SPEAKING OF LOST
The morning I realized Sean had moved out and it occurred to me that he’d planned this meticulously – he had a place to go and he’d been so organized that he was able to get all of his things out at once in a few hours – I felt utterly lost. Underwater. And generally, when I am overwhelmed by a sense of confusion, I am compelled to look outside of myself, cast about for someone to help me or advise me. What do I do? How do I know what’s Right? But somehow, this time, I knew that nobody would be able to answer me. Fortunately, over the next few months, I was able to work out a way to keep myself grounded by asking the following questions:
What do I want?
What do I need?
What am I willing to do to get it?
The first question sounded absurd, precisely because it was the one that was the hardest to answer. I didn’t want to be in this place in this time of my life. I didn’t want to be suffering the way I was. The only way I figured out how to begin to address the question of want was to get really granular; very small and quiet. I wasn’t asking whether I wanted to stay married; I was asking what I wanted in that particular moment as a reaction to the grief I was experiencing. That required that I get really clear about what I was feeling – which was unloved. I was feeling unloved.
There were two pitfalls with the first question. First, I could answer it in a way that was too big (I want this to not be real or I want to know what’s Right), which wouldn’t give me any focus at all. I would still find myself swimming about in this enormous body of water. Or, secondly, I could answer it in someone else’s voice – the “should” voices (You should pull out all the stops to stay married or You should kick him to the curb). I realized that when I got small and quiet, what I wanted was to feel loved. Cherished. Wanted. Important. I understand that it sounds absurd that the answer to a very granular, immediate question was enormous and diffuse and global. But it was also real and fundamental and foundational. I wanted to feel loved. Period.
The second question was designed to get at what that actually looked like. What did I need in order to feel loved? I needed Sean to be engaged, to stay and work, to communicate with me. Centering myself in this question reminded me that my needs were just as important as everyone else’s – a concept I’ve struggled with for most of my life. This question was one that kept me front and center and that made sure the voice that answered the first question was mine.
The last question was the one that told me what to do. What was I willing to do? That one took longer to answer. The stakes felt really high, but distilling my present reality down to these three questions gave me a way to move forward. For months, I asked myself these questions over and over again – not just in regards to my marriage but every time I needed to figure out what to do when the consequences felt enormous and I felt lost and underwater.
At some point, I realized that I wasn’t afraid of Sean not coming back; I was afraid he would come back and still not see me for who I really am. I was afraid that I would end up with someone who didn’t want to be with me as much as I wanted to be with them. I was afraid that I wouldn’t feel cherished, wanted, important. I needed connection, respect, and someone who made me a priority. When it became clear that Sean wasn’t going to be able to give me any of that, I had to ask whether I was willing to let him go. Did I want to feel loved and cherished enough that I was willing to forego any relationship that didn’t offer me that? Ultimately, the answer was yes. And so I filed for divorce, and while I still felt lost and sad, I also felt like I’d just come up for a sweet breath of fresh air.
I am a writer. I have been a writer for more than two decades. I started writing as a way to organize my thoughts, figure out how to understand the world and the way I saw it. I spent so much time alone when the kids were young that it wasn’t unusual for me to go days without having a conversation with another adult that didn’t revolve around logistics. I am also a philosopher – I love deep, winding, curious conversations that wonder about people and patterns and paradigms, so writing was a way for me to have those conversations with myself.
Because of other writers, I was able to find places that wanted to publish my work - anthologies, online publications, and my own blog. While I wasn’t making enough money to support myself or even add significantly to the household’s coffers, that wasn’t the point. My words were being read by other people and, for the most part, they were provoking conversation and finding spaces to resonate. It was exhilarating and it expanded my world. It was also mine. It was something that had nothing to do with mothering (although I did write about parenting often) or being Sean’s wife. It was a creative outlet and I really loved it.
It became painfully obvious early on that Sean didn’t read any of my writing. He didn’t follow my blog or seek out my essays at The Feminist Wire or Ms. Magazine (or even read them when they were shared with him). When I finished my first manuscript after three years of interviews and research and hours and hours of writing in the tiny room at the top of the house, he hugged me and said congratulations, but he never asked to see it. It felt to me as though he saw this work as a hobby, something I did in my spare time (that part is true; I did only write in the spaces between mothering and household management) like knitting or baking cakes for friends (not that those things aren’t important, too). He indulged it but didn’t necessarily support it; at least not in a way that felt like he was supporting me in it.
