milestones people use to settle even deeper into normality and routine, benchmarks around which they measure their movement towards successful human lives.
And then you get people like me. I wrote on my recent travels about not wanting to be defined by the place my roots sink into the ground but rather by the sky my branches are reaching towards. I want to climb mountains, sleep under the stars, swim in the Ganges and never use assets and responsibilities as an excuse to have anything less than an extra-ordinary life. I don’t want to be just another ordinary package holiday; I want to be unchartered territory. And I realise more than anything that I don’t have to be ok for everybody; I just have to be ok for me.
Tags: babies, backpacking, choices, conformity, crossroads, divorce, marriage, normality, relationships, routine, society
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Saturday, April 23rd, 2011
She asked me if I was jinxed … she mentioned that I had been talking a lot about handing out my mediator’s number to female friends on the precipice of divorce. She even jokingly said she probably shouldn’t see so much of me in case it rubbed off on her, and I’m still not so sure her laughter was to do with humor or nerves.
My friend has a point. Since I started the divorce process, I now know a multitude of couples either attending therapy, seeking mediation, getting separated or in the full throws of divorce. Is it purely because I am now privy to the private lives of others going through the same thing I too am experiencing … or am I caught in some kind of supernatural chain reaction that begins with one, and then gradually makes the next person more comfortable with the idea.
If I think back to my parents’ day when we were freakishly sheltered from such talk of the unmentionable breaking of God’s eternal union, I can’t help but wonder what hugely fundamental thing has changed that it is now almost acceptable to engage in the drama of divorce.
Can I blame it on Hollywood, Jerry Springer and the scourge of social networks … or are we just floundering about trying to find our way because we’ve done away with the rules? As relatively areligious beings, do we have too many choices outside of The Book? Biblically minded people still have guidelines to follow but as so many people move beyond the confines of this norm, we charter a territory where we are forced to forge new pathways where others can follow.
Of all the friends of mine who are navigating and following, there is one who is still clear about her boundaries, one who has it all mapped out because of her religion. The rules are still clear for her. The guilt is there to ensure she suffers through her decision and she asks God regularly to tell her when – or if – she should get divorced. Sure it makes things a little simpler when someone else can take the responsibility for your actions … but she’s got my mediator’s number just in case God doesn’t take her call.
Tags: choices, divorce, influence, mediator, Religion, separation
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Sunday, April 10th, 2011
I abandoned my writing recently and retreated almost completely into my left brain. My musings have been read and misinterpreted and judged until, through my honesty in revealing all, I have arrived in a place where I am watching my life as an observer being strung along by those errors in interpretation and by the judgments of people I once loved. And I retreat further and further into my left brain in an attempt to try and make sense of my dysfunction around blogging this stuff in the first place.
“It is not a sign of good mental health to be well-adjusted to dysfunctional society.” (Krishnamurti)
I go to therapy, I send my child to therapy, I try and conform to a set of norms. Defined by whom? I restrain my life into a set of rules and values. Shoulda, coulda, woulda. And you know what? It still sucks. Divorce sucks. Who said it shouldn’t? And who said we have to work towards a place where it doesn’t or that we’re ok with it? I wasn’t shy saying that I didn’t want a baby, I didn’t pretend to be ok with it, I just let the world know that I was ok not being ok with it. We don’t have to like the hurdles on our journeys but we’ve still got to jump them … to get to who we’re meant to be.
This violent hurdle of separation and divorce has been a slow, stressful and traumatic amputation but, just like the place the huge oak has fallen in the forest – there in the space that has been created – a sapling begins its journey towards the light. A new limb slowly emerges where the old has been severed. And then I left brain it and, like a cloud, it smothers the sapling’s journey out of the undergrowth.
I’d like to find my way back into my right brain where I don’t have to make sense of everything, where I can just bring judgement-free humour to my own vey personal shitty situation because it’s who I am. And who I am is not something that needs to make sense. I’m just me … with all my quirks and weird desire to sometimes just make light of the darkness that won’t disappear unless I shine in it. For things to grow they need both the sunshine and the shit … and if you’ve ever thrown manure onto a garden, it’s pretty clear where the accelerated growth comes from.
