All Sales Are Final

I looked in the mirror today and I was surprised by what I found.  I noticed the angle in which  my face appeared flattered the delicate line of my nose, the squareness of my chin was less pronounced now that my cheeks are full and plush, no longer sunken and hallow like that of an emaciated waif.  My soft brown hair, pulled back in a make shift bun had recently highlighted strands of blond falling and resting along the side of my face.  The eyes that were wide open and staring back at me were a deep, but sad shade of blue.   But yet I saw beauty in my reflection.   Despite the gain of 50 lbs and the plumpness of my belly and thighs, I saw my heart in that image, and for the moment, I loved myself.

The irony of seeing this self-image is that it comes at a time when I am surrounded by so much chaos, with debris and shrapnel exploding all around me.  The carnage and hurt that I’ve caused feels like an avalanche, you can’t outrun it, and soon I’ll be buried.  If ever there were a time to feel self hatred towards myself, now would be the time.  So, I was perplexed that when I looked in the mirror,  instead of experiencing a longing to inflict some deep and prolonged pain onto myself, I saw the truth and saw the beauty within my heart.

I stared in that mirror for a long time, trying to feel some hatred towards myself.  But, it was not there.  I am angry with myself.  I am disappointed.  I hate what I’ve done.  But I didn’t hate myself, but rather I simply for gave myself even though I look to my left, and then to my right and see the wake of destruction  in my path.  The expense of this moment of peace, perhaps, far exceeds the value of obtaining it.  But  “all sales are final” there’s no going back, there’s no way to undo the price that I’ve paid for this insight.  But because I have learned how to love I understand that I must carry on this path that I started, honoring the love that I have hurt so badly.  I’ve begun my journey towards redemption, so I must carry on without going back,  because …”all sales are final.”

Fall From Grace

These days I often wonder whether my husband finds any reasons, not necessarily good ones, I’d accept even “slightly okay” at this point, but any reason at all that he would want to be around or near me.  It seems as though I’ve nothing to contribute, nothing interesting or worth while to speak about, and all my thoughts just come out wrong, or are topics that make me seem self-absorbed or arrogant.  I don’t know how to talk with him any more and I don’t know what to say which makes it nearly impossible to explain to him that I miss his companionship and conversation.   We’ve just returned from a three day mini-vacation in a resort town at the foothills of some mountains.  Scenic enough to catch a breath taking view of the setting sun or crispness of  blue mountain lake, yet lit with enough flashing neon at night to entertain a child of any age.  The trip was an attempt to ensure the twins capture a summer memory, something to break the fluctuating tension that has built in this house that we once called a loving home.

I’m glad we made the decision to take the trip, although we both had apprehension about how things would since we  are stuck in this cycle of doing fine for a while until the tension slowly builds up then spills over for a bit.  The children no doubt, have picked up on it and my only comfort from that reality is the fact that  life doesn’t require perfect parents, we just simply need to be “good enough.” I’ve watched as my husband, in recent months has immersed himself more fully in the children’s lives, spending days in a row as their primary nurturer during their long summer days off of school.  I’ve watched as he’s begun to tend to their wounds, to feed them, play with them, and just become their friend, more in the last few months than ever before.  It is bitter-sweet.  I am so thankful that my children are receiving such wonderful fathering and are becoming so much more closer to him.  But the fear that they now need me less and less grows ever more greatly each day.  At one point during our mini-trip, my children each held their father’s hands, the three of them walked several steps in front of me.  Trailing several yards behind, it felt as if I were loosing my family, my inclusion in their happy mix felt burdensome and awkward, so I intentionally lagged behind, with a heart laden with grief and sadness, each step burdened by a  100 lb weight of guilt, shame, and remorse on each side.  If I didn’t keep up I’d lose them forever, but yet somehow I didn’t quite fit in with them either.

