Sometimes it’s a dangerous
thing to be away from the internet.
Trying to alleviate the boredom of a drippy day on vacation, I dove into
my archived journal drafts. I spied a
file called “Matt letter [1].” Oh
my…these are never good. I don’t know
why I save them. I only write my husband
letters when we are at the stage of impasse where full frontal communication
has been rendered impossible. So, of
course I had to open the document and read it.
Nothing like scratching open a nearly-healed scar and rubbing salt in
the wound…
But it gave me an opportunity
to assess the progress we have made (or not) since I wrote that letter last
July. Honestly, back then, I was still
trying to figure out whether I should stay or go. The only time we had peace was when we stayed
away from each other. It was plain to me
that he was going to be no part of the healing I so desperately needed at the
time, and that our relationship itself needed healing, something upon which I
was in no condition to focus.
Eventually, I came to
understand that the only thing I could change in this whole mess, the only
thing I could heal, was myself. In retrospect,
I’d pronounce it a blessing that I had neither the strength nor the will to try
to fix our marriage. It’s probably why
we are still together today. Two years
ago, I gave my husband the gift of choosing our marriage over continuing with
the café—though it was not consciously intended as an anniversary gift, and I
would not have been certain it had any value, at the time. Absent that choice, we would never have made
it to the 36 years we celebrated last Tuesday.
Still, I know my marriage is
not what I would have it be…what I believed it was, despite overwhelming evidence
to the contrary, for many years. As
surely as I know that the peace we enjoy today was bought with my capitulation. As the years piled up and we, along with our
partnership, lost the freshness of youth, I stuck to the conviction that I was
married to my best friend; that sole fact would outlast and outshine the cooling
passions and yawning distances of a love gone mundane. The pressures of joint entrepreneurship
proved even that conviction a misapprehension; because when the shit hit the
fan, it turned out we were anything but best friends. Quite the opposite, in fact.
So I’ve spent the past year
trying to figure out my own life, attempting to jury-rig what was left of me after the café debacle
back into some kind of functional, tolerable human being. I haven’t been altogether successful. I still have no idea what I am, but I know
what I am not: I am not an exhausted, overwrought
ball of kinetic insanity. Not
anymore. And that counts for something. It counts for everything, in fact, when it
comes to my marriage. That person drove
my marriage to the brink. The husband
had no tolerance for her at all. He
wasted not an ounce of understanding, patience or pity on her. He scraped her off and kept as far away from her
as he could possibly get and still qualify for the dual titles of “life-partner”
and “business partner.”
To put it bluntly, I acted
like an ass, and so did he. But I’ve
learned something about “unconditional love.”
Mainly, that it’s a crock. So
many chapters in my life—most recently this journey with the husband—have proven
to me that love does indeed have conditions.
That it is not possible to have love for someone—or give love to someone—no
matter what they do. “Love” requires a
person to act in a certain way; when one steps outside of those bounds, love
goes away. Or at least, it changes into
something that is no longer love. That
has been my experience.
I now understand that in
order to secure my husband’s love—or at least maintain the amiable state of
co-existence which we now enjoy—I have to BE a certain person. A person who is not necessarily who I am
right now; a person I suspect I have never been. It isn’t necessarily who I am NOT, either…I
really don’t know. But I’m not being
given the luxury of a choice.
There are times when the old
wounds produce waves of phantom pain, like the ache of an amputated appendage, which
usually manifests as a burst of unreasonable anger ignited by some
insignificant catalyst. (I’m shocked by
how much anger I still have, and how close beneath the surface it lies.) And if the husband happens to be within my
airspace during one of these episodes, he meets it with an ice bath of cold,
haughty meanness—his go-to weapon of our café years. Proving that there has been neither
forgiveness nor forgetfulness on his part…any more, it seems, than there has
been on mine. If I do not want to
challenge the status quo, I need to make every attempt to pilot my little boat
on an even keel. I have chosen to do
that, as much as it is humanly possible for me to do so; because I don’t want
to fight anymore.
So we live peacefully, most
of the time. We get along as long as I
mind my p’s and q’s. We even enjoy each
other’s company. Which is a far cry from
where we were not long ago. I should be
happy. Content. And I am.
Most of the time.
Most of the time seems good enough to me!
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