5 Reasons to Stay When the Ego Demands You Go

A Love Letter

Still Life with Husband and Hydrangea

In response to my last post about The Joy of Hanging In There, some people whispered that they, too, stayed in a marriage against the wishes of their own minds, their friends, and relatives. Those subtle undercurrents prompted me to tell the rest of the story, for things were not as they seemed.

1. No matter how magical your meeting, what brought you together will fade.

One day, after decades of loudly proclaiming I’d never marry, never have children, would not learn to cook or clean, that I was fine being alone, I woke from a nap, sat straight up, and sucked in the shocked breath of realization: I wanted a baby, a family, a picket fence, a backyard - gasp - a husband. “Oh no!” I wailed. “Not that. Anything but that.” But I knew it like you know your own name. The medicine that would heal me was the poison I’d been avoiding my whole life: A family. shitshitshitshitshitshitshit.

How could a fuck-up like me raise a child without fucking them up? I used to joke that I didn’t know how to love since it hadn’t been modeled for me. Wouldn’t I just inflict horrors on my child and then have to watch them suffer, too? Since all my relationships recreated the past, how could I avoid marrying some version of my father? I’d absolutely refused. But this desire to have a baby wasn’t fading as normal dreams do. No. Instead, it was growing in clarity, definition, and longing. I wanted a baby, and I didn’t even know a man I would consider acceptable. Oh, I was sure they existed, but my gaze bounced away. Or if I could see them, I found them weak or insufferable. If they wanted me, there had to be something wrong… with them.

So, I prayed. At this point, in my New Age career, I already didn’t believe in some capricious God on a cloud giving miracles to some and smiting others randomly. I prayed to a Grace I called The Highest Good. Since I often experience fear as anger first, that prayer sounded something like this. “Then you pick him because I keep picking The Father With A Thousand Faces and finding myself right back in my childhood. Make it so obvious that I can’t miss the signs. Override me.”

When I first laid eyes on Tom, he was the go-to man, the fix-it man, the problem-solving man of that New Age mega church I was devoted to in those days. On a busy Sunday morning with two overflowing services, the mantra was: find Tom. Toilet’s backed up? Tom’ll fix it. Need more chairs? Tom will get them. Problem in the parking lot? Send Tom. So, on that fateful day, I’d been sent from where I worked in Pastoral Care on a mission to find Tom. “You’ll know him when you see him. Big guy. White hair.”

I turned the corner into the nursery, and there he was, shocking white hair, startling blue eyes, a burly man with a sleeping baby cradled in each arm. When he looked up, I stammered the request and stumbled back to my post. Throughout meditation, the afterimage of Tom holding babies seared my mind’s eye. How old was this guy with white hair? My brother’s hair started going white in his early twenties, so maybe… it’s an Irish thing like that skunk stripe some of us get?

After the service, people streamed out of the sanctuary, and Tom swam against this tide on his way to reset for the next service. He reached for my hand, pulled me to him, and asked me out to dinner as people burbled and flowed around us. I popped out of my body, above the scene, looking down on the tops of our heads, and I knew. I was going to marry this man.

On that first date, I said, “I want marriage and a child. If you don’t want that, there’s no reason to pursue this. We should just be friends.”

And Tom said, “I want that too. Let’s date and see whether or not we can do that together.”

2. Their good qualities are not all that they are.

Most couples have a gorgeous period of infatuation called the honeymoon, where we take all the good qualities we possess and project them onto our partner. We can’t believe how they sparkle. Next, we heap on the negative projections, too. In fights, we say things like “I thought you were (perfect), but no, you’re (a hot mess).” We never actually see them until much later. Years can pass before the relationship gets down to the difficult work of pulling back our projections. Unfortunately, that’s what long relationships are for. Tom and I moved from the “honeymoon state” to the “let’s get to the real shit” stage fast enough to make your head spin like Linda Blair in The Exorcist.

We were barely three weeks old when Tom took me to a movie—a Bollywood-ish comedy called Bahji on the Beach. One of the women in the ensemble cast, running from an abusive husband, had recently moved into a shelter with her six-year-old son. Throughout the movie, the boy pushes his mother to return, insisting he needs both his father and his mother. He doesn’t know about the violence, and she isn’t about to tell him. So, naturally, the son blames his mother. In the climactic scene, the husband has tracked her down. He grabs her arm and slaps some sense into her - from the point of view of the child. We are about four feet tall, looking up. Boom! I can’t stop crying, because my body is crying, not my mind or emotions. Then the theater is empty, and the teenagers who work there are awkwardly trying to clean around the sobbing woman and the man waiting with her.

