divorce – Page 2 – Mama the Reader

bodhichitta

July 27, 2015July 29, 2015 Katie3 Comments

It’s the final full week of summer vacation as Jude starts kindergarten in ten days. (I can’t believe it!) I’m wrapping up my summer reading, and I’m feeling grateful that I’ve read more of my own choosing this summer than I have in probably the past six years or so. It’s hard enough to find the time to read as a mom, but then add the fact that my job requires some intense reading as well, and I rarely get to immerse myself in my own books.

I’ve read all kinds of things in the past few months, and it amazes me how all of these seemingly different works are connecting into one big mural of meaning for me. There is so much power in the written word because of the immense power of human connection. It’s a concept I try to relay to my students as the central thread of why I’m teaching them to read analytically and to write clearly. As C.S. Lewis says, “We read to know we are not alone.” We learn through each other, and I have no doubt that God speaks to us through one another as well. In Christianity they call it The Holy Spirit. In other religions, they call it by a different name, but it is the same idea. I feel as though it’s only through the past few years of my life, and especially the past few months, that seeing the divine in all of us is made real and clear for me. Namaste in the truest sense.

Looking back again as the dust settles, I can see this was an element responsible for the disconnect in my marriage as well. Motherhood changed me at my core in a million ways, but namely it made me more spiritual, more grateful, more aware of the big picture. I always felt that everything happened for a reason, but after having children I felt the presence of the divine more than ever and could see that hand orchestrating elements of my life and reflected in even my small daily experiences. I don’t think that philosophy was matched in my partner at all – actually I know for certain it wasn’t because this is something we talked about in the final days. And that is okay. My path is not the same as everyone else’s. But in hindsight, I’m not sure that I could grow spiritually the way I have in these past months with such a mismatched mirror in my own home. I see that clearly now.

Everyone’s path is different, and mine is my own. Spirituality means nothing if you don’t hold it close, and it takes holding it up to the light, trying it on for size, and seeing what feels right to make it real. I was flipping through albums at a family reunion recently, and I found a beautiful image of an old baptism. This is the way of my family for generations, and I know Southern Baptists get a bad reputation sometimes for some things that are neither here nor there on this specific post of mine (for another time), but what I love about that blend of faith is that it is held close and personal. The idea of being born again into something new only happens if you believe it from the inside outward and do the work yourself to maintain a connection to God. Baptism in the water is meant to outwardly mark a change in who you are. You are emptied of the old and washed clean again by your relationship with the divine, and now the divine resides in you.

And sometimes those sacred waters of baptism aren’t reflected as a literal pool of water but a threshold in your life and your own experiences. A crossroads when you are out with the old and in with the new, so to speak. My path is separating from people I’ve known, not just from my former spouse. And I’m learning to be okay with that. There are lots of complicated reasons for some of these separations; divorce always changes your peer group. My core of closest friends is just the same, and I can’t explain how incredibly grateful I am for their help and encouragement. But there are a few on the outside of my close circle who have fallen away. They are another example of the things I’m letting go – as I’ve alluded to before. David Whyte has a poem that states, “Anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.” And I think that sounds insulting somehow – implying I am bigger than someone else. But sometimes I think “too small” can just mean they are not what I need right now where I am on my own journey. And to be fair, I am likely not what they need either.

When thinking about how I am changing, who has fallen away and who hasn’t, who is “bringing me alive” and who isn’t, I didn’t really have words for how this separation has happened or why. But when I read Pema Chodron’s work I wrote about before, she has a chapter on the Buddhist concept of bodhichitta which is a Sanskrit word meaning a “noble or awakened heart” – or as she explains, “this kinship with the suffering of others, this inability to be able to observe it from afar” or “the discovery of our soft spot.” I’ve rolled that one around in my head often these past few weeks, and it illuminated a lot for me.

