Monday, September 29, 2014

I'm sorry it's been a while.

I apologize to you, blog, and dear reader, if there are any.  I apologize that my creativity and passion has checked out for some time.  I apologize for my crazy life and for my being so sad.  I didn't mean to leave so abruptly...
More than that, after looking at my other blog posts, I realize how off topic I had become.  This blog was supposed to be about marriage, uniqueness and life's honest issues.  So, without any further ado- here we go again.  I'll try to stay on topic, and I hope you won't be disappointed.
So, dear reader, stick with me as I sum up the last several months.  Then we'll get to the good stuff.
The last we spoke, I was bitching about Christians.  My Mother was still alive, and I was still deluding myself into thinking that I knew what I wanted in life.  Well, this is the update.  May 27, 2014, the day after my two year anniversary, my Mother passed away.  I had been in NJ for several days for my nephew's briss, and I was anxious to get home to see my Mother, since she was near the end of her fight against ALS.  We thought it would be a few weeks, but the day after we returned, two hours before I was due to see her, she passed away.  I do not have words to describe the pain of this.
Along with the pain came a strange relief.  It wasn't the relief most people talk about feeling- the "thank goodness I have my life back and I don't have to take care of a dying person anymore".  My Mother was the one person, ever, that I have been afraid of disappointing.  I was always afraid of disappointing my Mother until the day she died.  Well as she passed, so did that fear.  I suddenly felt free to live my life the way I wanted to.
Her funeral was a few days later, and due to the fact that a few weeks earlier, some members of my family had launched an all out attack on me, it was an incredibly awkward time.  I successfully mourned my Mother will all I had in me, and shortly after the funeral was over, I began to feel healing.  My amazing husband took such good care of myself and my family, and I don't know how I would have made it through without him.  He helped us stay focused, stay as close as we could and helped us to begin to heal.  He was a saint.
I continued to mourn and heal in my own way, and I continued to try to keep my wits about me.  However, I started to feel a shift.  A shift that was slightly uncomfortable.  That was the shift of feeling that my marriage was not where it needed to be.  It started small, and I thought it was just simple grief.  I thought that perhaps I was confused, or that I was bored.  We began to fight, or just have squabbles.  It was more than I was comfortable with and it made me feel like a horribly unsuccessful wife.  I began to feel my husband's discontent and it was clear he was running out of patience with the situation.  To be clear, we have always been best friends, so we did talk about things and we were honest and clear with one another.  However, the question lingered- were we happy together?  Was this working?  As much as we had made it through together... it seemed that we both felt something was missing.
We mutually decided to take separate trips.  I decided to go to Italy for two weeks and he would go to Glacier National Park to backpack for a week, much to the dismay of most of the people in our lives, especially married people.  We both needed to find ourselves again, as it seemed we had perhaps lost sight of who we were throughout the last two years of marriage and severe grief.  I can wholeheartedly say that I do believe a part of ones self is sacrificed in marriage, and it can be lost forever if you do not hold it close, and protect it.  For me, this was my sexuality, and my love for life and myself.  I'm not sure why marriage affected me this way, but it did... absolutely.
So, off I went to Italy.  As soon as I arrived I felt that familiar wave of passion and love for life and self that I used to know so well.  I felt the bliss and joy that comes from independence, and freedom to act however one feels is true to them.  Over the two weeks I met amazing people, and I met new parts of myself.  I fell back in love with who I am, and feared returning to the life I had created.  I had experiences I'll never forget, and I realized that my sexuality requires freedom to continue to live.
My husband's experience is for him to discuss, but through his trip he learned that he did like me (which seems like it should be a given, but if more married people are honest with others, they might say this is not always clear), and he wanted to be with me.
I can honestly say that although I always loved and will always love him, and I do sincerely like him, I did not know how to feel about my marriage.  There had been SO, SO much grief, and so many troubles, and we had just been clinging to survival.  Illinois was a problem for us, and our life together, basically since month 2 of marriage, had been nothing but grief and hardships solely due to outside forces.
I also found that the loss I experienced, that loss of the most beloved person in my life- led me to feel a deep and undeniable disassociation from society and the people in my life.  Even today, 4 months later, I struggle to feel connected at all, even to those who I love more than anyone alive.  I experienced the worst thing, besides losing a child, that one can experience- and I don't fear anything anymore.  That is, I don't fear anything except for living the rest of my life unhappily.  Let's jump back to the fear of disappointing my mother.  As she passed, and I had new experiences, I realized that I had so feared disappointing her with a divorce, or with sexual choices I might make. Those were the big doozies of disappointments for her.  I'm sure many of you can understand this part.
Now I wonder:  Am I a decent person?  Am I a good wife?  Am I able to love one man for the rest of my life?  Am I able to remain sexually monogamous?  More than anything, am I content?  Am I capable of maintaining contentment in my current life situation?  I have lost SO much of myself through the years, and although I don't know the answers to any of the questions, I do know one thing is true.
The life I have been told would make me happy since I was a little girl, the life I was told was "right" and "would be a blessing" has meant nothing but emptiness and confusion.  It has been the opposite of what is true for me.  It has set into motion a slow death of my wild spirit, and I only felt life again once I left this life for a time.  As soon as I returned I felt the slow death again, and I wonder, why have I been lied to?  Why has every choice I've made along lines of a traditional lifestyle only meant pain for me?  Why is my husband discontent as well?  Why are we left wanting when all we tried to do was live the life we were taught was right to live?
So now, with the absence of fear, and with these new questions and concerns, I find myself at a point of change in life.  We don't know what this means for us personally or for our marriage, and we don't know what the next few years will look like for us.  We know we love one another, we know we love ourselves, and we know that we need not fear disappointing anyone any more.  We have the freedom to make our own decisions for our marriage- and so does everyone else.  I never knew this before, but I know it now.  I pass this good news onto you, whoever you are, if you're struggling with not being able to live a life you feel is true for you, for whatever reason.  I hope you don't have to learn this lesson the way that I did, but I hope you soon feel the freedom I do.  It's the first time of clarity I have felt in a long, long time.