Lady Down on Love

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The day Todd told me he didn't love me anymore, and that in fact he had not loved me for awhile, something inside me broke clean in two.  Our marriage had been unhealthy for a few years; there had hardly been a rest in the fighting.  When he told me what he had probably been holding onto for more than a year, he was sitting at the kitchen table.  It was dim in there, with only the light on over the kitchen stove.  The shadows kept his face hidden, but I saw the flash in his eyes.  A dangerous, stinging thing.  It was March, just a few years ago.  

I remember feeling sorrowful, as though my heart had fallen to the floor and cracked into a thousand pieces. I remember feeling regretful for all the many things I had done wrong, but would never be forgiven for.  The place in my chest where my heart belonged felt an ache so full of repentance and remorse and imperfect contrition.  And now?  Now there was an even bigger hole than before.  

It was not angry, the way he said it.  It was from a low and honest place, which I still appreciate to this day.  What now?  I asked myself.

The next day, I didn't work.  I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror full-on as I pulled my straw-like hair back into a ponytail.  Boy, I had really let myself go!  I had always been plain; approachable, comfortable, familiar in that disappointing girl-next-door way, and not at all ostentatious or one to be voted Most Attractive in high school, and I felt perfectly fine with that.  But there, beneath the stark fluorescent light bar in the bathroom, I studied pale white skin, freckles and moles sprinkled all over my body like a crazy man's dot-to-dot.  Pendulous breasts from nursing three kids, crummy  bras, or genetics (take your pick) looked back not at me, but instead at the floor.  I saw stretch marks and the Cesarean section scar from the twins, and a disproportionate backside that I personally thought  revolting.  What I lacked in appearance, though, I could outperform in personality and wit and knowledge of random trivia accumulated by memorizing Trivial Pursuit game cards in my bedroom as an only child growing up, and so I prided myself on these things.  Those attributes were my calling cards.  Those quirks, I thought, would be the ones that would surely set me apart from competitors. They were supposed to be pieces of the puzzle that could only be understood by someone who chose to love me for me.  But now here I was 15 years into marriage --  and sweatsuits, stained tee-shirts, and the rare occasion (class reunions, weddings we were invited to but only I would attend) I'd even bother with makeup snuck up on me and became my way of life, my very code for survival.  His  flirting had stopped some 10 years before.  The loving look of adoration in his eyes stopped shortly after that.  Were these a few of the reasons why he no longer loved me?  Small gestures that had occurred early on eventually fizzled into extinction, and I realized I was no longer the woman he had married.  What now? 

I felt that same panicky feeling I had gone to bed with only the night before.  The feeling was curled low in my belly and just lay there like a rock.  I wanted to run as fast as I could for as long as I could, and I really did not want to come back to this sharp and jagged place in my life.  I put my children on the school bus, and I wept as I watched them walk to the end of the driveway to catch it.  Our lives were about to change, and I had no idea what that looked like.  My poor babies!  They had not asked for any of this, and yet here they were, walking to Bus #7 just as they'd done the day before, and the day before that.  What now?  

I secured the house and slid behind the wheel of the van.  Numb, I drove to the filling station and fueled up.  Anticipating the next logical thing to do in a situation like this, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.  Which way should I drive?  What now?  

I had been right to head south via the backroads.  What I desperately longed for was for my mind to uncrinkle, to breathe, to present to itself a cure for a problem it had not, until now, known it had.  Rather than the back of an airline seat or endless, identical rest stops on the interstate, I saw farmhouses in the middle of protective stands of trees, silos reaching for the sky, barns faded to the soft red of tomato soup.  The weather everywhere stayed promisingly warm, and people seemed edgily grateful -- what could this mean, 75-degree weather in early March?  I drove through one small town where old people sat on rockers on front porches, and kids (probably truants!) tore around corners on bikes, and young mothers, jackets tied around their waists, proudly pushed their babies in strollers. 

I passed white wooden churches, red brick schools, stores with names familiar only to the locals, and movie theaters offering a single choice.  I saw cats stationed in living room windows, horses switching tails against clouds of gnats, cows in pastures grouped together like gossips.  These scenes seemed imbued with a beauty richer than normal; they seemed so perfect as to have been staged.  Tears fell as I tried to take everything in.  Still dumbfounded, I felt very much like a stricken cartoon character who'd been hit on the head with an overly-exaggerated gray hammer, the throbbing red and large lump rising up out of my skull the only outward indication of my pain.  And yet...I had a peace in my heart I will probably never be able to understand.  I felt as though I were driving through a museum full of pastoral bas-reliefs, and I took in the details that way, with wonder and appreciation.  That was the tolerable part of my new vulnerability, the positive side of feeling my heart had migrated out of my body to hang on my chest like a necklace.  

There was an infinite variety of trees, and I felt ashamed to know the names of so few of them.  I have always been like this, the longing desire and the guilty responsibility to know lots of things about so many things.  I used to believe it was my duty to know the current phase of the moon as well as the names of trees and flowers and birds -- at least the local ones! -- and always felt that if those things were front and center in people's brains, maybe such a connection to nature would help to make us more civilized.  But I was as guilty as anyone; the only tree I knew beyond pines and willows and poplars was the apple tree, and that was only because of the fond memories I had of picking apples in my great-grandma and grandpa Neal's front yard.  I passed massive-trunked trees standing powerful and alone, and imagined how in summer their leafy canopy would provide a gigantic circle of welcome shade.  I passed a group of reedy saplings bending like ballerinas in the wind.  Willow trees dipped their bare branches into pond water like girls testing the temperature with their toes.  

I felt a low and distinct kind of relaxation.  Time became real again.  My breath seemed to even out again.  Nature became real: the woods, the sky, the lakes, the high bluffs and low valleys, the acres of spent fields, the muddy riverbanks.  Live photos flashed before me:  Here, a construction worker eating a sandwich, one foot up on the bumper of his truck.  Here, a woman in curlers loading groceries into her car.  Here, a child glimpsed through a kitchen window, standing on a stool to reach into a cupboard; there, a beauty operator giving an old lady a perm.  

I saw in a way I never had before the beauty and diversity of our earnest labor on the earth, and also our ultimate separateness.  This helped my pain metamorphose into something less personal and more universal, something organic and natural.  And on that day, that helped give me strength.  Someone had to say it first, I surmised.  It turned out to be Todd.  Nothing more. Nothing less.  What fell to me then, what I was driving toward, was the creation of a new kind of life, minus the ongoing influence of what I had loved and depended upon most in the world...my husband. The ONE person I was supposed to be able to count on more than anyone else in this world! 

In a way, my tumultuous situation reminded me of a little girl I'd once seen exiting a roller coaster at a state fair, all wide-eyed and pale-faced and shaky-kneed, cheeks red and eyes wide, the little auburn wisps framing her face damp with kiddie perspiration; press-on hair.  And when her older brother asked if she'd like to ride again, she'd said, "Not until I'm way readier..." 

​And just like that little girl, I felt myself trapped in line for a ride I was not nearly ready for, looking back but moving forward in the only direction I could go...