I was having lunch with a good friend and mentor last month and we were discussing privately one of these people I’m referring to and how hard it has been to regain footing in my life without someone who was once present often, and she revealed that she always perceived this individual to be “a lightweight” which I thought was a perfect description. Someone who treads in shallow waters because it’s easier or because it’s comfortable – or maybe just because they aren’t there yet on the capacity to process something greater. It’s far easier to distance ourselves from pain though, far easier to make it shameful and tell someone to hide it or move on quickly than to hold bodhichitta for a moment and let that pain penetrate your own heart. I can think of countless examples in my past where I listened to people shame others for showing pain and weakness or where I listened to others refuse empathy and compassion for someone else. These are things I’m now ashamed to even admit that I tolerated, and I simply don’t have the space or energy for that in my life anymore.

I think people awake to their own bodhichitta in their own time. I can keep people on the peripheral of my life when they see things through a lens of very little compassion, but I can’t maintain close connections with them anymore. And I’m seeing more and more each day that this idea has very little to do with our society’s concept of religion. Many of these personalities that have fallen away from me are seated in a pew every single Sunday, but somehow they haven’t softened their hearts. They don’t have eyes to see it.

And so often I think this relates to fear. So many people want to be seen as perfect with the house and the kids and the prosperity that they think defines them. To admit that you feel fear or hurt or embarrassment, to admit wrongdoing, and to feel in your core that there is suffering in the world and a battle within each of us – all of those things are uncomfortable. All of those things require admitting that you are not perfect and not always right. So few people are willing to step out of the skin they are wearing and own up to all of these things.

Chodron explains, “Because bodhichitta awakens tenderness, we can’t use it to distance ourselves. Bodhichitta can’t be reduced to an abstraction about the emptiness of pain. We can’t get away with saying, ‘There is nothing happening and nothing to do.’ … Spiritual awakening is frequently described as a journey to the top of a mountain. … In the process of discovering bodhichitta, the journey goes down, not up. It’s as if the mountain pointed toward the center of the earth, not the sky. Instead of transcending the suffering of all creatures, we move toward the turbulence and doubt… We explore the reality and unpredictability of insecurity and pain, and we try not to push it away.” The challenge is not pushing it away, not holding it distant from us because it makes us uncomfortable. I’m finding that seeing another’s pain, whether that is a close friend or a stranger, is so hard for many people.

And the reason it is hard is because it turns a lens on our own selves. It shows you where you are gripping too tightly, and it brings about the horrifying thought that the pain could be yours as well and that you are not safe from it. I know this because I have done it in the past as well. When you rationalize the million reasons that could never happen to you, it’s a way of trying so hard to convince yourself of a concept that is simply not true.

What I said before about these very different books working together to paint one big picture for me? I’m taking a big leap now from Pema Chodron to Amy Poehler which seems ridiculous, but bear with me. Poehler’s book (which you should read this very second if you haven’t yet) includes a chapter on friendship in your forties, and I am not quite there yet in age, but I related to her words so much in light of my changing landscape these days. She says when you are forty and have gained life experience, “You can read people’s energies better, and this hopefully means you get stuck talking to less duds….Gone are the days (hopefully) when you take everything personally and internalize everyone’s behavior. You get better at knowing what you want and need… Lastly, because you are a superhero, you are really good at putting together a good team. You can look around the room and notice the other superheroes because they are the ones noticing you. The friends you have over forty are really juicy. They are highly emulsified and full of flavor. Now that you’re starting to have a better sense of who you are, you know better what kind of friend you want and need….I am interested in people who swim in the deep end. I want to have conversations about real things with people who have experienced real things. I’m tired of talking about movies and gossiping about friends. Life is crunchy and complicated and all the more delicious.”

To me, these “superheroes” are those who are awake to the concept of bodhichitta, those who can drop the ego for a moment and let some discomfort set in. Those who have encountered past pain or disappointment or mistakes and aren’t afraid to talk about it. And as I form new friendships with people I am yet to meet and one day look at the prospect of future romantic relationships, that is my biggest test. Are you awake to bodhichitta and all that entails?

