Dangermond.org

For a few decades, I was convinced that my life was an interminable cliché. Any breakthrough, epiphany and light that went on would immediately be mirrored in a book, film, or someone else’s (read: more famous than me) reality.

Then it seemed my life more closely resembled the myth of Sisyphus, condemned for eternity to roll a boulder up a hill only to watch it roll back down. Sisyphus was punished for self-aggrandizing, and I, who had reached the peak of my career, became condemned, every time I tried to get there again, to watch it all slip from my grasp.

I thought I was done with Sisyphus, no longer enamored with telling his story as my story, when by chance I stumbled across a post my ex husband had made to his Instagram account. He posted a cartoon of Sisyphus and wrote, “Sums up my first marriage.”

I thought I was done with him, but after reading that I wondered why he was thinking about me after so long a time, and wondering why I cared what he thought about us after so long a time. Coincidentally, an editor contacted me then about entering an essay in a journal entitled “Letter to My Ex.” Fueled, I wrote one, and submitted it, but in the end declined to have it published. Instead, I sent it directly to my ex. Here is an excerpt:

Most of all, I forgive you. I gave all I had to our marriage for 15 years and asked for pretty much one thing in return: for you and I to be a family, to have a child. For years, we fought over this imaginary child. “You don’t want a child, you want to want something,” was what you told me in the North Beach apartment. “I know you will resent me one day for not giving you a child,” you said in our New Orleans apartment. “If you want to have a baby, I suggest you divorce me,” was your argument in the Portrero Hill apartment. Then by the time you were willing, it was too late. I was past 40 and able to get pregnant but not hold a baby. So we began a new version of the argument. “I am not adopting someone else’s child,” you said to me in the San Rafael house after the pregnancies stopped. I see the humor in it now. I did resent you. I feared having a child would mean I would lose you. I did. I feared you would leave me and have a child with another woman. You did. I feared being a single mother. I am. It has been a dozen years since these events ravaged my life and our marriage. I still have trouble connecting myself to the woman I was who did this. Now, it has only been a few years since you and I exchanged those final emails. I have not received a Christmas card since, but imagine your boys are bigger now, while my son is still young. 

Funny how life is short but it’s wide, here we all are sitting in our houses during a pandemic. We were asked to get out of our rut and be still. Thankfully, I learned long ago the only difference between a rut and a grave is the dimension. So I’ve tackled my restlessness and spent nearly a decade learning to be still, learning to accept what life throws at me, but even so, once again, Sisyphus and I share this story in common.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 29th, 2020 at 8:07 am and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.