A person can only tolerate so much insecurity, so much guilt, and remorse before their defensiveness kicks in.  When I feel defensive I get angry and lash out at the people around me, I yell, say hurtful things, and am just plain rude.  You’d think that because I am aware of it I’d stop it.  I hate that part of me and try each day to contain it, but sometimes I fail miserably.  Regardless of my good intention or desire to suppress it, sometimes it builds so quickly or so intensely it spills before I can keep a lid on it, causing me more shame and embarrassment.  Some days are easier than others.  But going new places and trying new things often triggers my insecurity.   Feel uncertain and unsure is a recipe for my impatience  and  irritability as I am more likely to interpret interactions as feeling judged, criticized or just with a negative lens.  Any small comment, meant with no malcontent feels like a personal attack, intentional, and fueled by hatred of me.  I worry incessantly, pointlessly, only to have it disrupt the calm I am trying to create.  On the first day of our trip I ignored a phone call from my CEO, letting it go to my voice mail, reassuring myself by  repeating over and over, like it was some prolific mantra “I’m on vacation.”   Reminding myself that my family doesn’t get my attention often enough so I needed to devote it entirely to them.  Twenty four hours later the worry and curiosity were wracking my brain enough that I caved in and checked the message…”Leigh, can you meet at 9:00 on Thursday?”   My first instinct was “Oh crap! What did I do?”   And my mind started to race as I created all sorts of elaborate scenarios of reasons why she might be displeased with me, all of them deluded and distorted of course.  Yet I still  envisioned myself returning from vacation and walking into her office  to be told to turn over my keys.  I sat with that fear and anxiety for another 24 hours before I finally  sent her a text to ask her what was up simply to be reminded that she needed a briefing  prior to her meeting  with some government officials.   Three days of pointless worry, the anxiety running a constant stream throughout my conscience, making me testy, impatient, and just plain difficult.  I wish I were a different person.

As we drove home the twins fell quiet in the back, watching a movie or playing their hand-held video games, ear phones muffling their noises and that of the rest of the world.  Through the winding and twisting mountain pass, the light and gentle snores of my husband let me know that he was slumbering beside me.  The tragedy of our situation struck me in the fact that I was relieved that he was sleeping so we could avoid the awkwardness of not knowing how or what to talk about.  Lately I feel as if I get so much wrong, as if I can say nothing right.  I don’t meant to insinuate he’s difficult to please, but simply because I’ve become someone different from who he’d thought.  At one point, unbeknownst to me, he thought me perfect and wonderful.  Where we fell apart is from the pattern of me being an endless pit of need and attention and his belief that “no news is good news,”  both of our needs and emotions in contrast with each others, fueling a cycle of slow disrepair.  As I drove for hours in silence I could think of nothing but the moments where his anger, hurt, and pain shot out from his eyes and I believe he was consumed by a  hatred of me. I don’t blame him,  it’s justified.  There have been moments where I’ve been a  lousy wife.   This awareness and the fear of hurting the kids are the burdens I carry each day, my penance I suppose.   But for me the hurt for me comes not just from that realization, but in the awareness that I’ve been so tragically wrong.  I have spent the course of our marriage thinking that I hardly mattered, that I was simply just a “role” for him, only to discover much too late, that I was so horribly wrong.  At  one point, for most of our marriage, he thought I was wonderful.  But, I’ve fallen from grace, and now I know what it is that I’ve lost.  With tears streaming down my cheeks I was thankful to have had my sunglasses on as they covered much of my face while I struggled to choke back my cries, understanding why that phrase is used to describe the experience as my throat swelled and cramped, and physically hurt.   Taking a sip of water in effort to suppress a sob, I was nearly unable to get my throat to cooperate, feeling as if I were choking.  My efforts to comfort myself, to reassure him that I still love him and want to work through this were met with no response as I drove, in silence and sadness as I wondered whether he was really  asleep or simply feigning so as to be able to ignore me without argument.

