Tag: divorce

Starting Over

When I was a manager in the civil service, the finance wonks set us off on an out of the norm budget exercise. It was called zero base budgeting.

The idea was to eradicate all the items in your existing budget and then start adding elements back in. In this way, we’d be forced to look at what we were spending money on in our division. A deeper look and closer consideration had us look at our priorities. What programs must stay? Which could go?

There weren’t many seasoned managers who took the exercise or the rationale for doing it seriously. Most budgets became even fatter when the numbers were submitted.

Of course in government, this exercise was moot. There is a reason there are numerous short-term contracts available toward the end of any government’s budget year. Managers want to empty their coffers because that which isn’t spent gets subtracted from their budget in the following year.

I am finding moving is a lot like that zero-base budgeting exercise. But more to do with stuff than money. I visited our new house before we moved in several times. Each time I was in awe of the empty space. The lines of the house flowed from one room into the next. Our old house had been choppy and compartmentalized. This new house was the interior decorating equivalent of a blank canvas.

I knew it would eventually be filled with furniture and stuff to make it habitable. But the question for me was, with what? I knew what I was going for as a design concept. But achieving that vision was a lot less clear.

An analogy with my life occurred to me. With anybody’s life actually. We all arrive on the planet starting at a zero base. I know there are lots of other variables and wildly different birth circumstances. But as for you, newly deposited and still breathing through your mother’s umbilicus, you ain’t got much to begin with.

And so we land in life with a host of expectations that are inherent in the deal of whatever family you have landed in. And life evolves. You don’t get a whole lot of choices in those early years. As a young mother, I was taught the importance of offering my children “choices” in small matters to enhance their sense of personal autonomy.

So many of us stumble along like this in our young lives picking up life experiences: education, family values, friends, skills, likes and dislikes, nascent hobbies and passions that may form part a key part of our life path in adulthood.

Once we settle into a life path, that’s it for the duration for many. Not everybody, of course. But the road less travelled is an aberrant path, and not what the majority choose. Life presents us with stepping stones and goals and benchmarks that shape our path.

The person we marry will be a large part of our future experiences. The decision to have or not have children adds another wrinkle to our life. Whether you elect to study or pursue a trade or start your own business, you will learn and accumulate experiences that will stick.

The midlife crisis was once much ridiculed as self-indulgent and unrealistic. But the more benevolent interpretation is that the so-called “crisis” comes about when someone finds they are living a life, and maybe with a person, not entirely agreeable to them.

They may feel they have missed the mark somehow in making life choices to honor their own inner reality. And time is running out. It is often a time of great change. Marriages break down. And against the stereotype of the boss leaving for his secretary, it is often women who walk out on their marriages in mid-life.

A sense of urgency can arise when the realization hits that you have lived considerably more years on the planet then you will live in the future. It can sharpen the mind and the focus of your life. this is when we hear more people say things like “I lived my whole early life for my parents, my children and my husband. For the next few decades, I am going to live just for me.”

Sometimes the hand is forced as in case of death. I know more and more women now rethinking their future since they have become widows. What seemed impossible to imagine when they were were living life “coupled up” falls away. Life’s lessons rarely mollycoddle us.

So I’m giving some thought lately to “zero-based budgeting” exercise in this moving exercise. We are making choices about “what stays and what goes.” As stressful and disruptive as the move is, choices are being made to decide what is and isn’t important to keep in our lives.

Not a bad exercise which like much exercise, shapes us as the same time that it strains us. Guess that is all part of the birthing process. One we can frequently repeat throughout our lives to get us closer to the essence of who we really are and what is true for us.

Broken Birds

It is commonly believed – somewhere – that a fertile young woman inclined to get herself in the family way will seek out the strongest, healthiest mate she can find as a father to her children.

The reasons are two-fold. A strong healthy male might be expected to produce the strongest and healthiest babies. A strong healthy male might also be expected to be a good provider.

