I like the phrase that Glennon Doyle Milton wrote in “Carry On Warrior”, which says, “Reading is my inhale, and writing is my exhale“. This blog is my exhale.
Welcome
This is the post excerpt.
Healing Heart
Dear Cherished Heart,
I sat at the curb for a long while. The sidewalk moved people along to their next appointments, or maybe to lunch. The whir of large-machinery construction gave it an other world feel. And downtown exhaust hung in the air like one long exhale. I looked toward the glass mid-rise building on my right.
Upon first meeting my lawyer I learned that it took an average of three years to finalize a separation and divorce. “Not us,” I thought, “we mutually agreed to separate; we get along; we don’t have any issues; we already have a parenting agreement” — in other words, we are not like the others. That was three years and one month ago.
This would be my last trip through the lobby, which is large enough for a herd of elephants to lumber through without interrupting flow. No longer would I sit alone in the waiting room being offered coffee with fancy creams, or water with lemon, like I was at a day spa. With over twenty lawyers, their legal assistants, and support staff, I couldn’t figure out why no one was ever about. It felt like a holding tank for the failed, furious, and fretting family law clients.
The package I picked up contained a thesis-sized document in an oversized beige envelope strapped down by elastic bands — I was tempted to pluck them like a kleenex-box guitar.
When I got back in my car, I opened the package. There was a letter: Dear Madam, please find enclosed … You’d think after three years, they’d know my name. There were two large file folders one blue, marked “Mr.” and one pink, marked “Mrs”. Really? It reminded me of working in a nursery years ago; each bassinet had a slot on the end for the baby’s name – a blue card for boys, and pink for girls.
The thesis confirmed what I already knew — my marriage was over. Legally. The years of our technicolor union had been reduced to one black and white page.
Why are there so many emotions associated with this package? I knew it would culminate here. It’s like walking down a long corridor and pushing though a heavy metal door that has a graduated spring closing. Halfway down the next hallway the door slams shut. The echoes shudder through the body, making it hard to move. And then, looking back, the slammed door has literally disappeared.
I thought that choosing to get married – meant I was also choosing not to get divorced. And yet, there I was, two separate folders in my lap, listening to the sounds of construction and wondering why things had fallen apart.
I had already let go, I had grieved and moved on. Yet, there was this final thread to sever. Never again would I be in a loving relationship with a person who I also shared the blessings and burdens of my children. We would not sit, years later, and recount the many parenting moments.
I suppose some people have cause to celebrate their divorce. But completing something that I never meant to start doesn’t create feelings of joy. Relief, possibility, and change—yes, but not exactly happiness. But, it’s not sadness either. I feel like something exists between these two emotions …
Maybe it’s healing.
Yours truly,
Wendy
* Photo by Jake Owens on Unsplash
Casualties
March 7, 2019
Dear Cherished Heart,
Kids. Casualties of their parents decisions and actions.
As someone who experienced the trauma of divorce as a child, I silently pledged not to do that to my children. In this, I have failed. Failure is reality. We can plan to move life in a certain direction, and though we have control over the intention, we cannot create the outcome.
I thought I knew from the get-go that parenting was a huge freaking responsibility. I did. But . . . leaving a marriage that is part of a family and therefore the bedrock of the kids existence is, or could be, considered a selfish choice. My life decision has irrevocably changed the course of theirs.
Research—and common sense—reveal that children in stable home environments have better physical, emotional, and academic well-being when they live with their married, biological parents1. Well, we already missed that boat — our family is made up of his kids, our child, and the world’s children (Ethiopian-born). The five of them have shaped us. We had a heightened awareness of how life’s choices and circumstances affected the health and well-being of our children, who are now teens and young adults.
Leaving a marriage for the sole reason being that I could no longer stay, now seems self-indulgent. I feel certain that our two younger kids would be better off had we stayed together and parented side-by-side. I don’t think they are seeing a happier version of either of us. They didn’t know we had relationship struggles. I wanted to protect them from knowing our faults and limitations: the depth of my emotions, and the breadth of their dad’s dedication to work. Where he under-functioned, I over-functioned, and vice versa. When I became emotionally overwhelmed, he took over; when he faded into his work, I carried the lion’s share of the parenting.