Because here’s what I’m finding, friends. Bodhichitta does not mean that you are sad and full of sorrow all the time as you reflect on the miseries around you and feel empathy for others. In fact, it brings quite the opposite. It’s only when you let in the sorrow of the world, when you sink into empathy, and when you embrace imperfection that you can find true joy. Happiness is something else entirely, and though this may sound strange, I’m growing tired of “happy” people who are not joyful. True joy cannot depend on outside circumstances at all, and true joy can only come when you let it all in.

In his lengthy work “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” Wordsworth writes that when “we are laid asleep in body, and become a living soul: while with an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.” He’s referring to transcendence through nature as that was his route to the divine, but I see those lines resonating in my own life as well. When we “are laid asleep in body” and strip down the ego and feel that harmony or kinship with someone else’s pain or imperfections, that’s when we see into the life of things. And at this moment in my own life, this crossroads in the journey, so to speak, I simply can’t maintain connections with those who don’t see it. Looking back, I see how this past few months has worked like a sieve for me. All the hindrances fell away, and those left are the real gems – the ones who are helping me grow bigger and propel forward to a life that is so much richer than the one I’ve left behind.

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waking up

July 6, 2015July 7, 2015 Katie5 Comments

My kids are home with me after a week away. For once, the time without them did not drag by slowly last week. I took dance class two nights in a row (sore muscles to say the least), finished up an editing project I’d taken on for extra income, and did a little reading and writing of my own choosing as well. I got some incredibly encouraging news on the freelance writing front with a submission that was accepted quickly, and I hope to expand on the details for that when it is published. It’s been a goal of mine to submit some personal essays to a few publications for quite some time, so this gives me the motivation to keep writing and keep submitting. On the whole, it was a really great week.

I’ve heard of Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart for years, and a good friend of mine mentioned it yet again recently, so I decided to pick it up this weekend. It’s a quick read, and I settled in one afternoon to read most of it in one sitting and then finished it up Sunday morning. I’m getting better at enjoying the perks of solitude. A quiet house, cooking a solo dinner of my own choosing, reading for pleasure more than I have in ages, or even small gems like having a house relatively clean and listening to music at my own whim. These things don’t make up for the kids being gone, and I am happiest for certain when we are together, but I’m finding that recognizing the positives of my situation is helping me to ease into it a little deeper and not long for this season to be over. This summer is also affording me so much time to think and reflect on the past decade of my life, and I can’t begin to describe the difference that is making in my ability to process things positively and move forward to make things better.

This recent change of perspective relates to Chodron’s book as well. It’s hard – especially now with social networking to let us know what others are up to – to rest in your own imperfections and your own transitions and not feel lame or worthless. People are in performance mode almost always, and I know that. But I fall for it everyday and have to shield its impact a bit from myself if I can. I see it with friends and acquaintances – and yes even strangers – on the internet. I see it with my children’s father who is excitedly planning a wedding that is only three months away and relishing in a lot of happiness right now. I see it everywhere. But the point Chodron makes so well in this book is that change is the only constant in life and that suffering serves a purpose in the grand scheme of things. When you rest in your discomfort and use stillness to do that, you truly evolve from your pain or experience.

She explains near the beginning of the book that “Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy” (8). Allowing space is the hard part for sure. I’m working hard in my current life to include fun experiences that take my mind off things for a while. Dinner with girlfriends, fun outings with the kids, trips to the bookstore, late night Netflix, weekends away, and lots of other things. But these past few weeks, I’m also letting myself sink into the loneliness and the feeling of being completely not in control, completely clueless about what lies ahead for me. Before I read this book and could give a name to it, I could feel what Pema Chodron is talking about already – the healing that only comes from allowing space for it all to be felt in the truest sense.

This idea of admitting and feeling suffering without fighting it is contrary to our nature. Chodron speaks at length about our culture’s tendency to avoid pain and suffering by covering it up with a multitude of things – alcohol, excessive spending and a desire for worldly attention, new romantic relationships – and more specifically, she explains how ineffective those distractions are if we really want to grow from our pain and become fuller and richer as a result; “We think that by protecting ourselves from suffering we are being kind to ourselves. The truth is, we only become more fearful, more hardened, and more alienated … When we protect ourselves so we won’t feel pain, that protection becomes like armor, like armor that imprisons the softness of the heart. We do everything we can not to feel anything threatening … When we breathe in pain, somehow it penetrates that armor. The way we guard ourselves is getting softened up” (89). I’ve seen this firsthand with friends of mine who have suffered unimaginable losses or pain or disappointment. They have emerged as completely different people than they were before. Life softens and deepens you if you let it, but only when you allow yourself the time to sink into your suffering a little and learn your way around what it all means. And though it is really inconvenient, I’m seeing more and more that you really can’t do that at all when you try to fill up the pain with something else.

