Posts Tagged ‘separation’

 

Freedom, Fate and Fortune

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.

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I should come with a warning

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.

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Left-brain hypnosis

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.

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Time, Dating … and Andy Warhol

Tuesday, February 1st, 2011

Someone once told me that if I was battling with the maternal instinct thing – which clearly I was … and not as rarely as some may think – then I should treat my baby as though he belonged to someone else. Try it. It is more profound a piece of wisdom than what it seems at face value. I notice even now – when my child has friends over – that I treat them with a lot more respect, and I take from that a huge amount of strength to work on my relationship with my own child.

Now that I am in the throws of a separation from my husband and best friend of 20 years, the prospect of dating again is daunting, not least of all because of the emotional combat it risks creating. But I can’t help but wonder how I can translate that piece of advice about baby into creating better communication with my husband … whether or not he becomes an ex. The biggest thing that happens when you are with someone for so long … or rather the biggest thing that doesn’t happen … is communication. It breaks down and with it goes respect, friendship and the love making that is the universe’s answer to Superglue.

Now throw in the dating game and – because it is from my perspective – a few cute men. What then? Well, I am beginning to see it as useful and not in the oh-so-obvious way. What do you do when you meet someone new? You reawaken those parts of yourself that made someone fall in love with you in the first place and the parts that were pushed aside in order to deal with the day to day banality of being in a committed relationship that has lost its spark because you’re just too tired to light up the sky for the person you would have moved mountains for in the beginning. You have to concentrate on your good qualities. You have to rip from the emotional abyss those parts of you that you allowed to get sucked away. And you have to learn how to communicate. And, as my therapist likes to point out, having an awful lot to say does not a communicator make.

Separation creates the vacuum required to suck back a strong sense of identity. You can take that and move forward with it or you can use it to return to your partner with confidence that you won’t retreat into the person you used to be just because she was the only fragment of you he could handle. Move forward or step back? Clarity and change come with time but, having said that, I will end with Andy Warhol‘s take on that: They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

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Separation Surgery

Wednesday, November 10th, 2010

I wrote before about lost friendships feeling like severed limbs. Well, I have since read evidence that when two people are together for so long, certain connections form in the brain that attaches those two people in a physical sense.  I suppose this is what creates the bond between parents and child and between long-term friends. Like symbiotic plants, this happens so effectively that no one notices … until you have to separate them. With plants you could barely do this without killing either one or both in the process. With people, separating can apparently be the same as amputating a limb. And I can now testify that when you split from a love so deep and so long, it feels as though each of your limbs is being severed … slowly … with a blunt instrument … and no painkillers.

So there’s Archangel Michael standing in his skimpy white shorts, with his long blonde locks and his huge … wings. He is standing with a large sword raised high. I stand in my mind’s eye opposite my husband with all our chakras connected by a spaghetti-junction of fine cords binding us to the point that neither of us knows where one ends and the other begins. My mind prompts the archangel to bring his sword down swiftly, wrapping the cords around the blade and flicking them away. The pain rips at my energy source and makes me want to throw up. I wrap the image of myself and my husband separately in soothing violet light to protect and heal. It is a visualisation that is taught to me, not to obliterate the pain but to speed up the amputation.

When practised over and over again, the process was complete in a month. The amputation was a success but I emerged from the operating theatre a few weeks ago, limbs in tact, heart replaced but bruised and energy restored and contained. But everything comes at a cost and I am still waiting to find out the cost of the amputation … did it come at the cost of a husband, a best friend, a lover …? or perhaps, and more hopefully, just that part of all three that had manifested itself into a tumour-like growth that we can both thrive without?

The joy of my gift will reveal itself over time. And, yes, there is a lot of joy. Just like a person can feel a sense of joy after losing someone they love, this does not mean they are happy about the loss but that there is a part of themselves that has been reawakened … there is a new beginning.

There are no happy endings, only joyful beginnings.