The things we shielded the kids from became weights that we could no longer carry. Separation and divorce can highlight issues to our children, but that allows them to see that we all make mistakes, and that we change and grow from our mistakes.
When my parents separated, it was not a mutual decision. My dad left all of us. He no longer wanted marriage or family. The consequences of his decision manifested in our lives over many years, and to this day we each have emotional scars. That experience became my frame of reference for children of divorce (even though I have witnessed my step-kids thrive).
Over the last number of years, high-quality research “has shown [that] the negative effects of divorce on children have been greatly exaggerated2”. The single most important factor in determining children’s adjustment is parental conflict. Moreover, as in marriage, so goes in divorce — children benefit from having both parents actively involved in and supportive of their lives. The more involved and the better the communication, the better the children will generally do.
Separation changes the relationships that children have with each of their parents. For us, given our propensity to “cover” for the inadequacies of the other (and look perfect), our kids rarely saw failure, and did not very often see emotions (not counting the emotional rollercoaster of our one daughters’s behaviour for a number of years). Therefore, once we started to live apart, we couldn’t hide in the shadow of the other parent and the kids saw us for who we were; we each began to live more authentically. I cried. He worked. But, we didn’t hide.
Three years after separating, our younger two children have developed strong relationships with their dad, and they enjoy new activities with him. They have adjusted. Of course, disagreement, conflict and pain occurred between us, but we have navigated those challenges with each other and with our own support networks — not with our kids as witnesses. And we made the unspoken decision to celebrate all family events together: Christmas, birthdays, graduation, death, funerals, and sporting events. I believe that this, more than anything else, has given the kids a safe place to grow through this change from.
It’s time for me to forgive myself for the decision to leave a good marriage, one with love, respect, and tolerance; but also disconnect, indifference, and neglect. In order to breath and blossom, I needed to leave. The notion of a selfish choice is irrelevant. “The importance of being selfish is equivalent to the importance of being selfless in living a human life. The latter is not possible without the former3.”
My heart continues to break in small ways when I have to say hello and goodbye to my kids on a weekly basis, when I miss out on enjoyable activities, and when I realize that we are not a cohesive family in the traditional way. This may be a necessary path, but it is not an easier one.
Courage is not a catalyst for success . . . just an antidote for fear.
Love in the lining of the heart, grows on.
Acceptance of what is, creates peace.
Yours Truly,
Mona Little
1 The BYU Undergraduate Journal in Psychology. Volume 13, Issue 1. 2018. “Effects of Divorce on Children” Katherine Donahey
2 Psychology of Divorce: Effects on Children https://www.mediate.com/divorce/pg61.cfm
3 Amin, Sheena. “Selfishness and Selflessness: This World Needs the Human in You”. Huff Post: Life. May 17, 2017. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/selfishness-and-selflessness-this-world-needs-the_b_591bd667e4b021dd5a828ffd
Happy Ever After
Dear Cherished Heart,
“You weren’t happy before,” they remind me.
Maybe I wanted separation in the same way I wanted happiness. The dream of something that either doesn’t exist or exists in an unstable state.
Maybe my vision wasn’t to be without this partner but to be with myself.
I didn’t like myself much in the passing years of marriage (or was it the years-long battlefield our daughter provided us?). Somehow I let go of self-appreciation even though I’m BIG on loving and accepting myself — walking in the light and dark of who I am.
The question that I ponder as the dust continues to settle is: Are we actually meant to stay married for better or worse for all time?
The word “marriage” dates back to the mid-1200’s, although the practice predates that. Marriage, in those days met certain economic needs and its main goal “was to act as an alliance between families”(1). Marriage was an arrangement, which, until recently, did not have anything to do with love. In fact, Stephanie Coontz wrote in, Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, “Too much love was thought to be a real threat to the institution of marriage. Earlier proponents of marriage were as horrified by the idea of a love match as late 20th Century people were by the idea of same-sex marriage”(2). And the Greeks believed lovesickness to be a type of insanity (2). Love as a primary reason for marriage didn’t evolve until the late 18th Century — like, yesterday! Even so, marriage may be an “old idea that doesn’t always work in modern society, where traditional beliefs and values have been undergoing a transformation”(3).
This brief history would not be complete without looking at life expectancy…’til death do us part. From the 1300’s to the 1800’s people only lived between thirty and forty years. Compare that to a life expectancy of seventy-five to eighty in most developed countries today(4). Perhaps the growth that individuals experience over time affects the marriage relationship, particularly when the couple disconnects.
