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.

Reposted from just after my husband's first visit. (When we were first courting.)

It's late or it's early, take your pick. The neighbor decided to have a 4 am heart to heart on her balcony and woke me up. She's gone to sleep now and I'm still awake. So my thoughts turn to all the unresolved aspects of life on the table in front of me right now.

Basically all of it.

Work has been busy and people have been slow to pay, it makes my life hard. I've been thinking about conventional jobs more and more lately but maybe more to the point, thinking about how it would be nice to have all the pieces in the same place for a change.

My personal life and my work life is now almost all in the same time zone, having it within daily commuting distance would be a significant improvement. It hasn't been that way for the last four years.

I guess I'm living an increasingly typical conundrum. You meet someone online and things develop. I suppose it would be nice if you could contain that to one place, nice if you can keep the job in the same place as the beloved but life goes where it will and in my experience, since 1995 anyway, it has seldom settled that easily.

So this year, fresh on the heels of having my heart broken, I decided to take charge of that issue for myself and to at least make it clear that if I were open to starting something with a new man in my life he would have to be living in one of two places before he so much as talked to me. Those places were, Austin or Ottawa - that's it, that's all. No more stretching myself into another time zone for another job or another person, enough is enough. If you don't live where I live or at the very least, I decided, in the city I love enough to make an effort to get to for at least four months a year, don't talk to me. Just don't. And while I'm on the subject, no motorcycles and no smokers.

I should have been warned by the first two guys who contacted me, a guy with a motorcycle and one who was quitting smoking. Anyway - I didn't notice a trend and for whatever reason, it didn't work.

By the way, I did not willingly stop caring about the original Texan, in fact part of this was to force myself to stop thinking about him. He committed to another woman and cheated with a third, there was no way I could stay. He made it impossible to be with him but I thought I still loved him so I also made it clear that whatever might happen, would happen very slowly, it would not be likely to be a passionate union but rather the companionable type of affair two people have when they are dealing with life, have had their great big love and now just want to be sane and sensible, have a pleasant companion and keep everything in proportion.

A moderate, quiet, friendly dating relationship was what I was after. Seemed reasonable at the time. All of this is possible because, if you are feeling blue and think dating might be an answer, you can go to a site like OK Cupid and set up a profile that is absolutely specific in your needs, wants and expectations, right down to the most minute detail, including neighborhood, favorite color, and specific sexual tastes, if you're so inclined. My friends have done it, I decided to give it a try. Thought it might cheer me up. What they don't tell you is that if you are curious about the random matches their program throws your way and you open up the profile attached to them, it is possible for the person whose profile you peruse, just out of curiosity, to see that you looked at it and then look at yours in return. I was unaware of this aspect of the site and amused myself with looking at every really good match they threw my way regardless of location.

There are a lot of interesting people out there and looking is fun. Anyway, that turned out to be either a really good idea or a really bad one depending on your perspective.

One of my random matches, one I thought was interesting, one whose profile I had explored and then left without saying a word to him? Well, he saw me and he talked to me and everything changed from there. I dismissed him as soon as I realized he was from the states and not from Austin. Granted, he's within a day's drive, much closer to me than the Austin man ever was but not in my preferred environment, not in either one of them. But he was smart, funny, charming and really beguiling, there's no other word for it and whenever I spoke with him, I felt much better about everything in life afterwards, consistently better - happy even.

So here I am. It's 5:30 in the morning and I am lying awake when I really need to be asleep, thinking about whether or not I can apply for the perfect job in a a place I never even considered as an option because there is a perfect job for me there that just happened to open up last week and there is this man and in case you haven't already guessed it, my heart's center of gravity that way has quite unexpectedly shifted from Austin to the Berkshires.

I suppose this proves that anything is possible. And yes, he's been to visit me here, the chemistry is real and intense, more intense in person than remotely. I'm planning to visit him there and it's fair to say, if we haven't already fallen in love, we are well on our way.

How did it happen? I was careful, I thought I covered all possibilities, I thought my case was air tight and my intentions firm but life slips in. It doesn't matter how much you try to seal up all the cracks and openings, life gets through anyhow and as cliched as it is to say this, people are unique. I'm in Ottawa and still love Texas very much but two things matter more than Texas, meaningful work (which can be done anywhere, I'm learning that) and the right person with whom to share a life, they can only be found wherever they are.

