7 - Initiation, part 2: an ending

Oh hey! I've been writing this post for 3 days, and it's finally ready. It happens to be Valentine's Day! I didn't plan it this way, but I think it's delightfully appropriate that this post tells a pivotal piece of the story of how my ideas about, and experience of, love and relationships went through a radical up-ending and transformation when I was in my early 40's. This is where this up-ending all began. Happy Valentine's Day!

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This post is a continuation of the story that I began in my last post titled "Reiki..", so if you haven't yet read that one, this one isn't going to make as much sense. This post, the previous one, and the next two or three, (or maybe four?) will be my attempt to condense an intense couple years of my life into a series of somewhat coherent and chronologically-arranged narratives.

At the end of my last post, I had just moved to Pine River, a little town in north-central Minnesota, from a rural farmstead near the little town of Glencoe in west-central Minnesota. My (now-ex) husband and I had both just started new jobs working for the same organization, a family-owned business with a couple dozen employees, trying to develop sustainable-living systems.

We'd lived in Glencoe for six years, and it was a nice enough town, but I had made no friends there, I had met no one there that I'd felt like spending time with, nor had I made any solid friends anywhere that I worked. In my last post, I described the dismal state of my interior landscape, and my marriage, prior to making the move to Pine River, and that had been exacerbated by the isolation I felt in Glencoe.

In my last post I also described the way receiving reiki for the first time had introduced the possibility of being internally tranquil and grounded, at least temporarily, and what a relief and hope-inspiring thing that had been. In addition to beginning to receive reiki from the practitioners in the Pine River area, Ed and I also spent a couple weekend afternoons, in the middle of moving our huge amount of accumulated stuff from Glencoe to Pine River, doing reiki on each other. This was a hugely welcome change from our normal way of relating, which always felt like a house of mirrors constructed over a mine-field.

The move to Pine River felt like a fresh opening in our lives for some much-needed positivity and hope to come in. We both had jobs that were in line with our values, and that paid well, instead of Ed being the one who brought in the majority of the money, while I struggled with three not-very-well-paying part time jobs. And we found, to our surprise, that though Pine River was even smaller than Glencoe, there was a wide variety of interesting people in the area who we felt some kinship with, that we met in one way or another through our employer, . We were renting a nice little house a short walk through a pine forest from the campus where we both worked. Our son, who was now 10, met kids his age that he got along well with who were children of employees or their family members.

Our marriage, instead of feeling like it was held together by sheer stubbornness and frustration and commitment to duty and to our son, was actually feeling a little bit like a loving partnership once in a while. Things were by no means stress-free and happy all the time, because there were inevitable tensions as we were navigating our new employer's expectations, learning how to fit in to the company we had both joined, moving our huge accumulation of stuff to a new location, and setting up a household in a new place. But compared to the life we had been living in Glencoe, with endless arguments and disagreements about what to do with our lives and our home, as well as countless stupid conflicts about sundry details of everyday life, this was a vast improvement. I felt like our marriage had turned a corner, and after 12 years of mostly feeling like hell, was now giving glimpses of beautiful possibilities for mutual respect and appreciation.

Writing about this period, 16 years down the road, is giving me an opportunity to explore, in a much more careful and honest way, exactly what was happening to me internally as the months went by in Pine River.

We moved there full-time in June of 2006. By mid-summer I was beginning to feel jealous of some of the people we had met, because Ed was much better at making friends than I was, and it felt like he was preferring the company of some of those people we had met, especially some of the women, to the company of his wife. This was not a new feeling for me in our marriage. There had been other times when he had become friends with women whom he seemed to respect and "vibe" with more that he did with me. This phenomenon was intensified now in Pine River, however, because we were working with the same people, sometimes in the same buildings, and some of these other friendships were with people we both had frequent contact with, so a lot of the energies of the interactions were in my face.

There were times when I could hold my own and not feel threatened by these interactions, and there were times when I felt angry and resentful and jealous, and sometimes I expressed these feelings to Ed, in a "poor me" sort of way. At the time, I felt that this was a perfectly justified and rational way to engage with the dynamics of the situation. I thought that I was trying to improve our marriage, by drawing attention to the ways I felt disregarded and overlooked.

There were other areas of tension, as well. One of them was that I was feeling a strong pull towards the peace and calm I experienced with reiki, and drawn towards silence, or music that fostered that sort of feeling, whereas Ed was spending a lot of time listening to left-wing talk radio, which was constantly focused on how the world was going to hell because of conservatives. I found this constant focus on problems and finger-pointing to be intensely grating on my nerves, and I didn't want it in my space, but Ed didn't want to turn it off every time we were both in the house together.