I believed that marriage would be forever. Over our many years together, we weathered many storms and I thought there could be no “worse” that we could not overcome. And truly, we were extremely good at navigating bad weather; crisis management became our strength. However, the consecutive years of crisis kicked the foundation out from underneath us, and in the rubble — inadequacy and failure piled up.
Each of us has factory-set defaults that get tripped when in highly stressful situations. We can learn to override the default settings—one situation at a time. But no matter how good your rain gear is, in a torrential rain storm you will eventually get soaked.
Too much time in stress-default created disharmony for us. I had emotion, he had logic. I remained hopeful, he was realistic. I blamed myself, he blamed others or circumstances. I would retreat, he created rules. For a long time our varied approaches created balance, but over time we came to appreciate our differences less and less. Team work turned into careful tolerance, and then indifference, which undermined our ability to meet (or even be interested in) the other person’s needs. The disappointment felt like a personal failure. No wonder self-love felt hard for me, I neither felt loving nor loved.
Regardless of history’s take on love and marriage — love is an integral part of human life. I believe in love. It was not love – or lack thereof – that ended my marriage.
Marriage might be more about overcoming the odds. And if the odds are against, it doesn’t mean it’s over — but it might be prudent to tally up and move on.
Yours Truly,
Mona Little
1 https://www.thespruce.com/history-of-marriage-2300616 “How Long Has the Institution of Marriage Existed For?”
2 https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/13/love-marriage-history_n_4774740.html – “Love and Marriage: A History That Challenges The Notion of Traditional Marriage”
3 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/post_n_2442820 – “Is I Do Supposed to Be Forever?”
4 https://www.verywellhealth.com/longevity-throughout-history-2224054 – “A Guide to Longevity Throughout History”
The Door
Dear Cherished Heart,
There is a door behind me that is closing. I can see it over my left shoulder. The deep brown, solid wood draws me back. Through the tiny window, I see movement. There was a lot of life behind that door. I’m thankful that I lived inside of it with a loving, rambunctious, challenging, and wholly unique family. Time has slipped away, and no matter what the future holds, this particular door is closing.
There are some things I need to take with me.
Memories, for sure. As well as my essence and the seeds I planted there. It’s time to dig up the roots I set down and pack them in fertile soil so that when I transplant them, they will spread and I can grow.
I will gather my feelings and wear them like articles of clothing. I just realized that to leave them behind takes away my power and diminishes me. I have a robust spirit and am emotionally developed (D cup) — IT’S WHO I AM.
The sadness— I will continue to walk through one step at at time, not closing my eyes in the dark because to do so would cause me to lose my way … or fall down a flight of stairs.
But oh, where to pack the regret! The wrong-doings, the would haves, could haves, and should haves. The disappointment of knowing that I gave up on us. The fact that I could not MAKE THIS work hangs over me like a dark cloud, and yet as wind surely comes to blow the clouds away, I will breath forgiveness into the regret so that I can feel self-compassion.
The feeling of failure has fastened itself to my self worth. Could it be true that I was not – in the end – loveable? No— screw that nonsense! If he could have, then he would have. I am not a broken down piece of machinery, a flawed specimen requiring fixing (imperfect is the new perfect after all). The push and pull of life shapes me, and the mistakes I make are what gives me those interesting bumps.
The anger has mostly subsided—but when it flares, I will harness it to create fire; which will spark and ignite my passion toward the life ahead.
Where shall I pack the love Cherished Heart? Love most likely doesn’t die. So I will place grace and faith upon it, so that our loving partnership can continue as we parent our children side-by-side and in alignment with our shared values.
I’m packed and the door is closing.
Holy shit, the door! It’s closing!
I wipe my eyes, pull down my shades, and shake out my ponytail. The swift shutting of the door creates a whirl that circles my feet and pushes me on my way.
Yours Truly,
Mona Little
The Bed
December 12, 2018
Dear Cherished Heart,
Never has the expression “You’ve made your bed, now lie in it,” hit home harder than right now.
The family that I married into, back in 1997, has taken some hard losses. In November, my brother-in-law passed away after living for a decade within the confines of a cancer that wouldn’t leave him alone. And today we will celebrate the life of my father-in-law who died peacefully last weekend after a short illness.