A few times over the years, I registered for workshops or conferences, arranging well in advance for him to clear his travel calendar so that he could stay home with the girls while I was away. All but one time, a few days before I was to go, he would email or text me to say he was so sorry, but a trip had come up that he couldn’t rearrange and I would be thrown into panic-mode, frantically reaching out to my parents or his to find someone who could take care of the girls so I could go. At the time, it certainly struck me that he wouldn’t tell me in person that his plans had changed, and it enraged me that the task of finding child-care fell to me entirely, but I never pushed back. More than once, I cancelled my plans because I knew that it was his work that paid the bills, that enabled me to stay at home and write. His work took precedence. When he was around, I started to believe that writing was a hobby. When he was gone, I knew differently. I knew that, while there was no way I could support myself financially with writing, it was still my work, and it was important.
When we sat in a therapist’s office for the first time after he emailed me to tell me how unhappy he was in our marriage, I brought up the fact that I was hurt that he didn’t read my writing. By this time, years after I started writing, I had just finished my third manuscript, a memoir, and I wanted him to want to read it. Not because there were things in it about him (although, there were, but nothing I imagined he’d object to), but because I was always paying attention to what he did – asking about his co-workers and some new project he was working on. While I cared nothing about the corporate world per se, I did care about him, and it was interesting to me to know how he spent his days, his travel, what he loved about his work and where the frustrations and challenges were. I wanted him to want to know the same about me.
The therapist asked him to respond to this and he wouldn’t look at me or say anything. I pushed a little more, “It makes me feel as though you’re patting me on the head – good girl, you wrote a book, now, go away and let the grown ups talk.” He sighed in a way that made me think he was annoyed with this whole conversation. The therapist asked if he would read it if I gave it to him. He was scheduled on a long flight to Europe the next day and I told him I’d print it out and put it on his nightstand and he could read it on the plane. The therapist nodded her head, noting that on a nine-hour flight from Seattle to London, he would surely have time to at least begin.
The morning he left, I came upstairs to shower after dropping the girls at school and the rubber-banded stack of papers that was the culmination of nearly a decade of my hard work sat neatly next to his alarm clock. He had left it behind.
Several weeks later, when he was back in town, we reconvened with the therapist (for the second and final time, it would turn out), and she inquired whether he’d read it or not. We sat on opposite ends of the couch facing her and I could see him squirm out of the corner of my eye. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of looking at him directly. He admitted he hadn’t.
“Why?” she asked gently as tears slid from the corners of my eyes.
He sighed impatiently and cocked his head, looking at her and steadfastly avoiding me. “I don’t want to give her false hope. I know how badly she wants it to be published and I don’t know if it will happen, so I don’t want to read it and tell her it’s good and have her heart break if it doesn’t get published.”
Of all the answers I could have imagined him giving, this was not anywhere near the spectrum of things I expected him to say. I barked out a short, scornful laugh, directly from the lower regions of my intestines. This man whose papers I had helped write in college, who hadn’t ever written anything for fun or for passion, whose pleasure reading amounted to approximately two Tom Clancy novels per year was afraid that if he told me he liked my writing, I would assume it was a gift from the literary gods, a veritable guarantee that it was good enough to be published for a wide audience. He thought I wanted his seal of approval, his pat on the back, his “good job!” for my work and he was afraid he couldn’t give it. Or that, even if he could, I wouldn’t ever feel as though it was valid or important unless and until my book was published, acknowledged by some larger system of capitalism that deals in money-as-sole-determiner-of-value.
“You think I’m asking you to read what I write so that you can critique it? So that I can know if it is good enough?”
I felt so condescended to. This was the last bit of confirmation that I needed to fully understand that he saw himself as superior to me, more knowledgeable, more valuable and important. A sick feeling in my stomach spread, as if I’d swallowed tar. The feeling I’d had about him patting me on the head like some cute little kid was really how he saw me as a writer. He thought he was more important than me – his life partner, the mother of his children, the person he entrusted his entire home life to.
“I wanted you to read it because it is important to me. Because it comprises some of my most deeply held beliefs and my history, ideas of how I came to be the person I am and how my earlier experiences shaped me…”
“I know all that. I know your story,” he replied, flapping his hand at me (or not, I don’t exactly recall whether he did that or not, but that is what it felt like).