Love. Life. Even when it’s shit, it can be pretty damn fabulous.
Tags: baby, creativity, divorce, dysfunction, interpretation, judgement, left brain, separation, therapy, writing
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Tuesday, April 5th, 2011
I have been working on several blog posts lately, working and reworking but never quite completing them. It wasn’t difficult before … before people actually read my blog or before they de-friended me on Facebook or just de-friended me in general.
And then I read http://networkedblogs.com/enz7C by Cath Duncan and pulled out this line:
“Grief needs to be expressed in some way – either privately or with witnesses, in order to heal.”
I grew up in an environment of repression and hidden secrets, a home where sweeping was obligatory and the carpet was lumpy with unexpressed emotion. Food was always the blanket that smothered the fire. And I married a man who held the same sentiment … for the obvious reason that that was my comfort zone. But as I evolved into the free-spirited writer, traveler and mother my perspective changed.
I became isolated and part of my means to break through to the other side involved sending out these messages into the ether – I didn’t know where they were going, I just wrote and posted and in a sense that was the release my issues needed … a public airing with seemingly no consequences and no obvious recourse that usually comes with discussing things face-to-face with someone who could quite easily instantly judge me.
The more isolated I became, the more I worked on finding my voice and in the midst of paradox, my blog was born, anonymous at first … and then not so. I broke free from fear of embarrassment and in a sense I embraced the inevitable judgement, fearless of the repercussions that would come from my admission that the thought of throwing my baby against the wall crossed my mind … and more than just the one time.
You ask what place grief has on a baby blog? I believe that every time you walk through the fire of transformation, be it willingly or at the hand of the universe, there is a fair amount of healthy grieving that needs to be done in order to heal. Not everything can be fixed with a roast chicken and a chocolate bar. When I got married I had to grieve my singledom. When I had my child, I had to grieve the life I had lost to motherhood. Sure, many women continue as they were, employ nannies or harness the help of family and friends to support their existing lives. But I had changed too much. And when I left my husband, I had to grieve … well, I had to grieve and grieve and grieve for all that was lost.
I remember blurting out how crap it was that I had fallen pregnant, only to fall prey to a barrage of criticism for my insensitivity considering one of the women in the group had been suffering with fertility problems. “But I didn’t know!” I claimed. It didn’t help. Another friend had a miscarriage and told no one so issues to do with abortions, for example, became a taboo subject … impossible if you were not part of her closely guarded secret. I have noticed on so many occasions how easily people have judged me for getting divorced … until I realized it’s not so much the doing as it is the telling. The telling exposes people’s vulnerability around issues. The telling makes them take a closer look at their own fragile situation. And in my case, for 14 years my marriage was perceived as a union of the perfect couple and if such a tragedy could befall the prom royalty, then what chance did others have when their relationships were far more ‘of this world’.
I have had to deal with therapy sessions that paint me as a tough piece of work who is terrified of displaying any vulnerability, hence creating a host of relationship issues around neediness. I took that on and practiced really hard to be vulnerable … when all along my blog is the very proof that I wear my vulnerability on my sleeve and the fact that it doesn’t line up with how my partner is needed has little bearing.
But I digress in my explanation. My laptop screen is littered with a variety of Text and Word documents, all posts waiting to be born but, ironically, as my healing begins to feel like it is close to completion, I struggle to deal with my audience. I lost my voice for months and it only returned recently. The posts on my blog were written by a woman who now forms only a part of me and the fate of the unfinished documents scattered over my desktop lie sealed by the hand of their author who no longer exists.
Tags: baby, children, divorce, emotion, Facebook, grief, grieving, healing, marriage, perspective, sharing, therapy, transformation
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Monday, February 28th, 2011
Since I announced that I was getting divorced, the questions have been … yes, besides relentless … focused predominantly on how our child is handling the situation. I used to dismiss people by saying he’s doing fine, he’s happier now that the conflict is no longer in his face every day and he is learning to develop separate relationships with each of us without the conflict over who is bringing him up more correctly. What I realize now, however, is as much as it matters how he is coping with the situation, it matters oh so much more how we are eliminating the fallout in such a way that all this ultimately becomes is another defining moment in his life
It has come at a time that I finally realize that this is it, that I am finally going to hit one of the biggest defining moments of my own life because, on the anniversary of announcing that I want a divorce, I finally know I am going to get one. I also know the climax came when certain defining moments in my life clashed with an almighty din with those in the life of my husband … defining moments based solely on the marital status of our own parents.