I met my father-in-law when he had lived nearly three-quarters of his life. He had a playful grin, a twinkle in his eye, and old-fashioned good looks like Jimmy Stewart. He was easy to love. I used to joke with my husband that his dad liked me more than him, and perhaps he did have a soft spot for the gals in his life. The separation was a sadness for my father-in-law that we did not talk about, but I felt it in the tears he shed each time he saw me. We had four final weeks together, in which my father-in-law moved into hospice. There he told stories, imparted advice to the grandkids, played his harmonica with melancholic joy, and bequeathed his love to us – as easily as breath.
My heart hurts, for myself, for my teenage and adult kids and step-kids, and for the man I spent twenty years of my life with. Not being in the inner sanctum of his family right now as they tread through this sad time feels so wrong.
This event is not about me – I get it. But my feelings are ricocheting through my day like bullets rebounding off the walls that surround me, and the pain is deep. I can’t lean in and support him the way I would like to, yet I can still feel his suffering; we are no longer having a shared experience but walking separately through similar terrain; I am not privy to the day-to-day family meanderings as they navigate this difficult time. I am either on the outside looking in, or the inside looking out. I am missing and reminiscing about the past.
I made a choice in 2016 not to continue my marriage and the ramifications of that decision continue to land upon me with a weight I thought I could bear. It requires me to step into places I haven’t been before and walk with a courage I have to summon from places I didn’t know existed.
I do not like this bed that I have made; I want it to be different. But it can’t be. I am going to have to make peace with it . . . again, and again, and again.
Yours Truly,
Mona Lott
Blank Page
Dear Cherished Heart,
How do I turn the page on a new chapter of a life I didn’t plan on living? I thought that entering my 50’s alongside a long term partner who had given himself to his career would mean him slowing down, the kids growing up, and us renewing our connection through shared interests and activities. Not only is that not going to be my reality, I’m having to open a fresh page of a new chapter that is at the moment blank.
I don’t necessarily want to be a blank page, I want to be the favourite book on the shelf.
Yours Truly,
Mona Lott
Un-Break My Heart
August 16, 2018
Dear Cherished Heart,
It is easier to let go of something than it is to release the idea that the something was wrapped in.
Ideas are the fibre of life. They are embedded in goals and hopes and dreams. They are the roads on your personal map. But all roads require maintenance, and if not tended to they become impassable and then obsolete.
There is a place in the middle of the night where pain still finds me. The wounds open and I cannot cover them—not with my hands or with any living band-aid. It is a time when I feel like separation is a dirty word; I feel broken by the experience, fatally flawed; I feel it was me and not us, and I carry the responsibility of failing like a ball-and-chain attached to my heart that runs down the full length of my spine.
I feel bad about myself and I cannot bear to stare at the opportunity of the blank page that exists before me. I can choose anything now. I find myself wanting to go back and choose for him. But standing at the end of that road is exhausting . . . and pointless.
Even when my heart stretches toward another, it remains chained to the past. How can my worth be bound to someone I’m no longer with?
Un-break my heart.*
Yours Truly,
Mona Lott
*Toni Braxton
Interrupt
Dear Cherished Heart,
I’m sorry I haven’t written. In late April I sustained a concussion; I thought I would be back to writing long before this. But as it turns out, I have had to use my limited brain power for other things like paying bills, getting groceries, managing our schedule, and driving my kids hither and yon.
I hope to be back at my desk soon.
Yours Truly,
Mona Lott
Threads
Dear Cherished Heart,
Fire up the DeLorean, I’m going back in time. Maybe I can find the thread, before it unravels.
Sept. 1997 – The day dawned with full sunshine. I put on my grandpa’s purple dress shirt, worn right through at the elbows. I was sitting in the salon chair beside my sister by 9 in the morning—a full hour before they opened. When we walked out, we each sported a version of Ivana Trump’s elaborately coiffed hair.
I stepped out of my bedroom draped in a crisp white, fully-beaded sheath, and my three-year-old nephew stopped in his tracks and said, “Wow.”
My entire body quivered as my mom walked me down the aisle toward my husband-to-be—the man I began to refer to as my soul mate some twenty months prior.
