Mixing Past and Present

There are boxes in the main section of the loft. My office is full of books, journals, bits and pieces, the guest room has a bed sitting in it, waiting to be used.

Half my things never made it here, they were lost along the way and the movers are all blaming each other but I'm glad we no longer pay for the storage of them.

My whole life is here now.

Looking through all this stuff is a bit disorienting. My journals in particular, are scattershot, disorganized, to me now, they are clearly a sign of fear, even desperation. I tried so hard to establish a life in Canada that would be both "normal" in the context of my family background and healthy.

In reality, the two are irreconcilable.

I realize now that I am in the midst of what will likely be a fairly lengthy healing process and I am humbled, honored and more than a bit awed by Steven's decision to love and marry me despite all my many flaws and scars.

But slowly, I am healing.

When I look at all of this stuff scattered around me I sometimes wish the bulk of it could have all been left behind. It carried with it a palpable sense of sorrow, loneliness, bewilderment and a willingness to delude myself into thinking things could be okay under circumstances where they clearly were poised to collapse into disaster that is embarrassing to read.

So I address the task of organizing all those mementos of unhappiness into my happy life. There's value in some of them; it's nice to have a selection of winter coats. I'm glad to see some of my art again and some of the books are welcome but in the main, the material stuff of a life that never satisfied heart or soul in any meaningful or sustainable way is just like driftwood on the beach; it's interesting to look at but you don't need to bring it home.

Fear (without the loathing)

According to the moving company, my belongings will arrive tomorrow.

I should be very excited.

But you see, I grew up in a situation where any time anything good happened, anytime I got anything I wanted, anything at all, something, very swiftly, swooped in and took something even more important away.

It started with my Grandmother and carried on from there. My family seems to have lived that way too because they have encoded it into their idea of what it means to be alive.

My mother takes great care to remind me, every chance she gets, that things could go sour at any moment. She always has, and fear of her being right made that a self-fulfilling prophecy at least half the time. (At least, it did in the past.)

So today, the day before my things arrive and my whole life is finally in one place with the man I love more than any words or colors or light or air itself, my finally happy and whole life - I am scared.

I turned on the radio and there was a show about "mixed status families" and how, very often, the government pulls them apart and sends the immigrant partner back to their country of origin.

And I cried. I cried a whole lot  because that made me even more scared.

When I first wrote about Steven in this blog his sister found it and told him I was too serious about him. Then an old girlfriend who was still a friend of his found it and brought it up to him. I can't hold things back, in my writing, I never really wanted to. Being transparent is meaningful to me.

But because I was afraid it would hurt the relationship, I took that post down and more or less stopped writing here.

Tonight, it is slowly dawning on me, that fear is the worst reason to do anything.

Fear seldom helps.

And in this case, in my case, fear is not justified.

So for once, I am not giving this life, not this day, not this love, not any part of it - to fear. I am not going to buy into the idea that I must pay for every good thing in my life with something so awful that it beggars the imagination - the death of my Grandmother, my parents divorce, the many moves, far away as a helpless child from anyone who loved or cared for me, the adoption of my only son. I have paid and paid and paid. I have paid more for my life than most people ever endure. I am done paying.

Everyone deserves happiness. Everyone deserves a great love, a home, a marriage to make a family from, whatever that family might look like to each of us, we all deserve one.

And I am not going to be silenced by fear anymore.

I am here. I live here. And I am going to celebrate it, revel in it and love it every single day. I will take every opportunity to sing about it. Because that's what I do. That's who I am.

And I don't owe anyone a single thing for that.

Happily Ever After

This really needs to be written out. I don't see any way of getting past it without going through.

I am happy now.

Happy at last. Happy in my life. Comfortable. Free. Safe. Happy.

For the first time in my life, I am loved and wanted without perimeters, without conditions. I am married and happy and done with Victoria and Canada and all the terrible, sour things that held me down and made me miserable and you know what?

It is making me mean.

Far from having the freedom to forgive the people in Victoria who bullied me, the rotten family - don't even get me started on how destructive and horrible it was to grow up with them, the mediocre jobs, the lack of care and concern from nearly every person who was supposed to help. God, in the end, looking back, now that I'm happy - could there be a more bitter and miserable life? No. Not really. I was thwarted at every turn, usually by the people who were supposed to be helping me.

So I find myself asking the universe why someone who tried so hard for so long would have to work, struggle, scrape and suffer for half their life, literally, just to get to what most people would consider to be a state of normal.