I’m the first to admit that these are wildly, out-of-fashion assumptions, and options in the baby-making realm these days are just as wildly variant. Many young women plan to not only have but raise and take care of their babies all by themselves, thank you very much.

But abused children as adults do not necessarily seek out what is good for them. Quite the opposite, in fact. I saw this manifest in my mother operating as an adult from her own abusive background (though she would rather eat nails than admit that it was.)

My mother was repeatedly drawn to the birds with broken wings. She invariably sought out others as abused and oblivious to its impact upon them as she had been. Our childhood was filled with an assortment of ne’er-do-wells and problem drinkers and people “not quite right” whom she could and would take under her wing.

She aspired and identified with the local “intelligentsia,” who willingly came to her countless parties and drank copious quantities of free booze. The professors. The lawyers and judges. Occasionally doctors, but her conversational boundaries with them were reached pretty quickly. Doctors were usually much too starchy and grounded in reality for her liking. She much preferred philosophers.

Mom married a bird with very broken wings indeed. His childhood of physical and emotional abuse showed up in adulthood as sex and alcohol addiction, domestic violence, and an inferiority complex the size of Greenland.

In retrospect, she would say about her attraction to him, “I was going to love him so much he would heal and get better.” And of course, he never did. Not with her. What she didn’t say is that water seeks its own level.

People change themselves if they are going to change at all. They may be motivated by someone else but the work of “changing” is theirs and theirs alone. And the “savior complex” my mother had was never completely altruistic.

There was something reminiscent of trying to remove a splinter in someone else’s eye while ignoring the log in their own. Mom came to see – after years of enduring my father’s abuse and her unceasing pain – that her assumptions about her marriage were painfully naive.

But she never really fully let it go and moved on. She liked having been married to a lawyer. It meant a lot to a small-town country-raised girl. I used to say that their divorce was only on paper.

And after the parents’ divorce, Mom continued attracting broken birds to her circle. The “recovering” alcoholics. The “between real jobs” handymen. The sketchy English professor who was “down on his financial luck.” She was inordinately proud of helping them. If they could be helped.

To me, they seemed like a rogue’s gallery of lesser men of even less fortune who were happy to prey upon my mother’s vanities and vulnerabilities. Children often see things differently than their parents.

So, in kind, I picked a broken bird. Our shared history of parental alcoholism was a bonding issue. But dysfunctional backstories do not set a firm foundation for a lasting marriage. My own views were so crippled and skewed that on our wedding day – carrying our first child – I blithely mused: “If it doesn’t work out, we can always get a divorce.”

Life and the children I would bring into this world drove the message of my own naivete home in waves of dull pain for all of the following years to date. I still have to carefully bridge conversations where my daughter bemoans the “fine line” she has had to walk her whole life between her father’s world and mine. “Mom screwed up,” is all I can muster by way of comfort.

Hindsight is 20/20, of course. But in choosing a father for my children, I did what I had been taught to do. “Pick a broken bird and make him better.” Poppycock, of course. I can only say that my children were the catalyst for my own embarkation on a healing path.

As my children wrestle with their own issues emergent from a dysfunctional background, I hope that owning up to my own mistakes will give them better emotional grounding and source material than I had to work with.

One of the greatest lessons I have learned about life is that hope springs eternal. Indeed it is often said of “second marriages” that they are a triumph of hope over experience.

With the all too human “compulsion to repeat” from those of us who emerged from dysfunctional families, it is one of those quiet blessings for which I often express thanks and gratitude.

Lived Experience

Does anyone else have the same problem I have? I am dumbstruck by the number of people who have lived and died on Planet Earth. Neil deGrasse Tyson says approximately 10,000,000,000 (that’s 10 billion for those of you who, like me, are numerically challenged.) Given the world population is hovering around 7 billion. or so, that represents some intense population growth in the past couple of hundred years.

