Truing It Up

At coffee with a friend this afternoon, we spoke in detail, finally (it had been a long time since we'd been face-to-face), about what I'm starting to think of as my imminent divorce.

After talking through the details of what's happening, when is it happening and how, she asked me a question I hadn't considered until I heard it fall out of her mouth. What about you, she said, long-term? What do you want?

She meant, do you want to remarry? Stay single? Start dating right away? Wait a while, then date?

My gut reaction was the blind panic I have come to recognize as the body's instinctive reaction to the crossing paths of the concepts divorce/change and me/my world. I let it pass. As soon as I was breathing normally again, I thought: what is she talking about?

What do I want?

What an enormous question this is. What a gigantically relevant and shockingly unaddressed question for someone who has just agreed to an ending of her marriage and has moved out of her home.

What do I want?

Excellent.

The answer that I gave just fell out of my mouth--it was so smooth it felt well-rehearsed, though I've never uttered it before. I said: I don't think I want to get married again, but I could see myself in a series of long-term, monogamous relationships--it's what I've always done. She nodded, understanding. We didn't talk about each of our views on what is or isn't realistic or attainable over the spans of years, a life spent bearing witness to another flawed human being's wrangling with life. We've had that conversation before.

After we left the coffee shop and each other, each walking our own way into the freezing, urban January dusk, I thought about it again. What do I want.

I got home to the apartment I'm subletting. I called my going-to-be-ex-husband. We both cried a little. Questioned the decision we've questioned and re-made eight million times. Hung up the phone. Again I thought it. What do I want?

I thought about the response I had given my friend: Probably not marriage again. Love in whatever form it arrives, yes; companionship; yes. Sex with available men (maintaining certain standards of pickiness), absolutely yes. Commit to one person again forever? Probably not.

And STILL I kept thinking, but what do I WANT? Specifically, clearly, what do I want?

And then I found the answer, or it found me.

I want HUGE love. I want big, huge love. I want love that makes your heart feel so safe and so challenged at the same time, your soul takes root in another human being. I am describing something that I am guessing that I have never felt, or possibly only felt as a very young woman during my first, all-consuming love affair (before I learned that there was any other way).

I want a love whose eyes can't help but pay attention when you walk into a room. I want a love that calls you pretty and kisses you until your mouth gets chapped. I want a love that remembers how to laugh, and that you can laugh easily with.

And the truth is, I don't really care so much about marriage. I could skip it. I could also do what I passed on my first time around if it mattered to the person I loved: the whole public ceremony situation. Get all decked out and invite your friends. I could see myself being happy doing anything in between. It's not what interests me primarily.

What interests me primarily, what I want, is the big love. Passion + acceptance + room for growth.

I don't know if this exists.

But I know that this is what I want.

Hopefully this is a good start.

The Passing of 2009

Following are a few thing I will not be sorry to see passing out of my life with the year about to shed.

1. Fearing the IRS
2. The act of sneaking out the front door early on a Saturday or Sunday so as not to wake my sleeping husband and be forced to have a conversation I don't want to have
3. A car that smells like fish
4. Having to bear witness to angry fights on trains
5. Going to sleep in a rage with the person in the next room
6. The commute from E. 26th Street to W. 55th Street in Manhattan, particularly in the morning rush.

But no matter how thin you make a pancake, as the saying goes, it still has two sides. The following are a couple of items of beloved routine that I know I will miss with an ache that already hurts profoundly.

1. My husband's smell
2. The millions of pet names, nicknames, and variations of my name that he calls me; even the ones I thought I didn't like
3. The conversations we could have when he was his most vibrantly alive, funny, happy self
4. Summer weekends--start to finish
5. The way he loved to hear me sing
6. Being his wife.

Time goes on, and here again it goes. I will read this post a year from now, two years from now, ten. Bring on the miraculous, bring on the pains and the highs and the lows of being fully alive.

Blessings and love.

With So Many Things to Be Sad About

I am at such a weird, in-between place in leaving my union. There is no telling what emotion each moment will bring. Most of the time, it's fairly safe to say that I am cautiously optimistic, sometimes cautiously excited and even occasionally cautiously ecstatic, about having a life on my own again. I have no children. I have a job I enjoy, with an interesting future. SINGLE. Being single.

Everyone single cringes. Everyone married thinks, STOP.

We have all taken some gambles and maybe some of us have cut some corners from the "things I absolutely need in a partner" list. Ignored a couple of things.

Anyway. Earlier, I was having a perfectly singular moment that is going to go into the file I'll mark "breaking up memories" or something similar. Walking back to my sublet apartment I decided, against plan and against my husband's wishes, to spend another night here, instead of meeting him back at our apartment uptown. We exchanged a few emails. He was sad but resolute. I was sad and torn, unexpectedly: between the need to take rethink my plan in order to take care of him, and doing something painful that I knew would be better, in the long-term, for myself. I stayed at the sublet where I write this now.

