259 Marbles
“Well, I'm gonna get out of bed every morning... breathe in and out all day long. Then, after a while I won't have to remind myself to get out of bed every morning and breathe in and out... and, then after a while, I won't have to think about how I had it great and perfect for a while."
Nora Ephron "Sleepless in Seattle"
I was raised a Catholic, so this stage of the grieving process is pretty familiar territory. On the surface, I’ve been angry and frustrated with Ex-man for instigating the breakup, but in at least one of the layers below, I’ve felt guilty for all the things that I didn’t do to prevent the breakup from happening. I rerun the places where we’d get stuck, and I think,”What could I have done differently?”
Guilt is a feeling of responsibility for some wrong, whether real or imagined. I still feel that our inability to keep our family together is a wrong and I feel responsible to our children for how our choices have affected them. If our children weren’t in the wake, the guilt would not be so strong. It would be the termination of a relationship between two consenting adults. There’d be a feeling of loss but there would also be lessons learned.
My son calls a guilt trip a “guilt trick” and perhaps it is a bit of a trick. Whereas I cannot deny that the adjustment has been tricky for the kids, maybe the wrong of the breakup is more imagined than real. When I’m in the guilt trick, I examine my actions to determine if there were ways that I could have made the relationship work, ways that I could have made Ex-man happier. Whereas my intention was never to break apart my family, in the heat of an argument the stakes seem less apparent and neither of us tended to act in ways that promoted our intentions. As the Hafiz poem of Marble 318 notes, we’d be like talking donkeys when we both had more beautiful animals latent inside.
The bottom line of the guilt trick is, I would have had to have been a different person to be with Ex-man. The truth is, I am who I am. What if the wrong of the breakup is completely imagined and we were never supposed to stay together? What if we were just meant to gift each other with children and family?
Can you let go of the idea of the breakup being wrong? Can you tease all of the good out of the relationship and leave the rest behind?
“Well, I'm gonna get out of bed every morning... breathe in and out all day long. Then, after a while I won't have to remind myself to get out of bed every morning and breathe in and out... and, then after a while, I won't have to think about how I had it great and perfect for a while."
Nora Ephron "Sleepless in Seattle"
I was raised a Catholic, so this stage of the grieving process is pretty familiar territory. On the surface, I’ve been angry and frustrated with Ex-man for instigating the breakup, but in at least one of the layers below, I’ve felt guilty for all the things that I didn’t do to prevent the breakup from happening. I rerun the places where we’d get stuck, and I think,”What could I have done differently?”
Guilt is a feeling of responsibility for some wrong, whether real or imagined. I still feel that our inability to keep our family together is a wrong and I feel responsible to our children for how our choices have affected them. If our children weren’t in the wake, the guilt would not be so strong. It would be the termination of a relationship between two consenting adults. There’d be a feeling of loss but there would also be lessons learned.
My son calls a guilt trip a “guilt trick” and perhaps it is a bit of a trick. Whereas I cannot deny that the adjustment has been tricky for the kids, maybe the wrong of the breakup is more imagined than real. When I’m in the guilt trick, I examine my actions to determine if there were ways that I could have made the relationship work, ways that I could have made Ex-man happier. Whereas my intention was never to break apart my family, in the heat of an argument the stakes seem less apparent and neither of us tended to act in ways that promoted our intentions. As the Hafiz poem of Marble 318 notes, we’d be like talking donkeys when we both had more beautiful animals latent inside.
The bottom line of the guilt trick is, I would have had to have been a different person to be with Ex-man. The truth is, I am who I am. What if the wrong of the breakup is completely imagined and we were never supposed to stay together? What if we were just meant to gift each other with children and family?
Can you let go of the idea of the breakup being wrong? Can you tease all of the good out of the relationship and leave the rest behind?
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