All we can ever know of people who went before us are what we hear about them or stories we read about them. We make huge assumptions about who they were based on hearsay and material artifacts and what people of an earlier time wrote. Our imagination of the lives of our forebears is largely apocryphal.

Understanding how others live today is a lot like that, too. We make assumptions about people that are based on scant and usually superficial information. Or more likely, curated information. I have seen resumes that are the greatest works of fiction ever published. Scandal du jour joker and “alleged” felon George Santos is only the most recent public offender.

I often wonder what daily life must have been like in the old days. Television and movies are great for filling in holes in our imagination. In movies and on TV, we are served curated scenarios that allow us to imagine the lives and lifestyles of those who lived long before we did or very differently. And in astonishing variety. Courtiers, family farmers, aristocrats, or maybe the occasional itinerant pastor who roamed the countryside with his horse and buggy spreading the word of the lord.

What fascinates me are the assumptions we make from what we observe. We can only speculate what is going on intellectually or emotionally inside other people. Past and present. I sometimes feel this frustration watching Holocaust footage. It is not only what you see, that is horrifying, but what you can’t see. Broken, skeletal, barely-clinging-to-life bodies twisted in pain convey some of their reality. But not everything.

One can only imagine the terror and humiliation of young Jewish females shaved bald and stripped naked before being paraded in front of leering Nazi camp guards. What must those young women have been thinking? What questions must they have asked themselves? What panicky racing thoughts did they have? Was their imminent demise clear in their minds or were they actually lulled into the delusion of the gas chambers as showers?

In the Steven Spielberg movie Schindler’s List, there is a particularly poignant scene – among many – where an elegant and clearly wealthy young woman disembarks from one of the trains at a camp. She dismissively gives a healthy handful of Reichsmarks as a tip. Her Jewish compatriot is already wearing the trademark black and grey striped pajamas and humbly takes away her bag. We have only the sad look on his pained face by which to gauge his reaction.

I do not understand evil very well. I do not understand what causes a teenager to walk into a building full of precious human beings with a semi-automatic weapon and deliberately start spraying bullets. Worse, I do not understand how a creature like Alex Jones who identifies as a “broadcaster” could consistently call the Sandy Hook massacre of innocent children a hoax, let alone have anyone believe him. I cannot imagine being a bereaved parent of a child victim futilely defending against that level of evil insanity. Those parents were bullied by people who believed Jones! I often wonder how those parents have made sense of their lives.

The only explanation I can come up with is that when nature is out of balance, life goes out of balance. We are a society wildly out of balance. Important institutions that were nurseries for human souls like communities or churches or extended families and even steady consistent parenting or any kind of certainty have broken down. Combining that with the information overload of our current epoch and mass breakdown was all but certain.

How is anyone supposed to internalize enough sense of self to navigate the exceptionally murky water and future that is presented to young people today? My daughter tells me that is why “mid-century” chic is so popular. People are looking backward more than forward. She also says it is why young people spend sinful amounts of money on gaudy self-care such as colored hair and three-inch acrylic nails. It is a world of “Why not?” and “What does it matter?” It is also a world of addiction. a teen suicide epidemic, easy divorces. All are indicative of a nationwide – even global – and communal loss of direction and purpose.

All of this external frazzle puts the onus back on us to create a better way of being for ourselves and our loved ones. Find a healthy and productive path and walk it with like-minded individuals who want to live better, richer, saner lives. I have a mountaineer friend who cured her booze addiction by climbing on rock and ice faces. I saw many brave if tremulous individuals surrender their to take the white chip in AA meetings as a first step toward sobriety. I know single mothers who go without to give their children everything they can give them.

Pain and obstacles are part of life. But so are joy and love. At an earlier time and maybe still in some places in the world, the interwebs of love in which people live function well enough to hold communities and each other together.

It wasn’t so long ago that a sense of community was widespread and dependable. Not without their own issues or problems to be sure. Where they don’t exist today, it behooves us to keep our counsel and to keep looking for one or create one that works for us.