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. . .

Gardening: A Metaphor for Life

Sometimes less is more. I don’t mean it in the cliché “too much of a good thing is a bad thing” but as an allusion to moderation and flexibility.  In an attempt to avoid rigid thinking or getting caught up in a patter just simply for the sake of perpetuating it when doing so may actually lead to the path of ruin instead of ensuring endurance and survival.   I think of the times I’ve over extended myself and placed too many  burdens on my own shoulders only to undermine or sabotage success I could have had.   In the past I have often thought of the way in which gardening is a metaphor for life.  You need to remove the weeds on a daily basis or else they will choke out the precious flowers because  the weeds grow more easily and rapidly than flowers, similar to the way that sometimes the things that are easiest are not the right things to do.   So, like weeding the garden, we need to weed our lives making sure that we removed the things that will ensnare and entrap us with wasted time and energy.

Sometimes our gardens flourish so greatly that the weight of the plants and the vegetables chokes themselves and in order for the plants to remain healthy for the duration of the growing season we must trim and cut them back or divide their bulbs.  That has always been the hardest part of gardening for me, cutting back a flourishing plant.  I know that it is something that needs to be done or the plant will suffer in the long run, but sometimes it is almost painful to cut or trim a plant that seems so healthy and beautiful in the moment, my faith is challenged to believe that by making that sacrifice the plants roots will deepen, perhaps because the growth is occurring below the surface where I can not see.  But time and time again I trim, I divide, I cut back the gangly branches and in a week or two the flowers and the stems of the plants have brightened and thickened and the plant can grow more strongly. Sometimes there are things in our life that we must sacrifice in the moment to secure our foundations, to help us and our relationships with others grow just like those flowers.

We need to water and nourish our gardens and make sure our plants get the proper sun.  Like a plant we need to ensure that our emotional life is nourished, watering and nourishing it with love every day.  If we do not nourish our emotional life and nurture our relationships they will die from drought as well.

Some of my gardens are lined with a stone border.  As the gardens grow and change I am constantly expanding or shifting where those stones lie.  Sometimes I need create more space in a place a garden is growing well and at other times I find that the ground is not so fertile or perhaps the type of plant needs more or less sun and I have to re design the landscape. But even when I do I keep in mind the bigger picture of the garden I create, that even if a plant gets moved, or pruned, or divided in two, they are all part of the greater masterpiece, all are still a part of the process of life, interwoven in the same garden.

 

 

Chasing the Snake

If you were walking through the woods and were bitten by a poisonous snake would you react in anger and chase after the snake so you could attack it or would you recognize that you are hurt and must tend to your wound and try to seek the necessary medical care?  Which type of person are you and how do you really know?  If you said, “well, I’d seek medical attention of course” can you think of moments in your life where you have acted differently?  And if you said “well, I’d get that snake” did it occur to you that you have been gravely injured and that by chasing the snake you might die instead?   I am the type of person who says “I’d seek medical attention of course” because I know that is the wise and rational choice, but in the moment that I get bit by the snake, I get so mad I can’t think straight and sometimes chase the snake.  Admitting that feels shameful, but it is the truth none the less.  So, I must ask myself:  “Do I prefer to grow up and relate to life directly, or do I choose to live and die in fear? Pema Chödrön

In her book, The Dance of Anger, Harriet Lerner states “Sometimes, however, even when we are ready to risk change, we still keep participating in the same old familiar fights that go nowhere. Human nature is such that when we are angry, we tend to become so emotionally reactive to what the other person is doing to us that we lose our ability to observe our own part in the interaction. Self-observation is not at all the same as self-blame, at which some women are experts. Rather, self-observation is the process of seeing the interaction of ourselves and others, and recognizing that the ways other people behave with us has something to do with the way we behave with them. We cannot make another person be different, but when we do something different ourselves, the old dance can no longer continue as usual.”  I think she’s right.

Pema goes on to say “The only reason we don’t open our hearts and minds to other people is that they trigger confusion in us that we don’t feel brave enough or sane enough to deal with. To the degree that we look clearly and compassionately at ourselves, we feel confident and fearless about looking into someone else’s eyes. ”  When I think about the moments that I have acted upon my emotion instead of  thinking clearly and calmly making a good choice it has always been because the emotion I felt was too large for me to contain.  So, how exactly does a person learn to “lean” into the emotion, to ride it out until it fades when it is easier to make a rational choice? How do I stop my dance with anger and be different myself?  I suppose it happens one moment, one experience at a time.

But my ability to do so will only come through the letting go of anger and resentment and learning to forgive.  Mahatma Gandhi says “The weak can never forgive.  Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”  I understand why.  I have spent so much of my time seeking the forgiveness of others that I never realized that I needed to learn how to forgive them myself.  To forgive them for their failures, their intentions gone wrong, forgiveness for their reactions to their own hurts, and how I often times made it worse.

