Through the Window of the Past: Marriage Unplugged

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I was going through some of my old journals yesterday and found a group of entries so raw I'm surprised my fingers weren't singed black just from touching them. They were really difficult to read, but once I was done I was amazed at the peace I felt deep inside. This tells me that those parts of me that used to bleed from those experiences truly have healed over (finally)!!! I will be sharing them with you over the next few days in the hope that you may find something of use to take away.

Here is the first...

Marriage: Journal for 27 October 2013
 
My thoughts on this topic have changed dramatically from how I felt about it as an eighteen-year-old bride to what I think about it now, twenty-six years later. Up until the night before my wedding, I believed many of the stereotypical notions...like, finding that "one" person you're "supposed" to spend the rest of your life with, sharing everything, being this joined "team" against the world, and a plethora of ideas I'd grown up on. Lots of guys still flirted with me when I was engaged, some of whom at one time or another, I dated and still cared for. But none of that mattered. All I saw was Brad. I put him up on this pedestal, as if he were my modern day Knight in Shining Armor who would rescue me from the damage and pain of my childhood and help me create a life that was "right" in the face of all that "wrong. It had been all I could dream of since I was little, and I now realize just how much pressure that must have been for him. Our dating and engagement seemed so perfect, in line with the fantasy in my mind of how it would be. Then, on the night before our wedding, he had a bachelor party that shattered my illusions. I got a phone call saying I should "come right away" and adamantly insisted my cousin, who was spending the night with me, take me to the party. She objected, but did so anyway, knowing how determined I was to go. When I arrived, Brad was wearing nothing but his underwear and he was being carried over the shoulder of his friend, Mike, back into the building (I learned later this was because they'd thrown him into the pool). To say it didn't look good is an understatement. By the time I got through his groomsmen and inside, he was lying on his back on a sofa, so drunk I'm not even sure he knew my name. It became quickly clear that asking him about the evening was a waste of time. So, I left, trying mightily to make sense of what did and didn't happen. I didn't sleep much that night, pondering what I would do when the new day dawned. Prior to that night,  I would have never believed he'd do something to jeopardize our future, and now it appeared as if that was the case. What if I'd been wrong about him? Wrong about us? What if we were making a mistake? The doubts piled one on top of another, even though I was still clueless as to what, in fact, had taken place. But assuming the worst was something I was really good at back then, mostly because I'd learned as a child the hard lesson that sooner or later it did, in fact, come...the "worst" part. I married him in the church that next day, but the doubt had taken root. Months later, when I finally got to see the videotape of the bachelor party (which was actually pretty tame), the pervasive word that comes to mind, played through my mind over and over is "betrayed". Did I over-react? You bet. But you know what they say about hindsight?!
 
That theme played out over and over again in those first years, largely due to the fact that we were so young and NOT ready to get married in the first place. I kept telling myself it would get better, and for a little while it would. Then, something would happen and we'd be right back in this pit of mistrust and betrayal. By the time we'd both grown up enough for it to actually get better and stay that way, we'd done so much damage it was impossible to see past it. Aunt Mattie used to say, "Take care of what you say to people, what you do to them...because they may forgive you, but you can't take any of that back once it's out there and when you cross that line, whatever that line is for you, there is no going back." It was years later before I fully understood this, and it doesn't just apply to your spouse. It is true for every relationship we have in our lives. I remember when my grandmother crossed my own proverbial line, and boy did I let her PUSH at it for a really long time. But when my mother died and she said to my face, "I forgive your mother for all the bad things she said and did to me when she was alive", a switch flipped inside me that was never going to go back. After all the ways in which she'd damaged my mother from a baby to the day she died, never once even telling her she loved her and SHE forgave my mother? All I could think of was my own youngest child, so much like what I imagined my "little mom" to be like, and how I'd have lost my shit if anyone treated her the way my mother had been treated. I was polite to my grandmother after that, but I dug her out of anything and everything in my life from that point, on.
 
Five years into my marriage, I'd come to the conclusion that my marriage wasn't shaping up at all to any visions I'd previously had about what it was supposed to be. I was supposed to feel safe. I was supposed to feel loved. Instead, I felt betrayed. Society has given us so many myths about what marriage is that for awhile, I was furious at the world, in general. Where was my "happily ever after"? Where was that "practically perfect male compliment" to me? I shared all of who I was then with him and repeatedly had it spit back into my face. "Share your fantasies with me"...only to have them used against me. "Share your hopes with me"....only to have those ignored, while he did what he wanted to do, the way he wanted to do it, and consequences be damned. "Share your truth with me" while he hid things from me or lied about our finances over and over. "Give  yourself to me"...and when I did, have him treat me for YEARS with indifference unless he wanted something. So, I learned how to build walls and close off more and more of me, locking some of myself inside a cage of my own building for fear that those deepest parts of me would be used against me. I was right back in the middle of my childhood nightmare, only this time I'd put myself there all on my own through the choices I'd made. Nobody put any of THAT into the "fine print of my marriage license", although now I'm old enough to understand that we were both just children playing house and we were really BAD at it! And so it went...on and on, year after year stuck in this loop until I had my girls and wanted out.

