I’m willing to be willing

A week ago, I was in another province for a conference, and while I was there I was blessed to spend some time with R who shared some pearls of wisdom with me.  There were two things that she said which particularly held meaning for me.  The first was her observation about human nature in what she described as some people’s penchant for preferring to be right over being happy.  Later in an unrelated conversation, she introduced me to the term “cherished sin” which struck a resounding chord with me, because I realized that my very own cherished sin was enjoying righteous indignation even at the expense of my own happiness (specifically within my marriage.)  There are some of you who may balk at the fire and brimstone term “sin” and I realize that not everyone’s theology or worldview includes this concept, but bear with me here.  If you think of a cherished sin, as that one thing in your life that you hold on to, even though you know it ultimately will lead to your demise,  that may make the concept a bit more palatable.   If you think of it as the one guilty pleasure you refuse to relinquish despite knowing that it is morally wrong, or damaging to yourself or to someone else, perhaps the concept will resonate with you as it did with me. I am convinced that we all have one cherished sin (or two, or five of them).  For some it’s substance abuse.  For others it’s anger or gossip or an addiction of some kind. For me, it is (or was) the need to be right about parenting, about what being a family means, and about the ways in which family members function and demonstrate  respect.  It is noteworthy that this need to be right does not exist in any other area of my life, other than within my marriage(s). On the contrary, I am the first to defer to someone else’s expertise in the workplace and in all other personal relationships.  Perhaps this is because as a girl, I was socialized to believe that it was a female’s role to create, institute and enforce the charter of rights and obligations on the home front, but like most girls of my generation, I lost my footing.  I lost my certainty and clarity as I began to encounter messages that I ought not to be happy with assigned gender roles, even though they seemed to be working well in all the families I knew of.   Perhaps this unresolved conflict rendered me overzealous later in life.  Hopefully  feminism’s third wave will allow my daughter and  her daughter to approach gender politics with an appreciation for nuances and a tolerance for apparent contradictions.  Perhaps my insistence on my way or the highway has been a way of honouring my parents’ values, their work ethic, their high expectations of their children and their vision of the family as a collective committed to a higher good.  Or perhaps... more likely, my predisposition to self-righteousness is simply rooted in stubbornness or in what they refer to in some places as “being ornery”.

So here is what I did today with this realization.  After work, I went back, with my dog, to the spot where I created my little altar yesterday.  The caramel stone I’d placed there yesterday to mark my surrendering of my dream of enduring marital love still sat on its lovely little lichen patch.  I decided that today I needed to add another stone and it had to be a black one.  The black stone would represent what I’d just come to understand as the cherished sin that may very well have resulted in the darkest, ugliest or most secret places in my being.  Unable to find a black stone on the forest floor, I wandered over to what had probably been the site of a fire pit party deeper in the forest.  I found a small charred piece of wood that would do nicely.  I laid it down on my lichen covered altar and announced that I no longer wanted my need to be right to get in the way of my personal happiness.  I announced that I was going to leave all my cherished anger and resentment behind with that little piece of charcoal on my altar.  It was humbling as I realized how much of that I’d been holding on to and how I’d used it as a substitute for happiness.

I’m telling you... I’m onto something here.

 

          My second stone                                          The steps up to my altar

                                           Oh yeah.... and my dog!