It is comforting knowing that forgiveness is difficult for everyone to learn and that my inability to do it well isn’t another burden from my chaotic childhood.  But I might have to work a little harder at it.  I was reading an analogy for marriage from the IMAGO dialogues where it describes marriage like two partners canoeing across a calm and placid lake that turns windy with waves picking up.  Should you continue to paddle the same way that you paddled when it was calm?  If you do it will not work.  If one person stops paddling and criticizes the other, the boat might capsize and both partners will get wet.  Harvey Hendrix, Ph.D says, what ever you do, stay in the canoe and just keep paddling.   I cringe at the analogy and think too myself “Oh My God” as my head hangs down discouraged.  I hate canoeing.  It is an argument I’ve had many times with my husband before, I hate canoeing for that exact reason, it’s why we bought kayaks.  I’ve always giggled at the fact that people call canoes “divorce kits.”  But the analogy says more about me than of marriage itself.

Harvey goes on to say “Empathy is the most powerful bonding experience you can have. It restores the experience of connectedness and union, overcoming the “illusion of separation.” The experience of connectedness is the goal of the process. This is difficult for most of us,
since in childhood, empathy was lost because of the emotional pain of frustration or abuse. Pain turned our attention inward, and we became self-absorbed. This is the single deepest tragedy of life–the loss of empathy and the emergence of self absorption. With the loss of empathy, we experience ourselves disconnected from others and from the world. We live in the illusion of separation.”

After writing this I spent some time reading websites about the loss of empathy due to chronic child abuse and the effects that abuse has on the developing brain of the child.  I read how the part of the brain needed for empathy is often less integrated in children who have been abused.  I read about adult attachment and the effects of a damaged childhood and I just feel so afraid and so discouraged.  It’s not just that I need to learn how to canoe with others, but the stupid canoe is on a lake at the top of a mountain and I’m in a canyon chasing rattle snakes staring up at it. A long sigh escapes me as I realize that looking up at it in frustration doesn’t get me any closer to it, but making one small step at a time will.

Cold Words Kill and Kind Words Kindle

When I was 15 I met my first real love.  I was reminded of this the other day when I saw two teenagers walking down my street.  They walked side by side, close enough together that you could see their interest in each other, but far enough apart that you knew that it was budding.  He stopped and stood awkwardly, making eye contact with her, smiling with his long and gangly arms stuffed in both his pockets.  It was a quintessential  moment where I nearly turned to see if I could catch cupid fleeing from the scene and almost expected to see cartoon bubble hearts floating through the air, unveiling a sliver in time that transported me to a lost memory of my youth.

He was 15 but carried himself with a calm austere presence that made him appear older and wiser than his youth.  His words were few but what there was well spoken, funny, and sincere. And I thought him beautiful with his tan and muscular build,  he was my Adonis.  I remember the innocence in our first kiss, the softness of his touch, the nervousness I felt as my body electrified the moment he came near me. I vividly recall one hot summer day, walking hand in hand down a country road surrounded by a cornfield on either side.  As I write this  I hum the lyrics and tune of Jack and Diane  by John Cougar Mellencamp.  “Hold onto 16 as long as you can, change’ll come around real soon make you women and men….oh yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone…a little ditty about Jack and Diane, two American kids doing the best they can…”  I sang that song over and over that summer, convinced that it was written for me, for us, we were Jack and Diane.

And as with everything, life went on.  We went to different schools and neither of us drove.  Vonage didn’t exist and cell phones were for the wealthy so even talking on the telephone caused problems as our parents complained about the expense of the monthly bill.   The romance lasted 10 months before we let it slip away. But he mailed me a school picture that fall,  and I’ve carried it in my wallet ever since that day.  I look at it this very moment as I write.  He wore a sky blue button up shirt that made his eyes glow brightly and his chiseled chin screamed of his strength and masculinity.  An attractive young man who had the potential to attract any girl, his shyness was betrayed by his timid smile.   On the back he wrote “Dear Leigh, I really (underlined) wish things could have been different but I want you to know that the times we’ve had together will never (underlined) be lost.  Who knows there may be (double underline) more.  Love, James”

Life parted our paths then.  But I married him almost 10 years later.

Now  we find ourselves at a cross roads again because we’ve allowed life to get in the way.  The destruction of a marriage is never one sided, but there is always the spouse that fires the deadly shot and in ours,  it was me.  And I regret it.  I look back on our years spent together and see the precious moments that I chose to ignore and to neglect.  I think of all the times I felt hurt, angered and neglected and reacted with “an eye for an eye” when I should have turned the other cheek and practiced faith, loyalty and love.  I regret that in the last 10 years I have not been the person that I am today because my choices and my actions would have been more worthy of his love.