I know you're supposed to forgive. Living well is the best revenge, being proven right is supposed to be sweet - all of that stuff but I spent my youth suffering. My life was wasted. My only son, given up for adoption in order to get him to safety. And when I finally found my happiness? When I found my husband and my life? It turned out to be in another country and so of course the "powers that be" are doing their damnedest to make that hard too.

I know I should be grateful and most days I am. After all, I have health and a sound mind, I was smart enough to know, all the time I was there, that something was deeply wrong. I was strong enough to try to fix it. There are many, many people who don't get this far.

How many people find their "happily ever after"? Not many. And how fucking sad is that?

Still. I hear about the successes of Victoria, people coming from there and their lives were easy, their hopes realized young. Friends of mine go and visit the place, (for reasons that completely escape my understanding) and they find it charming, beautiful, wild and lovely and you know what that does to me? It makes me hateful. I hate them for it.

Short of cutting everyone and everything that ever had anything to do with Victoria out of my life, I don't know how to handle this. It's making me a person I don't want to know. But how could a whole community allow a man to abuse his daughter and then blame her for it and carry that blame into her whole life? My father was popular. He was clever. He knew what he did and he told everyone about the "wild stories" I might tell them about him and how he abused me long before I even had any conscious memory of it. He set up a preemptive depth strike that still resonates.

If you were tortured somewhere and if your torturer found a way to get everyone there to believe it was you who was crazy or evil or something just fundementally bad, how would you deal with that?

Once you get out, get very far away and finally find your own, clean happiness on your own terms - I tell you, you just want the dead to stay dead.

It doesn't seem to me to be so much to ask.

I live 3055 miles from Victoria. I live in a whole different country. And yet the place finds ways to intrude into my life on a near daily basis.

I just want to erase it. Where do I have to go to be free of this? Why won't the dead stay dead?

Free Association On Not Feeling Loss

Here's what I remember: when the car drove away, I knelt on the couch and watched through the window, leaning on the high, cushioned back of the thing and I cried.
It was spring and the trees outside were covered with pale pink blossoms.

Those trees are gone now.
The cat I held in my arms as I sobbed, he's gone too.

My sister had the couch for a while - she's gone and the couch? Long gone too.

When the time cleared the dust away, he did it again. He was always doing it again, he did it every chance he got. My father left and left and left again.

The first time, I cried. I sobbed as though my heart would break, just as you'd expect.

The second time, I wept into my sleeve and got over it.

The sixth or seventh, actually, that time, I left but he pushed me - I rolled away in a train compartment in England, like something out of a Harry Potter movie, he stood on the platform and watched. He did not lift his hand to wave. His arms stayed at his side. I cried that time. I sobbed again but that time, I cried because I knew I'd never care again.

The last time, he wanted me to cry. He did everything he could to make it happen. It was autumn, we stood in my sister's driveway and he pulled out every stop, he used the way he loved my sister as leverage, he used his health, his age, our distance - then he kissed me. He kissed me for the last time and for the first time it was square on the lips. It was a wet kiss.

I got into my car. Not wanting to be cruel, I kept my hands at my side. I held my hand down to keep myself from wiping any trace of him off my mouth.

But when I turned the corner - I wiped it away.

And my eyes were dry.

Fare Well?

If you've been reading this blog, you've watched me go from being unreasonably involved with someone and trying not to talk about it. You've seen me find my way, meet my husband and now, settle into my new life in New England with this wonderful man.

Some people have come here to read this blog out of jealousy or a feeling of entitlement to the details of his life. I was offended by that but everything I've said here was true. Sometimes it was only true at the time, but true nonetheless.

I'm proud of most of it and at my ease with the rest. If you are a "mermaid" from Burma who assumed you had a romantic future with my husband, I'm sorry your dream didn't work out but I can tell you this; a better dream awaits you.

When I had to give up Austin, I assumed my life would be unhappy forever. Sounds dramatic and silly now but that thought, under those circumstances was still very real to me.

I do think it possible that some people get stuck in an unhappy life and never find their way out. I've seen it happen and I assumed it would happen to me. Through the benevolence of circumstance or the grace of the Creator, I found another way. I am grateful every day.

But I am also learning to be compassionate about those who stay rooted in misery. I know a few, although I hope I am wrong, I often suspect my mother and sister are two of those people. It's not clear to me, given the choices they've made in life, that getting out of that habit would be easy but I hope something changes to heal them. Souls cannot endure an unending stream of misery and misfortune without becoming permanently damaged. Maybe if we could all remember that, we'd be kinder to each other.