Tom took me home, tucked me into bed, pulled up a chair, and sat beside me the rest of that day and into the night. Periodically, I’d tell him a few of the images that were coming into my mind. Mostly, I just sobbed. Tom didn’t offer advice. He didn’t become impatient or annoyed. Tom was holding vigil. When the father in my head yelled: I’ll give you something to cry about, Young Lady. Tom took my hand. His presence held me. He didn’t need words.

The next morning, as he was driving me to breakfast, I was still leaking tears. His hand reached for the gear shift. I flinched and pressed myself against my car door. When I realized he wasn’t going to backhand me, I turned, expecting to see disgust in his eyes, so the compassion on his face broke me. He pulled over and waited, unfazed.

Another time, early in the relationship, we giggled toward the bathroom to shower together. While the water was heating, we stripped and started kissing. The image of another bathroom, a long time ago, popped into my mind. Rage wooshed to life like a gas burner. A childish voice in my chest urged me to bite off his tongue and spit it back into his face. Instead, I shattered. Tom wrapped me in a towel, tucked me into bed, and lay beside me outside the blankets. He just held me, this time with his body and his presence, while I thought about how much fun it must be to date me.

3. At some point, you’ll have to renegotiate the marriage contract.

When our marriage was young, before our son was born, we went to a spiritual counselor together for weekly sessions. We set many deep intentions for our marriage, but the deepest was when we “bolted the back door.” That meant we weren’t going to leave the marriage, no matter what the trouble was, unless there was violence. We were going to surrender to love unless leaving was the only option. To unbolt that back door, the problem had to be unsolvable.

When we’d been married seven years, we hit our first make-or-break. Our son was in first grade at a local Montessori school, and I had just finished my third year as a terrible teacher at a poorly run middle school. I’d limped to summer, but that job was killing me. Ironically, the next in a series of silent retreats that were saving my life started on the first day of school. I had to choose. I had no doubt what my soul wanted: quit that abusive job and go to the retreat. Could I, though? No teacher misses the first two weeks of school. We had a mortgage. For that whole summer, I walked in the woods and prayed for the strength to tell Tom. I prayed for love to speak through me because I didn’t trust myself. Many times I tried but failed to find the courage start that conversation.

So, I made rules because everyone knows that rules keep you safe. I’d tell him as a spiritual discipline. To prevent me from manipulating him, I’d only use one-syllable words and say only the factual truth, such as I want to go. I hate my job. Then I’d shut up and tolerate what came up inside me. No begging, no tearful manipulations - no little girl who needed saving. I forbid myself from using the word “you.” I had one ear pointed out, listening for what he would say, and one ear pointed inward, listening for what I would say.

And he was angry, frustrated with me and my needs, and afraid he wouldn’t be able to pay the mortgage, because everyone in this culture knows that this was his ultimate responsibility. Then, once the words were blurted, we stopped talking to each other. After three tense days where we avoided even brushing against each other, Tom finally said, “I want you to go. The marriage will be over if I say no.” That’s the way we left it.

And on that retreat, after seven days of being fully submerged in my craziness, because when you stop all the talking, writing, reading, and listening to music, you do go crazy. Everyone’s deepest fear about silence is true. But here’s the part your ego doesn’t tell you. Going crazy doesn’t kill you. It doesn’t break some fragile mind you’re pasting together with spit. You aren’t better off keeping the crazy. It’s uncomfortable, yes, but it’s all just a thunderstorm in the mind. And after going crazy, you go sane - even if you’ve never been sane before.

On the seventh day and for all of the three days after it, I was beaming with love. Huge love. Divine Love. It streamed through me, and as it passed, I got to feel it. Then, I got to BE it. I loved everything that ever happened to me, even the terrible things. And then on the tenth and final day, all that love focused on Tom. I loved him. I still didn’t know if I had a marriage left to go home to. I fully expected that Tom would tell me he’d had enough. I could understand that. I was a lot. But I loved him either way. And I knew that I would be okay either way, and so would he.

When I got home, I discovered that Tom had been on his own retreat. He’d had his own realizations. He presented me with a nine-page handwritten letter that delved into his own fears and resentments, and how deeply he wanted to stay in our marriage. I’d realized that I’d been asking his permission for everything, that I had cast myself as the child to his adult. I hadn’t married MY father, but I’d married a GOOD father. Maybe Tom didn’t want to be my daddy. It was time for me to grow up.