I was blessed with a husband who is kind, patient, and honest.  Who values integrity, service to others, courage, and family.  He has been forgiving, trusting, and rarely told me no for anything I asked and yet we’ve gone down in flames.  I can not write this without chastising myself because I allowed my hurt and anger, my fear, and baggage from my past to keep me from being the true and gentle person, my authentic self that our marriage needed.  Instead of looking at his strengths and holding onto the things I loved about him, I focused on the things that he did wrong.  Instead of remembering all the times he stood beside and held me, I fixated on the times he left me alone.  While we both pushed each other away, I simply blamed him and didn’t want to look at what I’d wrong  done myself.

And now we are both falling off that cliff that I dragged us towards.  I am reminded of a book I read entitled “When Falling, Dive.”  So, it is what I am trying to do at this moment, some how transform my wayward tumble, flailing all about, into a dive of a sea-faring gull before I plummet to the water, so that instead of landing in a way that breaks our ribs and causes us to drown, we survive this fall maybe sinking beneath the surface for a bit, but we manage to catch our breath and swim to shore, soaking wet and cold, but still alive.

His absence in this blog has meant to be an effort to preserve us, to show him the honor and the respect that I’ve failed at thus far, but in this absence I realize that once again I’ve failed him for it seems that I simply do not care. For the first time I understand how he must have felt throughout our marriage, trying hard to show his love but in a no win situation.

I’m not sure why he loves me, or what I offer him. I once asked that question 14 years ago “Why do you love me?” and he replied “I can’t not love you.”  But at this point I’ve forgone my right to ask him such things, and instead should simply tell him things I’ve not lately said.  Like how I miss the way I craved his touch and always sought his embrace when I needed comfort, or how I still recall the time where I thought he could do any thing, or how my favorite moment in our life was when his simply walked across a bookstore and kissed me on my cheek.  I miss the way I missed him when we lived apart, and the pride I had in just being his wife.  I miss our late night conversations about God, past lives, and unlocked mysteries and I miss the ideal belief that we would grow old together.

For our first Valentines Day I gave him a book of love, happiness, sadness, and pain.  All hand written, or personally typed, filled with journal entries, songs, poems, cards, and pictures that symbolized my love.  It was the book of “me.”  I simply wanted to share myself with him.  I wanted him to know me, fully, to accept me completely, perhaps in hopes that it would heal me, but I neglected to do my share of the work to make this happen.

In the book I’d written a phrase by an unknown author and now I wonder why.  It said “How easy the breath that kills a flame.  How hard to kindle that light again.  Cold words kill and kind words kindle.  By words withheld, a dream may dwindle.  Be careful which dream you clutch…for dreams come true.”   I should have headed my own advise, what a fool I’ve been.

 

 

 

An Hour To Live

Do you know the story of Richard Carlson?  Psychotherapist, Inspirational Speaker, and Author?  Perhaps you know his book Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff?  Ah, I bet that rings a bell.  What a tragic story, he died at 45 of a pulmonary embolism while on his speaking tour. Last night I read a book that was posthumously authored by him and his wife and it was based on a letter he had written to her and given her for a gift on their 18th wedding anniversary. It is called An Hour to Live, an Hour to Love.  This was the third time that I’ve read it. His letter asks three questions, if you had an hour to live who would you call, what would you tell them and why are you waiting. After his death his wife poured through all the years of letters she had accumulated from him and answered him in the final chapters  of the book. I encourage you to read it.

“Few circumstances awaken our aspiration to live  more directly from the heart than the grave illness or death of a loved one.  In such times of naked pain, we’re no longer so intent on clinging to our protections, so interested in preserving our small comforts and our fleeting goals. At such times, we may become aware of just how strongly we hold our hearts back in fear.  At this point, grief becomes a door way to enter more deeply into our life.” Ezra Bayden,  Saying Yes to Life.

Even grief and loss that isn’t due from death can be an awakening for us. Ezra points out that our most painful and unhealed aspects from ourselves are brought out of the shadows by relationships and asks the question “Do you still hold the false hope that love will magically extinguish all of your relationship difficulties?  Do you still believe the fallacy that love will save you?”   I’ve read those words before, but I see them so much more clearly now.  Uh, yeah, I guess I did.

So is there truth in the statement that sometimes love means allowing others to suffer in their pain?  Or what about the notion that when we wish that people accept us for how we are we just end up rejecting them for who they are?  I’m sure I’ve gotten both of those wrong.  Why is it so hard to remember that “what we want most from others is often the most difficult to Give” (Ezra).   Maybe if we kept that awareness present it would make us more slow to anger or less likely to point the finger in blame.  Maybe it would help us recognize the value of the gifts others give to us, maybe it would make us thankful  and accepting of what ever we can get instead of thinking what we have isn’t enough.

If we know these things why do we still allow fear and our unhealed pain to keep us in that cycle of acting in ways that lack compassion and empathy towards each other?  Why do we still hold back our hearts? And how do I breathe into this grief and remorse and be a true person?

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.