The Gathering

“…we all begin the process before we are ready, before we are strong enough, before we know enough; we begin a dialogue with thoughts and feelings that both tickle and thunder within us. We respond before we know all the answers…”

Clarissa Pikola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves

This is Post Number 8 in the Journey to Truth series.

March 1, 2024:

Life as I knew it continued. And, without even realizing, so did the gathering. The skeleton was not yet complete, but it was getting there. One bone at a time.

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April 30, 2021:

Today is a quiet day. There has been too much noise in my head lately. I need silence.

A rest day for my brain.

While my husband is at the gym I sit in my chair. Just. Sit. And listen to the quiet. Later, while I am sitting on the bed playing my ukulele, he rushes into the room with some kind of drama. The kind that sucks the life out of the room. And sends my dog climbing onto my lap and cowering.

The quiet that I have so carefully cultivated is instantaneously replaced with a pounding in the back of my skull. My chest constricts. I am pissed. So fucking pissed.

He asks (demands, really) me to call my step daughter, and tell her how to kill the yellow jacket she found in the Vince family cabin near Lake Tahoe. Me. How to kill a yellow jacket?! He’s the man. Has spent a good deal of his life at this cabin. I’m from Chicago. We don’t have yellow jackets there.

“I don’t know,” I retort. “Tell her to kill it with a fly swatter.” It’s what I’d do. Or I might get in my car and leave.

We argue for a while. And then something in me shifts. Breaks. I feel strangely divorced from the emotion of it.

I feel done.

As if sensing something is different this time, he moves to the edge of the bed. Sits next to me. “Tell me what you’re thinking.” His voice is calmer.

I shake my head. He does not want to know what I’m thinking.

“Why won’t you tell me what you’re thinking?” he asks.

I carefully craft my words. “Because I’m not ready to talk about what I’m thinking.”

“Why?” he asks.

I pause again, longer this time.

“Just say it.”

I narrow my eyes. Study him. Decide it is time to actually say what I am thinking. Right here, in this moment. Because, right now? I really do not care what the consequences are. Do not care if he walks out.

“Some days I just want to get in the car and keep driving. Never come home.”

He is silent for a long while. And finally we get real. We talk about our respective childhoods. About how we feel they shaped our belief systems. Left us unprepared for this kind of relationship. For him, it was the violence he witnessed as a child. How, despite witnessing the violence he became violent himself. But only toward women. And how he never really equated verbal abuse as ‘abuse.’ Because it is not physical. And therefore does not do any lasting harm. Because they are only words. Apologize and move on.

For me, it was watching my mother silence herself at any cost. And in the process, learning that women are not equal to men. That, really, life is much easier if you just keep your mouth shut. Go along to get along. I never learned that I deserved to be treated better. Or that there were even men out there who were not like this. Not like my father, who was not a bad man. He was just a product of his generation. So I grew up never learning how to love myself enough to walk away.

This, this, is why I am still here, with a bruised and battered heart, twenty years later.

So I learned to silence myself and my husband learned to express himself with anger. And here we are. Both of us wounded. Neither of us knowing how to bridge the chasm in our relationship.

The difference is that he wants us to work. I am ambivalent. I want to want us to work. I admit this to him. Tell him that my heart is wounded. That I stopped trusting him a long time ago. That I don’t know if it can be mended. If we can be mended.

As the words tumble forth, something dislodges inside of me. The knot in my gut. The one that held all of my secrets. The ones I have finally spoken. And I know that, whatever happens now, I am free. Know that I will never, never again keep silent.

No matter the cost.

We end the discussion with a mutual agreement to give counseling a try. One last Hail Mary to see if we can be fixed. Me. Him. Us.

Meanwhile, the gathering continued.