I gave up. I was done. I wiped my eyes with a tissue and knew that we might not recover from this. I remembered all of the dinner parties I’d sat through with his colleagues, listening with interest to his stories and ideas about how to better connect with clients; every evening I had paid close attention to the frustrations of his day – with co-workers and bosses and employees – and offered suggestions and sympathy. I had not done any of that because I longed to be part of his corporate world or validate the way he spent his days, but because I was interested in him as a human being and I wanted to know how he felt about the things he spent his time doing. I wanted to continue knowing him more deeply as a person and a father and a boss. In that moment, I was finally able to admit to myself that he had no such sentiment about me, no similar desire to know who I was and how I was changing and growing and what I cared most deeply about. He thought he already knew me, but the me he’d met when I was 17 was very, very different from the me he sat ignoring at the opposite end of the therapist’s couch and he didn’t seem to know or care.
Once I left my paying job to stay home and care for our children, I sunk in his estimation. Being the homemaker and nurturer of our family made me important but not equal. Did he see my days spent with children as monotonous and boring, empty of any actual intellectual value or interest for an important tech executive? My education qualified me to sit at those dinners and have conversations with his colleagues, but in his eyes did I really have nothing to add that was my own? Was I so uninteresting to him that he had no desire to know who I was becoming, how I saw the world? Slowly, it dawned on me that I had been aware of this for a long, long time, this gap between our relative importance in his mind. I had accepted it, ignored it, and tried to just keep doing the things I felt most deeply about, rather than confronting it. But like many of the things I was discovering, once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.
FILE UNDER “THINGS I WISH I’D KNOWN”
You can’t be in a loving, committed relationship with someone you’re in competition with.
Things that count as “competition”:
Keeping score – Silently tallying up all the times you asked the other person to do something important for you and they didn’t or couldn’t or wouldn’t, and measuring that against all the times you did things for them that they asked
Measuring relative worth – Paying attention to the number of times they’ve been promoted or highlighted at work for doing exceptional things and laying that down against all of the times you went above and beyond at home without any such notice. Wondering if that is because your work isn’t paid or supervised by anyone other than your children. Feeling inadequate and unnoticed for your efforts and resentful that your partner doesn’t care.
For a long time after Sean left, I kept score. I became more and more angry and resentful as I calculated the hours and emotional labor that came with parenting our children through a painful split. Whereas before, I had tallied up what I believed I owed Sean – the time he took two days off work when I expressed to him that I was suicidal, the time he left a meeting and raced home to drive me to the ER when I passed out and split my chin open on the hardwood floor, the European vacations we took thanks to his frequent flier miles and enormous salary - I had no rubric for calculating my efforts at home. They were not in service to my college degrees. They garnered no salary.
But after he left, the division of labor that had existed for decades became more starkly obvious since the girls lived with me and visited him whenever he was in town, but never stayed overnight at his place. They had fun with him. We did homework, had tearful, sometimes rageful discussions, fed pets, cleaned the house, and applied to colleges. They went out to dinner with him, visited grandparents and had raucous holiday celebrations with their cousins.
It was a year or more before I realized I was swimming in the stew of toxic masculinity – one of the hallmarks of which is competition; the assignation of a Winner and a Loser. The notion that our children might be actively choosing one of us over the other, weighing attributes and calculating our relative worth kept me in fear. And it flew in the face of what I know to be true; namely that rarely is life about Either/Or. Patriarchy wants us to believe in binaries, but life is nearly always Yes/And. The girls can love their father and have a ball with him, and also love me and enjoy my company.
Sean and I are very different people. Honestly, we always have been, and while sometimes I didn't understand why he made certain choices, I never wanted to control his choices. That's not to say I didn't wish he had different motivations, because I for sure wished that sometimes, but on some level I always knew that I didn't get to be in charge of someone else's values. But after he left and we lived in two different households and interacted with the girls in very different ways, I found myself wishing I could somehow force him to conform, to want different things. And when he didn't (I mean, who wouldn't choose to be the fun parent who entertained kids if they could get away with it?), I felt somehow both morally superior and rageful. But focusing on who the kids liked better or who was working harder was feeding right in to that paradigm of competition.