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My life as an open book

Monday, June 28th, 2010

You get people who brush things under the carpet. And then you get me. I lift the carpet. And then I search. With a flashlight. And I broadcast what I find.

I blogged about my travels. I put it all out there for everyone to read. People could read with horror or wonder and know what I was experiencing almost daily. And when I came back, I didn’t have to try and pack into a single conversation the enormity of the experience of travelling through India with a 4-year-old. Everyone just knew and asked for only a little information to fill the gaps in the story. A cultivated result.

But we tend not to do that with other life-changing experiences. We tuck things away and in the face of an enormous experience such as two great people parting ways, we have to explain how we got to this place without anyone noticing.

People were shocked when they heard my marriage was breaking up. It took them by surprise and I have been explaining for months what should have been out in the open for years. When you get to a point of needing support, it is useful when people know what you need the support for instead of having to bring your nearest and dearest up to speed. I had left a trail of crumbs on Facebook … a trail that didn’t lead me back home but rather straight into the witch’s house. My Facebook page became a forum for all the people who themselves had been tucking things away. Is my midlife crisis merely a sign of these new sandwich years – a generation stuck between a parenting style of shame, guilt and denial and a new enlightened age of gentleness and introspection? I haven’t seen the driver. Regardless, life’s experiences need to be shared. Not only do we learn from our own experiences but we also have an opportunity to teach. We don’t – and can’t – live in a vacuum.

“If you share with others, they will share with you”, I keep telling my son. And that kinda means I have to do the same … only this sharing thing just got a lot more grown up.

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‘Mommy Dearest’

Friday, June 25th, 2010

“Just make the decision to stay, and that’s that!” she says through puckered lips. I always find it amazing how someone of five foot can look down her nose so effectively.

I am in Durban at the moment. I ran ‘home to mummy’ to escape the stress of a tricky separation. Most people who know the relationship I have with my mother think that decision justifies a few months in a mental institution … and I might just be heading that way. What I was hoping for, and what seemed a few weeks ago like a very real opportunity, was the chance of using a truly shitty situation to heal the extremely tense and volatile relationship I have with my family. My friends may have a point though. In only one day, she went from being supportive to self-righteous and I feel like being a rebellious teenager and shaving off my hair. My child is all for it. Of course my husband thinks it’s about him. But my mother is too wrapped up in the fact that another daughter (the third) is getting divorced that she doesn’t care about my motives; all the wants is for me to martyr myself rather than risk the shame this will bring upon her. After a few days I realised that she would rather just ignore it, choosing not to speak about it lest something is not about her.

My child has already picked up on the volatility of this relationship. He was playing in the bath with a water pistol and he sprayed the ceiling … and the curtains and the wall and the floor. He froze, looked at me with his huge blue eyes and asked, “Are you going to get into trouble now, Mum?” Perceptive.

But the fact that I have chosen to spend five weeks in a household I spent 19 years of my life trying to get out of and the next 19 years of my life trying to heal from gives you some indication how bad the alternative is right now.

You can have a mother but if she isn’t there for you emotionally, then you may as well not have one at all. And I suppose the same could apply to all your relationships.

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The chicken and the egg

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?

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Who’s the best?

Saturday, April 10th, 2010

They say mum is the best. They say no matter what happens in your relationship, children must be with their mum. They will be fine as long as they are with the mum. I can’t help but wonder, is there ever a time when mum isn’t the best there is? Does mum just get too much credit sometimes because she is the female parent and grew the child from scratch? What if mum was the type to don a wig and tote a plastic gun and hold up convenience stores … would she still be considered the only person who can make her child’s life complete and safe?
Some children get lucky, I suppose. Some children get the type of mum who makes their world safe. Others get the totally fucked up variety that just adds to their baggage and ruins a previously perfectly good package. They come out so pure and full of light and joy. We don’t make them into who they are – that’s born with them – but we meld their perspective. We define their attitudes to life. So is it better to tear apart their reality and say it’s fine because they have their mum with them. Or do we play martyr mum; one who suffers for the sake of their happiness. It seems to me the latter would be the equivalent of taking their true mum away from them. But then I’m no expert.

