Posts Tagged ‘marriage’
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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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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Monday, September 5th, 2011
I’m not sure if it was the title, Keeping the Love you Find, or the cover picture of a single blue egg in a heart-shaped nest that taunted me until I had no choice but to hand it back to its owner, my soul sister. She promptly replaced it with another, Women who Love too Much. “Just read the back cover and tell me it’s not the book for you”, she said. The sight of me confirmed the accuracy of her choice. Hand clamped over my mouth, wide-eyed and dumbstruck, I delved right in … recognizing in an instant how emotionally unwell I was when I came out of my 18-year relationship, now becoming all too aware of where I went wrong in that relationship, the ones before, and the one way too soon afterwards … grateful now for the sheltering of such a long relationship but equally irked that it deprived me of the opportunity for the discovery sooner.
As a Woman Who Loves Too Much, I don’t understand love that comes without a knot in my stomach, a low self-esteem and a need to try really hard to gain the love of something unattainable; attempting to control the outcome and blaming myself when things go bad or people leave. I am a Love Addict and just because the affliction contains a beautiful word doesn’t, unfortunately, make it any better than your common or garden variety substance addiction.
Reeling from the end of my marriage, I jumped headfirst into a relationship with a man I thought would nurture and love me while allowing me to be me. I pushed him away at first – I didn’t want to get attached – and then I let him help me heal. He held my hand through my fears around letting go, being vulnerable and allowing myself to be loved for who I am, inadvertently feeding my addiction and, therefore, masking my true pathology. Attracted at first to his unavailability and later confused by the paradox that required my exclusivity – but willing to give anything to get his love – he left anyway and I was unable to prevent my emotional well-being from spiralling out of control. I had bonded; I had become obsessed … I had formed an addiction. And the withdrawals from love for a Love Addict are as hard as withdrawals from drugs for a drug addict.
I keep threatening myself with solitude – a state where I hope to gain all I need from the love I have within. I thought at first it was my psychological whip to get me out there to find an Adonis to ravish me … but knowing now how destructive my pathology can be, I’m terrified of jumping into another relationship that distorts my reality and blinds me to the damage I’m doing to myself. I need solitude to research and recover and I need solitude to gain self-acceptance and I need solitude to figure out how I can define love in a way that doesn’t require me to feel like I need to be medicated … because let’s face it, when you’re so addicted to someone that you’ll medicate yourself rather than give him up, it’s not the kind of relationship you should be in.
But of course, without rehab, the touching, smelling and tasting will always lead to indulging even when aware of the damage it’s causing. So I’m going into rehab for love … not to learn how to abstain from love, but from the triggers that turn it into a drug. Romeo and Juliet was a story of love addiction … and look how that turned out. Too much love certainly can kill you.
Tags: addiction, drugs, healing, Love addiction, marriage, medication, pathology, rehab, relationships, solitude
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Wednesday, August 31st, 2011
A friend of mine got divorced after giving up the booze and told me he only realized how boring his marriage was once he was sober. It was funny … in a tragic kind of way. More so when I realized the same thing quite possibly happened to me. Sure, the problems were already finding the cracks … like dust and water, they search them out … and once a crack is found, its permanence is solidified. I cleansed my life through the Art of Living, a course in breathing and meditation that partners of my friends steered them away from on suspicions that some of the lesser-known side-effects included a freezer devoid of meat products, a liquor cabinet full of sparkling water, way too much energy at 4am and … well, in my case … separation. I sobered up, scraped out the cracks, and my marriage was over in less than a year.
“You’re staying in a dysfunctional relationship, so you can use the problems you have with your husband as a layer to prevent you from dealing with the real issues within yourself that you are too afraid to confront.” I was talking yesterday to my ‘twin’ … my spirit friend and soul mate. I see her visibly cloud over when her husband enters the room and she shrinks from catwalk model to hobbit. “You can only truly unmask the magnificence of the person you’re meant to be once you’re free of him.” But no sooner were the words out of my mouth than I realized that perhaps this was purely a very valid projection of something I had come out of and that, due to our uncanny synchronicity, she was just entering into. One can also not completely overlook my new obsession with freedom.
It took me thirteen years of marriage to figure out that marriage was quite possibly the worst thing for me … a sentiment condemned in couples counselling, yet confirmed last week by a palm reading (yes, yes, ok, I also take guidance from the planets and my cycle is linked to the moon …). Apparently, I’ll Do Anything For Love. It’s written in the way my thumb bends right back. My little finger stands out from the others, claiming I push attachment away. But my love (index) finger stands stuck to my middle finger, defiantly standing up for the fact that I am just better with a mate. “Sigh.” I’m apparently incredibly creative, see beauty in everything, and am ruled by fate … But I digress.