Knowing and doing are two different things, though. So even though I saw it, it was still hard to stay in my own lane and know that I can make choices about what is important to me and where I want to put my time and efforts, and also not succumb to the rules of the broken systems around me. What I cannot do is get any sort of real power or agency from a system that was set up to disadvantage me. I can take crumbs here and there, but I will never be truly free to live the way I want to live unless and until I discard all of the lessons of patriarchy that have been stitched to the fabric of my skin for nearly six decades. On paper, my years of work look useless. Especially up against his resume. But it’s not a competition. My work, my efforts, my intentions have all been valuable and enhanced our lives whether or not they garnered a paycheck. I am not measured against Sean. I am measured against my own integrity and decisions, patriarchy be damned. It was time for me to start acknowledging the inherent value of what I offered to the children independent of how it measured up against what anyone else did and from there, I could fight for what we needed to thrive.
What do you do with the wedding pictures… (sung to the tune of Drunken Sailor)
Will the kids want to see them someday, to be reminded – or assured – that their parents were in love, that they chose each other, that they were happy? Deciding what to keep and what to discard is tricky when you’re angry and resentful. Is it hasty to go through boxes and boxes of candid shots from our wedding and honeymoon and anniversary trips and discard photo after photo? I can’t imagine ever sitting down and looking at most of these with any sort of warmth, but I could be wrong.
SPEAKING OF LOST
There are so many ways to be lost, underwater, without any landmarks. I’m a person who doesn’t remember street names. I give directions based on landmarks – go to the intersection where there is a traffic light and a Burger King and turn right, then go four blocks and turn left onto the street with the pink house on the corner. I also do directions – East, West, North, South. But since I moved to Santa Barbara in May of 2021, that’s harder. The coastline here runs East/West, not North/South, so when I expect the sun to set over the water like it did most of my childhood and early adulthood, I’m always wrong. I feel turned a bit sideways.
I was the kid who never “knew” Right from Left. If you pointed to my feet and asked which one was the right foot and which the left, I used my thumb to feel for the callous I got from writing with a pencil at the top of the inside knuckle of my second finger on both hands to know which one was my right hand and then answer. I got confused (frankly, I still do) by the fact that your Right wasn’t my Right if we were facing each other. I also struggle to read directions for assembling IKEA furniture because there are only pictures. Please, give me words. My brain doesn’t see things in three dimensions.
When I was younger, I wanted a road map. Tell me what I’m supposed to do and I’ll do it. Give me the rules and I’ll impress you with my ability to follow them. Give me a scenario where the rules get broken and there are no consequences or even an admission that someone broke the rules, and I am lost. When my brother Cameron was taken away without explanation, I was lost. If I don’t know why, what happened, whose fault it was, I can’t make sure it doesn’t happen again. I can’t even begin to try and undo it, reel it back in, explain so you realize it was all a misunderstanding, and beg for another chance to do better.
When Sean left, I felt that way again. Lost. If I don’t know what I did wrong, what you need that I’m not giving you, I can’t fix it. I keep swimming toward you and you keep floating farther away. It’s exhausting. Eventually, you disappear past the horizon and I go underwater, to a new world without landmarks. It’s unfamiliar. I can’t breathe here.
"Lost" also happens when I don’t have purchase, when everything I grab onto is slippery or crumbles beneath my fingers. When Sean was sick and the doctors couldn’t help us and Sean would rather pretend he wasn’t a hair’s breadth from dying every few months, the only ground beneath my feet was parenting. Feed the girls. Put them to bed. Bathe them. Focus on immediate needs. At some point, it became necessary to ask Big Questions – what is this? Why is it happening? What can we do to fix it? But when nobody has answers, when the people in the white coats with years of school under their belts shrug their shoulders and shake their heads, where do we go with our questions?
When I talk to people about Cameron, I generally say, “I lost a brother when I was a kid.” Most of them assume that means he died, but if he had, I’d say it that way. Although, ‘lost’ isn’t exactly accurate, either. I didn’t lose him. He was taken away. But because my parents never told me where he went or why, or allowed me to see or speak with him again, I kind of did lose him. I spent decades trying to find him, but to me, he remains lost.
