so we got married.
and now i obsess over our state of happiness or unhappiness.
i'm writing a story about us.
i do this a lot.
i have two parts so far. there is one part about a memory i have from our wedding.
there is another part about a couples' therapy session we had.
i am looking for another couple parts to add to the collection of little stories about us.
that makes me smile. little stories about us. i have so many to choose from.
- the time we looked at each other over our son's recovery bed after his surgery when he was seven.
- the time you had me spit my fear into your hands as i was in labor with our third child.
- the first time we almost got divorced, and you left for a weekend to do mens' work. (i googled 'mens' work' and i get a list of sites to look at mens' work boots. then i get a few sites for Men at Work. Then i get a feeling i am looking into men's work when really i need to be looking into women's work.....)
- the second time we almost got divorced and you brought us to a new couples' therapist who i now feel is golden, and the weeks we don't go to therapy are not as good as the ones when we do.
- the first time one of our parents died, and you stepped into the stable shoes for me, for a while, but then you had to go back to work and i had to do all that grieving on my own, cuz i didn't know to ask you to be more present with me.
- the second time one of our parents died, and i stepped into the stable shoes for you, and i didn't ask you to do the dishes for a whole year. and then i wanted a divorce again.
it's the heavy stuff that comes to mind.
Rumi says "Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."
I think my story for us, this time, is about the work, the amount of work we have to do to stay together as a couple. maybe i need to be googling 'couples' work.' how do i tell a story about this? how do i also show how essential all the little miracles are too? it's not just the work we do that keeps us together. and who says staying together is the right thing to do anyway? are we just to afraid to actually split up? we have gotten so close. and then we don't go through with it. and i chalk it up to work and miracles. what if it's fear that keeps us together?
i'm drinking golden dragon tea this morning as i ponder how to tell this story. this story of ours.
you wore a white bow tie to our wedding.
we weren't messing around. i sewed my dress out of an off white brushed silk..
okay, back to rumi. when i have barriers up, keeping me from loving, what within myself is keeping me from loving?
being in writing school, i keep getting the message that i am here to learn to tell a story. not to ruminate on my thoughts so much, but to just tell a story. ok bitch fuckers. i will just tell a story. but which one?
wu wei. i hear this guy saying this at the next table over. just let it unfold he says. wu wei. a concept meaning to embody the non-doing that keeps the world going. the way the planets orbit and revolve without working at it. the way trees grow without trying to grow. it's doing the natural thing. a little like this other concept i was reading about yesterday, in an interview with phillip shepherd, about living by listening to the world, interacting with the world through the belly, using the intelligence in the second brain, the belly.
alright. i'm gonna pay attention to this, and listen to my teachers and all these concepts of natural intelligence and just drudge through my gut and tell some story of ours.
the therapy story, combined with a piece of the wedding story
ok...tell me what you like and don't like about this little story i drudged up....or not, but if you are cool, and you read it, you will give feedback.
Foreplay
We went to our
couples therapy this week. This
room where we meet is in a grey concrete office park, on the second story of
the east-most building in an efficiently laid out soulless complex. The first time we came to this therapist, the
monotonous horror of the buildings surprised me. After parking, we enter through the exterior
tinted glass door, then up the grey concrete stairwell, down the grey hallway with
faux wood doors. Most of the offices
aren’t rented, adding to the overall sense that there is something wrong with
this place. No one wants to be
here. Once in the therapy room though, we
surrender to a hidden world of woven rugs with snake patternings, woven
hangings depicting primitive birds in neon yarns, and provocative, arresting
images in the framings on the walls. In
one frame is an image of a souldier, with another souldier behind him aiming a
spear at his back. Pay Attention I am
reminded. In another frame, an image of
a stone carving in the shape of a man’s face, the word MASCULINITY underneath. And in another frame, an image of black bird-woman,
with layers of shadow and light radiating off of her. Our therapist is a small framed man, with
dark olive skin, dark brown hair cut in a relaxed professional manner. He wears leather open-toed slip on
shoes. Each of his big toenails is
painted a dark purple as well as each of his thumbnails. He is sitting, legs crossed, in his upright
wooden chair, looking at his phone when we arrive. He looks up and greets us with cave-like brown
eyes, a hawkish smile, a look that somehow says, Come join me in the lower
realm.
There
is a photo of him and his wife, probably taken twenty years ago, sitting on the
shelf next to his chair. On this shelf
is also a photo of a wolf looking directly at us, and a clock. That snake rug is between all the chairs, and
those snakes lure us lower. All the way
to the bottom if we work hard enough.
Provided for the me and my landman are a low-to-the-floor, but deep-and-wide,
stuffed black leather chair, and a wooden rocker with a subdued crocheted blanket
draped over the back. A little table
sits cattycorner these two chairs, supporting a box of tissues and a blank
lined note pad and pen. This little but
spacious therapy room has one window looking out to the next sad office park
building across the street. I sometimes
stare out that window, at the sky above the sad buildings, when my husband is
speaking.
The
waste-basket is sitting behind and to the side of the therapist’s chair, right
next to his big laminate desk. Once well
into the lower realm, usually about a twenty minute descent, we shoot our tear
and snot soaked balled up tissues into the basket from our seats. If I ever miss, my husband gets up to put it
in for me.
