Reclaiming my Self

The past couple of years have been brutal. Almost beyond description in some ways, but in comparison to what others have suffered, mine just doesn't seem that bad.

First, my husband was diagnosed with Stage 4 prostate cancer, and on the day he called me "It looks like cancer", I pulled my car over because suddenly I could not breath. This is the man I'd called my partner for 21 years, and in that moment I swore to see him through thick and thin. And no, our partnership, nor our marriage, was anything remotely close to blissful. We lived like brother and sister, held captive in each other's inability to move along and forward. It is my opinion that I led our life together according to his wants, and I'm sure his lens on it is a different color.

And in the end of it all, along with his terminal cancer diagnosis, he decided to pursue his former girlfriends, and ultimately decided that I was, to put it in his terms, "ghetto" and "unprincipled" -- and he left me. But yeah, he didn't quite leave: he stayed in our house and started dating and spending nights out with the women he met. He felt, quite frankly, that it was my business to leave since I didn't like the way he was doing thing. Yes, he really did think I was supposed to upend my life because of his life crisis, and try to figure things out. 

But I didn't and making this long story short, he was eventually forced to move and I stayed in what has always been my house, was my mother's house. Where my Nana is buried in the backyard. He left me without resources, and in every single discussion, his vitriolic resentment seeps through as if I were the serpent that bit him with the germ called Cancer.

My son and I have had some horrendous fallings out during this time as well. I thought at one point we would not have a relationship again. I realized that the idea of losing that was far, far more devastating than anything Carter, my husband, could dish out. My son. My life.

I was destroyed. Devastated. In the grips of my greatest fear: that of being rejected and scorned. My worst fears borne out by men.

During the past two years, much of which was spent crippled with grief and fear, I learned of a woman whose husband had demonized her, forced her out of her home and away from her two children. He divorced her, took everything they had, and left her homeless. He took full custody of their children and has forbidden her from even seeing or visiting her beloved daughters. She is surviving.
A dear friend of mine lost her eldest son just a few years ago in a tragic accident. She bore this grief on the fortitude of her own strength. On the strength of her faith and with the support of her many amazing friends. She is surviving, and thriving as she pushes her home-spun business into her life's work.

Another close friend of mine lost her oldest son in a motorcycle accident only six months ago; it was the same way in which her son's father had died at the same age 30 years before. She has bad days, and good days. She grieves hard and still has time to laugh. She survives.

I've spent the better part of two years in deep, dark anger and in some ways I don't know why. I can demonize a dying man. It would be easy and he deserves it. But the story has to stop being about him, and start being about me. It has to be about moving into a new realm of being, to let go the man's pettiness and his vitriol. It has to stop being about my vitriol and hatred. It has to start being about me and my survival. And he didn't bear out my worst fears, in actuality: he just dug into the soul of one thing that could push me to think it was. My greatest fear isn't any man's rejection, my greatest fear is losing people I deeply, truly, honestly love. My children. My friends. My beloveds.

My friends make me proud. They make me grateful. They hold my space better than I do much of the time. They do not reject or scorn me, and they do not go away. They are my backbone when my vertebra feel shattered. They heal my fractures.

I am the Daughter of Oya, and my life is my own story to write.