Dear LBS, (((HUGS))).
The birthdays are tough, other holidays and special days too. Last summer I spent h’s at a museum only a short drive from where I knew he was, not on purpose but because I legitimately had to be there. It was a deep and profoundly almost religious reason, a “roots” task and family honoring I needed to complete; he had full awareness of it but had weeks before ignored my messaging, and so I was there without him. He was livid when he “found out” a few days later. I understood it was kind of facile or stupid for him to be mad; how can you be angry when you’d been given the information and declined to engage.
His birthday was very, very hard for me regardless. But when I remember it now, a year and some months since, what I remember is the image of my own hands “holding” an important relic of my own most important family past. It was pure accident or pure blessing, that the photo came out the way it did. I don’t think I could ever explain adequately what that photo, and what that moment of Self-realization and Self-integration and Self-healing, mean to me. Even this long later. There is a photo like it from when my D was a tiny girl, and the two “selfies” match up in a way that I wouldn’t get right even if I set it all up deliberately, which I hadn’t.
In one, I am clear and fully physical; I am a beautiful mother holding a beautiful baby girl, both of us in shadow but vibrant and strong. In the other, I am all shadow, my hands “holding” the body of an ancient and troubling god.
Like a baby. And from the front, the god’s visage carved in the squall of grief and abandonment, I saw, and pure pain at disconnection from the ones who loved and on whom it was, in all its vitality and power, fully dependent.
My point is that at some point you will find yourself moved to or drawn to some other experience on those key calendar days. Notice the symbols that have always existed in your own story and inner dreams. Some detail in you has been asking to come forward for honoring, for many years, and it might be even dark or something that has been troubling a long time below the surface.
Some detail in you has been calling for your attention and nurturance, for honoring of it and yourself, and for healing.
Whatever it is, it might seem odd. Don’t be afraid to go to the deepest parts of You.
When a spouse has left us, it’s so easy and natural to focus on all the questions about them. One pure truth is that they’ve left us the opportunity to go into our own surprisingly uncharted selves and to make clearer who and what we really are.
And we’re amazing.
We are no less amazing than they are. Some unloved or unbeloved or superficially unwelcome part of You is crying out now for you to tend it as lovingly as you would any new life or to respect it as tenderly as you would an ancient god.
I am so sorry you’ve been stuck with the terrible question of whether your w has switched sides and gone straight. Whatever she explores or determines, that just is not at all about you, your value, your identity or sexuality or presentation or anything else. I resonate with your creativity and generosity in celebrating the person you’ve loved; I don’t think the imbalance in giving or cleverness really indicates the measure of anyone’s love. It’s just that someone like you or me gives more expressively or visibly. Some would say that is a God-given talent. It may be that people who are not like us in this way just have different love language, or haven’t tapped or been permitted to tap the expressiveness they may feel inside.
I didn’t go full-tilt in celebrations until I became a mom. So my gift-giving and celebrations of others for 35 years before that were milder, more tentative, more vulnerable, and shy. For whatever that is worth; I don’t know that anyone had complaints or pain about how I did things or didn’t. I did love, I know that. Just maybe showed it in different ways, and sometimes only by showing up.
Life is hard. Loving, sometimes, out loud and proud, is also hard. We can’t change people or why they are the ways they are. We can just love and keep showing it.
Being deprived suddenly of the opportunities to show love, is REALLY hard.
Being cut off and not reasonably permitted or welcome to show how grandly and completely we adore someone we love, is the absolute sh!ts.
I don’t think we are show-offs or that there is any power play in the ways we gift and give to our beloveds. In its best examples, it is just an uplifting and amplification and sharing out of the joy that is there to begin with. For me it was a way of living, and I really thrived in secretly plotting each special day months in advance and loving and living it forward. My own plans made me really happy, from the moment of inception to the moment of reveal, and every time any of it was brought up afterward.
I was good at that and it sounds like you really were too. We both still are. It’s just on sabbatical for now. You know?
I ultimately came home from that experience having unexpectedly held the ancient god in my own hands, having swum in open waters with circling nine-foot sharks *on purpose*, and having connected with important family records on my own birthday. It’s the first time I definitively used my celebration strengths to give so, so deeply to my own Self.
I immediately went after some small thing to cement it all, afterward, and ended up in the bosom of a community of strangers who, when they sent whatever had been purchased, sent it along with any number of side thank you gifts. So that each mailing arrived here full of creativity and care. The first time I received a parcel, I wept.
Other people are like you and will show you they DO like you, just as a matter of course. And it’s weird when that happens, if we’ve been the most expressive one in our own couplehood for a long time.
I am not saying our more stoic or less expressive spouses are or were the wrong kind of people for us. Just that when we find community within which pretty much *everyone* celebrates even minor exchanges the same ways we might, that’s a boon and a balm and may even take some getting used to.
The parcels I send out, especially around key special days that used to be for h or S or our family together, I send during those times now to people I’ve never met. But packaging a purchased item with care, and adding in the odds and ends and sweet messages or asides, it makes my heart feel still aligned with itself and my old family and spousal rhythms.
It’s a transference, but without expectation or attachment, and so without disappointment. It’s fulfilling and I feel light when I send these things off. I recognize that I felt the same lightness when activating celebration in special and even pleasantly anonymous ways for people at work. One year during the Super Bowl, I filled a coworker’s physical mailbox with sweets in their team’s colors. I never even worked with that guy and couldn’t even pull him out of a lineup; I just knew he was the one in the company who was really excited and proud of that team. They did win and the sweets were distributed and I never did say there that I’d been the one to do that. It was the talk of the office and nobody knew. It was just something that happened, like magic.
What I’m saying is that there will be many avenues through which your love of life can be cultivated and shared to many others, in many special ways. Consider yourself a holy instrument of joy; it’s a much-needed role and if and when you can rise to the occasion, you’re a blessing.
You are anyway.
You are an essential living example of expressive love, much needed.
*
Back to the topic of w maybe going straight, that isn’t on you and it isn’t any reflection on your worth, identity, flow, strength, or presentation, in public or in private intimacy.
You be you, do you, and just know that universally and regardless of gender, sexuality, embodiment, or anything else, loving and intimacy and interpersonal functioning are sometimes just difficult or perplexing or include doubt.
People change their minds and ways and hearts and I can’t stand that, but then I do it too. So it is just something we all do. And it really, really hurts, sometimes more than other times, and there are a LOT of questions that no matter how crucial never do seem to get fully answered. Or else are answered in ways we never expected.
What I want to say to you is that really we have no guarantee anyone is ever fully gone from our lives unless we have made ourselves an ardent and absolute commitment that they should be. Sometimes it’s easy to make that decision even if we have loved them very much. Other times it is just a fluctuating thing that changes fairly often and for reasons we don’t quite understand. As cishet I know that men always seem to come back, for whatever reasons good or bad or in between. Within my LGBT community I know that women often do, too. Humans just do. It’s sort of unnatural to stay away forever from ones we’ve loved and grown with.
I know you already know so much of all this. I am maybe just telling you, I feel you, and I’m here for your journey.
She’s going to come up a lot. Your therapist knows that. But anytime she does, it’s an opportunity for you to see more deeply into your own Self and all your Good. (((HUGS)))