In this month’s theme of “saved” and on the eve of the three-year anniversary of my wedding, I am contemplating that thing I was unable to save—my marriage.

Tomorrow is July 7, 2010. I was married on 07-07-07—ostensibly a favorably auspicious date—to a man with whom I believed my life was destined to be entwined. Our wedding invitation was inscribed with a haiku I had written using the word we thought believed our relationship: inevitable.

my heart and your heart
twining our lives together
inevitable

I really believed my own propaganda. It truly seemed that his desires for his life were on point with my desires for my own life. I thought I had found—not the man who would “complete” me but, the man who would encourage me, support me in my unfolding. And I would do the same for him.

Today, I think I still believe in all that, but my (ex) husband has made it clear that he does not. And I tired of trying to sway him, and I let myself become beat down by his need to un-do us; I lost the heart to try and “save” us.

So here I sit today, ten months since our final split, trying to come up with a new direction for my life. I’m having a damn difficult time sorting through my interests and talents and desires to find which direction I shall turn next. And this may sound pitiful, but I still feel broken-hearted, and that makes it difficult to feel enthused.

For now I will sit seaside and watch the sky and water turn the colors of dusk, while the swallows swoop through the driftwood, harvesting their dinners, and I will work on soothing my heart, rather than planning my life.

I am ready for this pain to leave. I want to stop hating. I want to return to writing here about beauty.

But the hurt continues. I sit and look out the window at the glorious pink of the blooming cherry trees, and tears stream down my face–I am sad and angry and confused. And I worry a little that this deep emotion will never let up.

My dear friend, Carmi, checks in on me nearly every day, saying, “Good morning. How are you today, my love?” This morning I replied, “I hate my ex. I don’t enjoy being a hater. It hurts. I can’t believe how much I still hurt.”

And Carmi says, “You still love him, that’s why it hurts. You can’t say you hate something you don’t love in some way.”

Oh.

Earlier I made a snarly post on Facebook, my attitude getting the better of me. “I am stunned by how much I still hurt, and am thinking some phenobarbital would be perfect right about now.”

In their comments my friends say all the right things, and I love them for it, but it fails to assuage the pain in my heart, even their encouragement to pursue the Zipless Fuck.

I’ve had that actually (well, not exactly but nearly, and a little inadvertently, but nevertheless). It was great in the moment, but later he gave me the “I want to be your friend speech” which really is a candy-coated rejection.

And rejection is the last thing I need these days, seeings as I am still reeling from this most recent–ultimate–rejection. So I am better off I think, staying away from anything that might include any semblance of a brush-off. So, no Zipless Fucks. No dating, either.

But back to the hate. And the pain.

I am reading a book my friend, Elke, wrote a long time ago. It includes a chapter about healing, and it suggests that I ask my heart, mind, soul, and body what they have to say about this situation. And then, ask them what they need in this moment.

So I ask.

My heart says that she feels cheated and short-changed. And I understand that my heart means cheated out of an opportunity, short-changed of something that was beautiful.

Then my heart pipes up that she wants things to go back to the way they were, when they were good.

I tell my heart gently that that is not possible. We cannot go back. Then she says, “I want him to be happy.”

I sit quietly (with tears still rolling down) and I let this soak in. It is true, I want him to be happy and my sense (my belief) that unraveling our marriage was no particular key to his happiness, well, I wallow in that. (It’s pathetic, I know.) But mostly it makes me sad.

My friends give me (unsolicited) reports of bumping into him at parties and events around our city, and they say, “He looks like hell.” At first–from my hurt and angry place–I gloat at this news. But I realize now that those reports break my heart.

I cannot change the past. I cannot change someone else. We all know that. But these new understandings of my feelings about what was and what no longer is … well, the understanding helps me diffuse or re-purpose the pain. Right now, that’s golden.

Photo: I Hate How Much I Love You by Nawal Al Mashouq and used with Creative Commons License

This morning I am thinking that so long as I still feel this depth of pain at the demise of my marriage, and so long as I continue to hate on my (ex) husband, there is probably a whole lot left for me to learn from my marriage and its failure.

The divorce was finalized just about 48 hours ago, and the grief is rolling in.

I do not know really, why the marriage ended. The man who was my husband (I am not prepared to use the prefix, “ex”) might be flabbergasted to hear me say that–that I don’t know really why he had to divorce me–but I don’t. We didn’t talk about it much.

And what I do know of his reasons, I think they are dumb. Stupid. And why end a marriage over stupid reasons? And that makes me sad.

But I understand that they are his reasons, and he will feel what he will feel; there is nothing I can do about it. And it is this kind of rationalizing “acceptance” that I am relying upon to keep me making one step in front of the last, to keep me moving along.

I am not doing so well at this moment with the making one step and then another. I would really rather go slip into that bath that I have running, and slip under the surface of the water, and remain there. And be done with it.

