I tend to reflect often, looking back at my life, the good and the bad and evaluate. I look to see where I went wrong, I look to see if I’m able to not make the same mistakes. Whether it be with work or money or friends, yet most times it’s with relationships. Mainly my marriage and the demise I created in it. In all my ego I thought I knew so much, I was enamored with myself, I knew I was doing everything right. I wasn’t, she wasn’t - we weren’t and we divorced as quick as we were married. 5 1/2 years to get married and 5 years later divorced, almost to the day. I remember coming home from work the day after we decided I was to move out, I packed my stuff and moved it into my parent’s trailer, so our daughter didn’t have to see it happen. That night we sat her on the couch and told her I was moving out for a while. It was the saddest experience of my life, she held me close, crying, asking me not to leave. I can remember everything about it, her words, her tears, the pain it was causing her and I was sad, but I was almost removed from it like an outer body experience, being there but watching it happen. Looking back now I know that to date it was the worst day of my life.
I felt I had failed, I had one job – take care of my family. Truth is I had failed Elisa long before I moved out. I was a bad husband; I didn’t know how to be one. I had no role models and no one could tell me how to do it cause I wouldn’t listen when they did. I could go into my fuck ups but why, I have relived them so many times I’ve worn right through the memories like an old pair of shoes. At some point I forgave myself for not being who I could have been and when I forgave myself, I then started to forgive her. Resentment is funny that way, it takes the forgiveness of self in order to forgive anyone else. I think forgiving ourselves lets us admit we were wrong in our lives, it cuts through the ego and people become mirrors to us. Then when we dig deeper into self and stop the separation between us and everyone else, when we become equal to everyone around us, we stop grading the wrongs committed and judgement slowly fades away. We see that right is right and wrong is wrong, I stole a hundred dollars, you stole a thousand dollars, stealing is stealing. Removing judgment of the severity and circumstances as an excuse, it puts us eye to eye with everyone around us. It takes great humility to ask for forgiveness, maybe that’s why it is hard at times to forgive ourselves. Maybe we can say ‘yeah I was wrong I’m sorry’ and not get the full effect of removing ego until we look at ourselves as wrong and forgive ourselves. It’s like another level of a spiritual awakening.
I never knew how much my divorce would wreak havoc in my heart. It’s like today I can see how much I really loved my wife, more then I ever knew I did. I had no idea I could love someone so much, be so willing to walk through anything for them. But in our marriage, in that 11 ½ relationship I did not see this. I was blinded by self, by obsession, by ego. I wanted nothing more than to have a family, a wife, kid, house, dog – I had it all and I still wasn’t happy. Actually, we both weren’t happy and we faded apart so slowly, almost methodically. One resentment, two resentment, three resentment, four. They came and went in the beginning but as the years tacked on they left less and less. The fights start out small, in the garage having a conversation and in time the garage becomes the battlefield. You try to mend the fences you two build in your heads not even realizing there shouldn’t be any fences at all. You try everything to make each other happy all the while not even knowing you're trying to make the wrong person happy. You fight, you drift and the friendship fades away. The making up is gone, cold shoulders when you lay your head to rest and then you wake up one morning and you feel like you're sleeping next to someone you no longer know.
And it happens so fast! Just yesterday Delaiah was swinging in the tree, Elisa was making Sunday dinner, we were at my moms for birthday parties, her grandmothers for Christmas dinner, UFC BBQ’s, NA meetings, engagement party, a wedding, new cars, loved ones passing, report cards, buying a house, preteen years, all the beautiful things flying by so fast! My memories of them now, our time back then, pictures burned into my soul. I learned everything I need to know to do my part to make our marriage a success, to only learn it all to late. She will forever be my greatest teacher and sadly the recipient of my biggest mistakes. Some would say ‘some people are just not meant to be’ and maybe that’s true. Truth is that’s a complicated statement. We were meant to be, just not in the capacity we were in. I don’t believe that you have experiences as great as this if we were not meant to be. We can be forever and not have to have that physical relationship if we are willing to love one another unconditionally.
As I write this I have noticed I have no care of the remembrance of the negative, that was all I could remember for so long. I mean it’s there and I guess I could relive it if I chose to. What is odd though, when I have friends remind me of the travesty and the trial’s I went through the smoldering of a small fire starts and I fall back some into resentment, but as I said, it’s a choice and it doesn’t last long. I’m sure it’s ego that brings that on, ‘someone’ knowing what happened, ‘what she did’ and just like that I become the innocent victim in my head. Although when she doesn’t call back when I call or doesn’t text back, I do get pissy and it stirs the past. All the while forgetting I’m the ex-husband, forgetting it’s not about me and no one ever need call me back if they wish not to, no matter who I was, am or will be to them. My ego so quickly attaches to any situation, my worth so easily dictated by something so small.
For better or worse she is my ex-wife, she is my baby mama, she is my teacher, my confidant, my friend. I love her today in a way I should have loved her when all this started, unconditionally. I am there for her in a way that gives me nothing and gives her anything she needs. She is still everything beautiful I saw in her 18 years ago, she is who I secretly want to be at times, she is everything I am not capable of being. I am beyond grateful for her and everything we went through, all the love and all the pain. One day I will fall in love again and have the opportunity to be everything we taught me to be..
I thought this post was going to be more about evaluating my right and wrongs in order to not relive the left turns and cause no harm to anyone else. But it seems it has grown into what is now, what my perception believes it to be. It is about unconditional love and devotion to a person for not what they give you but for who they are. It is again about shedding ego, about forgiveness above all else. I never want to be as ugly as I was in years past, I never want to live that life of deceit and lies, towards myself and others. I want to know love, I want to be love.
Lord make me an instrument of your peace Where there is hatred let me sow love Where there is injury, pardon Where there is doubt, faith Where there is despair, hope Where there is darkness, light And where there is sadness, joy
O divine master grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console to be understood as to understand To be loved as to love For it is in giving that we receive it is in pardoning that we are pardoned And it's in dying that we are born to eternal life
-Prayer of St. Francis
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