Tucker is BETTER!
He woke this morning with clear eyes, renewed energy and just enough of an appetite to have some jello with bananas. So far today, he has pinched his brother, he's argued with me about whether he needs to take a bath, and he's been dancing around me asking how much longer before he can have the computer to go to the Playhouse Disney site. I made sure there are some fireworks for him to enjoy later in the week and he's been in the box saying Oooooooh! Aaaaaaaaaah! and wanting to know WHY the sun takes so LONG to go around the earth. (I told him we'll shoot them off on Friday because I'm working tonight and tomorrow evening.) Oh, yes, life is GOOD.
(Crying in the Night)
Crossing Denial
Months ago, I was writing blogs about the process of divorce. At the suggestion of my friend I posted each of those under the heading Crying in the Night. After six months of relative silence on the topic it's beginning to swell in my throat and I have to let it out to ease the pressure. There are a series of topics I've been considering as I'm trying to grow myself through this and considering the length of time since I've been willing to talk about it denial seems like a good place to start. So I'm continuing the writing I began eight months ago.
Last fall and winter I talked a lot about how determined Tim and I were to remain (or become) friends through this whole upheaval. I'm not coming here now to say that we've either succeeded or failed in our efforts. We're still working on it. There are good days when we are able to talk with each other. There are bad days when the emotional toll keeps us from saying anything. One thing I think we agree is that our commitment to the friendship has pushed us into paths with negative side effects. We grin and bear it on days we'd prefer to rant and rave. But the only way to do that is to practice a deep and pervasive denial.
Patterns of denial run deep. One of my favorite sayings, blatantly lifted from the habit of an old friend is, "It's better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick." or "It could be worse." These sayings are my way of negating my feelings about events of my life. They are my emotional kick in the pants that says, you have no right to feel upset or angry. But there's another saying I'm coming to be more and more familiar with, "Either you deal with your feelings or they deal with you." Healing takes time, but time alone doesn't heal. As long as feelings are pushed down and pushed aside they continue to wound and to scar.
For me, the most intense time of denial was before the separation when I desperately wanted to believe that we were going to find a way to work it out. I tried to live as though my marriage was a healthy happy place even when I was crying inside. Growing up in the family of my birth, I never saw divorce. My grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles on both sides had and have marriages that have lasted until death. I knew friends who's parents separated, but I had the idea from this that divorce is something that happens to other people. Maybe those people didn't come from as good a family as I did, or maybe there was something wrong in their raising ... yes, I have discovered that I have been harboring a lot of rather infantile beliefs about what makes a marriage divorce-proof. Add to this my background as a Christian and I was confident that divorce would never happen to me. When I entered my marriage, it was not an option. But after fifteen years the unthinkable non-option is where I ended up.
Divorce has the effect of shattering your belief system regardless of your spiritual background. We all hold beliefs about God, about morality, and about what kind of person we are. I have wrestled most with my beliefs about myself. One of the things that burned my soul was when Tim said to me that he never thought that I would give up. One of the things that he had counted on was that regardless of anything else, my commitment, faithfulness, stubbornness would never allow me to make this choice. And it's been very hard for me to accept myself at times because regardless of the reasoning that went into the decision, at the bottom line, I filed for divorce from my husband. That fact negates a lot of what I believed about my will and my heart.
That Will kept me in my marriage for years after we reached the point that in retrospect I think we both knew we would never recover. But it wasn't a Will that was based as I wanted to believe on my sterling character. It was a Will that depended on denial - the conviction that if I could imagine that my life could be worse, I had no right to ask for it to be better. It was a Will that forced me to distort my perception - to live dishonestly. And that hurts.
My Heart is filled with compassion for Tim. I hesitate as I write this to say that I love him as a matter of judgment against myself. What kind of love leads a wife to sit down with an attorney and form a contract for separation? It seems at the least a hypocrisy and at the worst a cruel manipulation to say that I love him. But one of the things that has been difficult for me is that I never stopped loving him. I want the best for him. I want him to have love and light and friendship in his life. And it took me a long time to accept that I'm not going to be the source of meeting those needs for him. I can be a source, but I had to let go of my desire to be the source. What kind of Heart would lead me there? How can I ever trust that Heart again?
My blog today is the direct result of a convesration I had with a friend earlier this week. I have been incredibly blessed in that I have a circle of friends who have supported me, encouraged me, told me to get off my behind and put one foot in front of the other when I got to places where it seemed just too hard. I have had people who put their arms around me and told me that I was worthy of love when I no longer believed that and couldn't find the strength to love myself. They are still here, loving me and helping me and telling me that they are going to hold my hand through the rest of this. A few days ago, I was asked whether I had taken time to feel angry with God or Tim.
No.
I have felt angry with myself.
It's too scary to be angry with God or Tim.
Tim has asked me if I'm not angry with him. And every time he's asked, I've denied it. In my mind saying, "I'm angry with you" is the same thing as saying "I blame you." So how can I be angry? If I'm angry with Tim then am I in denial about my own responsibility in the failure of our marriage? How do I cut through all these different denials and find the place where I can face the truth of my life? If I'm angry, how can we be friends? You know, I recognize that these questions aren't yes or no propositions. Intellectually, I know that I can feel anger within a relationship. But in my emotional reality, anger says that I don't love, that I'm not a good person. So the next thing that I have to grow out of is this dysfunctional way of looking at anger because until I can feel it and express it appropriately, any friendship we have is based on denial.
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