Probably it disturbs people to hear that. But right now, it is how I feel. So why not say so?

That’ll change, sure. It has already. My feelings are pure roller coaster–swoop up, swoop down, click click click creep up to a height replete with vista, and whoooosh . . . along down to depths. Again. Again.

The violent hate that possessed me scant weeks ago is dissipating. Hallelujah. And I strive to keep a sweet perspective, to frame circumstances and my feelings in a positive way, even to extracting the good messages from my nightmares.

But. I hurt. All up and down my being, from the tip of my big toenail to the end of those wild, silver hairs on my head, I hurt. I am sad.

I wanted my marriage. I wanted my husband. I wanted our lives together. I still do. In spite of my intellectual understanding that it’s not to be.

photo: widdowquinn and used with Creative Commons licensing

In June, 2008, I “retired”, upon my husband’s prompting. This retirement was a culmination of his (and my) desire to spend more time together and do more things together–combined with his assertions since the initial days of our commitment, when he said he would and could provide all the money the two of us needed. Now this wasn’t why I married him, it wasn’t even a substantial factor, but it was a premise that I believed.

In 2009 I had one real goal–to restore my printing press and print Robby’s book of erotic haiku. Seemed a feasible enough goal, and yet here we are launched head-long into 2010 and my press remains languishing in a garage, unusable.

Instead, in 2009, I worked on my husband’s CD, his home and garden, and his company. (I also worked fulltime for six weeks, and stashed all that money in a savings account for us.)

And here I sit today, with a divorce looming in my future.

Does my husband “owe” me anything?

I know that I conducted my life these last three (plus) years as if my husband and I had a mutual future. I know that I would have conducted my life differently if I had known I would be on my own right now.

I would have spent all that time that I gave to his business building up a business of my own. I would have spent all the time and money I invested in his home and garden on something of my own. I would have developed relationships unrelated to him.

Does he owe me anything for that?

Does he owe me anything for having invested my small business experience in teaching him more about his business, in making his business more successful?

Does he owe me anything for having brought my energy into his life, showing him my world, my places, my people?

It is true, we have had only a few years together. It’s not like a forty-year marriage or anything. On the other hand, I don’t have all that many years left–so relatively, a few years is a big chunk of my life. Heck, my mother was only 59 when she died. What if that’s all the more I have? That would mean that I spent one-third of my remaining years in a relationship that has had the plug pulled.

So, what if some majestic court decides that he does owe me? Then what exactly is owed?

Does it matter that I am over here now, living off my dwindling inheritance, trying to be frugal, while he continues a lavish lifestyle–chasing rock concerts, dining out, donning a new wardrobe, making regular salon visits, having frequent ventures to assorted “guru” happenings?

I try not to be touched by any of this. I try not to wallow in pity over the fact that I trusted my husband to be my teammate and found out that he was not. I try not to hate. I try to move on.

But honestly, I do think he owes me. I thought I made his life better; I don’t know that he agrees. I do know that I helped make his life (his business) more prosperous. And I know that I spent the last several years invested in a life that I thought was ours–and his decision to get a divorce means that I must now build a new life for me.

Sure, I can be all cosmic about it–and believe my new life will be even better than the old one–but that doesn’t put food on the table or pay the rent.

I have certainly sung the woe-is-me tune, wondering how my husband could be off seeking other women so soon after leaving me, and how could he be reunited within weeks with his former sweetheart.

More and more I attribute poor communication as a big factor in the “sudden” demise of my marriage. I am not without blame here, but really there were few direct peeps from my husband about what was rankling him about our marriage. Such that, whatever had been going on for him must have been gathering and simmering for some good long time–until it boiled over, and he was just done, done with the marriage and on to other things.

I stumbled on an article today that is looking at the flurry about Tiger Woods, and his philandering. The title is a little misleading–What Tiger Woods Can Tell Us About Sex Addiction–when the meat of the article is in the question of honesty

But imagine what it would be like if, for example, someone like Woods could discuss the possibility of having other sexual partners with his wife? What if he could have been honest about his desires? What if they could have negotiated their boundaries and talked about it with each other?

Like I said, I am not scott-free here. There are serious wounds from me biting my tongue about some things that I was perturbed or worried about. And it seems to me that there were a whole lot of things that my husband was perturbed or worried about, that I had no idea of. That I still have no idea of.

It is too bad when people cannot find the wherewithal to talk.

Two days ago I learned that within just three weeks of dumping me, my husband was back in the arms of a former lover, a woman with whom he had been serious not long before he and I met. I had known of her and had learned that they had reconnected, but I did not realize to what extent.

With this new knowledge, I stand here and look at myself, at him, at our marriage, and I wonder, wtf.

Over these few months since the break-up I have been doing a lot of thinking and self-examination about “what happened” and looking for explanations for the demise of my marriage and exploring my own role in its decay.