There
is a white erase board on a wall no one faces.
We’ve never used this board, but I wouldn’t be opposed to mapping out
our pains on there. A big map of our
hearts’ pains. I would paint part of my
heart black. My beloved would paint
part of his white.
I’ve
asked the therapist about his own marriage before. They almost divorced at year seven. They are now at year twenty-nine, reassessing
if marriage is still what they want. Our
therapist before this one was a divorcee.
And now she is a lesbian. Finding
an elder who made marriage work, without dying internally, is like coming upon
a wolf in the rocky mountains these days.
On this day, I
finally bring up the sex topic. I feel
ready to talk about my lack of desire to have sex with my husband, I say this,
my hands flat on my thighs, rubbing the nap on my pants back and forth. My hands flat on the top part of my tail,
smoothing my ruffled green and gold scales with my tears. The scales on my tail so dry and wrinkled,
like grapes on a vine in a drought. Therapist
says, sitting back in his upright chair, What would make you want to open to him?
If he didn’t
seem to need me so desperately, I say.
Therapist says to me, You are doing great, with a King Snake
authority I can only say Ok to.
King Snake asks
me to look at my husband, sitting in that giant black leather chair that causes
a person’s body to sink in such an uncomfortable way. I look. He
has that needy look in his eyes. He is
looking at me like I am all that matters.
I can’t look at him for long, I say.
Husband, the bearer of my (dry) land as the word originally meant, straightens
up and says he is not feeling needy. I say, But you look like you are. King Snake says, Mermaid, was there anyone in
your past that pulled you under against your will with desperate neediness? Of course, My mother I say, rocking slightly
in the grandma chair, pushing my cuticles back incessantly, my tail flapping, like
a cat’s on alert. My mother, afraid of man’s
constraints upon me, kept me under the sea, in hiding, hoping desperately that
no man would ever own me.
My Beloved has
been looking at me this whole time, his arms resting on the arm rests, feeling like
a tree holding his ground. He has stayed
steady. He is holding so steady in his uncomfortable seat while I rock, getting
wetter and wetter, sensing comfort in his eyes all of a sudden. King Snake asks Landman, Was there anyone in your life whose approval you needed in
order to feel adequate? Squinting his
eyes like he’s looking into a dark corner, full of the pent up fire that men
who aren’t getting laid feel, he answers, My mother. His mother who tended to him like all
well-meaning overbearing mothers do, teaching that the woman in his life determined
his good standing. The pasts’ snakey patternings
are perfectly uniform and there is no break in the pattern until we reach
either the head or the tail. We will
even shed our old skin, over and over, but our patterning will be the
same. We pay bucket loads for King Snake’s
transformative bites, week after week.
We leave the
therapist’s office coming up slowly from the lower realm. Stepping outside, on this day, the light is so
bright it hurts. We are both red in the
eyes, standing in the parking lot, surrounded by blocks and blocks of mostly
unoccupied grey buildings. We stand there on some thick grass, sweating
under the light. It is anything but soulless
in this office park I now see. Landman holds
his masculine pitchfork upright, knowing he is ok, and I swim feminine circles
around him, knowing I am free.
We leave in our
separate cars. I go home to the kids, let the babysitter go. Landman
goes back to work. He comes home a while
later, holds steady, as if I am the sea who can neither approve nor disapprove,
I just don’t have that power. My only
power is to rock, and he holds steady. I
am turned on for the first time in so long.
His foreign nature lures me this night.
I remember the gravel under my
shoes as my grandma walked me down the aisle to be married. I remember the sound of the grit under the
soles. I remember us both looking down
at our feet on the ground. I remember each
step we took, so deliberate, and each stone we stepped on spoke to us. They had something to say. The earth having her words with me as I
walked to meet my Beloved. It was so
formal and ceremonial. But the rocks
under foot said something else. The rocks
under foot said ‘You are on earth, and it is rocky. It is noisy, it is dusty. It is grey. You are on earth and your high heeled shoes
are awkward. There is grit everywhere. Welcome into the darkest lower realm of
marriage.’ I did not understand at
all. My grandma understood, and focused
on this exchange with the earth so I was free to smile at my Beloved.
Marriage, the word, comes from the
Latin maritare, and originally meant
union under the auspices of the Goddess Aphrodite-Mari. Aphrodite-Mari governed the world by ius naturale, the natural law of the
maternal clan. She was the Great Fish
who gave birth to the mermaids, the fish tailed Aphrodites. In matriarchal times, the land men needed to
be bound to a woman to gain power and land ownership. Under modern patriarchal law, the crown
claimed as its own all mermaids found in their territorial waters. As a postmodern
mermaid, I now cannot be claimed. I do
not feel mating for life is an unnatural construct, nor partnering between a
Mermaid and a Landman. It’s just the
patterning of the natural law was lost on us all. Buried so low. It’s in the lower realm, and
it’s incredibly rocky the path back down. My grandma knew the rocky terrain, heard the
rocky welcoming, held my hand, and walked me right to my man.
(A spell is cast, then broken, over
and over, forever.)