Maybe that right person isn't where I expected to find them but it does feel to me, a little more each day that he is exactly who I always wanted him to be. He found me, he followed his feelings and he listened to me, to who I am not to an image of something he was trying to make up - I guess that makes more of a difference than I thought. And he didn't change himself to suit me, his experience, his beliefs, he knew they matched mine before he ever said a word. (I was pretty explicit and not surprisingly, exhaustive in the details of what I felt I needed in a relationship, what was important to me and furthermore, when there was any doubt, he asked.) I sleep better when he's around So it turns out my right person might have been someone I never expected living somewhere somewhere completely unknown, unexplored, unsuspected, I guess it's lucky for me he had his priorities straight even if mine were still a little jumbled. I'm happier when he's around. Now I just need to learn to go with the flow. More yoga please. 4/17/11

Added January 6, 2012:
I went to visit him on May 13, 2011 - never left.
We married on September 21, 2011.
Every day since has been happier than any day before.

This is how real love finds you, effortlessly, when you're not expecting it and so powerfully, you don't need to pull toward it. It pulls you.

moving day.

In the time between now and when I began this blog so much has changed, if I read it in a novel, I'm not sure I'd have believed it. Just goes to show you, anything can happen. I live in Massachusetts with my husband now. He's not the same man I thought I loved at this time last year. He's a better man in every way that counts. He tells me the truth and seems to be interested in understanding and supporting me more than using me for fun. There's no point going on and on about it, I've posted about him before and was busted for it by his sister and a former girlfriend. But I like to be candid here and since I've shut this blog up tight (you have to have asked me to read it if you're seeing this) I can repost the original post about him. I wrote the next post when I knew we were falling in love. Now that we're married, I no longer have to be ashamed for being presumptuous. I knew from very early on that Steven was "The One." I had hoped others were but where there was hope in the past, this was inevitable. It felt as though it had a life of its own. I am only a part of this love, a part of this marriage. I am not constructing it as I go, I'm not in control and finally, I've discovered, that is the difference between real love and plain old desire.

How to show restraint

Right now, right this very minute, I am fighting the impulse to gush publicly about my new husband. I want to tell everyone how fantastic he is, how smart, how kind, how surprising, how talented, how tasteful, how funny, how considerate, how sweet, how tender, how strong and how handsome he is - all the things that make me happier by the day.

 I find myself caught by surprise by the sight of his broad shoulders or a glimpse of his hand on my arm in bed and how it's made a hundred times better by seeing the wedding ring on his finger and remembering how it was something he wanted more than I did. I didn't care if we had rings or not but it mattered to him, his ring matters to him.

 It makes me pause and catch my breath to realize this wonderful man is, as much as this is true of anyone with anyone else, mine. He belongs with me - by choice. I am the luckiest woman in the world and the rash and crazy thing I did a few months back? Getting on that train a month early, on a day's notice, without any idea of how I'd manage the trip?

Smartest thing I ever, ever did.

By far, hands down, no question, the single smartest decision of my entire life.

If I have learned anything in my life it's this: FOLLOW YOUR HEART.

 Forget money, forget convention, forget common sense and do what your heart tells you to do, it's right.

 It's surprisingly hard to keep this stuff to myself. My husband is easily embarrassed by too much attention so he doesn't want to hear me trumpeting to anyone and everyone about how wonderful he is and how happy we are and let's face it, nobody's friends want to hear anyone going on about being crazy in love. At best, it's boring and at worst, it rubs salt into the wounds of those who aren't so happy in their love lives or their lives in general.

 It's also pretty interesting to see people react to this change in my life. I have a cousin who has, since she reached adulthood, been pretty horrible to me behind my back. Generally speaking, I've ignored it. She's made up crazy stories and generally done all she can to alienate me from my Mother's family. Not that alienating me from my mother's family required a lot of effort - I was already more than halfway there.

Anyway, the reasons for this are unimportant I suppose, water under the bridge - who cares? Actually, I'm not even sure I know but it is what it is. Apparently she has been diagnosed with some kind of mental illness - that can't be easy and I am grateful my life path hasn't taken me down that road.

 To my great surprise, one day on Facebook I came across a comment she made about my marriage. She commented to another Aunt that she had found out about my marriage and wondered if my mother knew. She then said "I guess I'm the cougar now." That was pretty insulting, especially since I've never pursued younger men, and I have turned all of them down based on age but for one big mistake - and that's long over.

(My husband, although you'd never know it, is ten years my senior - the only reason I have ever wished he was younger was when I realized the human lifespan is limited and women tend to live longer than men. Now that I've finally found him, the thought of a day without him is unbearable.)

Last night I had to comment on my cousin's actions, I couldn't help myself. It's one thing to be unkind about me behind my back but to take my mother's hard-won dignity, which is already in pretty short supply and fairly fragile - well, I couldn't stay silent about that.

 Marriage has changed me. It has changed me more than love ever did, maybe more than love ever could. It has enabled me to feel secure enough to be emotionally brave. It has taken the fear away. I'm stronger, happier, more secure. It's changed my life. Now if I could only figure out how to stop wanting to talk about it.