Fall 1999 – The pieces of my life, which had a created a vision of happy-ever-after two years prior, began to blur. With work and step-kids and a busy husband and difficulty getting pregnant — I guess I fell apart.
“What do you expect me to do?” my husband demanded as I lay immobile across our bed, feeling a sadness I couldn’t articulate or get rid of. I closed my eyes and cried. He walked away and flung the door closed behind him. I packed a bag and went to stay with a friend.
Summer 2000 – Naramata ran right to the edge of Lake Okanagan. The family camp lay under broad-leafed trees tall enough to provide an umbrella and short enough to embrace those directly beneath. The sun shone every day, and the temperatures pushed what we Albertans were comfortable with, and we spent every afternoon in the cool crispness of the deep lake. Side-by-side. Playful. Family.
Our weeks, over the years, at Naramata provided a place where we could have fun with the kids, explore spirituality, relax on our own, say goodbye to cooking, and re-connect with one another. Couples counselling in the previous months had revealed that we would have to be intentional about staying connected, given the busyness of life. We agreed that our relationship needed to be a priority, and as a natural organizer I thought I could handle the planning of our togetherness.
July 2001 – I went into the bathroom and peed on the white, plastic stick. My husband sat on our bed waiting. I came out, “I can’t look. You do it.” He waited the one or two minutes required for the colour to change . . . or not.
“It’s positive,” he said, and I burst into tears.
I had given up on getting pregnant many times over our few years together. He had two children when we got married and I loved them; they loved and accepted me back without question. But, I yearned for the full experience.
March 2004 – Motherhood turned out to be all that I imagined. Just before our daughter’s second birthday, I longed for another child. As my husband and I soaked in our hot tub and re-connected, I brought up the topic.
“Honey, what do you think about adopting a child from Ethiopia?” I asked. We had previously talked of adoption as a back-up plan to failed pregnancy.
He leaned back and pulled his arms out of the water to cradle the back of his head. He stared at me. “I think . . . I think we are already so busy we can barely manage,” he said.
“But, our lives are filled with abundance. We have a lot to offer a child.”
“Abundance? It looks to me like we have no margins. We barely have any time together.”
“You have no margins,” I said. “Look at this,” I gestured toward our house, “we have so much. I feel like we have lots of love to offer a child without a family.”
“Why can’t this be enough for you?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s just…”
“I don’t think I can do it,” he interrupted. “I’m already running full speed ahead. We are busy, and…”
“Never mind,” I said.
April 2006 – The Ethiopian smog spiralled in the sunshine and threatened to steal my breath. My husband stood with his hand on my low back as we waited to meet our son. A caregiver walked around the corner. In one hand she held onto two girls who tripped over one another; in her other hand two-year-old Yohannes walked toward us. I crouched down, smiled, and opened my arms; he shyly sidled into my lap and slung his scrawny arm around my shoulder like an old friend. I leaned into him and took a breath; he smelled like dust and soap.
“Look at him,” I said. We sat together in the grass as Yohannes chased his new siblings. They laughed and hugged one another. “I don’t get it,” I said.
“What?” he asked.
“Yohannes . . . he seems happy. Why is he happy, he doesn’t even know us.”
“What’s not to like?” he playfully answered.
January 2007 – As Yohannes adjusted to our family, to Canada, and to a whole different way of life, he grew stronger and more confident with the rising and setting of the sun. I aged and wilted. Depression seeped under the edges of closed doors all over my life. My husband told me that he felt like he had lost me to motherhood, and he had.
Yohannes had a strong sense of justice, and when I served up a helping of injustice, he wailed until the wrong was cleared. Whatever his sister Laurèn got, he wanted, even when it didn’t make sense. At supper one night, I served Laurèn a large scoop of mashed potatoes. He screamed when I passed him by and served potatoes to my bonus-kids Kristin and Fraser.
“Mom!” he yelled.
“What’s wrong Yohannes?” I asked.
“Why you not give any to Yohannes?”
“Because you don’t like potatoes.”
He looked at the plate to the right and the plate across from him. “Kristin, you like potatoes?” She nodded. “Fraser, you like potatoes?”
“Yes, I do like potatoes,” Fraser answered and then changed the subject. “Hey guys, guess what I learned in school today?”
“What is it?” Yohannes asked.
“I learned what the opposite of love is,” sixteen-year-old Fraser said. “Do you know what the opposite of love is?” he challenged.
