Milestone

Over the last week, I’ve come to a major realization about my marriage.  That is the first meaning of milestone.  But I’ve also got an older meaning in mind, a milestone quite literally as a mile marker.  I’ve been blogging, and talking, and thinking long enough to know that the path of enlightenment, or happiness, or just living is not a direct line.  It’s a lot of loops and re-crossings. I’ll lose this realization, and have to come back, and I’ll see things I don’t see now.  I am marking it because it seems important.

My 30-year-old self, the self I was on my wedding day, would never have agreed to be in the marriage that I am in now, at 45.  If she/I could have known what would happen and what it would feel like, she/I would never have put on that white dress and picked up that bouquet of orchids and walked up to Daniel feeling –for the first time in (our?) life — like she was her maximum self and that was perfectly right.

The realization on which my marital happiness depends is that that’s okay.  It’s okay that almost 16 years in, I’m in a marriage I would have strenuously rejected when I embarked on it.

That’s what I’ve been trying to get to, probably for the history of this blog. How do I begin to unpack this?  There are two parts: Perfection and Witness.  And I bet if I go back through the archives, I can categorize most posts about the marriage as exploring one or the other.

I grew up believing that perfection was not merely a possibility, but an achievable standard, if I could put in the work.  And boy was I inclined to put in the work.  So, I never had to question whether I was doing something because I wanted to do it intrinsically, or whether I wanted to do it instrumentally, or whatever else was a possibility.  “Want to”, “should”, and “can” were perfectly aligned a lot of the time, and that was powerfully reinforcing.  I didn’t ask why, too much, I didn’t understand luck and chance.  I believed there were right answers that came from outside of me, and I lived by them.  Not robotically, but persistently and ardently.

So… marriage.  I don’t want to write the full details about the imperfections in my marriage. I am deeply shamed by them, even though they are truly not my fault. This may seem contradictory to the spirit of this post, but I believe that my imperfections are pretty garden variety.  (Maybe everyone believes that about themselves.) Nothing about my Daniel is garden variety.  I don’t see women’s magazine articles that describe my situation and validate my response. I see, instead, a lot of cultural and other messages that say that our situation is flawed and must be fixed.  And I felt (feel?) responsible for all the fixes, even though I am not the breaker.  (More on that later.)

I couldn’t accept the situation.  I couldn’t, as the meditation coaches say, get curious about what was happening and what I felt about it and why.  I just said, “This is not to standard.  This is not what a gold star marriage looks like.”  And then everything looked flawed, like a failure on my part and his.  Everything.  Daniel’s utter inability to pick up after himself , and the way his stubbornness increases in direct (or double) proportion to my anxiety about the mess, was not about Daniel’s history as a Jewish Princeling brought up in the 1950s and 1960s when no one thought to ask boys to set the table or make a bed.  It was about how flawed I was, because he didn’t love me enough to do what I wanted.  There was no boundary between disappointment and delegitimization of the whole project.  And that became the story of the marriage.  We weren’t getting it right.

That’s an absolutely crushing way to live.  I blamed myself, and that was so painful and there was so much blame that it overflowed on to Daniel. There were happy moments, but the sense of personal and shared failure got bigger and bigger.  The one place we clearly were not failing was in raising Milo, but, in the twisted logic of perfection, that only made everything else look worse.  We were clearly capable of great things — look at our son.  So what the fuck was happening between us?  Failure. I grabbed too hard at the moments of happiness, I put too much on them, so when they evaporated, as they do, that also added to the failure story.

Words are failing (!) me.  I don’t think I can convey this dynamic adequately.  Just believe me that, especially in the last few years, my marriage and myself have felt like a failure because it’s not what it was supposed to be.  It was not the gauzy standard set by TV commercials and Ladies Home Journal.  So how could it be good?  I was torn, knowing there was goodness but not having a way to reconcile that with all the fractured shoulds.  My 30 year old self was saying all the time “This is not how it’s supposed to be.  This is not right,” and how could I let her down?

Witness.

Yeah, my 30 year old self.  She suffered, and not only from what was in her own dear head about perfection.  She suffered because Daniel… Daniel did some bad stuff.  And Daniel can’t deal with it, so it never got put away.  This blog saved me after infertility because I could come here and say, “Here’s this pain.” I could recognize it for myself, and readers said, “Yes, we see that pain, it’s legitimate, and we are very very sorry you are feeling it.”  I never got that for the other stuff.  It never got acknowledged and accurately described, so it never got to be over.

So that feeling of failure, in a twisted way, became the monument to that suffering.  Does that make any sense to anyone but me?  I’ve written about it, kind of.  Somebody had to be there for her, for the woman I was, whose husband was looking for the exit when I was more vulnerable than I would ever be again in my life.  Daniel married me in good faith, but he couldn’t bear what it meant.  He both embraced and fled from fatherhood, and husband-hood.  A couple of years ago he said, thinking he was joking,”I’ve finally forgiven you for giving me a family.” I will remember that as long as I remember anything. He was in the living room, I was on the staircase.  I said, “Thank you. What’s interesting is that you think you are joking.  I know that you aren’t.”

When I wrote about the first realization that I was hanging on to the pain as a memorial, I thought it would be enough to walk away, to stop tending the pain and to let it fade of its own accord. Now the image I have is of something like burning man. Something intentionally constructed and intentionally destroyed.  I’ll keep the ashes in a pretty container in a drawer.

Resolution

I can’t keep feeling like a failure.  I can’t keep feeling like my marriage is a failure and Daniel is a failure.  God, how many times have I written that or the equivalent?  See “milestone” definition 2.  My 30 year old self didn’t know what she was agreeing to.  I bet most people don’t when they get married.  Do people really believe on that day in sickness, poorer, and worse?  I know some do.  I don’t blame myself for not being one of them, then.  Nobody is wrong here. 30 year old me is not wrong.  45 year old me is not wrong.  You have no idea how far I have to come to write those sentences.  Isn’t someone always wrong because that’s implicit in someone always being right?  And someone is always right, right?  (Usually me.)  30 year old me has suffered enough. That is my imperfection — choosing suffering because I couldn’t get to another option.  45 year old me is ready to stop it.  To let go of being right, and embrace being curious, and free, and unvalidated by anything other than my own sense that I continue to choose this, and it’s between me and Daniel.

I had thought this would be a better post.  I’ve been writing it in my head for so many days.  I smile at the thought that, given what I know about myself and the non-linearity of discovery, I’ll surely get a chance to write it again.