I Am Not Me

I've been chanting a line I heard Eckhart Tolle say to Strombo on The Hour:

"You are not the sad story in your head."

It's likely paraphrased, adapted after watching the clip into a language that would work for me. But it's working. I am not my mind. Therefore I don't have to let my mind be an excuse anymore.

I'm far from being healed, or enlightened on a Buddha level, but I feel like I've had a breakthrough.

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I've had a weird week. I've gone from thinking that there is no way my marriage will survive, to finding a way back to love again and celebrating our 9th wedding anniversary with a renewed commitment to making it work.

A week or so ago we were bickering in front of Nate and his cousin. Nate turned to his cousin and said, "My parents are always fighting and I don't know why." This was a pretty big wake up call for me. I thought all our petty snipping would show him that we're not perfect, that people can disagree and still love each other. But I realized it made him feel unsafe, because we've been venturing into some scary territory.

Plus my sage four-year-old is right. What the heck ARE we fighting about? Then BOOM! I got news of several women I know having their marriages break up. All of them with two kids or more. No one wants to say it, and no one knows what the outcome would have been without them, but it's hard not to look at the having children part of all this and wonder how much it has to do with the downfall of a marriage.

As one woman put it roughly in an email, "...it is inevitable I think, it's not their fault, but it does place so much stress." It's completely true of course, but the thought of my dear sweet children, who were both created out of great love, being the cause of that love's demise breaks my heart too much. I can't give up yet.

There's another phrase that's been going around in my head. Something along the lines of "Every horse thinks his load the heaviest." I would say that thoughts like that account for a lot of the discord in co-parenting right there.

Of course that's not all that I have to say on this subject. I'm working through a lot right now and (not to get all Oprah on you but) I've had a few "a-ha" moments. I've had to lay low, be quiet around here until I understood what was going on. Normally I would just spew, but I have to take into account the potential feelings of the three other (human) members of my family.

(Not Scout. Scout could handle it. She'd just look over at me and continue licking her puckered asshole. But I can't suddenly turn this into a cat blog.)

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I've just spent two amazing days with my beautiful kids, revelling in their blueberry muffin batter scent, big brown eyes that engulf my heart, giant mouthed smiles and bedtime giggles. They are so sweet with each other these days.

I lived through my parents' mis-steps. It is the sad story I've played in my head forever, wearing it like a security blanket, thinking I had to carry it to identify myself. I would say it made me who I am today, but that would be wrong. It made me who I thought I was for a long time; the person I'm working very hard to shed now, to separate myself from.

The idea of separating from myself might sound like weird hocus pocus, but it's the key to keeping me from separating from my husband. I know for many couples there are few choices and this is not a comment on anyone else. I can only speak to my own experiences.

No one ever wants to break their children's hearts, or to let their children watch as their mother's (or father's) heart gets broken. I'm sure my mother had no such intention, but couldn't stop herself from falling apart in front of us. (My father on the other hand was too sick with midlife crisis in the brain to notice the consequences of his actions.)

When Sly Stone sings, "It's a family affair..." it's always held a different meaning for me. Every choice we make as adults impacts the lives of our children to some degree. Maybe because I watched my mother fight for, and then forgive my father, I am hard-wired to keep going. Maybe because I didn't like seeing them act like children, I am forced to finally grow up for my own small family. These are stories for a book, or another day.

Regardless, I'm not carrying those old wounds with me anymore. I don't need them. But I need to fix this, fix me, for the sake of my kids. That's the only truth I've got right now.