This morning, the door slammed—the high school senior was late for school. It doesn’t matter the reason, though; every door slam awakens this echo that resounds inside of me, a muscle memory of the anger I lived with through twenty-five years of marriage.
For a full year following our separation, I felt like I was gulping down the absence of all of that anger. I thought I could never want anything more than the space that opened up inside this house and inside my heart when he left. I’ve known grief, and the way an absence can take up all the space, but this was altogether different. This absence felt like the antidote, and every morning when I woke up, and every night when I put my youngest to bed, I was grateful for it. I noticed it every minute in between too. I thought my thirst for it would never be satiated.
I see now that I might be a bit like a person who grew up without enough to eat but suddenly finds herself with plenty. Anger is no longer the undercurrent of my days, but a slammed door is enough to remind me how my kids and I almost drowned.
Wow! Nina….that touched me,
that you have felt this….I felt ‘the absence ‘ of some negative things from my marriage too…different things but you explained it so well…even after 24 years I am still grateful for those ‘absences’.
Thanks, Lamie. And thanks for reading. xo
Thank you for sharing yourself. I can relate to this on some level having just gotten out of a ten year, very frustrating, but (I must believe) not altogether terrible relationship…it is simultaneously difficult and easy, natural and strange, sad and liberating. Loud. And quiet.
Thanks for reading, Caitlin…. And though I know nothing about your relationship that ended, I agree that you must believe it was not altogether terrible. Most anything we can think of is both good and bad, and I think we have a responsibility to always see both sides of the coin, or else we aren’t seeing the truth…. But I hope each day you are leaning more and more to the easy and natural and liberating side of life as you recover from your relationship ending. Ten years is a long time.
Nina.