These are chapter-by-chapter excerpts from my book, Fertile Like a Mother, Fertile Like a Lover. If you’re just finding your way here, you might want to start from the beginning — each piece builds on the last.
This is a journal entry I wrote in the days after I made the internal decision to leave my marriage. It is unedited and written before grief had fully arrived.
Journal Entry — 7/14/22
It feels like I’m able to do it now. Or, more accurately, it feels like I have to do it, because I can feel it as somehow in service to something bigger than me.
It’s hard to explain that without feeling kind of egoic, like “I have a purpose here so I get to do what I want.” It doesn’t feel like that. It feels more like there’s energy that wants to be explored, and if I don’t, it just gets stuck and builds and creates toxicity.
There’s a fine line between selfishness and hedonism and … I don’t really know how to name this feeling yet.
It feels like devotion, actually.
Trusting that my exploration will somehow serve the people I love and care about, but maybe even beyond that. It feels like there’s an energy that wants to be created so that it can exist on a planet that needs it. And I feel willing to devote myself to that, to make sacrifices for that, and even destroy the things that get in the way of that exploration.
I mean, I have been. With tons of guilt and shame and all the things, but I’m starting to feel an ownership in that too, and even a responsibility to tear down all the structures that don’t support that.
For now, I’m honoring the selfishness.
I’m honoring the destructiveness.
It’s the pain that gets me, though. Feeling responsible for someone else’s pain. It’s crushing. It’s brutal. That is what has kept me here far longer than I should have stayed. But I’ve been unhooking from that. Slowly.
I am saying “no” to meeting someone in their disempowerment. There’s a difference between seeing and loving someone in their pain, and being willing to hold it for them, do the work for them, so as not to feel responsible for their pain. Remaining less than I need to be so that they don’t experience their pain.
Saying no, for the first time, feels like creating a blueprint.
Saying no, without guilt or shame in it.
Just no.
With love and lots of respect, but no. It feels honoring to both of us. It’s like, this is the path I’m devoted to. Meet me here. But I’m not leaving this path.
But it’s hard, because I know that he can’t meet me here. And that’s okay. I can love him and let him go. And yes, I know that he will judge me and maybe hate me and probably see all the ways I’ve failed him. My goal is to love him even as he’s judging me, love him even as he’s hating me.
I’ve been using this time to unhook from all the places I get hooked in, trying to prove what I’m not, that I’m “good,” and focus instead on just feeling who I am. Knowing that even as he sees me otherwise, as selfish or destructive, I can own that everything I’m doing is in service of love and growth.
Upcoming: Chapter 32: Grief
Leaving my marriage felt like four deaths at once. And the most devastating part was realizing that love, on its own, was not enough.
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