The interesting part – and where I’m really going with this – is that, according to a little padded area, I have a sense that I will never get all I want from just one man. “You need several at one time?” an astonished friend proclaimed. Oh yeah! Apparently … and interesting considering I have recently been marketing the idea that every woman needs to find her own Holy Trinity – Three Men who jointly satisfy all her Needs, Dreams and Desires. I kinda had it figured out at the beginning of the year when I was embracing my freedom, satisfied that I had made no commitments to any one person and I was, therefore, free to play. I had found my pretty young thing who made me feel like a teenager … having a Sandra Dee holiday romance. I had an intellectual attraction to an awesome mind who also inspired in me a kind of spiritual awakening. And I had this magnificent big man who sent electric shocks through my body just by sending me an sms … and fifteen a day was something like electric shock therapy.
When I get a picture of my husband in my mind, what I see is hundreds of hands trying to box me in, constrain me and gag me … and not in a good way. But my pathology at the time demanded it be that way … for reasons that are only now becoming clear. So, unlike my ‘twin’, I bailed out of the marriage that was hindering the path to my own recovery and I am still now unwrapping the layers of my pathology. With unveiled beauty, I continue to embrace the freedom from my marriage. But another Holy Trinity? Not so sure … as tempting as it sounds, it kinda goes against the Single and unComplicated bliss that somehow sounds even more so.
Perhaps, if I concentrate really hard, I can get the swelling on my palm to go down and prise my love finger and my middle fingers apart. And then maybe – just maybe – my thumb will even stand up straight.
Tags: Art of Living, fate, fortune, freedom, husband, love, marriage, pathology, relationships, romance, separation
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Friday, August 19th, 2011
Someone asked me the other day what it was like being someone’s mistress … she said ‘mistress’ in the same way some suburban folk say ‘black’ or ‘gay’, with a furtive glance around to check if anyone had overheard. The question shocked me into my new reality of having lived something with someone who was living something else. So I told her a little joke my ex-lover recited off his phone, clearly from someone in the same position he was in … someone who got the kind of humour … like it was some kind of inside joke.
“What’s a mistress?”
“It’s something between a mister and a mattress.”
Haha, funny fat lip! I didn’t laugh.
I tried judging but that didn’t work for me. I unravelled a bit … that always feels good. Hey, you can’t choose when you take a fall and who it’s with, and when you do land in a complicated love affair, you just have to make the best of it and hope all those impossible promises that are made don’t take root … And never forget to trust … and never hope – in these cases it’s the hope that always stuffs it up … the hope that there’ll be more and the hope that you won’t be grabbing at ankles again.
It’s just branding after all. And I don’t do branding. The branding of marriage didn’t work for me and the branding of mistress didn’t work for me either. Live free and love free, that’s what I say! Nice theory if you can find someone who can handle the practicalities of being free with you.
Tags: branding, free, freedom, love, marriage, mistress
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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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Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011
You simply have to look at my feet to find out how I’m coping emotionally. After several months of pretty toes and sling-back shoes, the skin on the soles of my feet are starting to crack, the tips of a few of my toes are opaque with blisters and a couple of my toenails are lifting ever so noticeably. And, as I reawaken the Forrest Gump within me, my emotional state is most likely going to turn all of my toenails black. When that happens, go easy on me – I may have a huge smile on my face but somewhere on a deeper level I am falling apart and through widening cracks that are simply reappearing due to bad workmanship. And if I’m wearing black nail varnish on my toenails best thing to do is approach cautiously … preferably with a bottle of bubbly and the promise of an all night party.
But as for the confession … I have been protecting the identity of my lover, so I thought, because of the many complications involved with the relationships I choose to pursue. But, as I disengage (or try to), I can’t help but wonder if perhaps it is simply myself I have been protecting. The cryptic ways I refer to love in my blog and the even more cryptic Facebook status updates … and, of course, the delicious pseudonym he has on my phone … are possibly my way of shielding myself from the judgement I am not meant to even be afraid of anymore. So, in the name of testing that theory and in the name of testing (again) who my true friends and followers are … I’m going extreme on confessions.