As a child, my mother was indifferent to me; as an adolescent, she was hostile; as an adult she is baffled as to why our relationship is so difficult. On an extended visit, I asserted my right to a full airing of our grievances (very "Festivus" of me) too forcefully and she resorted to violence. She threw dishes to the floor on one occasion and on another, threw things at me and flew at me, fists balled in rage.

Now she is blind and she suffers at the hands of my sister's neglect. While I cannot sit silently by and do nothing at all, neither do I feel compelled to rush to her side. She was cruel to me and now she bears the cost of that. I would say I wish it were otherwise but I am happy in my life now and while I hope her suffering is truncated and have taken steps to help, I can and will only go so far. I am kind but just as she left me without a protector, she is left.

If I had money, I would send it. If having her visit my home would help, I would try to arrange it. As it is, she loves my sister and her children and wishes only to be with them. All I can do is alert her support network in Victoria, as I know it to exist, and hope someone will visit her. She needs to sell her house and move into something bright and cheerful by herself but that would result in my sister having nowhere to go and so it will never happen. They are bolted together, the two of them. My sister, angry at her dependence on my mother and my mother, frightened to be alone.

Karma, when it really plays out, is difficult to observe. Worst of all when it effects someone you love on your own behalf. My friends all say my mother is finally getting her comeuppance and that the time will soon come for my sister to have hers but I don't think I believe in comeuppance. I would wish gentleness on everyone. Surely it's only through gentleness that any good and lasting change is ever accomplished. I would like to see my sister happily employed and housed in her own two bedroom apartment. I would like to see my niece with a place of her own. I would like to see my mother ensconced in a condo she could love. One where everything works well and where there are no rats or other vermin, one close to everything she needs, with a social support network that brings feelings of security and some pleasure with it. These are the things I wish for these people. They are small things, nothing so miraculous as what I've been blessed to be given this year but I think they are the things that will give them the most room to grow and the most cause for happiness.

I don't know but I think it takes something away from a "victim" when they have to witness the suffering of those who hurt them, especially when it's framed as "poetic justice" or "karma" for past misdeeds. It's true, I think, that only the devil could think up punishments, God, surely, must be a good and forgiving place to lay one's heart - "a safety", as I once heard an Inuit child put it.

Anyway - having felt the sting of having someone else use this blog used as a tool of "girlfriend intelligence" (however misguided) I feel pretty alienated from it and I wanted any readers to know I am carrying on the arc of this blog in another blog on Word Press called, New to North Adams. I'm reluctant to make any predictions about how this all will go but it seemed to me that without saying what needed to be said there was little to no hope of my every returning to write here.

Unless you are married to a man, you have no right to intrude on his relationships. If you have victimized someone, you lose the right of the normal expectations that accompany whatever relationship you poisoned that way.

Lord knows I love my mother and I respect her for what she's done for me and the efforts she has made to grow over her lifetime. I'm grateful that we've made our peace and I will always defend her dignity. I mourn for the wounds she suffered and wish her life had been easier. I'm sure there is even some love left stashed somewhere for my sister but after decades of unkindness, it is only natural that my feelings for them are somewhat weak. No matter what, having been betrayed by my own kindness so many times with them, I would be a fool to let it put my life at risk now. And regardless of what happens in Victoria, I will stay in New England with my husband. Also regardless of what ex-girlfriends or extended family may think, do or say, the debts of past relationships are irrelevant now. I release it all.

I may be back to write - it may dwindle away. Life is full of surprises. No matter which way it goes, I want you to know I have enjoyed writing to you and wish you a life full of comfort and joy. Most of all, I wish for you the kind of marriage that makes forming a true family possible - a solid and enduring love to make a safe and welcoming place in the world for your heart and soul. Having finally found that love in my own life - it seems anything but ordinary.

Home.

