digging to china

So if I keep digging in this dirt of my self, will I arrive in China?

I vastly prefer the metaphysical plane, where my soul soars, where everything fits and makes sense and has this rhythm I understand, where I can look down, nod and feel free, to what I am doing now.

What’s happening now feels like I’m sitting in a prison, in a room with my own filth and muck. I feel like I’m digging into such ugliness and pain. And I am. I’m sitting in my own shit, trying to figure out how to get rid of it, how to clean it up. With no tools other than my own heart and hands.

It’s my own fault, really. It’s been sitting there, festering for so long, I shouldn’t be surprised.

And I’m not. I’ve always known this piece of myself. I’ve always known that when she comes out, she can be among the most venomous, pain-giving people you’ll ever meet, a mirror image of my father in his rages.

This angry, hurt, lashing-out version of my self. The one that came out to play most starkly, most noticeably, when I was 17. My parents’ divorce was final, my brother had been kicked out of the house for hitting me, I had an abortion that summer… all the makings of a seriously troubled, angry young adult.

But now it’s time for me to vanquish that presence in my life, once and for all. If I don’t, the chokehold on my ability to be fully myself, and be someone who knows they deserve and are worth love, will never release.

It’s kind of amazing I’m the person I am with all of that, but there’s always more work to do.

internal combustion

I thought last weekend was going to be this big, painful, shocking, awakening set of hours for me. That I would emerge on Monday the way I did after having my dream about my heart being covered with thorns.

Whoops, got my weekends mixed up.

This whole physical/emotional abuse thing is way harder to confront than anything else in my life. I mean, even my parents’ split isn’t as hard as this is turning out to be.

I talked to my friend this morning about how what happened in my childhood has rolled out over the rest of my life like a fog.

First and foremost: I was told that my father loved me, loved us. Now I have to face the truth of the fact that what he felt for us was not love. He may call it that, some people would say “he loved you the best way he knew how” but I know that this is bullshit. He hated the fact of our very existence, much of the time. He coveted freedom. He wanted to be James Bond. He wanted to be free. We held him back, tied him down. Did he have moments of love? Sure. We can all have moments of love the same way the sun can peek out from behind the clouds on a cloudy day. But my childhood? One long, cloudy fucking day, man.

Second: that I believe in a deeply rooted place, and I have to dig this root out, that I am not worthy of love. I believe this because love, in my house, could be taken or given away and you didn’t have to do anything but be yourself — it would inevitably happen. I didn’t even have to break a glass. All I had to do was ask the wrong question. So I lived in fear of those times. I live in fear that I am unlovable. I live in fear that just by being me, I will end up lonely. So I married someone who needed me so much that it didn’t matter who I really was; he’d always stick around, always need me.

Third: that until I shake those things out of my system, I will not feel free to express and be who I really am, because I will always wait for the other shoe to drop.

unfair

As I read my post from yesterday, the word unfair echoes as a refrain.

As an adult I know that life is unfair. I know that bad things happen to good people and vice versa. I have no internal sense of justice that I believe should apply to all people. I have a personal ethic that guides me, I have my own standards I try to live up to, but I don’t hold others to any of those because that would be ridiculous.

I haven’t confronted these feelings because I know all of these things, and also because I was scared to confront the anger, to understand it. I know that the rage is over something that can’t be helped or fixed. My conscious mind knows there was nothing I could have done.  But the child that still sits there inside me, demanding to be heard and understood, she pounds her fists on the floor and says: Unfair.

The rage and helplessness and fear I felt as a child, that was unfair in the deepest of ways, in that way that makes a child grow up not knowing where safety and love are supposed to be found.

Unfair. The impact it had on me, the fact that it was a buried story, that we all lied about it until it was too late for us to escape the legacy of un-love. Unfair.

When my father would come home and I could smell his anger coming off of him, when you could practically see it emanating like waves from his head, when you could see the coldness of his stare as he came after my brother, that stare, those eyes – even if I wanted to get in the way, even if I had resolved that next time, I would stand between them, an eight year old ready to stop my father, that stare made my blood run cold. It was the stare of un-love. Of hatred of your own flesh and blood.

Unfair may not be a strong enough word.

