Something So Wonderful
Living in these pandemic days adds another layer of “surreal” to the lives of wives and partners of CASRD men (compulsive abusive sexual-relational disordered) men. Our own trauma symptoms are beginning to be normalized simply by a more common circumstance of real risk, isolation, and a sense of powerlessness.
No, this is not the “something so wonderful” to which the title refers. But for those of us who are working on how to recognize the signs of real hope in our lives (see last week’s blog video link) this can seem like a strange time of terrible anxiety and blinding wonder, both.
Like so many of you, I am very tired. The news that comes to me from a single person I’m meeting on my computer screen somehow has achieved the same scale as what news anchors are reporting nationally and internationally. I’m waiting for my client in Italy’s test results. I’m waiting for my client’s test results here in my own city. One of favourite homegrown YouTube reselling couples from my home province shared the hard news of her father’s sudden death from Covid-19. Viewers knew him from the various crazy projects they undertook with him as a helper on camera. He was one year younger than me. Another client’s online appointment is interrupted by a phone call about someone’s death from the virus. I am very tired. And sometimes my tears must fall.
In giving myself to full sorrow, I also remember that I am aligning my life with hope. But I am writing this on Good Friday. And we have come early to the tomb to find it already full. The tether line to hope is stretching thin.
But something so wonderful is already at work in the world. Something carried in us and raising its head to say “Look at me. Look at me. Look at me.” So I looked. And this is what I saw.
(video should be posted at end of this blog to view quickly)
I turned 64 this week. And here I am looking at something that in my childhood and youth, was unimaginable to me, not just impossible. Girls could be teachers, nurses and secretaries (until they had children—then it was over) and that was great if that’s what you wanted to be. Boys could choose from a banquet of things. That’s just how it was.
But here in this video I was looking at more female physicians in one spot than I had ever seen in my 64 years. Nothing could have prepared me for how that both comforted, healed and inspired me. But that’s not all. These women were leading us through this pandemic—with brilliant minds, training, skills, commitment, caring, courage and SINGING!!!!!! They took time, in the midst of all that, to sing hope for us—for you and me and everyone.
Something so wonderful.
Suddenly I was so grateful to have lived long enough to see something so wonderful as this. I was “grateful-ed” into a release of so much effort and work and grief in my own life that they changed my tears from worry and sorrow into tears of wonder and hope. Once again, I am aligned with hope. Solid. Bunking in. Grounded. Tethered.
One of the more difficult challenges I put have before readers many times and many ways is the consideration of what it is that we are teaching and modeling for our children in the choices we make after discovering a life partner has a secret life. This is not a cute secret life, it’s one that violates our core values, the core values of the relationship and the core values of the family. Looking back I can see my confusion and desperation before finally returning to those values and living them out for myself and for my young adult sons to witness. I remember the agony of those decisions, and the moment when I told them I was divorcing their father. Without a moment’s hesitation, each one affirmed that decision. “Good.” “That’s the right thing to do.” I became aware of their agony over what I was going to do. They loved and still love their father, but as it turns out, they had known more of their father’s secret life than I did, and sooner than I did. As their lives unfolded in the years since, and they too had to make decisions about relationships of every kind, the witness of that decision grounded in core values that I made gave me a currency in our conversations I could not have imagined. They each learned in their twenties what it took me to my fifties to learn. They made their own decisions. And they honored themselves in making them by honoring their core values.
But I have to wonder how different my life would have been had I seen women pursuing hopes and dreams that were like the ones I had for my life, once! How different would my life have been if I was not socialized at home, school and church to quash my strengths, bend my joy, and worry about men and their lives more than my own. Would I have wasted three decades of my life on a man who was his mother’s psychological slave, and intended that me and our children should pay for that? I sought help before marrying him and after. But not one professional, friend, or family member did anything but affirm my socialized priorities with which I was expressing real conflict for good reasons. Not one. It was always turned back onto me.
It sounds overstated when I write that, but that is exactly what happened. And so, it took a long time for me to stop trying to “help” a life partner who took the love and loyalty of his wife and children and used it to create a secret life that harmed us to the core of our beings. After all, how much is too much to sacrifice when that’s all you are socialized to do (besides being a “nice” girl?)
This week my mailbox held more messages from women whose greatness we may never know. Their “something so wonderful” may not have the opportunity to sing its hope and joy into the lives of those who need it. These are women still trapped. They sing that their husbands are such great fathers (except for modeling misogyny, lying, manipulation, disrespect betraying family core values, and putting the family’s security at risk, etc.) They sing about his feelings instead of singing what their own feelings are telling them. They sing against women standing up for themselves and their children. My heart breaks over each message. I have been these women, too. I understand. But I cannot affirm it any longer. They are losing their one precious life to a sacrifice with no redemptive value. And the whole world loses too. For no one can take their place in this world. Will they save themselves? We do not know. But we do know how hard it is to do that, and the price some pay for it. May they have strength.
And then there were the messages from women who still check in, after finding their core values again and choosing to live a life in which they lived out those values not just for others, but for themselves, too.
Yes, the biggest lesson is learning that our core values are not just what we bring to the world and its people—they are what we give ourselves to honor the sacred worth of our lives, too.
Something so wonderful. Even after everything we went through at home, at work, and at school, we did not completely forget the tune to the song we had to sing. And we are singing it again.
Make no mistake. We are all in a choir. And we are all singing something. Our children are listening. Our neighbours are listening. Our co-workers are listening. Our fellow members of faith communities are listening. Sometimes, even the whole world is listening.
What are you singing? What is your song—the true song of your life?
Something so wonderful. Something worth going back for.
“We rise again in the faces of our children.
We rise again in the voices of our song.”
Sing your song.
With you,
Diane.