I'm Still Standing

"How are you doing?" or "How are you feeling?" are loaded questions. I am a pillar of strength. I am resolute. I am so f***ing angry. I wish I had the power to inflict as much pain as I have been subjected to. I am so confused and nostalgic I think I might die from it. I am heartbroken. I have dread. I am confident. I am gutted. I am free.

Earlier this week, I inexplicably remembered how emotional we both were on our wedding day. It was a blessing and a miracle to be committing to this lifelong experience together, because we had reclaimed something magnetic after an absence that left big holes in both of us. And here's the thing - I was the least emotional of the pair. I cannot wrap my head around how THAT person is THIS person. I know THIS person, and I did not invite him to my wedding. Where the f*** did THAT person go? How can this BE? Where did my miracle go? That day was too poetic, too profound, too miraculous to have evaporated and lasted no time at all. That day our future could not have been further from where we've ended up, where we have ALWAYS ended up. Shakespearean.

My best friend has done the most unfriendly you can do - abandonment. Last week it didn't bother me so much. This week it makes him The Great Satan. Rage is also the frame of mind where I remember the most un-satanic things about being married to him. The hand on the small of my back to lead me through an open door. Watching him fold the tiny underwear of small children. Running to CVS for gummy candy at 10 PM on a Tuesday. Knowing that a roll is a roll and a toll is a toll and why you need both of them. Asking me to get in every time he showered for six years, even the week before he left, and feigning surprise when I declined. Cooking for someone who loves everything I serve. His reaction when I cried like a toddler when he pantsed me in my own home. Insisting that he could not sleep as The Big Spoon and be snoring in three minutes. Always making sure my oil was changed and my proof of insurance was current. Loving my dancing and tolerating my singing. Singing WITH me. Having someone out in the world being proud to love you. Understanding not only what "the perfect bite" is, but how to make one.

How can the person who gave me all of that no longer be inhabiting the body that comes through my door twice a week to get his children?

On my birthday I learned a horrible truth, the kind that are so bad you know when the lie is told that the lie is the biggest, boldest lie ever uttered since the dawn of man, but it's easier to believe the lie is the truth and the truth does not exist. Except it always exists. Always. And maybe the morning after your birthday is the day that you announce you can no longer accept that lie as the truth, and hoping at some point you are worth the truth to the person you've always wanted to be worth everything to.

In the afternoon on the day after my birthday, Jake had the worst rage he's ever had, ever, in eleven years of life. Landen had to send a 911 message to Corey to come to the house. When he got there, on the afternoon after the morning of the terrible truth, I was on the couch, in near catatonia. I do know that his words to me were no acknowledgement of the vile things we had said to each other six hours before. I also know that the sight of him, called over for this reason on this day, was when I completely came apart. Finally. Like the insides of me fell into a sinkhole. It was so sharp and so sudden that I am not convinced it did not make a sound, like a clap of thunder that puts moms on alert that children will be awake and screaming in fear any second now. Only the screaming was coming from inside me, and on the outside, it was primal wailing. I was crying on him, half the cause of the pain, repeating how terrible he was and how I now understood that he and his oldest son were engaged in a multi-directional attack to do me in. And then I begged for a break.

For all these months I had been sad and I had been crying, but I was emotional from all the changes and because I did not know what was going to happen. So I did the thing that I am best at, which was to taskmaster, to set us up so that everything started running smoothly with only one adult at the helm.  I focused on running it. I was not grieving yet, because it was not over yet. I was waiting for it to come back to life or be pronounced dead. The clap of thunder was the flatline. He did not even SAY anything. It was just THERE. And I knew what it was. So I said everything I felt, which included that all of this was awful, but the worst part was the memory of how elated I was to marry him in the first place, to have the person I've wanted to end up with since I was a teenager be the person I was ending up with. Only it died in a horrible, gruesome, semi-shocking accident-that-could-have-been-prevented accident. Not only did I feel the death, but I also felt the weight of what came after: that I had died. That my failed marriage and my shattered heart and my broken child were going to change the trajectory of my life and who I could've been. If only.

He granted me the gift of escape, and I loaded the car and drove to Nashville the next day. It is a nine-hour drive and I cried the entire way, like I was ending something without the dignity of a burial or the closure of a memorial service. Arkansas told me I would not be able to truly move on and rebuild myself and my life until I accepted the gone-ness. So in 1,000 miles there and back, I sat within the confines of my car with only the gone-ness to keep me company.

Divorce is death. Maybe not the death of the human, but it is the death of a life, the life you promised with your whole entire heart and soul to give to someone on the day you got married. The love remains. Even as I write this I know that it is given and received in a space held sacred between us that neither of us can bear to discuss and only make faces at above the heads of our emotional children. But the pulse is gone. And none of us will ever be the same for it.

I am not fine, and no where near fine, cannot even see the outline of fine approaching me. But I do know that fine is Somewhere Out There. The strongest thing about me right now is the truth, sometimes softened by creative storytelling and flowery words, but I say and I write what I mean. My cup runeth over with truth. When I got married, the love was true, the intention was true, but the capacity to build and sustain a committed and eternal relationship was not. And now that I know that, and now that I can accept that the end of the life is the truth and my ability to survive it is the bigger truth, I feel clean.

 

"Stand up straight and realize who you are, that you tower over your circumstances. 

You are a child of God.  Stand up straight." 

Maya Angelou