For a while, after I moved to Santa Barbara, away from Seattle and the friends and connections I made there over nearly 30 years, I was lost. After living in this new place for a year, I still felt lost some days, in the sense that I couldn’t see a clear path ahead. I was without a career goal or deep relationships. I was simply there. I used to wrestle with that distinction – feeling lost but also being here. It’s not as though I didn’t do anything; I made friends, I wrote and wrote and wrote, I drove down to LA visit Lauren from time to time and I texted Erin every day. But I didn’t have a goal, a strategy, a set of tasks that were all focused on one cohesive plan.
Sean is strategic. I am not. I am not a chess player. I don’t want to think several steps ahead, imagining different scenarios and planning for each one. That is what I excelled at as a kid, but only in times of crisis. Even today, when a friend or one of my kids texts me in a panic, I am skilled at walking through the “what ifs.” Having a plan in case of disaster has always given me a sense of calm, which was why I was an excellent surgical assistant – I had routes, scenarios, exit strategies. But in times of calm, I’d rather be in the moment.
Buddhist teachings about the ‘not-knowing’ mind have always frustrated me. I joke about being a recovering control freak, but in truth, most of the important lessons in my life have been about getting comfortable with the notion that I can’t know what will happen next. I wonder, can I ever feel safe in that space? I know I’m better at it than I ever have been, if only because of the unimaginable things, the unpredictable ones that have presented themselves to me. But this feeling that I need to have a plan persists. When people ask me what I’m going to do, how my life in Santa Barbara will play out, as a single woman, as an empty-nester, as a newly published author, I feel this pressure to have a tidy answer that makes sense. And yet, looking back at all of the things that have happened in my life that I didn’t plan for – many of them miraculous and amazing – part of me feels like I couldn’t possibly know; that making a plan is setting myself up for frustration or disappointment.
I think about all of the people who inspire me, who I look up to. Those people embody their purpose and passion, trust their instincts and intuition, and most of them didn’t follow a traditional path. They don’t lead with fear, they walk with it or through it. When I think about my desire for a clear path, I imagine it laid out in front of me, rather than this thing I’m doing now, where I lay one cobblestone at a time down so that I can step forward, breathing, focused. It feels a little precarious, and at some point, I had hoped that the groundwork I’ve done would be laid and the path would be there, shining and solid before me, so that all I had to do was follow it. But the only way to have that is to go backwards because I haven’t yet laid the path in front of me.
I have to just keep building, one stone at a time, asking over and over again, “is this who I am? Is this what I want?” And in a way, maybe the most important way, that is exactly how I keep myself grounded, how I make sure I’m moving forward with intention, according to my own passion and purpose. Laying each brick one at a time with care and determination is maybe the point. Maybe the point isn’t to show anyone else where I’m going in a way that they understand, but to just do the work, to ask the questions: what is most important and true today? What is the highest and best expression of myself? What is the next right step? If I embody those things, I will be focused on the work and able to respond to each new thing as it comes up. I will be able to pay attention to the things alongside the path that delight me and make me curious. And when I can’t answer the question, ‘what is the next right step?’ it’s okay to be still for a while and listen. I do not have to be moving in order to be purposeful. There is movement around me, it’s okay to stop and feel connected to all of it and be informed by it. That is a concept I wasn’t taught by patriarchy, that it is okay to stop and assess and admit I don’t know.
It is far more uncomfortable for me to feel lost than it is to think I’m on the wrong path, but I’m beginning to wonder if I can ever really be lost. Even if I don’t know where I am in space and time, I’m still somewhere. Even if I don’t recognize the landmarks, I exist. As long as I can feel where I am connected to the ground beneath me and notice the breath in my lungs, I’m okay. When I stop frantically seeking a path, I can stop feeling lost and just find my footing and begin again.
I realize that this new part of my life is not a reimagining or a rebuilding of my identity because I’m not starting from scratch. I am bringing with me all of the things I’ve done and learned and experienced. This time is a deep-breath-leaping to the next platform, an expansion. I am not chopping off the path behind me as I move forward, I am in this place because of the path behind me. And even if I thought I knew what my life might look like when I left home for college or moved to Seattle after college or got married to Sean, I didn’t. And to think that I might prescribe what comes next is actually doing myself a disservice. It is me limiting my own imagination. Maybe being underwater without any landmarks right now is where I’m supposed to be, swimming in a new place and exploring the new things that surround me.