It’s probably adorable, from maybe an alien standpoint, how as a species we decided to use the cycles of Sky Things like the phases of the moon and our planet’s journey around the universe’s heat source to clock our existence. Not to mention all those cute traditions we use to break up the monotony of our time here and give our lives a measure of relevance: The anniversaries. Birthdays. Holidays.
While in lockdown mode, as even uncertainty managed to become tedious, I felt the surrealness of a world where time suddenly had less meaning. I mean sure, I had the added spin of my husband walking out on me just as the world shut down, but did anyone else find themselves in a state where everything stretched on and blended together, all meaning garbled into nothing because everything that mattered and kept you tethered was suddenly gone– your very home now a foreign place where coldness settles in your bones no matter how warm the weather? A place where the air is too thin? The walls too close.
And you couldn’t even leave. Every day you wanted to scream. You wanted to tear your skin off with your own finger claws, but you mustn’t upset the children any more than they already were, so you swallowed it down- your jaw aching from all that clenching. You woke yourself up punching the mattress, you cried violently into a hoodie he left behind. You still swallowed it down while trying to keep your hands from shaking as you tried to prepare breakfast for your daughters and now two years later, you’re still having random, sharp chest pains.
Oh, pandemic life, amirite?
Anyway, no one cried while putting up the Xmas tree this year, so I’ll take that as a sign that things are stabilizing. People really like to espouse how resilient children are. How they can adapt to anything. And sure, they aren’t going to die from a broken home, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t marked by the trauma. Hence all the counseling.
In the like hundred of hours of my own therapy, I’ve reflected a lot on the cycles and patterns that led me to the PTSD caused by the separate, but linked traumas, of my husband’s affair and sudden abandonment. I think it had a lot to do with those cycles we don’t mark. The ones that don’t track on a calendar, that aren’t tethered by time. The ones passed down from one generation to the next, like a blood- curse that goes on and on because they’re based on behavior ingrained in our mushy child brains from our parents.
Abuse often follows a generational pattern. Infidelity, which is absolutely a form of abuse, also repeats down the line. Then there’s things like addiction which is both a pattern and likely a genetic inheritance to boot. These are all family destroying behaviors that can each leave a mark on their own, but they often pair nicely together. They’re why statistically If you came from a broken, dysfunctional family, you’re almost certain to end up back in one as an adult.
Here’s the thing though: you can break these dysfunctional generational patterns. But. It takes a lot of work. It isn’t easy to peel back the scab you’ve spent years forming over the wounds of your childhood, but you have to really look at the heart of that damage and ask what factors led to it. You need to understand, if not forgive, the patterns you grew up with so you can break them as an adult. You can’t just assume you’re going to be a better parent and partner than your parents were to you and each other, you have to make a conscious decision to not let history repeat itself.
I’d done the work.
Over the years. With and without therapy. I was so hellbent on history not repeating itself, that I’d even decided that I would never be a mother- something I knew would have fulfilled a deep need for me, if I couldn’t do it right. (“Right” for me was simply giving my children the love and protection of a stable family.) I’d made hard, heartbreaking choices so that I would not repeat my mother’s mistakes. Marrying my best friend was supposed to easily be the right choice because he wasn’t only my friend, but someone who said that he wanted the same things, who was remorseful over his past mistakes and who wanted to break those patterns too.
We had one shot to break the cycle of divorce and the broken home. And he blew it for all of us.
So, I’ve been trying to adjust to living through a lifelong fear the last couple of years. No, not the actual pandemic and what’s likely still coming our way because of it, but of finding myself exactly in the place I swore to myself I would never be. I did everything I could to keep my family safe and happy. I wasn’t perfect, but I tried to be the best partner I could be. I was caring, open and kind. I talked. I listened. And got zero complaints from my husband. But in the end …. exactly none of anything I did or didn’t do was ever going to matter.
I cannot help the man he chose to be. It took me a long time to accept that, but how he left- that he could just leave at all, showed his true character pretty clearly. Despite what I believed, he never thought to actually put in any real work on himself so in the end, he wasn’t going to put in any work on our marriage.
It’s a real fear of mine that this repeats again in my children. I want to teach them how to spot red flags and protect their hearts, but I worry I’ll seem like some creepshow crone jumping from the shadows with a flashlight under my face crowing out warnings about love and the wrong kind of men.
“I believed in love once, my pretties, but sometimes you kiss a frog and get a snake shaped like a prince.”
I’ll probably just stick to the basics then, and tell them love can blind you to patterns and that bad behavior will likely cycle back into someone who is weak. I’ll warn them not to bind themselves to someone who believes in nothing- I’m not talking about religion necessarily, just make sure they believe in something that guides how they behave and choices they make.
While I try not to dwell on any of this, it’s especially hard when the anniversaries, birthdays and holidays all converge at once. Not to mention all of the milestone moments. As hard as it gets, I’m grateful to be there with my girls for all of it, but it sometimes breaks my heart that I’m there alone as the end part of another completed cycle made up of avoidable patterns.
Grief is sort of cyclic too, but it doesn’t seem to follow any recognizable pattern at times. Even now, I’ll think I’m fine but something will pop up and remind me that I’m still heartbroken. As I said, things are stabilizing thankfully, so I get back up quicker than before at least, but I understand though why sometimes people look for patterns and meanings where there aren’t any to give themselves some sense of control. Something must be in retrograde. His moon was in a bad house. You broke a mirror, then your husband decided to stick his dick in someone else, so clearly these things must be related. On Friday the thirteenth, a black cat crossed your path, so your life fell apart.
Whatever the reason, I’ll always have little unexpected reminders of things still repeating, little earthquakes that can strike at any time. Like old Snoozy Bear here. Snoozy used to sit on my mother’s bed. He was one of the few things she didn’t take with her when she ran off with her boyfriend when I was about Lily’s age.
Poor Snoozy, I thought, she must not have been attached to him- if she could just leave him behind like that. I took him into my collection and for many years, Snoozy sat on my bed. Just as he sat on my mother’s
Now he sits on Lily’s.
For some reason in the last year or so, out of all of the cutsie, floofy, not (arguably) creepy plush things she owns, she’s latched on to Snoozy and will not sleep without him.
And now, I’m really hoping that the bear isn’t cursed…
Either way, thank goodness there’s good friends, therapy, and Netflix.
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“You’re cold on the inside
There’s a dog in your heart and it tells you to tear everything apart
You draw blood just to taste it, you hold bones just to break them
You ruin everything you touch and destroy anyone you love, you’re all over me”