I’ve let go of so many things this past few months. Material things – my car and house and leisure space in our family budget. But also I’ve lost so many assumptions about people and about life and about myself. It’s crazy to look back at the first post I wrote six months ago when I finally explained what had been happening for me, and even then I alluded to this act of letting go and the things I was still clinging to. And though that was only about six months ago, I feel like I’ve changed so much at my core. It’s like being completely emptied of everything you had and everything you assumed only to start filling yourself up again in a totally new way.

I wish there were other ways in life to experience this groundlessness as Pema Chodron calls it, but it usually only comes in these painful experiences of loss or profound disappointment. As she says, “We are killing the moment by controlling our experience. Doing this is setting ourselves up for failure because sooner or later, we are going to have an experience we can’t control. … We can give up on being perfect and experience each moment to its fullest. Trying to run away is never the answer to being a full human being. Running away from the immediacy of our experience is like preferring death to life“ (72). There are so many ways we “run away from the immediacy of our experience,” and they seldom look like running. They often look like distractions or like “moving on,” “staying busy,” or “having it all together” as I hear people say from time to time.

The biggest change that has happened for me is that I’m done with that. I don’t have it all together. I am not starting some brand new life that will align perfectly by my expectations and look just like my old life but with a different person. The perfection veil was pulled away for me. I didn’t choose the actions that began that avalanche. But in the aftermath of all of that, it feels so liberating to have it removed and simply be in a moment in my life when I have no master plan and no grand storyline I’m trying to write. All there is in front of me is the here and now. I worried so much in these past few months that I was missing life with my kids because I was so overwhelmed and busy with life tasks and cleaning the mess in front of me. But now, in a weird way, I feel like I am missing less than ever because I have no idea what is ahead and I have nobody to answer to but my own calling and these two little people. That’s it. I woke up to that new lens as I finally reached the other side of all that has happened. I’m here, right now. I don’t know about the rest, but the rest doesn’t matter.

And I feel as though it has taken a lot of internal work to get to this statement, but I am finally beginning to feel genuinely grateful for it all – every moment and where I am now. I’m starting to look less at my current situation as a stepping stone to something else and see it as simply life and what I am. Yes, it is all part of who I will be and where I will go and forever changes the way I see the world, but really it’s just the path I’m on to learn what I am meant to learn in the only way I could learn it. I am exactly what I feared when I made decisions seven months ago – alone and completely unsure where I am headed next. But ironically, now I don’t fear where I am at all. I’m almost beginning to fear the other end because I don’t want to lose this lens if I move forward to something else.

Everything is at its most essential and distilled moment. Everything is immediate right now. It’s like waking up, and I want to remember these lessons and these moments – even the hard ones – in my years ahead. In hindsight, I had years and years of ease and happiness, and I was asleep for so much of it. As Chodron says, “When we feel lonely, when we feel hopeless, what we want to do is move to the right or the left. We don’t want to sit and feel what we feel. We don’t want to go through the detox. Yet the middle way encourages us to do just that. It encourages us to awaken the bravery that exists in everyone without exception, even you and me” (54). I’m awake to all of it now, it seems. Awake to the bravery and the kindness and the softness and all of it. I’m seeing it all in a way I haven’t witnessed when things were easy. I’m becoming grateful for the hard part, and I guess what I am trying to say – if this makes any sense at all – is that I’m enjoying the middle way as Chodron calls it. There’s so much good I’m uncovering, and even more waiting down the road if I can keep these eyes to see it.

solitary

June 3, 2015June 4, 2015 Katie3 Comments

The kids have been gone for three nights. Three little nights; that’s it. It weirdly feels like a long time in ways, and I have a to-do list a mile long, but it’s hard to focus and get it done. Truthfully, I think the lists and the busy tasks are all to keep my mind off the idea of solitude and the quiet house.