The child psychologist reiterates regularly through the couples counsellor that our child is holding out hope that his parents will get back together again; that we will once more live together as a family under the same roof. Not only does that give me a tremendous amount of hope that he has been relatively untarnished by this – after all what child would want that if his memories included witnessing on more than one occasion the glint on the Global knife as it was brandished, between tomato slicing, in the direction of his father – but it makes me realize that this is one of his first rights of passage, one of many in his life that will define his personality … and, let’s face it, we don’t get strength from the good ones.
The fundamental issue that arose when the divorce came up was, like I mentioned, our defining moments based on how our parents dealt with their respective marriages and the hopes we ourselves had as children … our very own rights of passage journeys that have made us who we are today and defined how we have dealt with what has been happening recently. For my husband, he has been fighting for the very thing he lacked growing up – a traditional family. For me, who had the traditional family, I have been fighting for freedom from the restrictions that creates. My husband has been trying to keep us together to break the pattern that was created in his life and I have been fighting against staying together for the sake of the child … simply because my rights of passage journey – my defining moment – was growing up holding out hope that my parents would split up, desperate for them to not stay together for the sake of the children, desperate for them to take responsibility for their own fucked up relationship and desperate to not feel guilty for keeping them together when it was quite obvious that they should have been apart.
It’s the very thing that will prevent us ever restoring this relationship. A couple can clash on a huge number of issues bringing up a child but when something at the very core clashes so convincingly you know that there’s just no fighting it any more.
Tags: clash, counseling, defining moments, divorce, hope, marital, marriage, motherhood, relationships, rights of passage
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Sunday, December 12th, 2010
I have written before about the choices we are faced with and the deliberating we do as a result. The do-we-don’t-we-have-a-baby? … The what-if-it’s-not-enough-not-having-one? … The will-I-regret-it-if-I don’t? … The pressure, the peers, the drama and the confusion … that doesn’t go away until you eventually just have the damn baby and deal with the consequences. Except consequences are never quite what you expect.
Life can either just continue to be the same or you can mix it up a bit and hope for the best. And, until you just do it, you will always wonder.
Now that I sit on the brink of divorce, I go through the same … the pressure, the peers, the drama and the confusion. The deliberating is the same really since I will wonder what it will be like to be divorced … until I just do it. Not that that helps in the slightest since I know what happened last time I took the plunge and things haven’t exactly been pretty ever since.
I love my child so much it hurts sometimes. But that doesn’t mean I am still not acutely aware of the person I would be without him, the life I would be leading and the relationships I would be having. I wouldn’t change a thing but I am fully aware of my parallel dweller living the life I could have had (Note: not should have had since my path is MY path and it is how it is and as it should be). So what of the other choices to be made?
Like those childless couples I listen to lament with tangible indecision about their need to procreate … or not … will I forever wonder about whether to divorce … or not. The first thing I always say when people say they want to start trying for a baby … followed quickly with the usual back-peddling about timing and differing opinions on the subject … is, “Listen, guys, until you just fall pregnant, you will always talk about whether or not you should. Once you have the baby, however, you will never again have this conversation because whether you are happy with your decision or not, the social pressure will never allow you to utter your dissatisfaction with your decision since that would diminish the life of the baby you are obligated to love from the moment it comes out of you … even though you may as well invite a perfect stranger off the street to live with you and be expected to love it with all your heart. Whether you plan it or not, it’s a huge fucken surprise when baby arrives.”
But then I have a lot to say on the subject … almost 60,000 words worth in fact … which has always been half the problem.
Does the fork in the road prompt the decision or does the decision create the fork in the road? Who knows? I wish I had the answers but you’re not going to get them here … these are just the overactive ramblings of a woman clearly in the throws of your possibly not-so-typical midlife crisis.
Tags: baby, choices, decisions, divorce, midlife crisis, paths, regret
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