“It must not be hate,” I said, “as that seems too obvious.”
“Correct,” he pointed his finger at me for emphasis. “Love and hate are both filled with passion and therefore cannot be opposites,” he informed. “Anyone else?”
Between bites, Kristin answered, “Indifference.”
“Ha!” he said. “You’re right”.
Indifferent, I thought, of no importance one way or the other. I glanced at my husband, who seemed oblivious to the conversation.
We consistently struggled with our perception of his work-life. I felt he spent too much time working, and he felt he spent the time necessary to do the job. One of a lucky few, he loved the work he did. However, the amount of time he spent working interfered with our relationship. When I had worked alongside of him, I watched as one patient after another fell in love with him. His competent and straight-forward manner, coupled with compassion, made him a spectacular bedside doctor. I was proud of his many accomplishments, but the sacrifices felt great. My complaints—whether spoken or not—undermined my ability to truly appreciate him, and certainly made him reluctant to engage with me. After protesting for several years, and trying to find workable solutions together, I gave up. His work life became “of no importance one way or the other”.
February 2008 – I arrived in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia under the cover of night, twenty-six hours after I stepped out the front door of my house. I needed a travel visa, so I joined a line-up to the side. When my turn came I walked to a woman in a dark grey uniform, her hair pulled tightly away from her face. She sat behind a long wooden table with colleagues on either side. I handed her my form. She looked at it and then up at me.
“Occupation?” she said.
“I am a mother,” I answered.
“That is it?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“You are very fortunate,” she said, and stamped my form.
I thought of my kids. Leaving them, at the airport, had been difficult. Six-year-old Laurèn gave me a hug and kiss, “Have a good trip Mama,” and four-and-a-half-year-old Yohannes kissed me goodbye and said, “Say hi to Faven”. My husband held me against his chest, “Stay safe,” he said. “I wish you were coming,” I replied.
On the 2006 trip we had found out that Yohannes had a birth sibling he had been separated from, her name was Faven. We met her briefly, and some months later decided to proceed with another adoption. With the adoption stalled, and one complication after another, I decided to go to Ethiopia and visit her.
Spring 2009 – My husband and I went for pro-active parenting counselling to prepare to bring ten-year-old Faven into our family. I had studied attachment before we adopted Yohannes, and he didn’t have any problems with it. But, we assumed that Faven’s age would provide more challenges. Our psychologist taught us about attachment disorders, trauma and loss, and basic adaptation, as well as pointing out that we would have no history on Faven’s life, other than what she brought with her in memory—and she would have no english skills. Faven joined our family in September of ’09.
June 2011 – Before we’d made it through our second year together, Faven’s inner turmoil began to drive her behaviour. She often refused to eat what we provided, didn’t like the family rules—and liked the consequences associated with not following them even less. She was regularly having tantrums and hurling accusations, insults, and objects at us. She seemed to be in pain all of the time, and we awkwardly juggled her needs, often finding ourselves incapable of guiding or soothing her …(Or, quite frankly, coping.)
Most of the parenting strategies we had used successfully in the past with the other four children, failed or created more chaos. Faven often required one full parent and it became difficult to do anything as a family.
Her behaviour affected all of us.
Spring 2012 – We sat kiddie-corner to each other at the rosewood kitchen table. How many different times in our fifteen years of marriage had we gone for couples counselling? I couldn’t remember. I had started personal counselling in 2008, and hadn’t stopped since.
“Maybe we would be better of apart,” he said.
I studied the pattern in the wood grain table, and shook my head as a stream of tears fell into my lap.
Winter 2015 – Turmoil turned to chaos as Faven hit high school. We careened through the weeks like summer tires across sheer ice. Oddly, we became a formidable team under the most stressful circumstances. But hands gripped to the steering wheel and eyes wide-open are hardly conditions under which one thrives.
February 2016 – We began to live apart and go for counselling in the hopes of re-building our relationship, while knowing that the possibility of figuring out how to separate with dignity was a reality.
***
If there was one thread to hang onto, I dropped it trying to pick up the other threads that needed to be woven into the fabric of our lives.
I still can’t see the exact time or event that led to our decision to separate. The unraveling came from different directions simultaneously, across the years and through many experiences.
