Unbecoming

In which I tell and untell my story.

The Place Where We Are Right

From the place where we are right
flowers will never grow
in the spring.

The place where we are right
is hard and trampled
like a yard.

But doubts and loves
dig up the world
like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
where the ruined
house once stood.

-Yehuda Amichai, translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell

Streets of Philadelphia

I was bruised and battered
I couldn't tell what I felt
I was unrecognizable to myself
Saw my reflection in a window
And didn't know my own face
Oh brother are you gonna leave me wastin' away
On the streets of Philadelphia?...

-Bruce Springsteen

I am the difficult one, the angry one, the one who lashes out at the people who love me. 

I am the demanding one, the messy one, the one with the big and uncontrolled emotions.

I am the broken one, the hurtful one, the one who reaps what I sow. 

This is the story of the last two decades of my life, the Canon of Jane, as recorded faithfully by a handful of close witnesses. 

Pull up a chair. Let me share the highlights (the lowlights).

This is the story of my good guy/bad guy marriage. I used to joke that if my husband and I ever split up, I was not sure my family would choose me over him. The joke is less funny in the aftermath, ringing as it does with elements of truth.

In my marriage I was often angry, yes, and lashed out, yes. In my marriage I often could not breathe. When all you need is space and time to think, and when all you have is a person who follows you from room to room, demanding that the argument happen now, that the argument continue literally ad nauseam, when your heart is pounding and your palms are weeping and you just. need. time. to. think, then the anger rises, yes, and explodes, yes, and everything is a roaring and this is all your fault. 

Who hears the quiet gunshots under the deafening sound of the fireworks? Who sees the silent assassin when everyone is looking up at the awful sky? I was the angry one, scary and unseemly, and my wounds did not matter. This was my marriage.

And in the ruins, a love so great, so exquisite and unparalleled, it traveled far beyond words, although we tried our best to pin it to the page. He wrote: “You are a garden I could wander in, senses dazzled, for a geologic age, without ever seeking the far gate.”

He wrote: “[L]et Us never tear ourselves bone from bone. Listen, Jane. You are sublime, and when I say You are incomparable, I choose that word carefully, and I apply it only to You. I could go up Time and down Creation and never meet anyone resembling You. Bones are only clumsy bones; know that there are ways You press to my very atoms…”

Benedick and Beatrice (their faces hidden because they are minors) sparring in Vee’s eighth grade class production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. Aside: The class was only supposed to learn a couple of scenes, but they begged their teacher to be allowed to perform the entire play, which they produced entirely, from casting to lighting to sets to sound. (Vee played Conrade, and she was awesome.) The kids are alright!

Yet because the happiness was so stratospheric, I did not see the anguish until the unbearable pressures of the world burned all the joy into ashes. Months went by, and I was bruised and battered, I couldn’t tell what I felt, I was unrecognizable to myself…

Unrecognizable to myself and to my brilliant therapist, who finally made it clear: He didn’t recognize me either. I was a distorted, terrible version of Jane.

One recent night in the wee hours, unable to sleep, I went traveling down Time’s mirrored hallways, and read through some of the vast, written history of that relationship. And in it I found a gutting version of myself - someone who was angry and unkind, someone who took all of his kindness and patience and twisted it into a noose to hang him with. 

Or so he said. 

This is also true: Over time he constricted me, offered only drops of water from a well that had once run full. I was the one he cherished beyond all experience, but once the pandemic hit, he refused to see me, even outside and briefly, he restricted communication to brief text exchanges late at night, he banned all calls and video chats, then texting was dropped entirely in favor of weekly email letters, and then finally, on my birthday!, he imposed a five month silence, which I bargained down to four months, and which ended only when I left him for good. He had his reasons, of course, and I know his hurt ran deep as well. But still. My pain was no less legitimate for being mutual, and I never felt heard or understood.

