Wednesday Word Hug

Whose Pain Matters?

We were gathered around a table laden with cheese and nuts. Our wine glasses were filled. As usual, the conversation was animated and punctuated with laughter.
We're all middle-aged. Married. Parents.
And then one woman began telling a story.
Her story was about a husband. Not the one she's with now but one that we'd never heard of before. She'd married at 19 in the country she's from. There was abuse. Infidelity. Broken bones and broken promises.
She'd disclosed all this to underscore a point she was trying to make. That certain people are simply scum. Irredeemable. Monsters.
I've never been abused. But I have been cheated on. And maybe it's not the same. I have no bones thick at the broken spots.
But though I'm not for a second dismissing my friend's experience as anything less than devastating (and potentially deadly), I don't believe that, except for rare exceptions, people are irredeemable.
A visitor to this site over the weekend wrote that she hadn't considered that her husband was hurting too. And it does seem counter-intuitive, doesn't it? We imagine someone cheating as having the time of his life. Two women! The romance! The sex! The ego boost!!
So it's shocking when our husbands sometimes describe relief when the affair is discovered and ended. It floors us to learn that the affair was stressful, that the OW was demanding and unpleasant, that the sex was mediocre.
Why in the hell would anyone risk their marriage for that?
Well...it's complicated.
But it often boils down to someone unable or unwilling to explore his own pain. Someone who's long been a master at avoiding his feelings, at distracting himself, at distancing.
Often these guys are jerks. Some feel entitled, marinating in a patriarchal culture. Others genuinely fall in love though they don't always fall out of love with their wives, though, statistically, they are by far the minority.
Most are guys who lose themselves in the opportunity and start to believe their (and the other woman's) bullshit. Nobody appreciates them. Life has let them down. They deserve more. They deserve better.
Sometimes it goes a lot deeper than that. Old stuff, long buried, has a way of surfacing in our mid-life. The ways in which our parents let us down, or painful/traumatic experiences weren't processed.
A friend's husband, always the life of the party, is now revealing the pain of traveling the world as an ambassador's child, always having to make new friends, never staying in one country for long. It has always been framed as this exciting life. The truth is it was lonely and isolating. And it taught him that relationships were disposable. Easy to leave behind.
Another friend's husband returned from a tour of Afghanistan. Proud of the work he'd done to deliver water to villages, to build schools for girls, he nonetheless had experienced trauma. And rather than deal with it, he sought distraction in another woman, equally traumatized by an abusive husband.
Hurt people hurt people.
It might sound trite but it holds truth.
I doubt my friend's first husband was an irredeemable monster. He was more likely a hurt person who hurt people.
That is by no means a reason to stay with someone. When we are being hurt, physically or emotionally, it is incumbent on us to keep ourselves and our children safe. That is our very first step.
But if we are to repair a relationship with someone willing to do the hard work of excavating his own pain to better understand and to ensure it doesn't drive more hurtful behaviour, then we need to acknowledge his pain too.
It isn't worse than ours. And it doesn't offer him an excuse to continue to hurt.
But it does give us a glimpse into what drives someone to make choices that even they are baffled by.
Everyone's pain matters, of course. Yours take priority. And while it's part of his responsibility to help you heal, the reverse is not necessarily true. You can support his healing but it is HIS responsibility to sort out why he cheated.

How to unlock your heart after betrayal

I wanted to avoid heartbreak, of course. And the way to avoid heartbreak is to keep your mouth shut and your heart locked. 
~Penelope in The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