Yours Truly,
Mona Lott
Fenced In
Dear Cherished Heart,
I am sure that, like me, you’ve probably lain in bed with your spouse or ex-spouse in years past and talked about other couple’s break-ups. It may have gone something like this:
He: I can’t believe that she is asking for X, Y, and Z!
She: Really? That doesn’t seem like her. I think he’s making it pretty hard on her though.
He: I don’t know about that. Sounds like she’s really angry or hurt.
She: I can only imagine, it’s so shitty, they’ve been together forever.
He: Yeah. I guess it’s gotten pretty ugly.
She: How can they be that way? They loved each other once. I wouldn’t do that . . . if it happened to us.
He: Me neither.
There’s a false sense that “after everything we’ve been through” separation would be something we’d get through together, the final piece of teamwork in a relationship that just didn’t work out. No hard feelings.
HA!
I have said this before about other areas of my life, and I’ll say it again, “Until you are going through an experience—sitting right smack dab in the middle of it—you have NO IDEA how you will feel, behave, or react.” We all think we will handle the hard right’s of our lives with aplomb. Each one of us can create a mental image of what it would be like if we had a child, got married, finished a degree, succeeded at work, lost a loved one, dealt with a health crisis, or separated/divorced. The mental idea may come close the the lived experience, but probably not.
Working through a separation agreement —on opposite sides of a fence that used to be shared— is a process that makes me feel gutted, time and time again. Why is this so gross? Because this is the person I shared the most vulnerable pieces of myself with; the person who had my back; the one I watched grow from good to great at work; and the one who worked on the same team as me for all of our years parenting together. And suddenly it is Us versus Them.
We no longer have the best interests of the other person first and foremost in our minds. Not by a country mile.
Fear is driving the train right now, and fear is not a great conductor. In fact, fear undermines intuition and goodness; it prevents a person from becoming who they were meant to be. Nonetheless, we are human, and fear of the future courses through one’s veins after a marriage ends.
So, what to do?
I am on my second read-through of a book called Spiritual Divorce. This book was recommended to me by Dr. Fiona Lovely — “a learner, a teacher, a doctor, an investigator of body and mind, an archaeologist of dis-ease, a healer, a friend” — at an appointment late in 2017. It has been a game-changer. Author Debbie Ford writes,
The Law of Surrender tells us that when we stop resisting and surrender to our situation exactly as it is, things begin to change. We resist out of the fear that if we let go, we will be faced with circumstances we can’t handle. Our resistance is a natural protective mechanism, a shield that we unconsciously put up to guard ourselves agains pain. […] When we surrender, we let go of our pictures of how life should be and allow ourselves to be in the presence of our life exactly as it is, without any interpretation or illusion.
If I resist hearing things from my ex-spouse that I don’t like, he will continue to state the same point over and over until he’s heard. I get that, I am also trying to push my agenda. “Listening from a place of surrender requires that you soften your heart, let go of your expectations, and listen with innocent ears,” (Spiritual Divorce, pg. 45). Ford says that whatever is going on with your ex-partner—it may not be personal. That is a hard pill to swallow. It feels so personal; it feels like he doesn’t care a whit about what happens to me.
Surrender hasn’t come easy to me over the course of my life. I have instead been on the honour roll at the school of—If I control it, I can influence the outcome. Not a school for the faint of heart, as the underbelly of control is disappointment. I might be ready to surrender. But if I wave the white flag, isn’t that like giving up?
What if surrender is what Yoga With Adriene calls “willingness to uncover authenticity”? What if I don’t surrender to anyone—but to a higher power of faith? What if I merely believe that God and the Universe has my back, that what is meant to happen WILL happen if I simply let go, and lean in to the discomfort? What then?
Yours Truly,
Mona Lott
You had your maps drawn
You had other plans
To hang your hopes on
Every road they led you down felt so wrong
So you found another way
You’ve got a big heart
The way you see the world
It got you this far
You might have some bruises
And a few scars
But you know you’re gonna be okay
Even though you’re scared
You’re stronger than you know
If you’re lost out where the lights are blinding
Caught and all the stars are hiding
That’s when something wild calls you home, home
If you face the fear that keeps you frozen
Chase the sky into the ocean
That’s when something wild calls you home, home
“Something Wild” Lyndsey Stirling, Andrew McMahon
Separated into Parts of a Whole 