In the beginning, I was certain and uncomfortable. I knew that being with Sean was what I was supposed to do, because he was the “right” kind of bad boy. White, college-educated, from a ‘good’ family. I knew I was safe with him and I also knew I would have to work to belong.
College presented the perfect opportunity for me to reinvent myself, or at the very least, start hiding details of my past; who I’d been before I moved into my dorm room. I was a dedicated student and hard worker – things I carried over from my old life, but I reveled in the anonymity of a bigger town and a bigger school. Nobody knew my family history – the fights and trauma and big, big losses. I could say I was interested in starting a campus NARAL chapter for political reasons and nobody had to know I’d had an abortion three weeks before I graduated high school.
I could be adjacent to Sean’s world; meet his friends, pop into a frat party for an hour, slowly sipping on one drink. But then I could slip out with excuses to study or get to work. My pre-med friends weren’t part of his world and I liked it that way.
Sean and I had fun together. We went for walks, to the movies, had lots of sex. But he also drank a lot more than I was comfortable with, did stupid frat-boy shit, made fun of my “nerdy” friends. All of that bugged me, but in a glancing-blow kind of way as opposed to a right hook to the face. It all seemed part of that ‘good’ bad boy thing, and I mostly ignored it.
He was the kind of guy who was completely comfortable in his own skin. A little cocky, but also self-assured. He had an easy smile and a way of talking that drew you in. He was charming and smart and funny and everyone loved him. He was ambitious, but not in a hurry. He had this way of letting you know he had big plans and he knew they would come to fruition one way or another. He wasn’t sure exactly how he’d get there, but he knew he would.
I had big plans, too, but my anxieties dwarfed them every minute of every day.
I could easily have broken up with him and moved on. I hadn’t started dating him because I was looking for love or something long-term. I didn’t really think I was capable of being in love with anyone. I was still working on encapsulating my trauma and grief, faking my way through pretty much every day. But there was something about our relationship that challenged my world view. Sean gave me a safe place to test my boundaries. I could be a medical assistant in a clinic that provided abortions and go visit his Republican family on their farm for the weekend. I could be a vegetarian and navigate big dinners on the cattle ranch they called home. I could be mostly sober and wryly shake my head at Sean’s drunken antics. I was learning how to be slightly myself; slightly, “acceptably” unique and independent and feminist. I appreciated the freedom to take little stands and hold my ground. I began to believe that this was how I was supposed to live my life. For years, I continued to be certain, and it was only when I realized that that certainty was always accompanied by discomfort that I was able to begin looking at all the ways I’d carved pieces of myself off or denied them oxygen in order to fit in this place with this person. And I had done it freely.
I hitched my wagon to his star, hoping that his confidence would subsume my fears and together we would soar. It worked for a long time, and then we had children and one of us had to slow the ambition-train in order to raise them. I was happy to do it, but I didn’t realize that, in doing so, I became the engine that helped propel his rise. Anna Quindlen wrote in her novel, Alternate Side, “but arranging things for someone is not the same as loving him. It’s work, not devotion.” I did love Sean, but I was also working for him, for his vision. I had mistaken it for mine.
The thing about choosing to be with someone, to become part of their life, that I didn’t realize at the time was that I was bringing all of my Self whether I wanted to or not. Whether I knew it or not. I was dragging all the parts of me that I hated and wanted to deny behind me like Linus with his filthy (and well-loved) security blanket. I tucked little nuggets of myself away, secreting them behind my spleen, in between vertebrae, lodged firmly behind my voice box. I was hoping that nobody else would find them, but I was without a doubt bringing them with me.
The longer I was part of Sean’s world, trying to integrate myself, the heavier that burden got. The sharp edges of those little nuggets I’d hidden away began to chafe, their little poky corners sitting up against my soft, fleshy parts, jabbing into nerves and sending a twang up my spine into my brain. Every time I worried about one of my kids being asked to shape themselves into something more palatable, I felt a stab. Every joke made at the expense of someone who spoke differently or was “too softhearted” turned my stomach. Every time I felt like I had to justify helping my sister by sending her money, my eye twitched. Those hidden pieces of me surfaced again and again, reminding me that if I was to be whole, I had to acknowledge them, too, and begin to integrate them instead of pretending they weren’t there.
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The differences between Sean’s life and mine were stark. His parents were still (are still) married to each other. When I met Sean, both my mother and father’s second marriages were imploding and each of them would go on to marry again. Sean’s parents were affectionate with each other; mine hated one another. Sean’s grandparents all lived within a mile of his family’s farm and they spent every holiday together, cooking and playing horseshoes and sitting on the porch, talking. I wasn’t close to my grandparents and they all lived hours away from me. He had had a seemingly Norman Rockwell childhood, full of chores on the farm, learning to drive hay truck as soon as his feet could reach the pedals, with a mom who stayed home and cooked and cleaned and a father who worked a white-collar job. My childhood held secrets and grief – sexual abuse, emotional abuse, the disappearance of my brother, Cameron.