How many of us believe that in the wake of betrayal? I did. My mistake, I figured, was trusting this man. My mistake was opening my heart to him. How could I have been so stupid!
If only I'd kept my mouth shut and my heart locked. Right?
Spoiler: Didn't work for Penelope. Didn't work for me.
But that doesn't stop a lot of us from thinking it's a viable response to betrayal. We'll stay with him for the time being for a whole bunch of reasons: we can't afford to leave, we have children, our entire lives would be disrupted, we love this man. But if he thinks we're ever going to trust him with our hearts again, well, then, he's kidding himself.
Never. 
My heart will remain locked. My mouth will remain shut to my deepest secrets. My ears will refuse to listen to  his pain.
And it works at first. It numbs us somewhat. We play the role of wife, smiling when appropriate, crying privately. We're there...except we're not. Our hearts are locked away. Our souls are hidden. 
I expected to live the rest of my life that way. I stayed for my children, mostly. More than anything, I wanted to spare them the chaos of my own childhood. I wanted them to have stability, predictability, safety. 
So, to spare myself any further heartbreak, I shut my mouth (mostly) and kept my heart locked (mostly). 
I'm not so good at it, it turns out. My heart refused to stay locked. It felt heavy with pain. 
So I focused on finding slivers of joy where I could: my children, my pets. The lake and the woods. My home into which I'd put so much of my heart. 
And I kept showing up to therapy, where I felt safe to let my heart free, to open my mouth. 
That's where I learned that bottling up pain also meant bottling up pleasure. You don't get to choose which feelings you experience, my therapist explained. If you numb yourself to the bad, you numb yourself to the good. Which perfectly explained why I felt as though I was living life wrapped in gauze. I felt...nothing. At first, it was a relief. But, with time, I resented it. I watched other people living their lives. I was alive. But I wasn't living.
With time, I learned how to keep myself safe by establishing clear boundaries. (I'm a work in progress but I've come a long way!)
I learned that I was strong enough to handle the pain. Storms make better sailors, says Shakespeare and I discovered that was true. 
I learned that the tears eventually do stop, that they could baptize me into new life. 
Penelope says those words knowing they aren't true. She believed them at one time but, at the end of her life, she'd experienced more heartbreak than many. 
She speaks for all of us broken-hearted, who think the solution is to lock our hearts away, to protect them from being shattered.
But what we discover is that hearts can heal. That breaks, as Leonard Cohen says, are how the light gets in. 
But we have to look for it. We have to reach for it. 
We have to choose living over just being alive. 

Wednesday Word Hug

Tiger Mom

I interrupted a conversation between my two elder children on the weekend. And by "conversation", I mean bitch session. The person they were bitching about was me. And so, before they realized I was there, I was privy to some of their current complaints about me. Most of it was garden-variety teen stuff, annoyed because they were expected to undertake such Herculean feats as put their dishes in the dishwasher, their dirty clothes in the laundry, their coats to their cubbies.

But then my daughter said something that ignited my fury. "She's so passive," she said to her brother. 

Forgetting for the moment that my alleged passivity seemed in direct contradiction to their complaints about how demanding I was, there some something about that particular word that haunted me for the remainder of the weekend. 

I simmered.

I boiled.

But I knew what she was referring to. She had told me a couple of days earlier that she thinks I let my son – her brother – off the hook too easily. She thinks she follows our rules to the letter while he doesn't. And that there are no consequences for his transgressions. 

But what really kept me at a barely suppressed rage all weekend?

I wondered if she was right.

Do I hide my distaste for conflict behind being a chill mom? Do I avoid doling out consequences because I prefer peace? 

Gulp.

Yes, sometimes I do. And not just for her brother but for her too. For her younger sister. For my husband. For, well, pretty much everybody.

I've talked on this site about my visceral response to others' anger, the knot that quickly forms in my stomach at the first sign of conflict. 

Passive?

Ugh.

I prefer easy-going. Flexible. Reasonable.

We breed our worst critics, a friend said to me recently. Yep. Sometimes our most accurate ones.

"Passive" stings. But it's a reminder that my daughter is watching as my boundaries, which should be inviolable, become open to negotiation. She's watching as I let it slide that my son returned my car without refuelling. Or that I mutter under my breath as I put away the sandwich maker – the one she was using – rather than call her back to the kitchen.

It gets exhausting, doesn't it? This constant citing of transgressions. This policing of others' disregard.

And yet...

If I don't take the time and energy to remind people that I deserve courtesy and consideration, too, that my rules are not, actually, open to negotiation, then I can hardly complain when my boundaries are violated, right? If I'm not going to insist on them, well, then, they mustn't matter too much.

Except that they do. 

And when I mutter under my breath rather than point out that the gas tank wasn't filled or the sandwich maker put away, that frustration gets stashed. And, eventually, like this morning, I blow. 

Boy, did I blow.

I told my son that if he brings the car home again without refuelling, he will not have access to it for a week. I told my daughter that if she leaves kitchen appliances on the counter again, she will have to do all the dishes for a week. My son also lost his phone for 48 hours for refusing to keep his music off when he showered and others were going to sleep.

It will probably be a constant struggle for me to pay attention to when I'm being treated like I don't matter. My passivity, which I dress up as flexibility or easygoingness, will no doubt surface again.

Passive? This tiger has been awakened.

For today, at least.

RIP Mary Oliver

Wednesday Word Hug