Nearing a community we’ve both known our whole lives, I reached for his hand one last time.  Resting mine on top of his we drove past a building that is now a medical office, but once, in our youth was an Italian Restaurant and instantly I was reminded of one of our very first dates.  It was his school’s homecoming weekend and we were attending the semi-formal dance.  Neither of us able to drive his mother dropped us off at the restaurant for dinner.  As I drove past it yesterday I vividly remembered the excitement I felt, not because I was going to a dance, but because this young man whom I liked so much seemed to be interested in me as well.  I remember the way he stared at me, attentive and eager, polite and kind.  The memory came back to me in the image of a tossed garden salad accented by a crisp cherry tomato, the thing that I was eating at the moment.  I remember catching a glimpse of his maturity, sincerity, the intensity of his emotion and feeling frightened by it so I nervously looked away and down at my plate, like a camera forever preserving an image, “snap” my mind took a mental picture of my tossed salad containing all the emotion in it.

The intensity of the memory, the innocence of youth, the recollection of a time before I spoiled his perception of me feels like I’m grieving a death, the death of a person I could have been, the death of a marriage it should have been, the pain of the reality with no adequate way to express my remorse except to be committed to being different and taking it one day at a time, hoping that years from now, I will have spent more time getting it right then I spent getting it wrong, hoping that the words “I am sorry” some day gain some worth.

 

 

 

 

 

The Unspoken Bond that Death Creates

I was humbled by their pain and experienced what I had hoped, the exchange of honest, sincere, and genuine emotion.  The time that I spent listening to the bereavement of others was a sacred two hours.   They warmly greeted me and I was surprised to learn that instead of grieving widows, they were grieving mothers instead,  as every member had lost a child to death.  Straying from the natural order of death, loss of a child complicates the grieving process.   Each mother was at a different stage of bereavement.  Some struggled with a recent death while others were stuck in the a grieving stage  for a prolonged time, but each felt a degree of pain that I question whether  I could survive if I experienced it.  Selfishly, I was grateful that all their children had died as adults.  Not because it lessened the pain for that the mothers felt, but it made witnessing it more palatable for me.  The unspoken bond that connected this group of women was so visibly apparent that I thought I could reach out and touch the red ribbon that wound around them, tying one to the next.  Throughout the group meeting they shared their stories of their children’s death, all tragic, one prolonged, but most of them sudden and unexpected, with each of us asking questions about their thoughts, feelings, memories, and experiences. Two women chuckled as they described the way that they’d befriended each other due to the happen chance meetings at the cemetery because their children’s graves are near each other.  They spoke of grief exactly the way it is written in books, the guilt, regret, anger, sadness, sense that they just can never go on with their life while the rest of the world is ready for them just to hurry up and get over their loss.  They discussed the way they feel guilty when they have a moment of pleasure and their fear that feeling happy means they have forgotten the child that they’ve lost.  They grapple with the questions “why them and not me,” often perseverating on their self-inflicted survivor guilt.   For these women, moving on with their life feels as if it is a betrayal of their love, thus isolating them from those they love who are currently living and while not yet able to join those who’ve died.  Drowning in their solitude, they walk between two worlds, frightened and overwhelmed.

They spoke of the little things that trigger emotions and memories.  One described finding a hand written note and the way that it brought to her conscious awareness the knowledge that memory of her daughter’s once living and vibrant presence, quickly followed by a tidal wave of reality that she’ll never experience again culminating in the misery of her daughter’s death.  She spoke through the sobs that she tried to choke back, cries that were heart wrenching enough that it caused my own eyes to well.  They spoke of the things they did to cope, one turned to prayer asking for God’s Divine Mercy while another made a lists of things that could have been worse,  and while she was not yet able to identify them as things she’s grateful for, she was at least able to recognize that even this tragedy brought some graceful moments.