This was the version of myself I absorbed and agonized over for months and months, until I had become a hollow shell of the person I had been. Never mind that he left me dangling over a relationship precipice throughout our time together, refusing to ever commit to me. Never mind that his version of reality was - to him - the One True Thing. Never mind that he refused to seek or find help for his own past traumas, his own disordered thinking, his own anxieties, his own impatience with my anxieties, his own anything. He refused to own anything, except “this is the way I am,” except take it or leave it, except You, Jane, are the Problem Here. (I wrote: “I understand what you’re saying. I hear you, and I accept what you say. It doesn’t touch what I wrote before about the precedent that (partially) led to this level of anxiety, but if you want to stay firmly in the territory of what I’ve done to hurt you, ok.” He responded: “Jane …your anxiety and the consequences it has are your issues. It doesn’t do any good to redirect the conversation to something I’ve done, or some way I’ve failed to deal with these issues. What we need to talk about for a moment is how to deal with the root of the conflict, and the root is not something I’ve brought.” This was the message, over and over and over.)

Those of you who know me well know I am an advice column junkie, and my favorite columnist is the Washington Post’s Carolyn Hax. Just a few days ago she wrote this: “In 25 years’ worth of dysfunction mail, the single most reliable predictor of relationship misery is a partner who, in some combination, won’t look inward, admit fault or consider therapy.” (Because she is so unerringly right in all other things, I will forgive her the lack of an Oxford comma.) Perhaps I had some inkling of this wisdom back then, but it was still so much easier to internalize all the blame.

But finally, after months and months, after friends and my brilliant therapist begged me to walk away, I walked away. 

I walked away, but if two of my life’s most significant relationships had led to a story of me that was so ugly and awful, then what choice did I have other than to believe it?

I believed it.

In and around this slow-moving maelstrom, and even up to recently, were some friendships that ended hard and some that only limped on distantly. And with each fracture or fading, I blamed myself, even if I knew somewhere in some small cells of me that friends who lean on you with all their weight when their own life challenges hit, but go silent when your life falls apart, are no friends at all. It wouldn’t do to dwell on the flowers I sent on days I knew were excruciating, or the listening sessions when I put my own burdens down to hold theirs, or the safe shelter I gave them (and sometimes their children) when everything was going to hell, or the meals I made and the care I offered. The story was always that I was the problem, the difficult one, the demanding one. The story was never on my side.

It doesn’t take a brilliant therapist to find the origins of all of this. In my family, as I have written about before,  I am the messy one, the difficult one, the one with Big Emotions That Are Not Properly Contained. I believe my sweet father understands me, but I have always made the others uncomfortable. I know they love me, but they also watch me from a distance, reaching out tentatively from time to time to pat my hand, then backing away slowly. In the youth class at synagogue when I was a child, Mrs. Herman would lead us in song: One of these things doesn’t belong here, one of these things just doesn’t belong, can you tell which one doesn’t belong here, before I finish my song? I am the one who doesn’t belong here, and it shows.

But. 

But. 

But. 

Lately and beautifully, my story has begun to change, to unwrite itself. A cannonball to the Canon, a becoming unbecoming.

The meditation teacher, Tara Brach, asks us to contemplate this question when we hit a wall in our own self-concept: Who would I be if I did not believe this? 

And so I ask myself this vital question - who would I be if I did not believe in my own awfulness? - and I begin to see.

I see the line of people who never saw me as the worst version of myself - never evoked that in me.

I see a long-lost love, my first Great Love, who cycled with me through many beautiful times and many anguished partings, all without a single moment of meanness, all without ugliness. He remains unblemished in my heart, and I believe that I rest similarly still in his.

I see the countless mentors who have taken me under their sheltering wings, who have seen something in me worth championing, who have become second mothers, beloved aunts, cherished older sisters, fairy godfathers, kind advisors, and, so many of them, friends.

Oh, and the friends! Yes, some have gone, or faded away, or stormed off angrily. But I can also reach back all the way through the strata of my life, all the way back into the Time Before I Remember Much of Anything, and I can find layers of gorgeous friendship all along the way - from childhood, from college, from my dazed and dizzying twenties, from law school, from the neighborhood I have lived in for thirteen years, from my various jobs, from my Adventures in Dating, and from other places besides. 