The man I chose to fall in love with; the man who held up that mirror to the butterfly in me; the man who inadvertently became my One shortly before leaving the country – and my life – forever, with his world in tact; the one who helped me heal from a broken marriage and brought me full circle to the broken-hearted pain I was in a year ago is … well, he’s Married! There, it’s out. I’ll be very clear here, I’m no victim in this. I knew everything. All I can say is that the part inside me that was seeking the attachment (my ‘Pain Body’ perhaps) only heard what it wanted to hear. Being played for the fool in love has gone around in my head over and over, so whatever all this makes you think of me is really none of my business.
So, now I move beyond the unmentionable and return to the love that causes the attachment that ultimately causes the grief that turns me into Forrest Gump with black toes that reflect the deepening cynicism in my soul.
But the process is like unravelling the silk from my cocoon to make a scarf. So that’s enough for one day. More tomorrow … after my next consultation with Mr Gump.
For now I end with Paulo Coelho’s 1-minute reading:
http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2010/08/11/manual-for-climbing-mountains-3/
I’m not going to tell you which mountains to climb but I will try and give you the courage to climb the ones you can’t avoid. So put on your Big Boots and get ready for an Adventure. There’s a lot of stuff that goes on between A and B.
Tags: attachment, butterfly, challenges, cocoon, Eckhart Tolle, Forest Gump, grief, judgement, love, marriage, Pain Body, Paulo Coelho, relationships, running, transformation
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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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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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Friday, September 10th, 2010
On the 5th anniversary of my child’s birth, I took a drive to the beach where my husband proposed. It is a place of dishevelled beauty, designed by nature’s architect and built by force and violence over millennia, resulting in a scattered tumble of rough rocks and pebbles. And I sat there, observed only by several of the twelve apostles, and Lion’s Head peering down fog-wrapped slopes.
I was looking for a sign.
Twisting my wedding band around and around, feeling the cold metal between my fingers, I closed my eyes and listened. But all I got was indifference. Thirteen years did nothing to change this place but did so much to change me. This place didn’t feel my presence all those years ago and certainly didn’t feel my presence now. The waves continued in their obedience to the moon, pushing and pulling with the tides, crashing on the shore, disguising the ocean’s gradual ascent towards me.
I slid the ring down my finger and immediately tugged it off. Something didn’t fit and I knew I couldn’t wear it again. I placed it instead in a small hole in the rock beside me where I was sure that one day it would be wrenched into the ocean by an errant wave.
Face tilted to the sun, chilled hands pushed down inside my sheepskin boots, I closed my eyes again. I thought about the guy with the metal detector, the happy picnickers and the bird that sees the glint of objects below and carries them off to places they don’t belong. Something to do with the fit was niggling again.
And after sitting there for almost an hour, contemplating my next move, I suddenly felt release. Paulo Coelho said that a boat is safe in the harbour but it is not a place for the boat. I felt at that moment that I was the boat, tethered to the harbour wall, comfortably bumping up against a row of rubber tyres. I was meant to be at sea. I smiled.
I stood up and, jumping tentatively from rock to rock, I made my way to the slippery green rocks at the edge of the sea where the waves suddenly took notice and sprayed me for my intrusion. I didn’t leap into the froth but, instead, lifted the ring in my hand and threw it.
But watching it disappear in a twinkle beneath the foam didn’t bring the finality I had come for. I got my sign but it was a totally unexpected one … one of hope rather than finality. The symbolism of the ring was a weight too great to wear. I couldn’t help but wonder what might happen without it.
Tags: hope, marriage, Paulo Coelho, release
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Wednesday, July 21st, 2010
My mother asked me what my next move would be. She was referring to the next step in the process of taking myself and my child through a divorce after my husband’s decision to fight for our marriage was followed swiftly by amnesia.
“To go for a run,” I replied.
On the brink of something so huge, I can no longer think in terms of years, months or weeks … sometimes even a day ahead is a stretch … so I think as far as the next few hours, and the only steps I can think of are small … and usually involve running. It ties up quite nicely with my intention to run a full marathon before the age of forty, a milestone that is fast approaching and one that I intend to reach in clichéd fabulousness. It means I can take all these next steps in a positive strength-gaining manner and achieve something solid when everything around me is tumbling down.
Or is it?
There is something to be said about rights of passage, something that begs the question on the outset: Is this really necessary? As it is with climbing mountains, the view from the top always surpasses the obscured view at base camp and the feeling of getting to the other side shifts all previous protestations into cries of, “That was so worth it!” So why are some mountains so damn difficult to climb? Is it because of the baggage we’re dragging … or the people?
Adapt or die. Is that the thing it boils down to? It’s taken me five years to adapt to life back in South Africa; five years to find my way to the life path I was searching for during the money-spinning days of London’s investment world; five years to turn my world on its head and redefine my life and who I am. Adapting to save a marriage would be devolving … it would be like both adapting and dying simultaneously.