There is something in the moment of choosing your own self-interest over that of someone you have come to know as HUSBAND that confirms for the soul, uniquely, that your couplehood is coming undone. You are unzipping. The seams aren't going to hold.

With so many things to be sad about, this feels to me like one of the saddest. It's something you have ultimately no control over. Your feelings are telling you what to do, and if you believe them, you can't go back. The seams split. This life you have made comes undone.

You start starting again.

On Christmas

This comes to you from a drizzly place, a grey day so New York and so winter it hasn't got the energy to say more. A day for staying indoors, with food cooking.

In more ways than the weather this has been a grey drizzly month. A month of not knowing enough about what was happening, what was going to happen, yet having so much happening that it took over. Enough so that I got sick, my body just quit.

So the year is ending and it is Christmas. Christmas I think, unlike your birthday, is marked in the hostory book of your memory from two such different directions: It's memories of moments of giving, and memories of moments of receiving. We're taught that that is Christmas, and so it becomes. We teach our children to walk the presents over to your aunt, now over to grandpa. Teaching them to give in pace with receiving.

Not everyone learns to give in the same way. As a result, I think that life does not give to us each in the same way. We are somehow making different asks of the universe. And what we ask for is what we get. And what we give is what we get.

So today, in all of its grey damp, in the lonely ending of my marriage, it is strange to say that it really does feel like Christmas. The past month has shown me, so many times and in so many bizarre and eclectic ways that life truly opens up when you let it. Make the space and something wonderful floats in. Set the intention, know it is for your better good, pray and let it go. Miracles, magic things, happen.

Life is scary but scary is good. What is not so good is when life is grey on the inside. Inside keep it Christmas. Keep it magic and alive.

Peace and love. Merry Christmas.

The Month of Nothing to Say

November came and went. It's better to describe it this way than to go into particular detail. It's not really true that there is nothing to say about the month, but rather that there is too much to say.

I was planting seeds. Getting things ready to bloom. I will tell you about them now, as they begin to flower. Finally, December.

One thing that happened was that I sublet an apartment. I will spend my time both here and there.

HERE = the apartment I share with my husband
THERE = the friends' apartment I've leased while she travels

This little realization is what I learned on my first night alone at my new apartment:

Being yourself fully is the only satisfying way to be yourself. You know when you're being yourself fully because you can feel your soul singing. It is always good to pursue directions your life could go in that seem as if they might keep things interesting and evolving. It's OK to be scared and not know what's going to happen next. None of us knows what's going to happen next. Ever. As a result: Plunge, jump, into life. Don't be reckless, but be free. Find freedom, the place where your soul is excited just by the prospect of being.

When we are in this place, the universe speaks to us.

Notes From a Vacation

Here are some things to know about traveling with someone you love, and have loved for many years, who you are trying to find the strength to leave.

1. Vacations, even beach vacations where it rains every day or one of you gets some painful form of dysentery, fall into a mental folder marked special. When we were away has a kind of magic, no matter what happened. Maybe trips are an echo of a time when things were new.

So even when you are in the thought process of un-coupling, much of the time spent on vacation ends up (perhaps by mental default) in the special folder. You will probably decide on vacation that none of the conclusions you'd reached about your relationship before your departure are true, after all. You actually are happy. This is how things are supposed to be. Your heart is full, and sweet, and greateful. You don't feel empty; you just needed this vacation.

When you come home, the realization that this is not reality will hurt.

2. A couple traveling together speaks the private language of couple. After years in a relationship, you just know how to do stuff, away, together. You each unconsciously know whose job it is to gather the passports, book the rental car, pack the toothpaste. If you're flying, you know which of you gets the aisle; who has to sit at a window. There is lazy comfort in this. If you are part of a couple that is happy or at least intact and surviving the world, I urge you to try to enjoy these rituals. They are dear and spectacularly unique. See them as one of life's little gifts.

3. While traveling, you will begin to interpret celestial pointers, signs from the universe, in irrelevant actions. I found it prophetic on a recent trip, for example, that I only wanted two bites of my chicken taco, generously giving the rest to my husband. Did this mean my heart was opening somehow to him, in a new way? When he began driving more aggressively through green lights, instead of slowing down to a crawl on the chance they were going to turn yellow, I took it as sign that he was becoming aware of his own passive aggression. And so on.

I don't know why this is. Maybe the changed perspective of being in a new place makes us yearn to see everything in a fresh way, including the mess inside our own hearts.

4. At some point on the trip, you will experience irrational rage towards your partner. This is completely normal, and will come at an unexpected moment. Here's what: it has nothing to do with the fact that he forgot to pack his bathing suit.