Some years ago, in my sophomore year of college, I took a class on myth. For one assignment, we were asked to write about a classical myth that had parallels in our own lives. At the time, I was still in the final stages of a serious, live-in relationship with the man in Victoria whom, I assumed, I would one day marry. I was dividing my time between Victoria, where he lived with my things, and Ottawa, where I rented a room and shared a house with a woman and her 10 year-old son and went to school. It was a pretty long commute. For that particular class assignment, I chose to write about Persephone. I wrote about how, when the seasons changed, I would return to the darkness of the Pacific Northwest and the rainforest, then - when they changed again, I would be free to come home to myself and my education. As the year turned, circumstance removed my from my home, plunged me into darkness and then, in due time, allowed me to return to my home again - but never forever. Of course, I knew Persephone was longing to return to the home where her mother lived and where her house and goods were stored. My mother, my family and my material possessions were all in Victoria. I knew her Persephone’s husband had abducted her and taken her to live far away from anything familiar but to me, so in that way, we were more a mirror than a parallel but for me, having to leave my independent life and go back to the life of material privilege, family, old friends and familiar places all rooted in that dark, wet, grey and green setting, was like having to return to the underworld. This was so because in Victoria, I was not respected for my intellect. I was not a writer but rather the eccentric partner of a man from the old boy network. I was an active volunteer at the local contemporary gallery, a singer in a chamber choir, a shopper, a patron of the nicer restaurants in town, my mother’s driver, my sister’s babysitter, my friend’s confident. I could walk along the ocean and drive my car up island to see the forests, but I could not be myself. I was a dilettante, not a whole person - I felt like I had my whole family and all their expectations, (which were mostly negative) strapped to my back. In my senior year of college, I left for school as usual but when the summer came, I looked at the horizon and said no. I never went back, I abandoned my belongings, said goodbye to the man and started over. The spell had been broken and, beginning a life I could lead myself, as myself, I was “home.” It didn’t matter that I had nothing to my name and nobody who had known me for more than a few years, half-time. It didn’t matter that I was poor and would need to struggle to make a living for the next ten years, (Even though, I admit, it was much worse than I anticipated, I expected it and chose the path deliberately.) What mattered was I was fully able to be my whole self and not the parcel of expectations and stereotypical roles doled out to me in my “home town.” Despite the fact that I grew up there, Victoria had always felt like a place to which I had been carried off against my will, abducted into the darkness of a long, rain forest winter with no snow and no sun, entirely without my consent. To some degree it was true, my family moved to Victoria when I was ten years old. We moved from the East, Fredericton and then Montreal, where it snows in winter and the sun reflects off the snow turning everything blue, white and gold and where it is hot in the summer, which rarely happens in Victoria. But the people were different in both places as well. Somber and soft spoken in the west, they were serene on the surface but chilly underneath. Compared to the outspoken warmth (for good or ill) in the east, it was alienating to be amongst them. I was never quiet enough, never discreet enough, never unruffled enough about anything to really fit in. People I knew, thinking they were helping me, applied a slow and steady pressure, trying to get me to be quieter, more acquiescent, more accepting of life as it was and less likely to make waves. They were crushing the life out of me. What I found in Ottawa was the edge of myself. Foolishly, I became attached to a man who had similar traits to those of Victorians and spent the next seven years working that out. In part, at the time, I had the words of a friend in Victoria ringing in my head. She told me, whatever I had done, whatever I felt I had done wrong or whomever I had hurt, it would take me an equal number of years of my life to get over it - to repay it. I went from one bad spouse to the other, the latter in the throes of a serious chronic disease, and cared for him until my penance was done. At the end of that time, I began living a life of my own. The money still wasn’t there but if I paid careful attention to the details, lived very frugally and made use of all my resources, I found I could make a modest living as a writer and travel for part of the year, every year. I allowed myself to like what I liked, to do what I wanted to do and just to breathe. It felt like someone had removed tight iron bands from around my body. Then there was Austin. I found a place I thought could be the home of my heart and began another Persephone cycle. Thank goodness for a bad lover. Had the man I thought I cared for in Austin, turned out to be true, I would still be living Persephone’s story. As it was, Austin was a lovely place where I was miserably unhappy in my personal life. It could have been worked out, like so many Canadians, I might have become a snowbird, spending half the year in Canada and half in Texas but I thought my heart was broken and spent the latter quarter of 2011 figuring out what I could do to mend it. My friends advised flirtation. All of them did. I immersed myself in Ottawa, determined to make the city work for me, and flirted online. I restricted myself to men from Ottawa or Austin (so I wouldn’t feel so heartbroken at the loss) but, life intervened, as it so often does, and I found myself talking to a man from Massachusetts. At first, I assumed I could control the situation. After all, it might be nice to have a short-term relationship with someone who was at least within driving distance. We exchanged hundreds of emails. We spent time on the phone, we planned a visit. It was pleasant and I felt fairly certain it would consolidate the life I had planned, as planned. I thought I could manage it under my own terms. I thought it would be a light affair, something fun while I was working things out. I looked forward to visits and letters and romantic weekends. I thought I could keep it casual. Four months later, I knew I needed to spend the rest of my life with this man, I agonized over what to do, thinking it unlikely that he felt the same way. Seven months later, in the town where he lives, we wed. Just a few weeks ago, I was looking out the window toward some of the hills in the Berkshires and thinking about how unfamiliar the place still feels on many levels. The weather is different. All of my things are still in storage. There are plenty of adjustments to be made. I looked at the sun coming over the mountains and tried to take it in as home. It didn’t really settle. I love our loft and now, this morning, when I look out the window at the cloud and the rain settling in for the day, I see the ordinariness that has become my home, I have been gone long enough now that anything else is unfamiliar. Home, for me, is rooted in the man sleeping in the bedroom, waiting for me to awaken him to another day. Home is his smile in the morning. It is our conversations in the car. Home is dinner cooked for both of us together. In the feeling of his arms around me, the scent of his shirts, the way he takes my hand right before we eat dinner every night and says something sweet - without fail. Home is the two of us, alone. My marriage has changed and deepened my definition of home. Home is where I am loved for myself and left as myself. He makes no effort to change me. Home is where he understands my needs and struggles without my saying so, it is our marriage bed, it is our kitchen, it is moving the furniture and shopping for a washer and dryer, it is the perfunctory phone call and people from the community invited over for tea. And I ask myself, “would I be as happy with him if we were in Victoria?” I cannot imagine I would, but that is only partly based on location. He and I would never choose to live on an island with no way off. He could not live the life demanded of him there any more than I could. Then again, it doesn’t have to be here. I would be with him anywhere he truly wanted to be. We would arrive, I would look around me and I would begin the process of making “home” because of course, as long as he is there, it would be home. It would be an adventure and welcome because it is the two of us together. It is always the two of us together, seeing the world as it turns. I am astonished at how deep the connection has become, I am grateful every day for this union of souls and more grateful for how interesting he is, how everything about him is deep and rich and new to me in so many ways and yet entirely familiar, exactly as it should be. He is everything I hoped for in a mate and those things I had forgotten to hope for but always wanted anyway? He is all of them too. Geography is dependent on him. The world is home, as long as he is in it.