What happened in my family challenged how I would forever feel about myself. It would make me seek out men who didn’t treat me well, because I grew up believing: this is love. This is home. Someone who decides, at the drop of a hat, that you are worthless and beats the hell out of you for it.

That’s what I married. He may not have used his hands, but my ex’s feelings of being worthless were best dealt with (for him) by handing them off … to me.

she’s skinnier

So, my daughter says, “Dad told us not to tell you that L is skinnier than you because it would make you feel bad about yourself.”

(They say you can tell a lot about someone by how they talk about their ex. But seriously. What if there is something really wrong with your ex?)

There are so many things wrong with the mere existence of that sentence I don’t even know where to start. My initial reaction was to stifle a laugh, thinking, asshole, you were the one who made me feel bad about myself. Then I thought, God. Does he ever think about what he says before he says it? Do he and his girlfriend sit around talking about how fat I am?

Knowing him… probably. He is not capable of focusing on anything but the exterior… he is blind to his own insides, much less those of others. Regardless, I still want to grab him by the ears and ram his big mouth onto my knee until he can’t talk for a good, long while.

The conversation evolved… starting off with her concerns around his girlfriend (not unwarranted), into the things Dad says about me. Let’s see. So far, that I didn’t do anything when we were married, that I didn’t sacrifice anything. That he did all the work. That I didn’t try to keep our marriage together.

My daughter’s comment: “Don’t worry, Mom, I know it’s not true.” Oh, and this gem: “Dad has a big mouth.”

But I want to know, she says, why you wanted to get divorced. Because her father has told her that it’s what I wanted.

See, the issue here is that I’m using my parental ethics – that children should not be lied to but should not know everything – with my ex’s “ethic”, if you could even call it that, which is that he just blurts out whatever comes to mind that he thinks will make him look like the better person, and to talk to my children as though they were non-family members, adults.

So I have to walk that line between what I would normally do, while knowing all the other shit that is flying around them. So I try to be the parent I am, the parent they need. The fucking grown-up.

My response was that one day, when she is 25, she and I will have a nice long, grown up talk about what happened, but she should know that I worked really hard, that I tried to keep my family together, and only when I knew it couldn’t work did I end things.

She said that her father and I had “totally different perspectives” and I told her that our perspectives don’t really matter, that as curious as she is about all of this, what matters most is her perspective, her story.

And that I was sorry she was being put in the middle of that kind of silliness. I told her what I wish for my ex, that I don’t think ill of him, that I just think we shouldn’t be married any more, and all of this is true, even with the pettiness he shoves in front of them like an unwanted three course meal when he spends time with them.

I understand that the words come from a place of pain, from feeling rejected, from not understanding why I don’t want to be with him. And he simply isn’t capable of being a grown up, yet.

Finally, I told her, that what she needs to know is that she is loved, and will be taken care of. In the end, that’s what matters most.

nails & coffins

In my first therapy session last year – sometime around May – my therapist asked me, “So, you’ve been planning this for what, about five years?”

“Seven,” I said quietly. “Maybe more.”

I was asked about the things that killed my marriage. There were so many moments my marriage died I could fill page after page with the stories. Each one would make your jaw drop; you would ask me, how did you allow yourself to be treated that way. Why did you not go sooner?

There was the moment when my daughter was four months old, and I said to my husband, feeling about ready to vomit: “I feel like I have a choice between shutting up and never saying what I think again, or divorcing you.”

That was more true than I ever considered again.

It was surreal, my marriage.

On the one hand, I handled everything. Did everything. Raised my kids alone. Took care of my husband’s enormous insecurities the best I could, tried to foster in him adulthood.

Forgot about myself in the bargain. My body retaliated. My soul shrunk. My mind narrowed, my heart closed.

On the other, my husband — true to his pattern from childhood — tried to get me “under control” the way his father controlled his mother. His mother won’t even go to the bathroom without asking his father if it’s ok with him. I would never be that woman. I would never cower in the corner.

I fought, god damn I fought like hell, but eventually, I stopped fighting because every time I fought he became more vicious. I let him make me feel worthless. I let him make me believe I couldn’t survive without him.

Surreal, for a woman who for all appearances took care of everything and everyone.

