Play Free Bird

Sometimes I long for the simple life, when I didn't have to devote so much energy to taking the emotional temperature of the room.

I think about the life I would create if my life really belonged to me. I'd read and play poker and go to the gym. I'd smile at people and seek out conversation and new experiences. I wouldn't walk around with my head down feeling wounded and defeated and ashamed. I'd greet life with eagerness and curiousity instead of shame and doubt.

My God, listen to me. I'm living like a prisoner in my own skin. I've surrendered my worth and hopes and heart to someone who regards me as a person of no value. I've swallowed whole the messages of contempt and powerlessness, waiting to be redeemed or forgiven or released. As if I had no say.

It would be amazing to have space of my own and permission to live and be alive. How do I reclaim that permission, extricate myself from the mess and ruin and neglect? How do I get out of Marie's terrible shadow, the screaming I wear like a shock collar.

Kiss Me It's My Birthday

If there were ever a day you thought hopes would be high for a thaw or a miracle or a seminal moment, it would be your birthday.

Marie's kids came over for my birthday tonight. We had shrimp and pasta and homemade chocolate cake. Everyone sat around telling funny stories from when they were little, long before I arrived on the scene. I was an outsider at my own party. I don't blame them for that, not at all. The love and deep affection they have for one another, the good humor, it is quite lovely to see. It's just bittersweet to be on the outside of it. This isn't the way things are meant to be, third and fourth marriages, broken bonds, shattered families. an occasion like this should bring whole families together that share the same stories, memories as sweet and satisfying as homemade chocolate frosting. I'm not a part of those memories and I can't be and shouldn't be--it's an ugly haphazard seam in a beautiful tapestry. Shared history and shared hopes are a sacred thing, the way things were meant to be in our living rooms and dining tables. These are lovely young people but people I scarcely know. They belong at the table of their father and mother, but that table was axed and burned long ago. It shouldn't be like that, but it is so all over the country. We try to blend and build new families but it isn't the same. Still it was kind of all of them to come and share dinner and have cake. Stephanie sent me a sweet text message and my brother did me the tremendous honor of embarassing himself singing a silly song in a voicemail. These are the fleeting embraces of the electronic age, better than despair, worse than a gathering at the fire. It's what we have.

I'm trying to find my heart and soul and person in all this turmoil. I live with a wife who no longer loves me or respects me, that in her angry hours scalds my soul telling me how pathetic and weak and unworthy and inadequate and contemptible I am, in the harshest and most awful words, with a sneering viciousness that tears me to the core. I'm trying to be calm and think what I should live for and how I should measure my days. I try to read a little and throw up an occasional prayer. We are so tentative with each other and so lost. I'm nostalgic for solitude and lonliness. It felt safer. I don't know if the rage and betrayal will ever end.

I could just walk out, but I'm afraid I'd miss some grand chance to make everything right. I'm afraid of the moral failure it would represent walking out on two women with no means of support. I feel as though I'm waiting for them to walk out on me or run into my arms, and either possibility seems painfully remote: it seems more likely we'll just suffer and exist until something awful or overwhelming happens to throw everything pitching forward. I don't know what to do or how to cope with all this. I don't at all. I pray for understanding that never comes.

Alternating Moments of Grace and Terrifying Uncertainty

In the aftermath of all that's happened and scalding criticism and awful arguments, the ground is unsteady under my feet. Rather than day-to-day I am moment-to-moment, filled with uncertainty and self doubt, anxiety and fear.

Yet we have moments of redemption and unaccounted for grace, moments when anything seems possible. A tender embrace. Genuine affection. Reflection, quiet conversation and the beginning of belief, understanding and healing. A pleasant night watching The Rolloffs or Duggars, or playing Sequence at the kitchen table. Marie makes a favorite meal or holds me tightly before I leave for work.

When she leaves home and is gone later than I thought (three hours for a job interview?) my mind starts racing and I'm apt to start watching the clock. My heart doesn't stay calm. Alone in my thoughts I start questioning the wisdom of trusting again, and I'm filled with discouragement that she might not ever forgive me for my own sins and flaws of character. Can we make it out of this fireswamp of hurt? Some days it seems inconceivable, and others it seems true love can survive even death.

Our Story So Far

I grew up in a miserable, violent, scary family but I don't want to overplay that. No one ought to be blaming their life on their childhood at 53. At 53 we have the face we deserve to have. Someone said that once. In the words of the immortal Casey Stengel, you could look it up.

I watched my father beat the hell out of my mom. I watched him knock my brother's front teeth out, and I watched him brutalize all of my seven brothers and sisters. I felt the sting of poverty and embarassment, of yellow teeth and having the Pacific Power and Light lineman come striding up the lane to disconnect our electricity. I was nine, bounding up to him like a puppy, asking him why he'd come to visit. We lived eight miles out of town on 60 acres half full of sage brush. Visitors didn't come often. My fourth grade teacher came once to hunt arrowheads. My mother filled our ears with bitter sarcasm in her embarassment over our shabby furniture and rundown farmhouse. I loved Mr. Deeds. He was our flag football coach and wore white short sleeved shirts and skinny ties. I bought him one for Christmas. I hated my father. When I was 18 and grew tall enough I challenged him to a fist fight in the kitchen. He didn't hit me back.

Thirty six chaotic years passed, and nothing prepared me for the brutality and bullying oppressiveness of my current marriage. I've never felt as raw and naked and unloved as Marie makes me feel when she is angry. I want to escape with every fiber of my being. But she doesn't have a job, and I have no place to go.

If You Live Long Enough

If you live long enough you have the opportunity to eventually realize that sometimes getting what you think you want winds up being the worst possible thing that can happen. This is not a profound or original realization, but it is the kind that can hit you full in the face and leave you gasping for air and swallowing your own blood.

Marie and I have been back together for 11 months now, and it has been 11 months of misery. Insanity is repeating the same behaviors and expecting things to change. They rarely do, not without a profound shift in attitudes. They have been no such shifts.

We are repeating the same arguments and fomenting the same resentments. A bad relationship is full of its own unreal reality. Those of you who have witnessed, or come out of the other side of such craziness must know exactly what I mean. You begin to believe the worst messages you hear about yourself. You begin to think, she treats me this way because I deserve it. You surrender the power to change things, or walk away from what you can't change.

I've run all my life. Run from conflict and run from failure. My thinking was, I'll stick this out, I'll change, I'll try harder, and things will get better. They haven't. New battle lines are drawn every day. No combination of sacrifices or gestures invalidates the fiercely stored bitternesses of the past. The script is maddening and exhausting and futile. I hurt all over. The walk up the steps to work is the lonliest and most miserable of my life. I come home to a crazy, lost, hurting house, and I want to escape. Pack up a few things and sleep in my car. Show up at my sister's or my best friend's doorstep. Anything. Anywhere. Just go. Can the unknown and uncertain be any worse than this hate-filled oblivion?