By late fall, the intensity of tension and conflict had returned to pre-Pine River levels, but I was hopeful that with our continued healing sessions, which enabled us to each individually recharge once in a while, and with a community of friends who could take some of the pressure off our dependence on each other, we would be able to find ways of working through our difficulties and keep our family together.

It came as a shock, therefore, when Ed told me in early January that he was in love with a young woman we both knew. She was the sister of a man he had hired to work for him in the machine shop. I liked her, too. She was sweet and curious and empathetic. I understood why Ed found her attractive. I thought that if I was accepting of his feelings for her, that he would feel like I was accepting of him and that our marriage could weather this development, and come out stronger on the other side.

Soon after he told me this, I found out from HER that not only was he in love with her, but they had actually been physically involved, during a recent weekend I had spent at my cabin two hours away near Duluth.

Ugh... And when I told Ed that she had been forthright with me about what had gone on between them, he revealed that he didn't want to be married to me anymore.

(It occurs to me that one stereotypical reaction of someone who's found out that their spouse is having an affair is to want to get a divorce. This was not my reaction, at all.)

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ooooof

I was .. beside myself ..

feeling waves of betrayal, rage, abandonment, shock, confusion, more rage, more abandonment, more betrayal, disbelief, more rage...loneliness and sadness and desperate disbelief...

"HOW? after 12 years of hell, and then a glimpse of the possibility of redemption, how could you give up NOW?"

"HOW? just as some tender shoots of love are starting to feel their way into the light between us, who have known each other for years, and been through hell together, how can you just .. stomp on those brave and tender shoots, and grind them into the ground with your own boot? All while feeding and watering and lovingly nurturing some flashy new little shoots between you and some woman half your age that you just met and hardly know??"

He insisted that I wouldn't understand, but that it was for the best. OK, thanks for the supportive explanation. That helps a lot. Dumbass. Clueless motherfucker..

I felt like a furious basket-case non-stop for over a month.

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As January turned to February, and it was obvious that there wasn't anything I was going to say that would get Ed to see any sense about this, I started to resign myself to the reality of the situation. But I was in no way in agreement that separating was the right thing to do. I stuffed a lot of sadness and anger, and tried to just keep the peace, since he was still living in the same house and we still worked at the same place. I still felt like my life was falling apart, and my identity was crumbling, but I went through the motions of being an adult. Ed was trying to figure out where he was going to live, so that I could stay in the house we were renting. I was putting on a brave face to cover up my inner desolation. I still couldn't fathom how he could dissolve our family for what looked and felt like an infatuation on his part.

I don't remember going to see one of my favorite healers during this time, but I think I finally did sometime in late February. I don't remember what happened at the session. I do remember looking through the book collection that she had in her office. I think I found something that piqued my interest. Or maybe she said something to me.. however it happened, after seeing her, one evening in early March I found myself on some New Age website reading about "twin flames." I don't remember what I read exactly.

But suddenly some valve flipped open in my heart.

All at once I realized, or maybe more accurately, I remembered, that I was connected to the Source of Love. I knew that I was not designed get Love by trying to extract it from Ed, or anyone else. I knew that if I loved him, which I knew I did, that meant that I wanted him to be happy and feel fulfilled in his life. And I knew that if being with me wasn't doing that for him, then I had to let him go. I had to let him go, BECAUSE I loved him. Suddenly, instead of feeling like an empty hungry shell that Ed was supposed to fill with what I needed, I knew myself to be a conduit for the powerful energy of Unconditional Love, not just for Ed, but for myself.

Looking back on this now, I can see that this is the same thing I felt for that few minutes when I was a child, sitting in the back seat of our car! (If you haven't read the post about my childhood glimpse of being Love, that's where I tell that story.) I never made that connection at the time, but I felt the same invincible inner strength and peace and knowledge that this Love is what I am designed to be. Whew! What a relief!

The other thing that was happening in me that day was that I got a little glimpse of possibility of finding someone that I actually got along with and could be with instead of Ed... A friend of ours had invited us to her birthday party the following day, and when she invited me, she said, "there will be someone there who I think you should meet." This friend was aware of all the anguish and anger and all the rest that had been my life for the past two months.

I was intrigued and got little butterflies when she told me this. This combined with my epiphany of being Love, and suddenly I emerged from beneath the thick, dark, angry, sour and sad fog I'd been walking through, into a bright, beautiful, breezy and warm sunlit vista. I was free!

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This, as I said in the beginning, was the beginning of the up-ending of my ideas about love and relationships. This up-ending was the starting point for the radical re-writing of everything I'd previously understood about these things, and the bones of this re-writing would take several more years to solidify, and frankly, I'm still learning to put flesh on these bones.

Furthermore, the love-and-relationships part of my life was getting a complete overhaul at the same time as many other major aspects of my life, but for now I'll try to keep these threads somewhat organized, and describe them one at a time.

And now, it's time for an intermission...