But knowing now that my husband (he is legally still married to me) was so quick to leap back into something that he had assured me many times, and under many circumstances, was not only over, but something he had no interest in . . .

Well I guess it helps in some ways, in that I can release some of the blame that I have placed upon myself for the demise of the marriage. Maybe he was enthralled with her all along. Maybe he just wanted to jump her bones and couldn’t get that out of his mind. And maybe, it was neither of those, maybe he’s just an opportunist who saw an opportunity to rekindle a flame–and if that’s the case, the speed at which he did that indicates to me the small level of commitment he had to our marriage.

Is there a polite “mourning” period that civil people adhere to after ending a marriage? I wasn’t so silly as to expect such a thing from my husband. But, I really never expected him to go back to something he had vehemently told me was not only OVER, but also was really not his cup of tea.

I have to tell you, I feel enormously betrayed. I know, I know: what’s the point? He left the marriage, I should expect he would be moving on. But the particular way in which he has moved on just makes me think that he must have been lying to me all along. And THAT feels worse than him ending the marriage.

I have been struggling with what to write. I find myself in this space where I just do not understand how I got here, and mostly all I can fathom is to blame myself–for not paying attention or something.

I find myself adrift. I find myself without a dream to follow. I find myself with a heart that is quiet and abstaining from giving me guidance.

Actually, my heart is in shambles–so perhaps it IS trying to give me guidance but all that it can emit is garbled whispers through the bruises.

It has been eight weeks ago that my husband revealed that he was done with our marriage.

I didn’t see this coming. (Which would be the part that starts me blaming myself for not paying attention, or something.) I truly was taken by surprise, and for the last two months I have repeatedly wondered, “How did I end up here?”

The “here” being, of course, abruptly without the life I was living–a life with a husband, a home, a mutual future–zip, poof, gone.

Now, I did know the extent to which I had most of my eggs in one basket. My home, my income, even my vision of my purpose–all strongly tied to my husband. And you know, I didn’t have real qualms with that, it seemed destined and correct. I certainly was not fearful of a cataclysmic rearrangement of my life.

But here I am now, riding on the back of a cataclysm–as if I am straddling some rare winged beast, flying without reins.

And all I seem to be sure of right now, is that the only way to hang on is to let go.

I have decided that what is going on is that I am waking from a dream. Maybe several dreams.

This is how I am thinking about it today, and maybe I will think about it differently tomorrow. But for now, I like to view the angst and pain and confusion I am feeling in my life as the process and residue of waking up.

I had thought that I was living my life. I had thought that I had found my direction, my “calling” even, and I was merrily and a bit obtusely going about my days without a whole lot of thought expended on either the “where” or the “now.”

Which wasn’t all that criminal, because like I said, I thought I was moving in my direction.

But these days I find myself with a sharp, heavy ache in my breastbone and it radiates downward to become a knot in my belly. Another tendril of the ache travels to my spine, up my neck, and plants itself as a burning circle around my eyeball.

So obviously, something is a-kilter. I am identifying these (and other) symptoms as the accompaniments to awakening from my dreams.

I had my dreams (a marriage, a home, a social revolution), and now they are fleeing, and I am doing that thing I do when dreams have been so sweet–I am feeling sad and pissy to be awake.

Waking from dreams can be so jarring. Slipping out of a sweet, warm dream-state into the morning light’s glare, the alarm clock’s annoying airs, the list of chores awaiting–slammed into “life” suddenly, I stumble, stub my toe, and cry.

Today I sit and look back at those sweet dreams, and try to see my pain for what it is. I can name this The Loss of My Dreams, gnaw on the pain, and try to slip back into the fleeing dream-state.

Or I can see this time as an awakening, and view the pain simply as the stark contrast between the sweet dream times and the alarm clock’s shrillness.

I believe I will find more peace in awakening than in loss.

Photo by Elfleda and used with Creative Commons license.

It has been seven months since my marriage unraveled, and two years since the marriage itself.

It’s been these past seven months that we have stitched our marriage back together. Not fine tailoring mind you, but not a complete hack job, either. I will admit though, that today’s marriage looks distinctly different than it did two years ago.

Yes, it is a new & improved marriage, with more appreciation and forgiveness, with more respect for who and what we are. It fits better and is more reflective of our realities. And, I will say that although I am less “in love”, I am profoundly happier.

We are not the same people we were on 07 07 07 when we married. We have each become more of who we truly are, which of course makes it more possible to have a real and growing relationship. And I think the real and the growing are what please me the most about all this right now.

I cannot say that I am always present and appreciative in each moment, and I must admit that I fall far short of being the spouse that I want to be. But I have learned to make this marriage my utmost priority.

I am not wise about all this. I frequently wake to see a sleeping head on the pillow beside mine, and I marvel, “Whoa. That’s my husband. What does that mean, really?!”

If I am lucky, I will have many more years to find out.