I surrender

Let there be spaces in your togetherness – Kahlil Gibran

I have been unlucky at marriage. I’ve never quite figured out how to find that perfect balance between being a hybridized ‘couple’ and being sufficiently distinct so as not to get lost inside the ‘Mr and Mrs’ unit. Each time I’ve started out as a distinct individual but somewhere along the way I always lost myself and morphed into a half-being. That is not to say that I imagine that everyone who is still married after 10 years or 20 years had that balance all figured out going in. I think some people just stumbled onto it through dumb luck, or else they got there after countless arguments, negotiations, concessions, trade-offs, and disappointments. I’ve always been so ready to defer to a stronger, louder or more succinct voice that I’d end up giving in, relinquishing, accommodating and being stifled. I take responsibility for that. I allowed that. I surrendered parts of myself willingly if not always cheerfully. The thing is that after a while my core self would kick back in and I’d feel resentful. That resentfulness would always catch my partner off-guard because I’d appeared to be so agreeable the previous 9 out of 10 times that I’d been required to cough up a piece of myself. I had seemed to be so giving and charitable and selfless. If I’d learned to set boundaries from the outset, I’d not ever have ended up feeling so exploited. I guess that’s what my (most recent) husband meant when he said that I was not consistent with his children. I’d drive home from a funeral parlour visitation to let one of them into the house who’d forgotten a key. I’d pick up another from school on a rainy day and end up driving a group of friends home too. I’d stop my morning workout to find a pencil crayon, a protractor, a piece of Bristol board. I’d put off my dissertation to help with a book report, to print off an assignment, to edit an essay. I’d tutor in French, in Math, in English, in History and then one day I’d just decide I was being taken advantage of and so I’d become cool and distant. I’d do this for a few days to ensure that no one asked anything else of me until I could replenish my spirit. It was the only way I knew how to take care of myself: make a miserable face and appear unapproachable so that I could be left alone until I felt ready to give again. Not a productive way to take care of myself. Not an adult way to handle things. Nevertheless it was also not a crime. It could be argued (indeed I did argue this point upon being dumped) that I deserved the benefit of the doubt... that at least I gave selflessly the vast majority of the time... that when I was being aloof and distant I was just protecting myself, refuelling my ‘charitable’ tank - at least I wasn’t yelling or beating anybody.
Somehow I didn’t warrant the benefit of the doubt. Somehow this behaviour made the marriage toxic.... not the fact that he’d never trained his children to be more responsible, but the fact that I couldn’t always be Mother Theresa. So to wrap this up, let me tell you that as an exercise in determining why I never learned how to take care of myself within a relationship, I decided to figure out what marital union is supposed to look like. To honour the languages of all the countries in which this blog has readers, I used Google Translate to look up the verb ‘unite’ and then after finding the translation, I swapped languages again in order to end up back in English. In the spirit of linguistic diversity, here’s what I’ve not been able to accomplish in the past 26 years that I’ve been somebody’s wife:
Integrate (French), Stick (Belarusian), Persist (Chinese), Mix (Italian), Blend (Dutch), Fuse (Korean), Combine (Afrikaans), Join (Japanese), Interlace (Arabic) and Merge (Spanish).