So the beginning of the end? Probably came when I verbalized the bargain of the abusive relationship I was in – because it was then that I began to fight for every little bit of me I could keep, and he fought to make me see him as my God.

Social networking did play a role — it held some of the nails. It was a world of the mind, where I could just be me, and didn’t have to be anyone’s wife, anyone’s mother. Just me.

It was a world in which people told me I had good ideas. That I was better than I thought.

It planted a seed.

The stronger I grew, the worse my husband’s behavior became. The more I locked down emotionally at home, the happier he seemed. The harder I tried to please everyone, the less he respected me.

In the last three years of our marriage I would tell him I could fawn all over him all day, and it would never be enough. He could never get enough attention or affection from me. So I gave up giving any. Sex went by the wayside. He went crazier, the harder and further I pushed away from the safe harbor of the life we had built.

Finally, I demanded my own space to write in, or I would leave the marriage. Things have to change, I said. You have to let me go. You can’t hold on this tight.

For that last six months I experimented with a life apart. I envisioned what it could be. I started to see the world for what it was, not the skewed reality in which I was nothing, worthless without my husband. The truth is, he was afraid the opposite was true.

With enough time, distance and healing, I can say that we had a nasty co-dependent dynamic that we let snowball into a world of pain for both of us. I can say that as I pushed out from the dynamic, he did his best to pull me back in – unfortunately, his best involved breaking me down to get me to stay.

There were a hundred – a million – moments that killed my marriage. I’m not sad it happened because I have two beautiful children, and I’ve come to realize my own worth. Nor am I sad it’s over, because I needed to stand on my own two feet.

i’m an idiot

So there are times when I have something to say and I don’t know how to say it.

So I write things out and fire them off, thinking that somehow if I write it out I’ll do better, because I’m a writer and I should know how to say what I want to say, right?!

Wrong.

And invariably look at them later and think, good grief. Any normal person reading this would be — name your negative response: upset/angry/think I’m crazy.

So what do I do? I type more words. Follow mistake with mistake.

I need to get more ok with silence. I need to stop thinking that I have to constantly explain myself.

I hate this about myself. I’ve certainly gotten better recently, because it’s a function of confidence that drives me to do these idiotic things.

I hate recognizing something like that, and then having the two steps back of not correcting the problem immediately.

Like, don’t I get as I type what I’m about to do? No?

So I get to feel like an idiot. Over and over and over.

50 foot pole

I was told that my ex is still asking people we know in common, because he does not understand, why I won’t talk to him any more. Why I want nothing to do with him, why I won’t touch him with a 50-foot pole. Apparently these conversations happen with tears and incomprehension. Some of our friends ask me why; most understand exactly why.

I feel for him. I have an idea of where he is at – it is a dark place, feeling rejected by me. He still does not know, I think, why this happened between us. Why I left the marriage. And the severing of the connection is complete because I have made it so.

He still does not understand how or why I don’t love him any more. And it wouldn’t matter how many times I said what happened, he wouldn’t understand.

He keeps going back to “but you said we would be friends” – and I meant it, although there was a part of me that wondered if it would be possible when I said it at the very outset of separation almost a year ago. He clings to that as though I betrayed him. He doesn’t acknowledge that some of where we are at now was contingent in how he conducted himself throughout the divorce.

I think that with time we can be acquaintances, but it is his nature that makes me stay away, combined with his actions.

He cannot inhabit a space with me without going back to that enmeshed behavior. It’s remarkable, really, how he lights up when I allow him to cross one of my boundaries. It’s sad to see that he needs that from me. I can’t give it. So the best strategy is to simply not engage.

If I engage I will not be able to help myself. I will get angry about the things he has done recently that have had serious, direct consequences on my life. I will unleash on him. I don’t want to waste my emotions on someone who can’t comprehend anything I say.

Up/Out

I love my friend. She is brilliant. She is ethereally, blindingly brilliant. Amazing. I can’t think of enough words to describe what an incredible person she is. I wish she knew, I wish she could see herself through my eyes and see just how wide my eyes open when I am talking to her and how thankful I am for that.

I have had a rough week. I had a seriously shitty morning. I had to sit there processing information for about 3o minutes this morning. I had to talk about it with other people who reminded me that I was expecting what is about to happen – my ex’s near financial ruin.