I play music all the time. I’m going to the gym every day and staying for an hour or more. My friends have been great about checking up on me, and my usually relaxed social schedule is actually mostly full for the rest of the week. I’m going to a concert with a friend tonight, watching the kids on Thursday during the day as their father needed help with childcare, and then I have plans on both Friday and Saturday night. Which is not normal for me at all. But I don’t even know what normal me is anymore.

Normal me used to be busy with work and kids and then happily on the couch with wine or knitting and Netflix at 8:30 every night. I’ve always been someone who was not scared of solitude, but I can’t explain it. A quiet house just feels so itchy and unnatural right now.

I fell off the train on Parenthood, a show I once adored, and I have picked it back up again thanks to Netlfix. Just two nights ago, I got to that episode where a recently separated Julia has to spend the first night alone in her house without her two kids, and it resonated with me so much. She’s tossing and turning and not sleeping at all and eventually moves to her daughter’s bed. The next morning, she’s up with the sun and going for a run which is pretty much my mode of operation this week as well. Her sister on the show has been a single mom for a decade and tells her it will get easier. Everyone says that, and I know it will. But I’m ready for easier. I am impatient for an easier time to be here already. But I know that’s not how it works.

I’m doing so much better than I was in November when I couldn’t eat or sleep or even talk about my life without anxious tears. As I said before in this space, I am not sorry anymore. I know I have the core to push through this. And I can’t explain it, but I even know somehow that there is something really good down the road waiting for me. I wish I could see it more clearly, wish I knew the time and place and had the foresight to see exactly how things will unfold for me. I don’t, of course. And I can’t see the future. But I have this tiniest space of peace inside me, and it’s covered often by a yearning and a list of worries. But sometimes in the still moments, I can feel it just the littlest bit.

I have a sign hanging on my wall in the kitchen, just next to my coffee maker so that I see it as I begin each day. I found it for cheap the week I moved in this house, and I hung it immediately. It says simply “Joy comes in the morning.” It’s a reference to Psalm 30:5 which says “weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.” There is an echo of this concept in every major religion. Yin and yang, life and death, pain and rebirth. I know my morning is coming, and that, more importantly, you don’t grow in the easy seasons of your life. It’s the trials that give us substance. I know that transitions are important, and when you skip them and move straight forward to some false kind of happy or distraction immediately, you have a major price to pay years later. I know the internal work is the most important part. I know all of this. But just when I think I am moving forward and making major strides on any internal wreckage, so to speak, I see that the kids have shielded me a bit from the loneliness that people experience after divorce.

And I have so many friends checking on me all the time. (A huge THANK YOU to you guys if you are reading this.) I had lunch with a good friend yesterday followed by book shopping and a sunny stroll. And so many fun plans are lined up for me this summer to fill my time away from the kids. But this is work, y’all. The knowing yourself, the moving forward with real purpose and intention and thought so that the next chapter will be the bright morning light I know it can be. It’s just hard. That’s the simple truth as I’m feeling it now, so I’ll just say it.

I’m listening to lots of good new (to me) music to fill the time and the silence in my house. Redbird has been an obsession lately, and there’s a particular Gospel Whiskey Runners song that has been on repeat a lot. Isn’t it weird how art – whether it’s visual or literary or musical – can echo your own thoughts sometimes? It’s that human moment of “Wait, you feel that, too? I thought I was the only one?” And that’s why I write, friends. You get it out and write it down and see it on a page or screen and know that it’s the human experience. Pain and joy, crying and smiling, death and rebirth, dark and light. It’s all here for us, and at least when you’re in a season that stings, you know the next one is around the corner.