The part of me that contemplates, reflects and weighs my own choices with gravity, was watching their grief over the isolation and estrangement that death has created between them, their other children and  grandchildren has begun to mull things over and brought my self-induced estrangement between me and my parents to the forefront of my mind.   At one point during yesterday’s group  I found myself telling one of the mothers that  “children estrange themselves from their parents for lots of different reasons.  Just because a child chooses to estrange themselves doesn’t mean that they ever stop loving or wanting to be with their parent (even if they say otherwise.)  The estrangement simply means the child can’t manage the degree of emotion that being around their parent creates, but the child still misses their parent’s all the same.”  As the words spilled out of me I wondered if they suspected that it came from my heart and personal experience or whether it came from something I read, or something I knew from work experience, or perhaps they didn’t wonder about it as all because they were too busy noticing the smile emerge on the face of the woman I had been speaking too, as she realized that regardless of anger, love can still persist and that there is always hope.

As I drove home from work with my children in my car, my daughter began asking about our family, her cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents.  She began to talk about they way she misses my parents and wondered how my father’s health is, showing a degree of maturity and compassion that makes my decision to estrange myself from my parents all the more painful and difficult.  I feel as thick and gray as the Berlin Wall,  the barrier that divides families, built for the purpose of establishing safety, to keep two sides from warring with each other, when in fact I am the only one that has been hurt by my parents.   I’ve never thought they would hurt my own children but have no way to get them to be able to interact with each other without facilitating the visit myself.  Since interacting with them is so destructive for me, I have had to forgo any contact and am wracked with constant guilt of being that big gray and concrete wall.   I wish things could be different, that my children could visit with their grandparents without my parents becoming enmeshed in every thing.  I know that I am more emotionally stable and that I function better without the distraction and interference from my parent, but I have a constant desire to be able to have a relationship with them and the absence of parents, regardless of the cause, is an ache that haunts me every single day.  I listened to these women talk of the regret for words they never said, things they would have done differently if they could get their loved ones back, and I sat in silence knowing the hands of time are ticking far more slowly for my father and I have the sense to recognize that if he dies before our estrangement ends, I will forever regret the things I never said but yet I know that if I say them now, I risk jeopardizing the stability I’ve found…and I realize that I am stuck between two worlds as well. . .

I Had It Backwards

It is  humbling learning the realities of love at my age.  Accepting the notion that throughout my childhood I had been taught inaccurate things about life and love is unnerving.  I don’t know what it is that I don’t know.  I must concede that the  thoughts, feelings, and cognitive patterns that have allowed me to survive and even excel at times, have become an instinctive part of my being that sabotages my relationship with others.

1 Corinthians 13:4-8 explains what love is.  “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  It does not dishonor, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.  Love never fails.”

Could it be more simply stated or explained? But yet I’ve gotten it wrong because there is a simple phrase that is missing, one that allowed me to misconstrue that phrase.   All this time I had thought that if you loved  someone, if  it was real and true love, those things just magically, effortlessly occurred. I thought that when you felt love for another person its power intoxicated you, casting some amorous way of being that brought about those things.

As I drove homeward last night I reached the crest of a hill that offers a vast view of the valley below.  I could see the grey clouds rolling in and watch the rain descend upon the valley, falling in patches and obscuring my ability to see things that I had known were there.  Yet in other places I could see the greyness lighten as the rain drifted towards the mountains, clearing my ability to see things I had forgotten or not realized were there.

That is how my brain works.  Storms will rage from no where, grey fog and clouds settle in, rain pours in places, yet the sun can shine at the same time.  All of these things can happen simultaneously and yet outwards I will carry on as if there is nothing wrong.  Dissociation is a difficult thing for others to understand, they see the outward smile, the apparent success, the image I want to portray, without the awareness that my inward moments are in a hurricane.  I thought if they loved me it would be as if they stood on the crest of the hill, that they could see me the way I looked down upon that valley.

As I watched the clouds and rain roll past, shifting to my left, it was as if a storm within my mind had finally run it’s course.  A small portion of my thinking finally cleared.  Love is not those things.  Love is what makes you do those things.  They do not just magically happen. If you truly love, then you work at being patient. You work at being kind, you try your best not to be envious, you don’t bloat yourself with pride.  But most importantly, you make sure to put other people first.

I get that now.

I reflect upon the decades of my life and now I recognize that  I misunderstood and must bear the weight of burden from countless mistakes I’ve made.