Between rounds of shrink appointments, we just are. We float in the hot tub and talk. He hates therapy like he hated yoga, but just
like that is/was supposed to work, as the exertion pain ebbs the benefits flow,
and so in successive delays he absorbs them.
He says many times about various things, “I see it now”, and seems to
move through epiphanies at a steep rate.
It alarms me and heartens by turns.
I’m not sure. I want to be
building a life but still wonder if I’m just a way through to somewhere else
for him, that will not have been me and/but will not be the storyline that I
interrupted either. And he has learned
that “mostly” he “doesn’t know”, proven again and again by how much he is now
thinking “I didn’t know that about myself a minute ago”.
My own shrink appointment again looms, and I know she will
not be interested in any of that except in so far as it pertains to me. What am I doing here? With a man so unsure of himself that he
cannot (in good conscience) make commitments, can he? I can’t answer that question so much as
describe it: I’ve never felt so substantively present as I have with him,
except for the simple facts of my children, so like that he simply IS and when
he is not, it feels like mounting panic and I can’t stand it for forever. I can stand it for days, I withstood it for 7
weeks, but in the end, I reel him in and put my arms around him and becalm
myself. And I know that is not necessarily a safe
place to be. Aaron dealt me a blow that
was the most violent I’ve ever taken and withstood. It was violent. It was purposeful, selfish, conscienceless,
merciless, calculated and cruel. It gave
him a rush to do it, then sickened him, a sickness he then counteracted with a
rationalization that mimicked some higher moral duty to ‘his own family’, which
then sickened him again, until no matter how he thought about it and no matter
what he did in the day to sustain it, the truth was only sick. And what I am certain
of is that that blow to me was repercussive.
It came through him, and thus
hit him first, and he’s been taking and passing on that violence onto his own
life always. From his parents, at everything he was and wanted and
loved, exploiting every shred of self-doubt to do it, so that it looked to him
like “support” for the self-doubt they’d themselves built to a large enough
proportion to do him in (and anything he loved/wanted put asunder) time and
again, the violence came. And when I
think about it, I recognize it because it has been so with every other person
who has ever loved me also – each that I look on in retrospect had what I had
not growing up, i.e. a “good family”, loving parents, a “happy” childhood, that
upon closer inspection occasioned by trying to love me and failing, turned out to
be a kind of abusive-to-the-self upbringing to some extent. (What is it in me that drew you, and me to
you, I wonder? Karma, says my shrink, which I thought I understood the
definition of, but no.)
Aaron’s family is not merely abusive to some extent, though,
it is a systematic violence so large that I had to be punched in the face back
from it far enough to even glimpse its proportions. How he made it this far, I don’t know. (His brother didn’t.) And what I’ve inherited from it is the shared
experience of it, because he now has given me a kind of love that feels like the
safest place to be exactly when it is not
that at all. With love like that,
who needs hate? It feels almost
not survivable except by a counter measure of equal heartlessness, a kind of going
dead.
So, I understand indeed. But I'm far from gone-dead.
Justice ft & Problem - On Mamas
