Twenty-five years ago my newly married state was threatened with extinction. There were schisms and issues and liberal smatterings of defensive indifference that brought my husband and I to the intersection of Unilateral Dissolution at the corners of Its Not My Fault and We Have Nothing In Common all within a brief two and a half-year span of time.
Somewhere cradled in between the reactive impulses of love and loss a wolf lies waiting.
The three trips we invested to consult a marriage counselor concluded with her suggestion at the end of the fourth that, although she did recognize a certain affection between us, the disparities were wide enough to make the Grand Canyon resemble a spider vein by comparison.
She could offer us no solution other than her recommendation of two reliable divorce attorneys who were both local and affordable. Since it was known that we had a two-year old child at home and obvious that I was seriously vested in the gestation of a second, I was grateful for her consideration of our fledgling familial and financial estates.
We drove away from the grey-shingled bungalo of her cozy home office in separate vehicles. I needed to collect our son from my parent's home, and my husband needed to return to the trampled graminoids and black mud of the high school football field where he spent his free time as the coach for defense. As if linebackers needed to be taught how to be large and immovable. But denial and convention as they funded his ability to ignore the obvious and focus on the unnecessary, served him well in coaching such a brutally redundant game.
It was mid-autumn in Connecticut; chilled and raining. Being at home offered a misguided glaze of peace as the weather outside threatened to drown the wolves at the door; because inside I had my child, my things, my sanity and my protection from the elements.
The wolves could howl and scratch at the walls of my domesticized fortress for as long as they pleased, but they could not consume me.
I am a chronic ruminator, which is the introspective equivalent of The Terminator. There is nothing that wedges itself between the seams of my soul that I have not inspected, dissected, re-orchestrated and validated at least a dozen times. Nothing.
On this particular night, as I waited for the late arrival of my husband home from practice in order that we might begin to discuss the practical aspects of terminating our mutually misguided attraction to one another, I had the television on and was drawn into, of all things, the movie Who Is Afraid Of Virginia Wolf?
Whether I remained fully present in my body or not, I cannot to this day recall; but as I watched the celluloid scramble of vitriol, vengeance and vituperative bantering, I had an epiphany:
Fear is the wolf.
I am prideful out of fear that no one will like me as much as I feel I deserve to be liked.
I am greedy out of fear of not getting or having enough.
I am envious out of fear that I am not as good as.
I lust out of a fear of being unlovable and untouched.
I am slothful for fear of failure.
I am angry because I fear not being heard or understood.
I am gluttonous for fear that I will starve.
I am indifferent and inattentive to my deepest prodding for fear of learning the truth about myself.
And that night I realized that in my relationships, particularly those whose commitments make me vulnerable, I hate because I fear the risks attendant to loving that much.
When my husband finally arrived home, he came outfitted with smiles and congenial persiflage and flush with denial over the inadequacies of his teenaged linebackers.
And as he praised my over-cooked dinner, I knew also that he had chosen to ignore the clinical conviction of our therapist: that perhaps 'parting's sweet sorrow' trumped the potential for murder/suicide.
I decided to roll in the direction his disposition suggested and have been doing so ever since. The wolves still come and go and more often than I would like, one or two threaten to blow my house down.
But as long as I can name them, I can tame them; and although they will then be registered to me, I will make sure to keep up with their shots through heavy doses of integrity.
Now if only I knew where to get them microchipped.
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