Anyway, here’s a little listen for you if you want. “My bones are tired but they’re still shaking, and my heart is torn but it’s done breaking, and my hope is set on things unseen” Amen and amen and amen.

on loneliness

March 29, 2015 Katie5 Comments

It has been a crazy couple of weeks over here. I am moving to my new place in 3 days, and I hope to write more on that process soon. There is SO MUCH that I’ve learned about the post-divorce real estate process that doesn’t seem to be written anywhere. Important things that can help women avoid headaches I’ve endured. I hope to write those down here soon – if nothing else so that I don’t forget them. When you’re in the fire and it’s all happening at once, it is intense. Then I think people look back and smooth out those rough edges, and we forget the details.

Truthfully, there are details I hope to forget.

This week, my ex informed me that he’s engaged (via text message, no less), and I didn’t expect it to be such a hard pill to swallow, but it is. My kids. I hate this all so much for them. I don’t know what to say or do when they ask questions. I, frankly, know very little of the situation or the person involved, except that the relationship began before my marriage was over and that it is moving at lightening speed with an engagement already and a shared home my kids will visit twice a month.

This process of relinquishing control of my kids in light of a troubling situation and immense heartbreak is unbelievably hard for me. I felt like the dust was beginning to settle a bit, but now there is new mess to clean yet again. I feel frayed. At loose ends. Open and raw. I hope to dig into some books this summer about kids and divorce and remarriage, but time is so precious right now as I pack a house, do the daily duties of mothering them, and then also manage to carve time for my paid job at what is undoubtedly the busiest time of the semester. I haven’t read much yet on how to ease this transition for them or get them to feel secure in the midst of marriage and cohabitation.

But the big hit came with an email I received on Friday night that I guess was supposed to be some sort of consolation or comfort. An email that explained that she hopes one day I find someone who “completes me.” I can’t fault someone who is ten years younger than me for saying something like that, I suppose (especially someone who has been engaged since she was 21 – minus a 3 months break before her engagement again last week). Age teaches us so many valuable lessons. What is it Maya Angelou says? “When you know better, you do better.” … But her “completeness” comment is still itching, still crawling under the surface of my skin, and I can’t get it out.

When I was married, I never viewed my husband as someone who “completed” me, and who knows… perhaps that is why we didn’t work and he found someone who fills that hole. But to need someone else to fill you up is such a dangerous place to be as a woman. For men and women both, really. But especially as a woman when we receive so many messages about what we should or shouldn’t be, that lone voice inside has to guide you and complete you. People are not half-broken pieces looking for a fix. People are not half-empty vessels who can only be filled through a particular man (and then another particular man, and then another one). Or perhaps some people are, but I refuse to be.

But even though I say this, the comment still stings so much. The announcement of their engagement still stings so much. And here is the ugly part, friends, as I pour the rawness out here like I always do. The ugly part is that I need to ask myself why it stings. Why her comments succeeded in hurting me. Why I began to heal, but now the wounds are raw again. I am the one who can control that hurt and reaction. The words aren’t rolling off. They are sticking and stinging. The message that I am less than she because she has someone whom she feels “completes her,” and I am alone and somehow broken and inferior as a result. That message succeeded in reaching me, and I’ve given it far too much space in my head these past couple days.

I’ve been reading here and there when I can – which honestly is pretty seldom these days. And I’ve flipped a bit through my old copy of Eat, Pray, Love remembering that I read this long before I divorced, but it begins with that rock bottom moment of Liz Gilbert leaving her marriage. Some passages are catching my eye that went by unnoticed before.

The only way to get through is through. Could I find someone to put a band-aid on the wound? Absolutely. It’s not hard. Brokenness typically tends to attract similar brokenness, and two wounded people come together like magnets. But where that would lead frightens me, and more than that, I have been through enough pain with this, and I don’t want it to be wasted. Pain is senseless suffering if you don’t grow from it. The only way through is to keep trudging, keep moving, not cling to someone else’s body or emotions or flattery as a means to escape my own pain. But I’m going to be honest that this is hard. It’s hard to swallow the feeling of being alone when you haven’t been in quite some time.

I’m learning there is a difference between loneliness and solitude. A major one. But sadly, this week I also learned that no matter how comfortable you are with your own solitude, it still stings when people ask you questions, when you see happy couples, when you receive a consolation message from someone who wants to wear her relationship like a badge.

