“You should thank him,” my mother said, when I told her how much David had hurt me. “Thank him?! That’s- that’s- that’s outrageous!” I cried.
She looked up from her computer screen and seemed to be counting to 10. “Yes, you should thank him, for what you are learning from this,” she continued.
“MA, you do not thank someone for kicking you in the teeth! O.K.?” I shouted and stormed up to my old bedroom.
She followed me upstairs. There was a knock on the door.
“Go away. I don’t want to hear it.”
“Look!” she pleaded from outside the door, “either he is the worst shit in the world or he is just what you needed.... I do not know which, OK? I am sorry.”
I slowly got up and opened the door. She wasn't there so I tiptoed across the hall to her bedroom and stood dumbly in the doorway. Mom was writing again, this time in a notebook.
I folded my arms across my chest. “...Well, what do you think I needed?”
“I don’t know; you tell me....”
The tears started, “Not this!”
“Lenore, dear,” she frowned, lowering the pad to her lap with resignation.
Here we were again.
" All of this anguish--this cannot be just about him. You know, even I know that just because you sleep with someone, that doesn’t mean he loved you!
" You knew it was a risk--I thought you were just experimenting, not looking for another marriage."
[My mom at eighty is more hip than any of her grown daughters.... In fact she once almost refused one of my sisters the permission to marry a guy she'd not slept with. Mom urged my sister to please find out if her fiancee' and she were sexually compatible, first. (My sister had become a religious fanatic. My mom had become a buddhist).]
“Yeah, that’s what I thought too. But Ma, once that man gets under your skin, everything changes.
"It changed.
" Now he hates me. He thinks I tried to trick him, as if I was just into screwing around all the time I was acting like I was falling in love. He thinks I set him up to get back at Roy!
“…Well, did you?"
“Of course not! Ma. I really thought the marriage was over. I was just trying to take your advice and wait a full year before I made it final.”
“Well did you tell him that, that you weren’t positive it was over? “
“ No! I told him I was positive. I told you that. I told everyone that. I didn’t try to fool him, Ma; I tried to fool myself!
“Well, dear, I don’t think you did anything so horrible. Why can’t you just move on? I don’t think he’s losing any sleep over you....”
“Ma, I know this sounds weird but, I worry about him, I think of him being alone and I want him to have a family and I want him to know I really did mean it--how I was with him. “
“Well, what was it, what’s the big deal with this guy?”
“Ma, can’t it just be that I loved him?”
“I don’t know it doesn’t make sense. I think this is some kind of a smokescreen honey, some kind of a terribly painful lesson you’re avoiding, hanging on to him. He’s gone. “
“I just don’t believe it. I dreamt he was waiting for me.”
“BELEIVE IT, Lenore!” she groaned, then paused and added,
“What do you think he represents? Do you think it was hope?”
“Hope?”
“Yes, hope--the way he was able to recover his eyesight.”
[David had gone blind and against all medical explaination had regained his eyesight. In fact, he'd told me, "the doctors can't see in but I can see out."...what a metaphor....]
“You have been trying to recover in your own way, for a long time, yourself...”
“No, I know what it was,” I admitted, as it crystallized in my mind.
“What?”
“I knew I had to go, I didn’t want to but I knew it wasn’t right to stay. …Courage....Ma, when he made me leave you know what he said 'Have courage, Lenore.' ”
She nodded.
“You know what else he'd said? He said that the pain I was feeling would heal me...”
Mom looked at me fondly as if she sensed the enormity of the loss. I felt as if I were hemoraging and I was trying to make the bleeding stop but couldn't.
"You always were looking for that weren’t you? I remember how you hated weak people, how you ran from pain. Do you think it was courage you lacked.?”
“Well, in some ways yes. I mean, I love strong men.... I love strong women. Yet it’s weird -- in some ways I can be absolutely fearless myself, you know that! I have to get therapy just to learn some common sense, to have normal fears.”
“Yes, in some ways you have enormous strength and courage,” she acknowledged-- and endurance--in fact, you are the most dogged person I know,” she said slowly, puzzling at my contradictory lack of coping.
“I know--I am unstoppable.”
“And yet, Lenore you can be such a contradiction--I’ve never seen anyone so terrified of rejection, Lenore."
She was right--rejection could put me off the map. It felt like a death sentence. Rejection felt like condemnation to a slow death or insanity. Rage and fear could so easily eclipse my famous courage. How could you have courage when you feel as if a person’s leaving is always a matter of life and death? How do you have courage when you know your brain is breaking that you are falling into an abyss and all you can do is obsess about him. What if your brain just jams every time this happens. He really can drive you crazy! You find out it was true after all, after all the trips about how you can’t drive another person crazy. This broken record in my head proves you can--he did.
“He really got to you, didn’t he?”
“Yeah, I feel like I have "David-itis". I’m sick with him, I need an exorcism.”
“What was it?”
“Well, the great sex didn’t help.” Erica Jong says if its good for you your in trouble--if it’s good for him he’s in trouble. I looked up from where I was sitting on her bed across from her in her easy chair. “Ma ,I’m in trouble big."
“Do you want to consult the I Ching?”
“Sure.”
The I Ching book of ancient Chinese wisdom relays that the intensity of the change is in direct proportion to the urgency of the need to learn something.
“Being a couple yet free is our next challenge on the evolutionary ladder. This book successfully helps us unravel the myths that block that achievement. It does it with warmth, with readability, and with balance. It recreates everyday problems and
