History Lesson

I think the adage “Forgive and Forget” must have been coined by a man.

The process of rebuilding my life out of the ashes of “our” entrepreneurial disaster has been a challenging undertaking for me. Our marriage became so entangled in the frustrations and failures of running the restaurant that it has been a monumentally painstaking process to separate the two. And for my marriage to survive, they do need to be separated.

Forty-eight months into the stint, I felt that the intricately knotted mass was wrapping around my neck and pulling me down into…what; I had no idea. But I knew it was dark and ugly and I didn’t want to go there. When the opportunity to walk away presented itself, my first instincts urged me to cut myself loose and run like hell from the whole mess—café, husband, and everything associated therewith. I’m convinced a lesser woman would have done exactly that. Exhausted, burned and hurt as I was, the task fell to me to extract the shreds of my marriage from the wreckage and try to piece them back together into something that was at least peaceful cohabitation, if not happily-ever-after.

Scraping off the business part of the mess has been relatively easy. I don’t have to go to the restaurant every day and try to pretend that everything is fine. As far as the café goes, it’s gone, I’m free, and I can brush off my hands and walk away. With it safely behind me, the sting of any lingering wounds will fade pretty quickly, and I can process the lessons learned at my leisure and move on.

It’s ever so much harder to try to be IN a relationship while attempting to undergo the healing/assimilating/going forward process. One needs to adopt the talents of the proverbial duck—what you see is a bird gliding serenely across the surface of the pond, but under the water, her feet are paddling like crazy.

The husband, however, doesn’t want a duck. He has no patience with a duck. He wants a phoenix. Or maybe that’s not even quite accurate, because I’m pretty sure he doesn’t believe there are ashes from which to rise. In his mind, emotional trials don’t leave anything behind. No lingering effects whatsoever. The principals involved merely forgive, forget, and leave it at that. End of story.

If life were meant to be that way, why should we have memories at all? Why not just flit from episode to episode, always surprised, never prepared? Maybe we wouldn’t be unhappy. But we wouldn’t get anywhere, either. We’d never learn anything. We’d make the same mistakes over and over. And we wouldn’t be allowed to pick what kinds of memories we get to have. If “forget” is the prime directive, we don’t get to keep the good and ditch the bad. No history is NO HISTORY. Period. Not much of a life, for my money.

In real life, if it wasn’t for my memories of the good things about our relationship, if it wasn’t for the fact that I wished to honor our HISTORY together as much as anything, I might very well have become that “lesser woman” and walked away from the whole sinking tangle of our business and our marriage. In this day and age, people do it all the time.

But I didn’t. I considered everything, past and present, and opted for us. For the marriage. For continuing the partnership with the man I fell in love with a long time ago. Good thing I didn’t forget that, huh?