Completing yourself is hard work. But it is THE work. It’s why we are here – to know myself, to feel whole, to fill myself up, to know my purpose and the role of the divine in that purpose. To stand on my own feet and hear my own voice as I guide two little people as best I can to hopefully one day teach them these same lessons. I hope to reach a point one day when that voice inside is loud enough to drown out the others, but I’m not there yet.

life raft

February 9, 2015February 16, 2015 Katie6 Comments

I remember when I was pregnant and nearing the end of it, I’d always have a moment in the grocery store when I bought something with an expiration date after my due date. It was always a scary realization, knowing that the milk or yogurt could potentially last longer than the inside kicks I was feeling.

I keep doing that retroactively lately with so many things around my own home. The huge bag of bulk brown rice I bought at Costco? I had no idea when I bought it that I’d be divorced when we reached the bottom of the bag. I had no idea when we bought this dream home that life events would force me to sell it before we even put down real roots. I had no idea when we adopted our lab 8 years ago that he’d follow me to a new chapter alone with two children while my husband began his own new life with a woman ten years younger than I am.

But as another thing that outlasted my marriage, I also vastly underestimated the role of friendship in my life. Over the holidays, I had dinner with a friend who only knows me from my work life years ago, and I was in a bad place of fear and confusion and self-pity, and I remember saying that I felt like nobody even knew me outside of my husband. No one sees me as a separate being. But in reality, I’m learning that nothing is farther from that truth. Even when I didn’t see my own self in the mirror very much and I only saw a wife, others were seeing the real me tucked away inside.

Lately, not a single day goes by that I don’t receive a call or a text or an email from someone close to me. Someone who graciously continues to think of me and check in and give me words of encouragement. As word has leaked out on social media, something I feared for a long time, I have been so surprised at the people who have reached out with some really specific and genuine words in my time of shaky ground. Graduate school classmates I’ve hardly talked to much in the last 8 years, former teachers, former students, so many I forgot that I’d once been closely connected to.

I dreaded telling our neighbors for quite some time. I don’t even know why. It’s just such an awesome neighborhood as I’ve mentioned before, and I’m sad to leave it. But it’s also ALL married families with children here. And everything always looks so pristine on the outside when you are looking in. It’s intimidating to let someone know that yours doesn’t match. (I think we all know what I mean with that feeling.)

So finally last week, I had to tell them the day before the “for sale” sign emerged in our yard. I emailed the three I am closest to with very few details and a lot of tears, and what happened? They rallied and sent such words of encouragement and invited themselves to keep me company last Wednesday evening, sneaking over after kids were asleep with bottles of wine and gifts and food. My only contribution was s’mores dip and a lot of conversation.

There is a line in Almost Famous (anyone else love that movie?) where Phillip Seymour Hoffman says to the young protagonist that “The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.” I’m learning that lesson in all of this. Every time I open up and share the real vulnerability, the real pain or sadness or confusion or whatever overflows, the result is real currency, so to speak, real friendship.

It’s such a lesson for me, and for all of us I think, to be genuine and real and stop the game of pretending we don’t have worries or sadness or doubt or fear. This problem is worsening with Facebook and Instagram and blogs and every other avenue for posting polished photos and catchy captions. Let’s be real, for once. Say what bothers you, say what you need from a friend, say what you need from your own self. Express your sadness and doubt and fear and disappointment. So much good happens when we finally just say it.

I’m so grateful for friends and real conversation and relationships that span time and distance and reach out to comfort us when we need it. Life is funny. I’ve connected with a lot of people, at times closely or intensely, and then you move forward and time separates you. You forget you had that connection once, and yet if we are willing to put ourselves out there, it can still shine through unexpectedly when you most need it. And at this time in my life, when I am feeling so doubtful and less steady than ever, it soothes and encourages me more than I can express to hear someone say that I have what it takes to move forward and begin this new chapter for myself and my kids alone.