When we came back from England, I told my mother (and she was the only one I told) that I was going to finish my degree and divorce him. It was the most difficult decision of my life because at that point I felt like such a failure and now all those people who'd flat out told me to my face that I would BE a failure would be right. I felt crushed, defeated and so damn lost. She told me she'd stand by me, whatever I wanted to do, and help me when she could. She added, though, that she thought I was making a mistake. She said she thought Brad was "right" for me and would come around, grow into the man I needed him to me. I didn't believe her. And then suddenly, she was dead. I don't even remember how long I knelt on the floor of our townhouse in base housing screaming when I got the call. I don't even know what happened the next several days, as I walked around like a zombie. During the funeral, I vividly remember Sarah, my youngest daughter, who was four at the time, standing on the pew next to me, putting her tiny hands on both sides of my face, turning me to look at her. She said, "It's okay to cry, Mommy. Crying doesn't make you weak. It makes you strong." Before THAT moment I always felt like I was so weak if I cried, probably because my grandmother  taught me to never, ever show my pain or it would be used against me. By nature, I am very expressive, so I learned how to shove deep, hot emotions down into dark spaces to protect myself. And here was this tiny girl of mine, opening up the floodgates of years of emotions that poured out until I was nearly blind from them all, over-whelmed from them! And like it or not, they were never going back into that box again. That scared the hell out of me!

Days after her funeral, Brad and I went to my mother's house for the first time to start packing up her things. Her jacket was hanging on a chair by the door...her shoes underneath. I put both on, sniffing her jacket to smell her scent. I turned my head and there was her blood, feet from where I stood, staining the carpet. I FREAKED out, sobbing so hard I thought I'd throw up, shaking uncontrollably. Brad tenderly guided me back into her bedroom to work on the things in her closet and told me not to come out of the room. When I finally ventured out a long time later, he was on the floor, on his knees, trying desperately to scrub her blood out so it wouldn't upset me. It was the first time in a long time that I looked at him with love in my eyes instead of betrayal. After her affairs were finally settled, I let him take me away from North Carolina to grieve and heal. I told him about my plans for a divorce but agreed to stay with him until I could get on my own two feet.  In Arizona he tried so hard to get me to let him in again, to get me to invest in "us" again, but to my mind too much damage had been done.  I had long since stopped feeling safe and gotten comfortable wearing the "mask" that society wanted me to wear, so I wore it, getting through each day, throwing myself into my girls, my education, and a new career I found in the midst of all those broken pieces.
 
When I finally came out of that fog of grief, I knew I wasn't going to live my life another day feeling afraid, lost, empty or unlovable. My husband got orders to Korea and asked me to wait until he got back and we'd figure it out together. I agreed. I gave him my wedding band and he put it on a chain he wore around his neck the entire time he was in Korea. Meanwhile, I met a friend online who'd been married as long as my husband and I, and we began to talk. Prior to discussing relationship issues with him, I didn't really have any married male role models I trusted or knew well enough to ask honest, raw questions about what it meant, how people made it work, etc. Every day for a year he and I had conversations about all of this, at the same time, Brad and I were having the most honest conversations of our entire relationship. At that point there was nothing left to lose by laying all the "cards on the table".   I also started reading about what others had to say in regards to marriage and what they believed it to be. Who made it work? How did they make it work? How did they make it last? I also prayed, a lot! 
 
I didn't know how much of me I was holding back from MYSELF after years of conditioning had taught me if you show who you really are to people, sooner or later they'll just use that to hurt you. And if you show them who you are too deeply, you give them the power to destroy you completely. Older me, however, understands that people are messy and don't always live up to your expectations. That is true for ourselves, as well. I am such a "Type A" personality and when I was  younger, when I'd make ANY mistake, I would beat myself up about it for a long time. Perfection is something I will never attain and I have made peace with that. Making my own mistakes, letting myself down, has taught me how to find forgiveness in others AND for myself. Learning how to love with an open heart, and still keep enough of myself not to completely lose myself in them is something else I've learned how to do. I am happy that I can continue to love, even when it scares me because even if it hurts, I have stayed true to who I am and I have continued to LIVE. To take chances. To plant seeds of that love, that light in others.
 
Marriage, to me, is a leap of faith we take with another person day after day after day. It is a choice we make, day after day after day. And frankly, I believe that society has defined marriage by parameters that are bullshit. Fighting about gay marriage? Who are "they" to tell others whom to love? The Bible defines marriage as "one man and one woman" but why can't their be other definitions? Why is that the final word? Other cultures have marriages that involve multiple spouses, usually wives. But why is that acceptable and not the other way around? Why does love have to be placed on a slide like some litmus test and examined to see if it "fits" into the proverbial box of social norms? For some people, marriage is the trappings of what society's expectations are...but if that is true of everyone, why is divorce such a common occurrence? I have a dear friend who is like a sister to me, and she says she thinks marriage should be a "five year renewable contract where if it doesn't work out you just don't sign up again with that person...no harm, no foul." I'm not sure I buy THAT but I think that it is certainly open for interpretation. After a host of skips and starts, mistakes, anger, disappointments, failures and finally forgiveness, Brad and I agreed to keep choosing each other day after day, one day at a time...and sometimes hour by hour. In the end, my mother was right. Brad grew up, I grew up...I mean it was bound to happen, right? And somehow in the muck, mud and messes we've gone through, we found we had, in fact turned into the "right" people for each other. God, my mother is beside herself with glee somewhere in the great beyond to hear me say, "Hey mom, you were right" (and about more than just that, too). Perhaps his mom and mine are having a great laugh about it right now!