I have a few all-time favorite books. They are the ones I read once a year, going over my old highlighter marks and dog-eared pages and remembering, and they also teach me something new every time. They are the books I give as gifts to dear friends because I know how important they are and that they have something for everyone. David Whyte’s The Three Marriages is one of those books.
I first read it at the prompting of my friend Linda, who knew of David because of his poetry and the workshops he teaches in the Pacific Northwest and around the world. And while David is a masterful poet, this book is prose, and it is astonishing in its ability to elicit audible gasps from me over and over again.
David turns the whole idea of work-life balance on its ear in this book, defining the three ‘marriages’ as our relationship to Self, purpose, and other (he means intimate partner, but over the years, I’ve come to understand that this can be any significant relationships in our life – friends, family, beloveds). Through a series of gorgeous stories and incredible insights, he explains that these three relationships need to be in harmony with one another, reciprocal and nurturing of the others, in order for us to be whole and well. Most of us walk around believing that we have to “balance” these things, stealing time from our marriages and self-nurturing in order to work, or stealing time from our work in order to shore up our own personal well-being or spend time with a partner. But, David says, the magic comes when we don’t see these things as slices of a finite pie, but as things that give each other energy and allow them to grow. He writes that, ideally, our relationship to each of those three things should feed and nurture the others and be fed and nurtured by them as well.
For so long, I pressured Sean to spend less time at work so that he could be home more with us. I was annoyed and then irritated and then often enraged at his travel schedule, and he tried to make up for it by taking us on weeks-long vacations every year and completely shutting off from work. For my part, I neglected my passions and purpose and my own self to put all of my efforts into being a mother and wife, supporting Sean’s work by making home not his to worry about. We both had some vague notion that these things needed to zero out on some balance sheet (the work and the home life), and it never felt good to either of us. But more than that, we were both almost completely ignoring our relationship to Self, buckling under the pressure of work and family.
David writes that these three relationships need to honor, recognize, and feed each other in order for us to thrive. Our connection to our Self, the understanding of who we really are and what we need to feel safe and cared for, should be intimately aligned with our purpose (whether or not that is paid work is another conversation entirely) and the two should be in communication. How does who I am inform the way I show up in the world? How does the way I show up in the world inform who I am? How do they support each other? Likewise, our relationship with an intimate, loving partner will ideally enhance and support our idea of who we are as individuals and the kind of work we do in the world, and both of those things will offer support to our partner as well.
When Sean didn’t celebrate my writing successes, comment on my revelations about my own healing from childhood trauma, pay attention to the way I was choosing to spend my energy with the girls and volunteering, my relationship with him became separate from who I was as a person. I was showing up as a compartmentalized version of myself in our marriage, and I suspect he was, too, although neither of us had the language or awareness to talk about it that way. We were both taught that success looked like getting married, owning a home, having a secure income that rose incrementally every year, and not fighting with your spouse. We checked all of those boxes. We added boxes like buying a new car every three years or so, vacationing in Hawaii and Europe, and sending our kids to private school. And we were both carving off pieces of ourselves to make that happen.
It’s no wonder we stopped having sex. Most of my needs for physical intimacy were met by the girls – by breastfeeding, cuddling, playing. What I didn’t realize then that I know now is that it is impossible for me to feel a sexual attraction to someone who makes me feel inadequate in some way whether they know it or not. Anytime either of us felt as though we had to keep some part of ourselves separate from the relationship – whether he avoided talking about work because he knew I wanted him present with us at home or I didn’t bother to tell him about a new essay I’d written because I knew he wouldn’t read it anyway – we were cutting off the flow of energy that could have sustained our relationship. So much of our day-to-day lives had become transactional and focused on accomplishing tasks with little spurts of trying to connect emotionally and physically, but we hadn’t nurtured that part of our connection all along the way.
I once had the great good fortune of being in the same place as Gloria Steinem for several days. When I gathered the courage to talk to her about writing and my frustrations with my writing project and she asked me about my life (at that point, the girls were in middle school and my dad was dying and life felt incredibly overwhelming; my writing took place in the spaces in between shoring up everyone else’s world), she cocked her head and took a deep breath.
“In my experience, if you want to have X at the end (be a writer, have joy, or love, or ease), you have to be practicing X all along the way, or else you risk not recognizing it when you get ‘there’ – if there is a ‘there’ there.” At the time, I took that to mean that I had to write some portion of every day if I wanted to be a writer, that I had to practice that thing. But over and over again in the years that came after that amazing conversation, I realized it truly did apply to everything just like she said. Sean and I hadn’t had connection all along the way, so how could we expect to feel connected at some future point in our lives when things “settled down”? We didn’t show the care and consideration for each other as a general practice. We didn’t feed the connection by feeding each other’s relationship to our own passions and purpose. That was the last thing on the priority list for a long, long time.
