I faced a colossal thing. I looked right at the fact that I'd been pretending in my life for too long and needed to take my marriage off of autopilot. I had to stop letting my deep, wide self float in stagnant waters. I was lost.
I was so completely certain of how it would all go. I knew exactly what my husband would say and do and how slimy I'd feel. But then that wasn't what happened at all. He somehow still loves me, wants to fight and grow and build a thing that is all our own, brick-by-brick, daily. Doesn't want to tell me, but show me that it is true.
The colossal thing is telling the whole truth about years of holding back. And we've both done it. It could have started as a kindness, a priority. There's no need to say everything after all. But then it became a withholding. He found something I'd written and it wasn't about him. And yes, I was holding back. Ripping off a scrap here or there of what I might have said, who I might have been... and tucking it away somewhere else for safekeeping.
Perhaps if I divvied myself into parts and saved some for later/elsewhere/another, I could still be me; and the me that fit in my marriage could keep fitting where it was. The other parts of me grew no matter how I mistreated them. They were sprouts of a sturdy vine and they slipped through cracks. And I had to stop it all. Had to.
I acted and took off on a trip to remember myself. I had nurtured one sprig. And my husband knew. I didn't know he knew but he did. I wrote about that growing part and it took almost no fertilizer or anything at all to spread everywhere. Once I drove to Oregon, the plant sprawled across me and a stalk the size of a mountain sprouted.
I came home and faced him and told him. And when his reaction was not relief that he no longer had to pretend, not indignation or annoyance, not fury or hatred, I didn't know what to think. I stayed on my side of a wall and waited to see when the real reaction would come. When would he throw things and hate me? But he hasn't.
And now? Now, I'm not sure what I feel. For days, I felt music in my body and invigoration flooded every capillary. I swore I would be true to myself, like Maya Angelou's advice about protecting a part of yourself that you keep pristine, I would stand all the way up and take what came.
But what do you do when what comes is unconditional love that makes you feel like your pieces might fly apart? Like the gravity of myself has lost its power and I'm fragmenting, pieces drifting outward. I liked when I knew who I was and what I wanted. I was so very sure of how it would go, what I would say, the five lives I'd dreamed up to live. And now? I can't say. Maybe I'm a totally different me than I thought. But at least I know I can stand all the way up and face it all. I know I will live differently from here on. There is no going back. I dove into cold waters. And now I am awake.
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