Sea Change

Time has wrought it's wear on me and I have changed. Like most people, Steven thinks the phrase, "Sea Change" refers to a dramatic change. It doesn't. The phrase is drawn from a poem by Shakespeare, written as a song for Ariel in the Tempest, the relevant stanza goes like this: Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell: Ding-dong. Hark! now I hear them—Ding-dong, bell. See? He has not changed and yet he has. Where he was flesh and blood and bone, he is now made of treasures of the sea, coral, pearls - nothing faded, he is recognizable but he is now made of different stuff, valuable stuff, stuff wrought not by the man himself but by the sea. His body has become something different altogether and his soul? Who knows where that is, it is not the point. We look at others from the outside in. We see the value in them as people or we don't see. The thing is, nothing from the outside in, can be lost, only altered in perception or value or substance even - changed but not changed. Sometimes I feel as though I am living in a kind of afterlife. Stephanie-then resembles Stephanie-now. Lord knows she's built on the same scaffolding, the same foundation but she is not as she was. I am something new. I am something new that would be strange to those who knew me before. I look like a model of myself with silver hair instead of brown. I lapse into the same faults and foibles often enough but I am altered. Stephanie-then has been eaten away by a soft yet persistent tide and in her place is Stephanie-now. Made of the stuff of this place, no longer from the places that came before. I loved before, as I could love. My capacity for it was different than it is now. I wanted escape, wanted some ease and some beauty to take in and indulge myself with its wonders. Now, I want something else - connection, endurance, belonging. I want to know a person and a place completely. And I want to live in the midst of it, even when I find it ugly, alien or cold. I want to be clear, transparent, I want to be known and seen - no longer only an observer. And I am married. My husband's life is my own. He is, whether he likes it or not, the center of my world and I know he will remain in that place for the rest of my life. I have changed. Changed from angry, solitary, defensive and impulsive to a reflective, responsive, if strong willed, wife. I am Steven's wife. And I feel as though it is what I always yearned to be. (even when I didn't know he was there.) I have undergone a sea change. Single woman, daughter, maiden, friend and sometime lover to Wife. Anyone who has been there understands exactly what I mean. Meaning has come into my life and now, I am made of different stuff, pearls and coral, honey and amber, perfume and detergent - I am no longer only Stephanie, I am Steven's wife.