These days, I am not interested in being in relationship with anyone who doesn’t understand that writing is an integral part of who I am, that being a mother is vitally important to me, who acknowledges, recognizes, and embraces all of the parts of me. I don’t want to be with someone who feels threatened by the time I spend nurturing my own well-being or engaging in my passions, but who has an appreciation for all the ways that those efforts can enhance our connection to each other.
I mourn for the younger me and the younger Sean – the ones who thought we were doing it all “right.” We were such good students of the world, believing that tending to our souls was unnecessary, and that finding good work wasn’t about nurturing our selves, but creating wealth. I mourn for all the ways we hid and crushed and lopped off pieces of who we really were and ignored the pleas of our passions to pay attention so that we could keep checking off those boxes. I am sad that we both probably felt it when our connection faltered and acutely aware that neither of us had the tools to know what to do about it.
Toko-pa Turner said, “Even the forms of belonging that are enduring … only perpetuate through our willingness to allow them to grow and take shape.” When Sean and I were hiding away portions of ourselves in small, dark closets, we were starving them of connection, nurturing, growth. During the times when I forget who I am at my core, if I have connection to my purpose and someone who can help me remember, I know I’ll be okay. I’ll find my way back. When I’m faltering in my understanding of what my purpose is, where my passions lie, being in connection with what makes me Kari and another person who can mirror that back to me, helps me find my way back. And luckily, once I got crystal clear about who I am becoming and what I really want to spend my time and energy doing, I found a relationship with someone who happily embraces all of that, nurtures it and is fed by it. I have the language and the determination to make that a priority and a practice now.
THE TRAPS OF CAPITALISM/PATRIARCHY/COLONIALISM
· Binary
· Urgency
· Logic
· Easy Answers
· Hiding
· Comfort
· Progress
· Hierarchy
· Exclusivity
· Judgment
· Work
The beauty of divorcing myself from so many of these old paradigms and rules and binaries is that I have come back into myself. I am so much more clear on who I am and what my gifts are than I ever was. I know what feeds me and what doesn’t, what feels soul-nourishing and what shrivels my soul. I am comfortable not answering right away if I don’t know. Urgency and certainty are a trap of the patriarchy and white supremacy. I get to take as much time as I want to discern whether something feels good or not and determine whether I need to set boundaries. I get to honor the cycles of my own life – today I might write for four hours and clean the entire house and walk the dogs twice and do some grocery shopping and read for a while and tomorrow I might nap two times and watch television and sit on the beach for an hour staring at the waves. It’s all okay. I have rhythms just like every other living thing and I know that recognizing when I am depleted or in need of rest is one of the most important things I can do for myself and other people in my life.
SPACE MOUNTAIN, BABY
Space Mountain is my favorite ride at Disneyland and it has been for as long as I can remember. (Well, my kids would tell you I dragged them to the Tiki Room every single time we went, too, and they’re not wrong – I love those little animatronic birds and their goofy songs, but that’s not the point). For those who aren’t familiar with it, Space Mountain is a roller coaster that you ride entirely inside, in the dark. You strap in and are immediately plunged into total blackness, not knowing whether the track turns left or right or will take you up a steep hill or race downward until your heart is in your throat. Some people find that terrifying. I find it freeing, and it is exactly how I feel about my life right now, but it’s because I know I’m safe. That no matter what comes, I have the resources to manage it. That is what severance has done for me.
I am firmly in the “fuck around and find out” phase of my life and it is glorious. Now that I know exactly who I am and that I am not willing to compromise that for anyone, I am strapped in to the roller coaster. I trust that it is well built and will keep me safe, and whatever life brings me is just fine. It is exhilarating. I have decided that I am open to whatever the Universe brings me. I will be presented with something and then I get to discern whether or not it is right for me at this time in my life.
All of those years when I was frantically trying to make goals and plans and contingencies for when things went sideways, I was taking care of business but I wasn’t taking care of myself. Every time I wake up and make some plan about how things will go, I am artificially limiting the possibilities of any given day. When I can wake up and know that whatever comes to me is something I get to choose or not, when I stay open to everything, the possibilities are endless. If my first 54 years on the planet have taught me anything, it is that I can weather big crises and manage challenges I never imagined I’d face. I know how to access my resources, call in help and receive it, and have faith in my own abilities. In the end, my mantra was right:
I am safe.
I am loved.
I have resources.
I deserve joy.