The New York Times just started a (somewhat hokey) happiness series, and the first day was all about having a healthy social network. There was a quiz. I took it. And you know what? My network is strong and thriving. Could I make it stronger? Absolutely. Are there ways in which I could be a better friend? So many ways. But I am not leading a mean existence, and I think that counts for a lot. Or at least I hope it does.

And then there is Ben. Our anniversary is in early February, and I feel absolutely confident that we will be able to celebrate both the temporal milestone and an incredible emotional milestone as well, namely one full year, 365 days!, without a single fight, without a single unkind word being lobbed between us in either direction, without anything worse than some serious-but-surmountable disconnects, brief periods when we needed to spend some time thinking, and talking, and giving each other space, and hearing each other out. Which - every. single. time. - we have done with grace (on both sides) and compassion (on both sides) and love (on both sides) and flexibility (on both sides) and the feeling (on both sides) that the other’s happiness is just as important as our own and fixing the breakdowns is as important for our own sake as it is for each other’s sake. Neither of us wants to hurt the other, and something we are doing is causing pain, even inadvertently, we are both open to doing the work necessary to make repairs.*

And it is not - emphatically not - that my anger rises and he assuages it. It is that my anger does not rise at all. Whatever moon hangs in other skies and pulls those tides, the ocean Ben and I swim in is calm and sweet. In the entire history of our relationship, the most intensely negative feeling he has ever invoked in me is mild annoyance, or a sad feeling of disunity or hurt. But never harshness. Never explosive anger. Never panic or wild anxiety or fear.

And also, he has this amazing quality of learning my sore spots and gently soothing them. He knows that uncertainty sends me spinning, and so he works hard to be as Sure a Thing as possible. With him I never feel anxious or unmoored or in thrall to a scary mystery beyond my control. He never exploits my fears by going silent on me, or lecturing me about how I should really try to control my worries better. When either of us needs some quiet time, we ask for it and it is, of course, granted, because while we love our time together, we are also both solitary beings, and crave times of silence as well. With Ben, silence is never painful.

So yes, my marriage, and my Big Love, and my broken friendships, and my other difficult human moments are me, but what I need to remember always are that they are me in context - they are me playing off of someone else, the immovable object to my unstoppable force.

All of this conjecturing and contextualization though leads to another question (lest I rest on my laureled haunches and feel any sort of happiness about transcending my mottled past): What is the rule and what is the exception to the rule? 

Put another way, is it easier to evoke my best side, as Ben and my best friends do, or my worst side, as my ex-husband and ex-friends did?** I came to this sudden sheer drop-off in the middle of explaining all of these thoughts to Ben, and it kind of knocked me flat for a while. (He, as ever, was patient and understanding.) But once I had taken some time to think, I realized that maybe it does not matter. My favorite lines from the poet Rumi, which Ben points out are not in any way a literal translation from the original, but which I really like anyway, are: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there.” And knowing, as I do, that two seemingly opposite things can both be true at once (thank you, Aleta, for teaching me this), I recognize that while it is true that I can sometimes be difficult and demanding and harsh with people who, for whatever reason, bring out the worst in me, it is also true that I can be compassionate and patient and gentle with those who bring out the best in me. And sometimes, as with my daughters (life’s most complicated, yet non-optional, relationship!), I am both difficult and wrong and also brimming with love and kindness. I contain multitudes. This is okay.

* I ran this essay past Ben before posting it, to ensure that I could fairly say that we both were balancing each other in kindness and compassion and all the other good stuff. I am pleased to report he confirmed my impression.

**I will say that, to his credit and mine, my ex and I have a much better relationship now than we ever did when we were married, and after a lot of work and heartache, I can finally say that we are bringing out more of the best in each other, and co-parenting far far better than almost all of the other divorced couples I know (which relationships are mostly comprised of reasonable people trying fruitlessly to negotiate with sociopaths). Yet another vote for relationship context being pretty damned important, I guess, when two equally decent people are involved.