Sean and his family seemed to be the antithesis of my family and so the calculus in my head was that if I aligned myself with him, with them, I would be protected from pain and dysfunction. That isn’t to say that I didn’t love him, and I think that is a powerful revelation; that even if he wasn’t the person I was meant to be with (if that is even a thing), I could still love him and be with him in a way that was compassionate and caring. I was able to love him even if I didn’t entirely love myself.
Over the years, Sean and I had some grand adventures and we created a beautiful family and a really amazing life. But I didn’t have the tools or the self-awareness to express what it was that I needed in order to feel truly safe to be who I was and to heal. For most of our marriage, I didn’t even know how to ask myself what I needed. That wasn’t a question I’d ever imagined was valid. And even if I had, if our relationship was to grow and be sustainable, Sean would have had to have the tools to receive that and ask me for what he needed. In that way, the end of our marriage wasn’t a tragedy at all. It was the natural conclusion of a relationship between two people who couldn’t grow together in a way that nurtured them both separately and together. Neither of us had ever been taught that it was okay to reveal all of the parts of us to one another. Indeed, we had received the opposite message – that if there were parts that were insecure, ugly, scarred, it was our job as individuals to clean up that shit, make it pretty, fix it, and then come back when we were presentable.
Someday, I will research all of the ways to remove part of one’s self that grow back. Like cutting one of the rays of a sea star off or chopping a worm in two in just the right spot so that it regenerates the missing piece. In various ways at different times, I did both of those things, even though I didn’t know that’s what I was doing.
One of the ways I did it was to make Sean’s family mine. Even when there were things about them that raised the hair on my arms – the conservative conversations at the dinner table or the easy way they judged and made fun of people who weren’t like them, I still believed that they were more acceptable than my family, with my parents who hated each other and my dad who was a notorious cheater and my mom who had given up on us. My sister who struggled with addiction and mental illness and my brother with his long hair and wardrobe of black heavy metal concert t-shirts. I believed that, even though these people were uncomfortable with my vegetarianism and the fact that I worked in an abortion clinic and had a tattoo, they were something to aspire to. I didn’t realize that I could be part of their family and grow to love them and also love my own family for who they were, unapologetically.
Even before Sean and I were married, I spent every single holiday with his family. I’d set aside little slivers of time to go see my mom and dad, but the only time I saw my siblings was when our visits to our parents’ houses coincided. Otherwise, I embraced Sean’s siblings and his grandparents and their family traditions and let myself be subsumed by them. I chose his family over mine. Unequivocally.
What happens to the ray of a starfish when it gets tossed aside? Does it entirely decompose or get eaten by a predator? I don’t honestly know. But it doesn’t really matter, because the body of the sea star retains the memory of what was in that ray and it immediately begins to build it back. I was never going to be able to discard my family or my history. It was always going to grow back because it didn’t live in that appendage.
And yet, I chopped it off ruthlessly and mercilessly, as though it were some ugly, diseased part of me. And every time it started to grow back – every time I began to wonder if I’d done something I shouldn’t have, I mistook the growing pains for disease and cut it off again. Now I know, it was just as beautiful a part of me as all the other parts. The things I learned from my dad were some of the most painful and horrible things, and also some of the most gorgeous and tender things. The things I learned from my mom, the experiences with my brother and sister, however unbearable they felt at the time, those things made me strong and capable. And it was only when I learned to integrate all of those things, the both/and, that I was able to embrace that part of me as it grew back, and thank it and see it as an important part of the whole.
It was shame that made me want to leave all of those things behind and while I knew that at the time, what I didn’t understand is that shame is this really weird thing that prompts us to take responsibility for things that we have no control over. I couldn’t have rescued Cameron if I tried, or prevented my parents from divorcing, or kept my mom from descending into her own personal hell, but I somehow felt as though those things were mine to carry and that they said something about whether or not I was worthy of belonging and love. I was so desperate to show the world that I was normal and well-adjusted, that I believed if I just didn’t tell them about my family, those experiences would cease to exist, but it doesn’t work that way. They happened and they couldn’t un-happen so while there were people who undoubtedly would judge me simply for having lived through them, ultimately I was who I was because of them, not in spite of them.
I missed an opportunity to integrate my family with Sean’s family. By distancing myself from them, I was sending the message that I believed that they were less worthy, that I agreed with what I perceived to be his family’s opinion of the “kind” of people who get divorced, struggle with mental illness, cheat on their spouses. I’m not naïve enough to believe that I could have fundamentally changed anyone’s viewpoint on those things, but I could have stood in my integrity and been outspoken about my love for my family even in the face of the fear I had about Sean’s family rejecting me. But that existential need to belong is a tricky thing, and so I danced around the edges. I embraced being a vegetarian when his family had raised cattle for years. I talked about my experiences at the abortion clinic when I knew his dad was an unabashed Rush Limbaugh fan. Somehow, those things felt like they were safer – maybe not grounds for banishment. And being honest about them gave me the illusion that I was standing up for myself and pushing the envelope. Frankly, that was the story of my marriage to Sean; calculating just where and how I could speak up and speak out enough to satisfy my desire to see myself as a feminist and an activist and an advocate, all the while denying the parts of my story that actually led me to those things.