Accept, Release, Renew 2023

PMJ October 2020, two years prior to MS diagnosis:

     “I’m still growing my legs back from the third and last time my mother chewed them off. Functionality is unpredictable. They’re soft and useless much of the time, but I’m trying.

     I wasn’t prepared for this.  Being on my own. Managing my life, my house, my money, my lawsuits, my vehicles, my decisions, my emotions, my well being, my breakdowns.  I never wanted to leave. What I wanted was my loving husband back. But a girl has to know when to quit.

I knew how hard this would be for me and I have struggled stoically to have faith that I am smarter than your average bear and there is no reason I cannot be a grownup on my own.  Except there is.  I have CPTSD. (*What I did not know when I wrote this is that I also have Relapsing Remitting Multiple Sclerosis (RRMS) and was in a massive flare up at the time, brought on by the still-ongoing lawsuit with the builders of my falling-down house.)  When I’m triggered I startle like a frightened animal and become totally incapacitated for extended periods of time.  No amount of meditation alleviates my suffering, although it may be the only thing keeping me alive.

I haven’t watched out for myself because I didn’t know not to trust people.  I did not, could not comprehend the plethoric commonality of duplicity.  I thought if I gave freely, most people would rise to the occasion in gratitude. WHY?! Because I don’t see egos. I see souls.  I see goodness.  I see the Presence within a being.  This pernicious habit has resulted in years of self-sanctioned emotional and financial victimization.  I have to take responsibility for the fact that no one is going to watch out for me.  I am on my own, which I have long acknowledged would be a heavy undertaking, decades before I understood why. 

XDH promised to take care of me.  I suppose by his 3D definition he did.  But he did not, perhaps could not, comprehend the world of my physical and emotional reality. How could he when for at least a decade he rarely spent more than a few waking hours per week with us, typically rising before we awoke and going to bed while the girls and I continued working, creating, bonding, often accidentally waking him with our boundlessly joyful mirth?

My XDH’s perception of his wife and children was based on an incognizant interpretation of events to which he was neither witness nor accessory. The stage was perfectly set for his ego to craft a projection precisely designed to inflame pain bodies, for it is on resentfully hemorrhaging pain bodies that the ego-mind  gorges its voracious appetite for suffering.

Will Smith’s daughter said it perfectly. “It’s so sad. Daddy has a family in his head, but it’s not us.”

I often hear said it takes two people to ruin a marriage. While it is generally true that it takes two to make a marriage work, even this assumes both parties are emotionally and/or physically present. I was able to hold us together for 16 years virtually on my own by deeply following the guidance of my higher self and The Universe.  This might have continued indefinitely had he not chosen to white-knight the tears of our anorexic teenage daughter who didn’t want her YouTube channel put on hold. So I guess it did take two people to ruin my marriage: my ex-husband and our eldest daughter.

XDH’s betrayal reached a high watermark when he denied my pleas to send my gaslighting mother out of our home, instead locking me up in a psyche ward and bringing our daughters to witness my incarceration. 

A new capstone was set one year later when he contrived to entrap me in the lies he imagined I was telling, hiring a “marketing manager” for our youngest daughter, whose real job, as it turned out, was to befriend me and report back to him the details of my innermost thoughts. Ironically, after knowing me for some time, this same person suggested to XDH that he undertake to treat his wife as the Goddess she is and explore approaches of supporting and participating in the rejuvenation of her spirit. Apparently, this would have required time and money my then-husband preferred to spend elsewhere.

As I leaned into the profoundly transformative experience that is bringing two independent human beings into this world and helping them find their spiritual mission on this planet, XDH became mesmerized by the felicitous magic of compounding interest and institutional panegyrics. Money and fawning veneration were the catalyzers of his retreat into the egoic mind, until the man I fell in love with was irredeemably lost to me. By the end, all my mother had to do was flip the switch and we were nothing but a house full of fatally wounded egos feeding ravenously on inflamed pain bodies. The only path of survival was to leave.