4. Unpaid Labor Includes Emotional Labor

When I went to graduate school, Tom became Laundry Man, Grocery Man, Homework Man, and Take-the-Kid-to-School Man. He also put dinner on the table and did the dishes. In fact, he took on almost all the unpaid labor women usually do in a marriage, which goes unnoticed by absolutely everyone, unless it doesn’t get done. Then they complain. I could not have worked a more than full-time job as a high school English teacher and gone to graduate school(s) full-time without him. That’s right. Schools. Practically the minute I finished one expensive master’s degree, I started another. Why two masters and not a PhD, you ask? Hmmmmm. The world may never know.

But when I discovered, quite by accident, that Tom had been falling into debt for years, that he had credit cards that I didn’t know about, that my inheritance and his were spent the instant they arrived, all the issues of safety - the lack of it in my childhood home - whooshed to life. I’d been functionally homeless for two years and imagined I was safe now, but no.

I cannot tell you how much I’d judged my mother for not divorcing, how much I did not want to be a single mother, and how much I wanted to kill Tom, or at least punish him severely. I wanted to make the man feeeeeel things. How could Tom be so financially unfaithful? He was an accountant for fuck’s sake. When I married him, I thought I’d never have another money problem. I gratefully abdicated all financial responsibility toTom—Whooo boy.

To tell me the extent of the damage, Tom handed me a profit-and-loss statement. He waited until we were in a therapist’s office. She promoted a plan to contact creditors and make a payback schedule that would drain us of everything and take years. In retrospect, it was a plan that would have worked. His credit card debt was precisely the amount of my student loan debt, a synchronicity. I barely noticed because my debt was legit, out in the open, agreed to - while his was a dirty secret. I grew into a mushroom cloud. The therapist said, “Now, Susan. You can have some respect for the courage it took to tell you all this, can’t you?”

I turned in a slow-motion “Whaaaattttt?” Once safely in the hallway, I told Tom I wasn’t going to any therapist who was uncomfortable with anger. That bitch was fired.

5. You Have to Tolerate Some Difficult Emotions

While we were declaring bankruptcy, I had another opportunity to solve the problem. Turns out, if you have student loans, the judge can pause your payments and order you to pay creditors instead. Of course, during the years this takes, Freddie Mac would still be charging 6.8% interest on a huge principal. The lawyer said she didn’t think our judge would do that. Could I trust this daddy-judge? Turns out I could not. I closed my eyes and begged for clarity—too many times a day. What should I do? Please tell me. Every meditation brought a different divine guidance, and nothing felt right. Finally, I said we should dismiss the bankruptcy. We kept the debt because I couldn’t trust.

During divorce mediation, Tom accepted full responsibility for all the debt. I received all of this as my due. There was only one problem. I’d just found out that our son had a secret just like his dad’s. My straight-A student had stopped doing homework and was failing every subject. When I asked him why he couldn’t tell me he was struggling, he said, “I was going to make it up, so you’d never find out.” He curled into the dog’s bed and sobbed.

Word for word, that had been his father’s logic, too. Something in me broke like Bahji at the Beach. Turns out, everyone in the family system has the same symptoms.

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do this to my son. I asked Tom if he wanted to be roommates, just until our son graduated from high school. Then we decided to see him through college. Sometime after that graduation, the debt was resolved, and the student loans were forgiven (thank you, Grampa Joe Biden). We put our wedding rings back on. And now, just as in the Philip Larkin poem, we are walking down cemetery road together.

Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t easy. I had fantasies about the Beautiful Other, the life I could have had if I’d divorced Tom. I criticized myself as harshly as I had criticized my mother. What perfect second husband might you have married if you’d only been brave enough to face life on your own? Yada yada, I’ll never know. Could I have really divorced my problems by divorcing Tom? How far could I get running from myself? Sadly, until ridiculously recently, I still thought the debt episode happened to me rather than being something I co-created.

Pema Chödrön, author of “The Wisdom of No Escape.”

And now, I’m glad we never unbolted that Hermetically sealed back door - what Pema Chödrön calls the wisdom of no escape. The joy is crystalline. Pristine and sharp. Maybe I would have ended up in this joy whether I stayed or not. I suspect so. I’m sure that path would have been just as strewn with landmines. But I’m glad that I still have my best friend, the one I love, and that we have the long course of years behind us as we round the final turn and head into the homestretch together. Both of us have thrown our jockeys. When we cross that finish line, kick off our saddles and spit out our bridles, we’ll jump the fence and find the forest where the wild things roam. Maybe. You never know. But whatever lies ahead, I’m facing it with Tom. He’s proven himself to be pretty reliable.

I’d love to know what you think about the ramblings of this mythological mind, how this hit you, or what it brought up. Please leave a comment. You are all my teachers.

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