What Can Grow from Your Burned Down Life

I had a choice. I could desperately scramble to re-create my old life in some new, hopefully better, iteration. Or, with the very pretense of success as I knew it now burned to the ground, I could start living in a completely new way. One not marked by time or arbitrary goals, but personal desire. One that walked forward wiser from all the steps already taken. 
~Xochitl Gonzalez, Turns Out It's Pretty Good Aging, from The Cut

I never aspired to be married. While my friends doodled Mrs. MacKay or Mrs. Stuart in the margins of their notebooks (depending on the surnames of their beloveds), I pictured my current name on the cover of books or at the top of magazine stories. No "Mrs" for me.

But then I met my husband. And marriage became appealing. Children seemed appealing. I liked the idea of tethering myself to someone til we were old and withered. I became a convert to the idea and told my husband that if he didn't propose to me that he could expect a proposal from me. 

Like so many others, my thoughts around life after the wedding seemed vague. Gauzy. We would live together, of course. But...what would our days look like? What would growing old be like?

I got pregnant fairly quickly (I was not a young bride so time was not on our side). And then pregnant again. And again. Life settled into something of a routine. I worked from home with part-time childcare. He worked increasingly long hours in an office. His income grew. Mine flat-lined. 

Still we were happy. I thought. And maybe we were. If by happy, you mean one person was keeping a whopper of a secret. Ignorance can indeed be bliss. Or, if not bliss, ignorance can be...acceptable. I grew tired of begging him to be home earlier and accepted his absence at the dinner table. I grew frustrated with his late nights on the computer. "Working," he told me, and I figured, well, he's a hard worker.

I grew lonely. But this was what I signed up for, wasn't it? When I said, "I do". When I agreed to "til death do us part."

And then, well, we all know what happened next. "Burned to the ground," as Xochitl Gonzalez phrased her own reckoning. 

Nothing but smouldering embers. Nothing but the stench of what was. 

You all know that smell. 

But the thing with looking around and seeing little that resembles your former life is that you have a choice. It may not feel like it right now. Right now might feel like the opposite of a choice. But wait.

You can visit the site of a devastating forest fire weeks and months and years later and see that, within those ashes, seeds were planted that took root and grew. The same is true for your burned-down disaster of a marriage. Seeds are being planted. Choices are available.

You can scramble to recreate your old life in some new, better iteration, as the author notes. Or you can start living in an entirely new way. Either response is perfectly fine. And what you choose might depend on what your pre-disaster life was. Maybe you had a perfectly good marriage that got derailed by a horrible decision your spouse made.

Or maybe, like me, your marriage was smouldering long before you smelled the smoke. Maybe a good choice for you, like for me, means living in a completely new way. 

My completely new way didn't involve walking away from my marriage, though yours might. Rather it meant examining the ways in which I existed within my marriage the same way I'd existed in my first family, the way I existed in the world: Believing I had to earn people's love, believing I had to earn the right to take up space on the planet believing that my job was to quash my wants and needs and be what others needed me to be. Living in a completely new way meant challenging those long-held, incredibly toxic beliefs and showing up differently. In my marriage, with my children, in the world.

That's a choice. And it's not one that requires me or my husband to stay in the marriage, necessarily. It's not one that requires anything other than a willingness to value myself, to treat myself as worthy of respect and honesty and decency.

Whether you yet realize it, living through this brush fire of infidelity is teaching you something. If what it's teaching you is that you are not worthy of love and belonging, that you somehow deserved this, then you're learning the wrong lesson. But if what it's teaching you is that you didn't deserve betrayal, that nobody deserves betrayal, then that's the wisdom that propels you forward into a completely new way of living.