In the end I decided I can’t be concerned or afraid. The issues, the problems, are his and his alone. While they used to be mine, because I had to fix it along with other people, now they are his. Self-created. All I can care about is the child support payments and that he is safe for the kids to be around. That’s the extent, and really, that’s all I care about. I think what I was all worried about was the idea that people still connect me and him in a reputation way, an idea that makes my stomach turn.

And then along comes my beautiful friend to remind me of how much more there is to my life.

I love my friend. Have I mentioned that?

Mired

I can’t live forever in the world of the practical. I have to function in it but I can’t live every day of my life in it.

I can’t live in a system, gauge it, play it, fine tune it, and have that be all I need. It empties me of heart.

I read this article about reality being subtle and I agree about certain things, but there are many things about my life that are far from subtle right now.

When I have too much “real world” I lose touch with my spiritual self and it becomes too easy to lose my center.

I start seeing life as a game, which is what the working world is. A game. Men love games. I like games. I can play them. But they interrupt my flow of being human, of being cooperative, of moving with instead of scoring against.

My friend writes these amazing pieces about things like the soul being feminine. Tonight we talked about social and economic institutions being set up primarily to help solve the problem of male alienation from their anima, from their feminine self, and to keep woman from feeling her own power.

That for men life is such a battle with externals, and while it is true that both men and women confront the externals daily, I think for some women, the lucky ones – we find our spine, our strength, and it comes from within. It is a job of realizing, not finding. The journey is within, it’s not a battle.

So back to the game, the external, the non-subtle.

If you can jump up off the grid you can see the system for what it is and it has its own beauty. Its own subtlety. But it is also a fight to survive.

Maybe that’s what it is. The fight of it. The fight to tune out irrelevancies, focus on my own stuff, so that I can get it done and move back into my heart.

Girlfriend

This morning I took a yoga class that was almost two hours. It’s a good thing I did.

I was about to drive off to my old house to pick up my wedding dress and take an old family photo out of a frame that needs to be sold, when I saw that my ex had called and sent me a text that there was something he needed to tell me “verbally.”

I thought, oh great. A continuation of the ridiculous conversation of the day before in which he wanted to hold onto child support money until he was good and ready to send it to me.

Nope.

The kids and I are going bowling at some point today, and I just wanted to give you a heads up that my girlfriend will be coming. To meet them.

“OK,” I said. “Thanks for letting me know. Good luck. And sorry I only sent J with one pair of undies for the weekend. They are all dirty.”

And that was it.

I hung up and sat there for a few minutes.

You might be wondering why I didn’t tell him what I thought, which immediately was, It’s too soon, you moron. But it is not up to me. He does not need my permission. According to the divorce agreement, he only has to tell me he is about to introduce them to a significant other before it happens.

I bet his balls crawled into his asshole when he told me. And if they didn’t, they should have. I was castrating him in my head.

The kids don’t even know the divorce is final. They know that I’ve been using my maiden name — I alerted them beforehand and they have seen me use it one time — but they don’t have any idea that there was a court date or anything of the sort – because that information doesn’t matter to them. I’ve learned that there are many types of information that don’t matter to them — and shouldn’t be made to matter. And in starting at a new school, I wanted to give them time to adapt before dropping another bomb on them. I asked for the same courtesy from him.

I bet they know, now. I’m sure he made it out that he was the truth-teller and I was keeping it from them. That would be typical.

I hurt, I ache for them. Because with every ridiculous decision he makes, they learn what took me a year (or several years, depending on how you look at it) to unlearn: that life — that all of our lives — are all about him. What he wants.

I knew it was coming. I knew he was prepping them. I’m just surprised — or maybe just dismayed — at his lack of respect for them as people.

Because when you see your parent with another person that way, that’s when the tangible destruction of the family occurs. The mine that’s been waiting for your step in the minefield.

In a totally selfish way, I’m glad he’s going first. He is the fuckup. Let him be the fuckup. What he has to lose is the relationship with his children. It’s his to lose.

Needless to say, I refuse to keep a gigantic, poster-sized family photograph and lug it from home to home for years, on the off chance one of the kids might someday want it. And I’m selling the wedding dress.