I know my way around uncertainty. Namely in the form of marital crisis. I wrote an essay and a memoir about a particular season of my life in which my husband wanted out of the marriage. I felt that he was in a deeper crisis of self, brought on by career failure. And rather than "kick him to the curb," as so many have told me would be their reaction, I chose to hold the space for him to get through it.
I had limits. I wasn't going to go on like that forever. But I loved him and had 20 years invested in the life we'd created together -- two wonderful children, a farmhouse in Montana, a life we'd so deliberately built. I privately gave him six months and stood back while he behaved in ways that challenged me to the core. I practiced living in the present moment, focusing on what I could control and what I could create, letting go of the rest and trying not to take his actions personally. My commitment was not to suffer emotionally. This was his issue, not mine, but when you are in a marriage, the actions of your spouse are likely to ultimately affect your emotional and even physical safety, especially the overall climate of the family. It was my job to keep my children's lives as normal and safe as possible, hold down the "fort," as it were, and communicate with them throughout. We can love and respect someone, but not necessarily love and respect their choices. Life isn't always black and white. Crisis does not have to be your undoing. These were the concepts I tried to model for them. It wasn't always easy.
It was a fine line I walked... between taking a stand for myself and my own wellbeing, (as well as that of my children), and giving my husband the space to work through his crisis. Three years later, things are not all tied up in a pink bow. Not at all. I don't look at marriage like that. Marriage is about ebb and flow. And some marriages are meant to end. Mine has never been a strategy to stay married. Mine has been a philosophy about how to live your life during hard times, especially when you are dealing with rejection -- something I know all too well from being a writer and dealing with the publishing world. People like to use my story as an example of how to save a marriage, but to me, that's not what it's about. It's about living in the grey zone and how to cope, moment by moment.
For whatever reason, I have been given the opportunity to learn much about crisis and have often asked myself: How long is too long? When is it time to move on? Even if you still hold hope that your spouse is going to heal and come back as an equal loving partner, at what point is it taking a toll on your well-being and even your health? At what point do you model graceful endings to your children? There is no rule. There is no road map. Each marriage has its complexities and mysteries that cannot be understood from the outside. Or even sometimes from the inside. It's a fruitless pursuit to judge that which you do not understand, even though people seem to consider it a lusty sport on the internet.
I do know this for sure: Life is ever-changing, ever-evolving. Ever-uncertain. When the kids were little, it felt static. My life was measured by nap times and play dates. Now with one in high school and one in middle school, each day brings last minute "surprises": "Mom, I just remembered, I have a soccer meeting tonight at 7:00." There goes the roast chicken/dinner around the table fantasy. "Mom, can I spend the night at Ryan's tonight and then go skiing tomorrow with his family?" There goes the family game night/popcorn fantasy.
It turns out that a lot of what I have built is in fact, a fantasy, or in laymen's terms: goal-driven. And while those fantasies/goals might have been sustainable when the kids were little, they aren't now. Everybody has their own needs now and voice them boldly... and we dance together to meet them, not always well. Life has turned into more of a democracy in our home than anything else. And there is always the knowledge that you just might get voted down. What was familiar and felt "safe" not long ago, has been replaced with surprises. Some bittersweet. For instance, I have been there for my children every step of the way. Very suddenly, that changed. The last two years I've been travelling, promoting my memoir and doing speaking engagements. I've worked a long long time for career success and on top of it, we've needed the money. Because I live in rural Montana, that means I can't commute into New York City to do a reading at a library while the kids are at school, or pop up to Boston to speak at a fund-raising luncheon. It means that I am on tandem-airplanes, thousands of miles away from home and usually for at least three days. The constructs upon which I co-built this family are different now. We have been through upheaval in more ways than one. We have learned that upheaval is the natural course of life. It doesn't have to be "bad" or scary or resisted. There is no such thing as the perfect family. But no matter what, we know that we love each other, however that love looks.
Life is ever-changing, ever-evolving. I have learned that when we accept the "groundlessness" of that, as the Tibetan Buddhist Pema Chodron says, when we breathe into it and find that there is actually comfort in the not-knowing, it's easy to hold that space. Space for going slowly and not projecting into the future, worrying about the turns life might take. I read a quote recently: Something to the tune of -- "If you worry about something and then it actually happens, then you've worried twice. And if it doesn't happen, you've worried in vain." I want to live my life like that. Not in an ode to what I had envisioned. But to what's actually happening. Right now. In this moment. Certainly uncertain.
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Laura Munson is the author fo the New York Times bestselling memoir: This Is Not The Story You Think It Is (Amy Einhorn/Putnam) website: http://www.lauramunson.com