7
DIVORCE IS A DIRTY WORD
"Most of us will arrive at some point in our lives when the world with which we are most familiar no longer works for us. We are meant to outgrow ourselves; indeed we can no more avoid this development than we can stop the aging process. Our lives change externally as we change internally. More often than not when you are on the journey toward self-discovery, you will be met with opposition. I doubt that those of us on the search would make as much progress as we do if we knew ahead of time the full extent of the difficulties we will face." 1
The accident was the turning point of my life. I knew I had to make a change but wasn't quite sure how to go about it. Pulling up stakes was inconceivable. Divorce was as foreign to me as adoption.
It was then, while recuperating, that Steve came into my life, marking the proverbial beginning of the end. He visited one weekend with a friend and after they left two dozen roses arrived. I felt a stirring in my heart. What flowers will do for a woman!
I read the book Open Marriage and suggested it to my spouse who regarded it as an alien intruder. I mentioned that we never talked and it might be useful to see a therapist. He said he wasn't crazy and if I thought I had a problem I should go. According to him everything was fine.
The one thing we did talk about was toilet paper. With everything else going on at the time, it was the toilet paper that got the biggest rise out of him. Like a dutiful caretaker, when a roll was used up I replaced it. But my husband threw a fit if it was hung the wrong way, with the paper hanging over the roll rather than coming from beneath. I actually never thought about it. Having so many other things to do, it was lucky the rolls got replaced at all. He was definitely stuck in an anal period of development, and could not get his shit together (no pun intended) about how I hung the toilet paper. It had become a constant irritant in our lives and we had terrible arguments about the proper procedure to hang a roll. Perhaps it was safer at the time to argue about potty protocol than what was really on our minds. To this day I deliberately hang the roll with the paper on the outside, aware that most everyone hangs it the other way. That roll of toilet paper meant more to him than I did.
In February three hundred Oglala Sioux declared the village of Wounded Knee liberated territory. The United States government vowed to review the 1868 treaty.
The next two years of my life saw the distance grow between my husband and myself while Steve and I became good friends. The weekends were filled with riotous revelry, mescaline and marijuana, baseball games, fiddler contests and my children took it all in. Their father came and went in the fog of festivities and we drifted apart with no turning back. I yearned for my freedom.
One night while we were all stoned on something, talking and watching slides, my husband dragged me up to our bedroom and made sure I was still his by forcing sex on me. I wasn't happy. He knew it and didn't care. I reluctantly submitted, not wanting to cause a scene, embarrassed by my feelings, and afterwards went downstairs to rejoin the rest of my friends. I felt frustrated, as I always did when I couldn't stand up for myself and make my feelings known. I knew that night that my marriage was over.
I had been brought up as a dutiful daughter in a strict and neurotic Jewish household. That wasn't who I really was. My roots were torn from a distant do- main and while the tree grew, its branches clipped to conform, the flowers never actually blossomed.
You picked up from your biological mother a sense of the rebel. She was someone who refused to do what she was supposed to do. You need to go back and accept her inability to keep you. Allow your- self to feel the rejection and rebelliousness and recognize that those were her dynamics. Then recognize that is only a small part of your history as a conscious living being moving through many lifetimes and many dimensions.
Psychic Reading, 1983, by Mitra
I needed to talk. When I brought up the book Open Marriage again, my hus- band, lost in his world of narcissism and sports, laughed at me and suggested I talk to somebody. I made an appointment with a family therapist to find out if I was normal.
The administration would not admit that the powerful anti- war movement in the United States had anything to do with stop- ping the war. "History, as someone has said, is a dull account of wars. Were the people led into them by lies, or did they want to believe the lies so that they'd have an excuse for war? Did they just want to kill? Kill anyone, anywhere? The desire to kill is one of man's explosive and strongest instincts. Civilization is an attempt to guide that instinct into safer channels, such as making machines, goods, and so on. We have substituted business and other competition for war. But there comes a time when the whole thing is blown to hell. Instinct is stronger than civilization or morals or religion. And there are men who know that only too well: politicians, armament makers, presidents, kings, leaders of people. Men who will profit by the people's love for war and who will gain power by it or financial rewards."
The Senate Watergate hearings were followed by the resignation of President Nixon, the first in American history. On April 29 a hard end finally came in Vietnam and it fell to the Communists.
And a hard end came to my marriage as well. I had tried to conform but couldn't, and the decision to make divorce a reality was the biggest of my life. My husband moved out of our house leaving me with our three daughters, two cats, one dog, two horses, two chickens and a rooster, and went to live in town with a friend who was also separated from his wife. We fought a lot; our lives were in turmoil. When he told me he had hired a lawyer, I was forced to find one myself. And when I did, he acted surprised and hurt, saying that he really didn't have a lawyer and had just threatened me figuring I would run scared. After fifteen years of marriage he didn't know anything about me.
After divorce proceedings began, my husband insisted I move out of our house thinking it was too big for us. So I found an old Vermont farmhouse, with a vine- covered chimney and peeling white paint. It shocked my two older daughters, a stark departure from what they were used to.
The house itself, well hidden from the road, went on like most Vermont farmhouses do. The staircase creaked when anybody other than the cats crept down it. The fireplace kept the large main room comfortable, while ill-fitting windows 'helped the good Lord heat the outside.' A wonderfully warped hallway floor, oak and aged, led to a tiny back room and porch. Two acres, fenced and flourishing, lush and still, provided a place for a tree house, a dark cave, a quiet corner.
The large modern home which I had so carefully designed and decorated be- came an empty shell. Steve finally gave up his New York apartment and moved full time into the home he had purchased to be near me.
Going to court was physically and psychologically horrifying. My lawyer, a brow-beater from Burlington, and I sat on one side of the courtroom while my husband and his lawyer, who wore his pants too short having never acknowledged the last three inches of his height, sat on the other. The next hour was a blur of legal maneuvering.
Six months later, after living alone with my three children, we met at the court- house to finalize the divorce.
My kids now had to accept a different mode of living, with yet another set of standards, as had I after I was told I was adopted. Our divorce wasn't