So to any of you – if you are reading here though I know many of them don’t – but if you are reading this and you sent an email, a text message, a card in the mail. If you listened to me cry on the phone, if you sat across from me at lunch or dinner or over coffee and listened to my rambling as I worked through the hard weeks and hard moments. Thank you. Thank you for seeing me as I really am and looking beyond the mess to exchange real currency, so to speak. It’s been a life raft for me, and I’m still clinging.

And I’m promising to become a more fearless friend in the future as well. I think we sometimes fear being too connected with others, judged as too forward. We might hear that someone is in a rough patch, or likewise hear about something good in her life, and stop ourselves from reaching out to comfort or encourage or congratulate. But having been on this end of the equation, I see how much it means. Putting yourself out there with a quick note or comment or call – even if it’s been years since you’ve seen the person – it feeds the soul in a way nothing else does. I’m vowing to put some of my own encouragement outward again and really observe and listen, in the truest way I can.

redefinition

January 28, 2015August 25, 2018 Katie11 Comments

I’ve missed this space so much in the weeks that have passed. I’ve wanted badly to come here and string words together in this familiar spot and gain encouragement from those of you who read. But because of the details that exploded in my life last fall, I’ve resorted to an old pen-and-paper journal until I felt ready to come here and strong enough to begin to tell my story. I feel like life during these past few years has been one reinvention after another. From grad student to young married. From high school teacher to motherhood that consumed me full-time. Then to college professor with one foot in the working world and two preschoolers to look after. And now to single motherhood. I read Anne Lamott’s Small Victories this past December, in efforts to make sense of anything that was happening and to link together my fumbling attempts at reframing my whole perception. As always with the written word, the perfect thought was trying to find me, and a beacon was shining already on page ten when Lamott explains the process of forced change that happens in our lives:

“Redefinition is a nightmare – we think we’ve arrived in our nice Pottery Barn boxes, and that this or that is true. Then something happens that totally sucks, and we are in a new box, and it is like changing into clothes that don’t fit, that we hate. Yet the essence remains. Essence that is malleable, fluid. Everything we lose is Buddhist truth – one more thing that you don’t have to grab with your death grip, and protect from death or decay. It’s gone. We can mourn it, but we don’t have to get down in the grave with it.“

I’m here to finally tell you, friends, that in the weeks of my absence from here, I was in the grave, so to speak. In the darkest reaches of a grief that gripped me so completely it sickened me from the inside outward. I wish I had words to explain what it feels like to have one perfectly sculpted idea of your future, and in a matter of days, that image disappears completely. But I know so many of you know exactly what I mean by that – whether it is a wandering husband, a scary diagnosis, a death of someone you can’t live without, a change in your life or career or family that is irreversible …. We all encounter it at some point. And after that initial heaviness of grief, I’ve seen women emerge stronger and better and wiser because of it. But how they get to that new place, I am not really sure yet.

I won’t be the same me I was before. It’s weird to look back and hardly recognize who you were in your last life. I’m embarrassed in ways – of how I loved without question, married at 24, so sure that I would never be in this position. Of how unbelievably hysterical I was for weeks when this erupted. Of how I made excuse after excuse of all the things I found last October and November and blamed myself for someone else’s actions. Of how I still wonder what I could have done differently or how I could have been better, and I know that list is long. Marriage is a partnership, a work in constant progress. And I think anyone in my position tends to look back and wonder when it all started to unravel, how I could have predicted the future and intervened sooner. Why I didn’t see it coming. Sadly, you reach a point when these questions don’t even matter anymore because what’s done is done. Irreversible. The only place left to go is forward.

I wanted so badly to believe the best, and I think I also feared what life is like on the other side. And I am still a little scared, to be honest. But I’m flailing – ungracefully but purposefully – to make it to the next shore. I lost my center and my backbone in the mess that was left when it all fell apart, but I’ve found it now.

A new adventure awaits, and I’m losing my death grip, as Lamott calls it. Piece by piece, I’m letting go of what has no place in my life anymore. It still hurts, and I know I’m gripping some of those pieces a little too tightly even now. But I’ve heard it said that “Ruin is the road to transformation.” I’m ready.