I embarked on a spiritual journey just over a year ago. It is not a conventional journey but one that has led me to make choices such as giving up alcohol, caffeine and certain foods. Peer pressure aside, it has been relatively easy because I have come out with a greater sense of clarity, a strong, healthy body and energy I so desperately need to summit the next peak, baggage in tow. The feeling that I have gained from this journey has made my decision relatively simple. Not easy – never easy – just simple. I have realised if someone can choose a house, a bedroom, the TV, a bag of crisps and a pint of beer ahead of a marriage, then not choosing those things to the detriment of the marriage should also be acceptable.
But then in divorce no one is right. I desperately wish it wasn’t over but I am doing what I am being pushed to do – I am forking off down the road less travelled where my pioneering skills will lead me to a place of no mountains for a while. Or perhaps I will just have to go climb a real one.
Tags: adapting, choices, climbing, divorce, marriage, process, rights of passage, running
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Monday, June 21st, 2010
It sounds surgical every time I say this, but I am separating from my husband. I often wish it were surgical as both the procedure and the recovery time would be shorter. Besides all the material I have on the subject which you will no doubt be subjected to at a later date, I have to mention that our child has not slept in his bed for a very long time. Now most often when couples allow their babies/toddlers/children to sleep in their beds I would profess to an unhealthy marriage and one that is most likely going to break up. But my child has been in his own room, in his own bed since the day we arrived home from hospital and has only slept with my husband and me since we have no longer been sleeping in the same room let alone the same bed. I can’t help but wonder that perhaps the child in the bed thing gets a bad rap. What if the child in the bed is only the scapegoat for a marriage that is on the rocks anyway? What came first: the broken relationship or the child in the bed?
Tags: bed, child, couples, independent, marriage, separation, sleep
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Wednesday, April 14th, 2010
All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.
~ Isak Dinesen
I sit on the cusp of my story. My story is not, like Isak Dinesen’s, of Africa but it does contain heartbreak and sorrow and promises of new beginnings. There are no happy endings like we were all promised in childhood. Nothing ends happily ever after. There are only ever happy beginnings. And sometimes we have to jump between the two in an attempt to minimise the cataclysmic fallout the ending may have.
My cusp sits somewhere between what my child terms as mum and dad splitting apart and an awfully big adventure. My child and I are going backpacking around India.
Now, everyone has an opinion about this. It’s too dangerous, he’ll get lost or stolen; he’ll get dehydrated or get malaria; he’s too young etc., etc., etc. But say I’m going to leave him behind and the opinions change to I am abandoning him.
As his mother – not the one who yells and says f*ck a lot but the one who loves her child so much it hurts right down to her toes – I decided to take him along for the journey. It wasn’t intentional, it just happened. I was chatting to him at bedtime about all the stuff going on in the house at the time and the options that were open to us … and the India adventure thing just popped out. I regretted it instantly and immediately told him what a bad idea it was because of the disease and the poverty and the filth and the sewerage. It was already too late though … I had him on ‘adventure’ and he wasn’t letting me back out.
The planning process ensued and having so much time to organise meant OCD overload with purchasing and decanting and labelling and packing and printing and unpacking and folding and rolling and changing the itinerary so often, I think it has included almost every part of India at various stages of its lifecycle.
I now have such an awesome first aid arsenal it is more like a pharmacy and it takes up half my backpack with just enough space left for two changes of clothing each. I have been frenetic but I’m not sure the output has quite matched the input as I seem to still not have everything done and I leave today! I believe I would be at the same stage had I given myself a week to get ready for this journey.
During this process I have waited daily for a break in the cold war but it has never come. My seventeen-year cycle has run its course and I look to India now for the beginning of my next new cycle. I feel excitement, fear, happiness, gratefulness, anger, privilege, frustration, pain, joy, sorrow and betrayal … as well as emotions that haven’t yet been named.
There was a grim temptation when packing the pharmacy to calculate if there was enough clout there to obliterate the pain of a broken heart. But I didn’t think I could handle a failed suicide on top of a failed marriage.
Darkness makes way for incense, marigolds and kindred souls. I will eat bravery; I will drink inner peace and I will find strength again to travel towards a new me.
So, farewell until we meet again. I’ll be a totally new person, but you’ll recognise me by the smile on my face.
Tags: adventure, backpacking, child, india, journey, marriage, relationships, travel, traveling with children
Posted in best reads, bhalababy, travel | 2 Comments »