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4 minus 1

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

Our pool of friends has suffered its first casualty. It’s because of the children. I am sad and relieved all at the same time. Sad because I knew them at the beginning, I was at their awesome wedding and I love them. Relieved because they are the first!

What do people do when their children get in the way? Because they DO get in the way!

I work with children whose parents throw them away when they get in the way … they are dispensable. But what if you’re not a prostitute or a drug addict or you don’t live in dire poverty? An educated and affluent person throws away their partner instead. We feel the burdens of life too strongly to suck it up and live through the pain. We are weak. We haven’t suffered enough to realise that ‘this too will pass’. Or maybe we are just a bunch of cynics and life is too short to get bogged down by small miseries.

I can’t say the thought doesn’t cross my mind – I can’t throw my child away, so why not just get rid of my husband? I suppose the few years you get to grow your children into adults pass so quickly and then they leave you eventually … they never took that vow to stay with you forever – so maybe it’s the relationship with the person who just might stick around once the children have left that should be preserved.

I’ve lived through unbearable but perhaps this is even beyond that; I just cannot say. I don’t support the argument of staying together for the sake of the children but splitting up because of them is just plain tragic.

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No degrees for separation

Friday, July 17th, 2009

Relationships are based on what you have in common, and you stay together as long as you maintain some element of that. Then, just like that, you suddenly realise that there is something to disagree on … something big, huge in fact … and it was never there before. Not only that, but it is never going away. It’s your own child.

People have babies for many reasons – one of them to glue the relationship back together – when, in fact, there is a greater chance that it might pull it further apart. Since my child was somewhat a surprise to me, I am obviously not referring to myself here. I am sure though that everyone knows at least one couple – at least one – that has split because they thought a child would be the answer and they failed to look at the real reasons their relationship was failing.

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Pre-school blues

Sunday, May 4th, 2008

“I’ll be back at about 2 p.m. The routine is on the fridge, his lunch is in the freezer … and, oh, don’t forget to read the sleep schedule … and, whatever happens, don’t pick him up if he cries when he is meant to be sleeping,” I shouted as I rushed out the door in my suit and boots, gathering my phone, wallet and laptop bag and almost forgetting the car keys in my haste to get the hell out of my prison for the previous eight months.

I had looked for a job until I was five months pregnant and showing too much belly to disguise my desperation to work and I had started looking for a job again as soon as I was off the painkillers from the birth. The interview that got me the job was the one that marked the moment of giving up hope of ever escaping the house in a way that would require me to use my brain … which is why I probably got the job. It was a case of: well, there’s my CV, you either like it or you don’t–give me the job, don’t give me the job, I’m not really bothered either way.

Eighteen months, a fall out with the boss, a few freelance jobs and a near breakdown later, I find myself at the school gates, my two-and-a-few-months-old boy by my side, feeling like I want to vomit. He cries, I’m upbeat. He wails, I’m upbeat. He tears at my clothes, I’m upbeat. I get to the car and I break down and cry. I’m weepy all week and I can’t figure out why–after all, I have waited over two years to get rid of him and now I don’t want to leave him.

I may have figured it out now. I still need to take a moment after the heart-wrenching way he has to be peeled off me in the mornings but I need to give us time … mainly I need to give me time. I know he is fine once the moment of separation is over and I know he will have fun, learn to socialise and learn a host of things I can’t teach him at home (mainly due to lack of patience than lack of ability). But I’m a whole different basket case. I need to give myself time to learn that relinquishing control three mornings a week does not have to send me back to therapy.

Perhaps sending him to school will teach me more than it will teach him. When is school ever out?

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