Out With Lanterns

Photo by Meg Tuttle

When I turned 40 a few years ago, I made a post on social media about feeling that my 40s would be a decade of bringing me back to my deepest, truest, most whole self.  When I imagined this journey it appeared in my mind as a walk, or maybe even a stroll, down a path through a wildflower filled field.  But as most of you know, a spiritual journey doesn’t really work like that.  Instead of a field full of wildflowers, it’s more like a dumpster fire.

In that post I also shared that things were about to get a whole lot harder, and boy, was that an understatement.  When I wrote that, I had already been struggling pretty profoundly.  My husband and I had been separated for about a year and a half, and I was a few weeks away from moving out, after which, we spent the next year and a half trying to salvage a relationship that had been crumbling for much longer than either one of us wanted to admit.  Part of me knew it was over, long before the rest of me caught up.  I remember reading this poem in Maggie Smith’s gorgeous book, Goldenrod, in 2021, and feeling it ring true at a cellular level:

—

After the Divorce, I Think of Something My Daughter Said About Mars

Once you go, you can never go back.

If you returned to Earth,

the gravity would turn your bones

to noodles.  I mean your skeleton

would sort of melt.  So if you go,

you have to stay gone.

—

And finally, earlier this year, I woke up one morning and something in me had shifted.  I just knew that I was never going back; I had to stay gone.  I told him the next day, and it was official: we were getting a divorce.

And because the Universe has such a hilarious sense of humor, soon after telling my husband I wanted a divorce, a friendship I had, quickly developed into something more and I started seeing someone.  It was horrible timing and probably ill-advised, but I’ve never been one to be overly cautious or pragmatic when it comes to my heart.  It was meant to be a fun, casual thing, but, full transparency, I fell in love with him.  I fully intended to let it be what it was supposed to be, but once again, when it comes to my heart, I’ve never been one to be cautious or pragmatic.  I let myself say it out loud only once after he had left my apartment, “Oh, fuck, I think I’m in love with him.”  Then I hid it away.

And then, within a month, it was over.

You see, my sweet friend who I love(d) so much, lives in a self-described, metaphorical dungeon, and even though I hid my love away, it kept finding ways to shine through (sometimes in unhealthy-anxiously-attached kind of ways).  And for someone who is used to the dark, that kind of light can be blinding and just all together too much.

So, he went back to the darkness of the dungeon, and there I was, a soon-to-be-divorcée with a newly broken heart.

And what we sometimes forget, is that when our heart breaks, it breaks wide open and a whole lot of crap comes pouring out.  Not just the hurt that we are experiencing, but in my case, a whole lot of wounds that had been suppressed since childhood, leading to a deep, impenetrable sadness that vacillates between being expressed as anger at my sweet daughters, and a deep depression that leaves me feeling untethered and disconnected from myself, unable to recognize the person looking back at me in the mirror.

And while all of this hurt is true, there is another truth that runs parallel to it; there actually is a field of wildflowers adjacent to this dumpster fire.  All of this hurt, the pain of the end of an 11 year marriage, the pain of losing someone I have loved, but with whom I never got to see that love grow into being fully realized and reciprocated, the pain of feeling like an unfit mother, and the pain of feeling unrecognizable to myself, is the burning away of who I used to be so that my deepest, truest, most whole self has the space and strength to be remembered.

Even though I know this to be true in the deepest part of me, I can’t tell you how I made it through to become my deepest, truest, most whole self, because I’m still right smack dab in the messy middle.  I haven’t come out the other side.  I’m not healed.  Nothing has been found.

But, I guess we are never really truly healed, only healing; never really truly found, only searching.

So, why am I writing this now?  Well, I have been holding all of this inside of me and as someone who listens to her body and her deepest knowing, I felt the pull (or is it a push?) today to not only say it, but to have it heard; to have it witnessed.

I need it to be witnessed that I loved my husband very much and still do, I just didn’t love us anymore.  The chasm between us kept growing and it got so big that nothing could be done to bridge it.

I need it to be witnessed that within the rubble of my marriage, I fell in love with someone with an enormous heart who brought me back to life in so many ways and dislodged parts of me that I never knew I needed to heal, and may never have had the chance to heal without his presence in my life, a presence I miss immensely.

I need it to be witnessed that even though I put on a strong, brave front, I’m deeply sad and desperately struggling.

I need it to be witnessed that even though I fail daily and make mistakes by the minute, I’m working really, really hard to become a better mom.

But most of all, I need it to be witnessed that I’m doing the best I can to remember my deepest, truest, most whole self.

Or as Emily Dickinson said (and is also the quote at the beginning of Maggie Smith’s new memoir):

I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.

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