Afterword

It is worth remembering that the time of greatest gain in terms of wisdom and inner strength is often that of greatest difficulty.
Dalai Lama

    After the last marble was dropped, I didn’t end up with dude from New Orleans. I learned a great many things from him but he was not for me. As Chris Cleave put it in Little Bee, “It’s something that I could never have explained to my mother, I suppose: that there are circumstances in which we will allow men to enter our bodies but not our homes.”
    I went home and visited the occasional “hook-up” (as I learned a one-night stand is now called). These few experiences had varied success but they served the purpose of someone wanting intimacy while not ready for another relationship. 
    In the spirit of gonzo journalism, I enrolled in burlesque classes and performed a couple of times until I lost my dance partner and thankfully went back to writing. 
    Take a deep breath and don’t be angry with me when you read this, Dear Reader… Etienne wrote, “But one always returns to one's first loves,” and as the year went on, I ended up back with Ex-man. Why? Because I believe that love can transform all.  Because I believe in family. Because I believe what Eckhart Tolle wrote, “Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you,” and here’s the thing - so many of the qualities that annoyed me with Ex-man were traits that I saw in myself.  Part of me believed that if we could come back to love, all would be well in my world, our kids’ worlds, in our world. And because I believe that I had changed in the time we were apart and because I saw changes in him. I believe in the type of change that Dickens describes in A Christmas Carol, “He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.”
    And so my heart was happy. For six months.  And then – the Perfect Storm.  Disneyland, two over-tired, hungry kids . One crazy final day at the Happiest Place on Earth. One fight between the parents.  We left the amusement park and trudged through the vast parking lot in the dark. When we arrived at the motel, he went off to get pizza and I got the kids ready for bed.  While he was gone my thoughts were of how we could have managed things better, how we should have had a vacation with more balance, how next time we would have more balance.  He came back with the pizza and the phrase, “I guess we’ll call it quits.”
    Something shifted for me that day and despite agreeing to try to work it out, I had a difficult time trusting the yo-yo-yo relationship again.  We trudged on for another year, through my mother’s death, through his cancer scare, through my working and re-working my script. There were more arguments and when he started distancing, this time I didn’t pursue. I distanced too and inevitably the relationship fell apart. 
    There’s an old saying that goes, “Relationships are like glass. Sometimes it's better to leave them broken than try to hurt yourself putting it back together.” It took me some time to be okay with the last split-up.  It was supposed to be “Third time’s the charm” but turned out to be, “Three strikes you’re out.” At first I beat myself up, feeling like a heroin addict always going back for another fix, knowing that it was wrong for me.  I thought of the definition of insanity, “Doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.” Yet I insisted, “I wouldn’t have put my big toe back into the relationship if I didn’t see real change.” But there was change so first there was the toe, then the foot, and so on. (Thankfully we didn’t totally jump in and we still had our own places because the change didn’t stick.) 
    It didn’t help that Ex-man talked with forked tongue – on one side he said, “We’re not meant to be together,” from the other, “I’m open to being with you in the future.” Telling our kids, “We’re taking a break,” telling me, “We’re done.” Now I believe in recycling of many things but his recycling attitude towards me was making me crazy.  I had to decide that it was final for me.  Despite the fact that we were so happy for six months, I realized that six months out of almost fifteen years is not a great ratio - that’s a 1:30 happiness to hard work ratio.  I took faith that I was in good company when even Nietzsche wrote, “For every man there exists a bait which he cannot resist swallowing.” Ex-man was my kryptonite: Some women date the same type of guy, I just happened to date the same guy, and although I loved him dearly – he represented my youth, my first love, the history of where I came from – he would no longer be my future.  The slightly weaker side of my heart that loved myself was getting stronger. I gave him back his Claddagh ring and his house keys and wished him well, letting go of the dream, once and for all, of creating an “us” with this man.
    There was a red flag that went up when Ex-man broke up with me the last time. He said, “You can’t hide who you are from me.  You may be able to do that with someone new but you can’t do it with me.  I know you.” I told him I had no intention of hiding who I was from anyone but the way he worded that made me feel like he thought there was something wrong with me.  I remembered my writing teacher’s words, “You do understand that a character can be flawed and be completely loveable” and I knew that this was the lesson I was learning.  Yes, the flawed me was, and is loveable, as we all are.
    I remembered how it felt like my own parents were just tolerating each other.  I no longer wanted to be tolerated.  I want to be celebrated.  No matter what, the long and windy road was over with Ex-man.  Ex-man took on a whole new meaning.  There was now a permanent “X” on him for me that I’m sure would be an exciting check mark for some other woman and that would have to be okay. Paraphrasing the words of Taylor Swift, “We were never, ever, ever getting back together.” I felt like Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings placing his stake in the ground and facing the Balrog, “Go back to the shadow! You shall not pass.” But was Ex-man the Balrog or part of my own shadow? As Carol S. Pearson explains, "When people have integrated most of their Shadows, they spend less energy repressing and denying their internal reality...They spend less time fighting external battles because they don't so often project their Shadows onto others."
    I recalled  my Ex-husband’s parting words to me, “Lisa, you will be okay when you realize there is nothing wrong with you.” I was finally leaving a relationship where there was something inherently wrong with me to go forward with the knowledge that I am completely okay.  I was leaving behind a relationship where I was always striving for perfection, not to lose my temper, not to ever have an argument, taking myself to endless counseling sessions in a futile effort to fix myself when I was never really broken in the first place except where my understanding thought me so. Part of me questioned whether this Ann Rice quote was true of me, “And I realized that I’d tolerated him this long because of self-doubt.”  But did it really matter? Underneath the smoke and mirror show of Ex-man and me, I was changing my relationship with myself.  There was no bad guy in this story.
    And then, I was right back into the marbles – not 365, but about 150.  150 marbles that I didn’t complete the first year round.  Sure, I had notes from those missed days but I didn’t complete every day in sequence.  It wasn’t a stretch of my imagination to put myself back to that earlier breakup as destiny had managed to play me the same hand again, maybe so this time I’d get my work done.  So if my voice seems off-tone in some entries it may be because they were written in my remedial class - Level 301: Breaking Up with Ex-man, Again. 
     365 marbles became a year (and more) of working through the termination of a love relationship that I started the first day I set eyes on Ex-man when I was fourteen years old, many years ago in this lifetime, and perhaps (as some have said) eons ago in other lifetimes.
 
Check out the sequel blog …”More Marbles: Navigating Online Dating, One Marble at a Time.” http://datingmarbles.blogspot.ca/