Chapter 3: More beautiful

Beautiful Women

Women sit or move to and fro, some old, some young,

The young are beautiful – but the old are more beautiful than the young.

-       Walt Whitman, Voyages: Poems

I get it that human fathers are fallible, but heavenly fathers are supposed to be perfect, and maybe even predictable? I wasn’t expecting the mysterious capriciousness of my heaven father during some dark years of my marriage. There were many months of feeling like I was psychically confined to a single dark room with scant movement or light.

Dad’s illness and dying in 1999 was juxtaposed with what turned out to be the final year of four years of marital infidelity. I struggled intensely and had deep questions around feeling rejected and alone during that time. It might help to back up to closer to the beginning of those years.

During the first fifteen years following our most intense marital difficulties, I both desired and loathed to recant the story; I would put off writing it out, yet still be inextricably drawn to transcribe it onto the page. I asked myself: why revisit those times and relive the pain? Often I wasn’t sure it was wise. I started and I stopped. There were times when I spent a few afternoon hours emerged in those difficult years as I read over my journaling and by evening I was a mess: tearful and discouraged. But as time has passed, I grew more distant from the pain.

Times does heal, along with many good and grand moments together with Gregg. Gregg is a kind, decent, warm, witty, all-around good man and husband. Much time has moved me toward understanding Gregg’s perspective and extending empathy for those most difficult years. I am not the easiest person to live with: I am too often melancholy, critical, cold. Less than compliant to Gregg’s attempts to make me happy. Unfixable. Unaffirming. For a time, Gregg maybe needed me to be something other than I was. 

Gregg has his side of the story and I welcome his telling. I can say this much: I know that his regret for some of his choices runs deep. I hope and think he has forgiven himself and forgiven me. He hung in there with us and worked as hard as anyone could to make things right again and love us well. He continues to work diligently at our relationship and love his family and me so well. Please keep Gregg’s goodness in mind while reading what follows in my story, knowing that my story is not the whole story. Gladly, from the perspective of now, around two decades later, the story reveals light emanating from the experiences that seemed dark: goodness of what has been gained, a beauty of metamorphoses.

What does the psalmist mean by "darkness is as light?" (Psalm 139:12) Does darkness overcome the light? Or does darkness lead us to light? Or, even though we attempt to name what is darkness and what is light, do we not really know the difference? Sometimes seemingly dark stuff turns out to be light producing.

"The wound is the place where the light enters you." 
- Jalaluddin Rumi

My tendency is to equate wound with darkness: or so the infidelity seemed. But if it (wound/pain/dark) lets in light, then maybe it's not so dark?

The writing of this story is an attempt to give attention to this stuff—not only the concentrated difficult years of our marriage, but to all of what has formed and transformed me, dark and light. 

In Writing the Sacred Journey, author Elizabeth J. Andrew relays that Anne Frank wrote in her diary, “I want to write, but more than that I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried in my heart.” A similar expression is offered by author Andrew, “The longing I feel today, poised at the keyboard, is the press of the Sacred yearning to emerge. When we write, we help bring holiness to birth. Writing is a way to participate in the world and in its continued creation.”

I too feel the press of the Sacred yearning to emerge, allowing Reality to transform whatever life brings into Love.

So, back to a beginning: not the only beginning, but a start of a difficult absence of answers and considerable personal darkness.