LOST AND FOUND

My writing group decided to write about a time when we have felt the most lost in life. We wanted to try and describe it using all of our senses and then follow it with the experience of being found. (Thank you to Leaf Seligman for her Pocketbook of Prompts for this question.)

On being lost

It’s interesting to write about loss or being lost and binding it up with being found. I wouldn’t necessarily call myself something that belongs in a lost and found box but I do think that for some time, in between the separation from my first marriage and finding my second wife, I belonged inside that box.

If I’m clear, I knew something that looked like loss was coming but nothing could have prepared me for the actual feeling of it. I remember at the time, comparing it to the feeling of losing a limb. I imagined I was someone who, one day had an arm and then the next day it was gone. In the end, I loved my first wife like I loved my limbs. I think that’s why we divorced. It’s not often that I wake up appreciating the strength of my arms, the dexterity of my fingers or the distances that my legs travel. I just wake up knowing my limbs will push me out of bed.

We were on a run together in Tilden when my first marriage officially ended. She told me it wasn’t a big deal, they had just kissed and slept in each other’s arms for the night. She had returned a week earlier from visiting with a friend and I already knew what she was going to say. So I waited a week to ask the question, buying time until I could process her answer. “Did you have an affair?” I asked that day in Tilden. “It’s not what you think, Katie. It’s not like we had sex.” I can’t remember if I said this out loud or just thought it, but I wanted to remind her of Dana and the affair she had right after our daughter was born. “Was that a big deal?”

You’d think that would have been the moment I fell apart, but it wasn’t. That came later. If I think about it now, her prompt denial of the obvious end to our marriage welcomed a familiar dance. One that was marked by me asking for the truth and her not being able to tell it. The familiarity of our dysfunction in that moment saved me from experiencing the deep betrayal I was about to feel in the coming days.

When it arrived, I was in the shower. No one was in the house, soap was running down my face. Was I crying or was it the water from the shower? I remember thinking if tears aren’t coming out but I’m wailing, is that still crying? Could my neighbors hear? I had no other option but to sing, to cry, to moan. I had to give voice to something that was underneath everything else. It was the chord that tethered me to our marriage. I knew it had to be cut yet I had built everything on that bond. I thought it was impenetrable, unbreakable. I had given everything -- not as a sacrifice, but as an offering, as a gift to me, to her, to our children, to our families. She was my life, my heart, my partner in crime.

Over the 20 years I was married to her there were times when we cracked and fractured. It was those days that I spent carefully rebuilding, restoring, waiting for the glue to dry, treading lightly until it did. The only way I could have stayed for so long was by holding onto the belief that even if we didn’t make it, we would always tend to each other’s hearts. I wonder if she forgot that part in the end -- or maybe she never knew it. I know I never lost sight of it. I wept wondering how I could have spent 20 years with someone who didn’t know how sacred that trust is. I cried for how much healing I had to do -- repairing, restoring, regenerating.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t my first wife who first taught me about the pain of deep loss, it was daughter. Not long after giving birth to her I imagined losing her would be like losing my heart. My body wouldn’t survive. I noticed that if I spent too much time thinking about it, I could easily wrap the two of us in a cocoon where I’d hold her, protecting both of us from the unbearable pain of losing each other. But the sweetest thing about babies is that holding them is such a gift -- a gift that can never be held or captured for too long. Each time I felt the inclination to hold her for fear of losing her, I also felt the regenerative nourishment of loving so deeply that the only thing to do was to watch her grow. As I watched her change, she taught me that love and loss are simply two sides of the same coin. To love deeply also means I must be willing to deeply lose.

I’m not sure why I couldn’t incorporate the ideas of love and loss into my marriage with my first wife. I guess I had a different lesson with her. For 20 years I was stubbornly unwilling to budge, grow or move on. That day in 1994 when we married, I married for life. There was no option to back out. So when she did, I was dumbfounded. Today I know that I unfairly blamed her for breaking a contract she couldn’t have kept and I shouldn’t have made. Just like our children, marriage between two people is meant to grow, evolve, and take new shape.

My ex-wife wife and I slept in the same bed for nearly 2 weeks after making the decision to part. Looking back, I wish I would have spent those two weeks differently. A bed can be such an intimate space to share and I didn’t understand it would be the last moment I would have to thank her. I mean, I suppose I could today -- it would be no less authentic, just more removed. If I could go back I would say something like, “We did well. We made it all the way to the end together – we even crossed the finished line and kept going even though the race was over. We gave it our all. Thank you.”

Not long after my ex-wife moved out, I had a dream. The two of us were standing on opposite sides of the road outside our home. We were both on the top rung of a ladder, wound together with boat rope. The kind of rope that is threaded together from the twining of thousands of individual strands.

The rope was weighty, about a foot in diameter. Our whole neighborhood came out to watch the cutting. We stood there, wrapped in rope, a reflection of each other. Love and loss both balancing precariously on the top rung, waiting for the incision. The scissors were too large for one person to manage. So large that it took several folks to move the scissors and even more to make the final cut severing our marriage permanently.

I woke up that morning from the dream, understanding what the end looks like. I could see the finality of something great that was always meant to end -- even despite my stubborn persistence of “marriage-for-life.” Truth is we were never meant to finish the way we started -- that’s the way circulation works. It’s inherently meant to circulate, intertwine and intermingle with other things. Had I realized this earlier, I may have been able to let go of us more gently, humbly, and with care. Instead, I had to put our marriage on the chopping block, severing it’s head and then calling all neighbors to help clean up the mess.

On being found

Whether I’ve wanted it or not, I’ve always felt extremely seen by others. Mostly by men but sometimes by women too. Culturally, we watch women – the way we move and talk. Defined by social constructs of gender we give ourselves permission to criticize, challenge, dismiss feminine energy. We also seek beauty, curiosity, and grace in the day-to-day activities of anyone who identifies as female. Because of this, I learned to find myself in the gaze of others. If you called it dysfunctional, codependent, or a demonstration of my low self-esteem, I might agree. But I would also add that finding myself in the reflection of another taught me how to find the contours of myself in the rough edges of the world. It taught me how to use my intuition, how to relate, how to communicate without words, and to be humble.

It's confusing at times to reflect upon losing myself in the eyes of one only to find myself in the eyes of another. Then I think of Paul Simon singing the phrase, "There before the grace of you go I." When he sings it I think he means he could have ended up in a bad situation if it wasn't for meeting the woman he loves. Before I really understood what it meant in the context of his song I thought it meant the only way to know the beauty of another is to be able to understand the beauty of oneself. Being seen in the world has always been my path to being found. And because of this it has always been my family, my friends, and my loved ones who’ve grown me. If there's one thing I can trust about myself it's that I can always find the self I want to create in the eyes of the people I love. So when I write about knowing myself better through the deepening of my relationships, I believe that dysfunctional codependence is always a possibility, but so is being found.