5. Once you're back home, have fallen back to your normal routine and the aching malaise starts creeping in, pictures of you and your partner together on the trip may shock you.

When I was a very little girl, my sister and I had a pact: Whenever forced to pose for a picture, we would do some funny little physical quirk-- crinkle a pinky or move a foot in a funny way -- that the photographer (we thought) wouldn't notice, but that my sister and I would recognize when the pictures were developed as our secret code. For all time, that photo would bear the stamp of our rebellious yet unspoken truth.

Something similar happens, unconsciously, in your vacation photos. When the picture is being taken, you will feel like your face is in its correct position, that you are standing together the way you always stand together, smiling the way you always smile. It will feel utterly usual.

But when you finally see the photo in detail, on Facebook or as a print or in a frame after the vacation has ended, you will spot it: the rebellious unspoken truth. It's always somewhere--your smile or his; the slightly awkward way in which you are standing; a glint of something in your eye. I will not. Captured forever.

The vacation is over. It is time to move on.

Skipping My First Marriage

I used to say, when people asked why I had waited so long to get married, that I had simply decided to skip my first marriage and go right to the happy one.

Who knew?

My family grew up renting a cottage every summer in a small beach town that most of the world still has yet to discover. My sister and I grew like trees over long, luscious summers there; I still think of those years as the happy ones . When I was 37 I eloped, and my husband and I (of one day) bought a house in the same town, on a whim, inspired, each unsure the other wouldn't call all of it off at some point. A weekend-long game of chicken.

Much of my living has taken place in this beach town. When I was twelve and my parents were divorcing, my father had a nervous breakdown. After spending a few years downward-spiraling, he was ultimately diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. He has been out of my life, thankfully, since I was in my early teens.

Before any of this happened, though, there was the beach. As such, there was a day every summer that was the Last Day at the beach. We would pack up two cars with pets and sheets and the accumulations of a summer, and drive home to the suburb where I grew up. Spent cold winters waiting impatiently for the time around the Fourth of July (firecrackers, barbecues). Then the suitcases would get pulled out and the packing would begin, and it would be time to go back to the beach.

When my father lost it all, my mother didn't so much lose her center as become her center. The dark hole of rage and frustration that she had quieted in the business of raising a suburban family 1970's-style disintegrated. She fell into a well of rageful, bitter despair that lasts to this day. Our lives--hers, my sister's and mine--became chaos. For example: In the kitchen ceiling of our house, we had a leak. What started as a leaking upstairs bathtub pipe had, over years, enlarged into a gaping hole. Plaster dripped from ragged exposed pipes. If you ran a bath or, eventually, took longer than a 15-minute shower, white water would run onto the kitchen floor, forming a pool on the linoleum next to the stove.

My mother kept order by keeping the floor mopped.

But before this there was this beach, and peaceful long summers, and growing up.

Because this suummer place meant so much, when my sister and I were old enough to drive the first overnight trips we planned were with each other, back to the beach. We'd recruit another girlfriend, rent a motel room in a bunch of pine trees on Route 1 and spend a short weekend soaking up a place we loved that had loved us back. I remember these weekends as being more painful than anything, but we both felt the powerful urge to return, return.

Through all of these visits, it never failed, still there was always a Last Day at the beach.

I should point out that the Last Day has a distinctive look. The sky is always impeccably blue. The water matches. It is very dry. Though there is a cool wind, it is not strong. The sunlight makes everything glow. It is late, late in summer. It is all so beautiful, and you are leaving for another dose of forever. Your heart aches.

So here I am in my first marriage, which isn't really my first marriage because I'm skipping my first marriage by going right to the happy one, and fast-forward 25 years.

Last weekend, my husband and I went surfing for what turned out to be the last ride of the season. It was obvious when we stepped off our boards into the shoreline froth that by as soon as the next day, the water beneath us would be too cold to fall into. I should mention that we are pulling apart, my husband and I. Coming carefully, gently, hardly at all chaotically, unglued. Undone at the hinges. For that reason especially, last weekend really felt like The Last Day at the beach.

At the end of a long rides I crossed the hazy, sunny, Last Day parking lot with my surf board balnced on my head. A thought srruck me suddenly: Please, I thought: On my last day on earth, may I please remember this moment.

Heat on my face, wind starting to chill on my thighs. Rough pebbly parking lot under my feet, sun going down on the horizon. He is at my side. Husband. Wife. We.

There is so much to be let go of, yet the heart wants to cling.

Please, let me remember forever that one day, I was here like this with him.

This is what I'm here to tell you: I don't believe there is such a thing as skipping your first marriage. Your first is always your first. You have things to learn about yourself--terrible, wonderful, disappointing things--that will make you who you are going to be for the rest of your life. Your first marriage is the only way you can learn them.

I hope I remember that day until my last day on this earth.