Chapter 33: Cutting The Cord

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.

I began to pay close attention to the energy in my breasts, and I noticed that when I thought of Dean, or had to interact with him, I’d feel a tightening, sometimes even shooting pain, in my breast tissue. At first, I simply let myself be aware of it. I breathed into the sensation, almost trying to gently unravel the tension from the inside.

I felt like my body was asking for something specific. After a few months, I decided to hold a cord-cutting ceremony for myself.

When we had first separated, I asked Dean if he’d be open to having a divorce ceremony with me. I imagined something akin to a commencement, a ritual to mark the ending of our relationship. A space to share what we loved most, what we would miss, what we wished we’d done differently. To acknowledge the significance of what we had shared, and then to release each other with love.

Dean wasn’t open to the idea, so it never happened.

About three months after moving out, nine months after ending the marriage, I decided to have the ceremony myself.

Karina Maria was getting married in her mother land of Colombia, and I decided to arrive a few days early. I rented a small, one-room cabin in the mountains outside of Cali.

When I arrived, a wild storm was moving through the area. Lightning, thunder, torrential rain. The cabin sat several miles outside of town, reached by a long, winding drive up a bumpy dirt road. By the time I arrived, the electricity had been knocked out by the storm. It was dark, quiet, and isolated.

It felt like as good a time as any to begin.

I had brought candles, music, and, the pièce de résistance, five grams of mushrooms.

While I’d experimented with mushrooms a few times in college, it wasn’t until I moved to Colorado and became friends with therapists working in the psychedelic space that I began relating to them more intentionally. For the past few years, I’d have about two sessions a year. My experiences had always been profound, pointing directly to blocks in my body, around wounding, abundance, love.

I have deep respect for their medicine. I trust that they show me what I need to see and feel.

That night, I set the intention to feel everything there was to feel, so that I could let Dean go.

As I dropped in and turned my awareness toward my body, I felt pain immediately. A deep ache everywhere. I couldn’t get comfortable. My low back was excruciating. No position brought relief.

As I breathed into it, I began to sense that Dean lived in me. We’d been together for twenty years. The essence of him was woven into my body, into my cells. I couldn’t simply extract him.

But I became aware that the version of him I was holding wasn’t neutral. It was the him I felt pain for. His depletion. His anxiety. His unhappiness. That version of him was living in me, taking up space in every cell.

And that I couldn’t make him better, couldn’t make him happy, couldn’t make him okay — the guilt of that was diminishing me, my health, my vitality.

I couldn’t make him better, couldn’t make him happy, couldn’t make him whole.

I sobbed for hours. It felt like my whole body was breaking open. Like childbirth.

I felt all the places where his pain lived in my body.
The pain of hurting him.
The pain of not being able to make him happy.
The pain of my love not being enough.
The pain of having had to fight for the love I needed.
The pain of wanting someone to fight for me.
The pain of not getting it right.
The pain of failing him, myself, my marriage, my children.

I wept and wailed, letting it all move through me. The physical agony braided together with heartbreak and grief and a pain that felt all-consuming.

But as the pain began to unravel, a new awareness emerged.

I realized that the most loving thing I could do for both of us was to hold an image of Dean as whole and healed. Not as someone I needed to fix or save, but as the man I had always believed he could be. Even if he never chose that for himself, I could choose which version of him I carried inside me.

I imagined him standing in front of me, filled with golden light. Embodied. Peaceful. Enlivened by life. I held that image there for a long time, sobbing at its beauty. Wishing this version of him into being. Shiny and bright and full of his own vitality.

I imagined him standing in front of me, filled with golden light. Embodied. Peaceful. Enlivened by life.

I decided that whenever I thought of Dean, this was the version I would see. This was the Dean I would relate to. The Dean who lived in my heart and in my cells.

This Dean didn’t tug on my tits, on my guilt, on my feelings of not being enough or doing enough or giving enough because this Dean was full. He, without me giving anything of myself, was enough, had enough. He was love.

I imagined cutting all of the cords that were draining my vitality into him. And I saw him releasing them too, because he didn’t need my life force anymore. He could stand on his own.

I’d spent the previous few years trying to get him to see. To just see just how much I’d been doing for him. Just how much I had been giving to him. How much love and life I had poured into him.

But I could suddenly see that his inability to feel my love had far more to do with his capacity to receive than with the reality of me. It was like feeding someone who couldn’t absorb nutrients. No matter how much you offer, they remain undernourished.

I knew then that even if he never recognized what I had given, I would be okay. I’d spent probably my whole life trying to prove that I was enough. Giving more than I had to give to try to prove it. When I let him go, I also let go of my need for that validation to ever come from anyone other than myself.

When I woke up the next morning, I was bleeding.

It felt like my body releasing everything I had worked through the night before. I wrote Dean a twenty-page letter. Though it was a goodbye, it also felt like the purest love letter I had ever written.

I had released him. And in doing so, I had released myself.

“Grief opens a doorway to the sacred. It forces us to slow down, to feel deeply, and to confront the reality that love and loss are inseparable. In this space, we come to understand the true weight of our connections and the beauty that exists even in our sorrow.”

Dr. Sherry Walling, Touching Two Worlds

Upcoming: Chapter 34: Devotion

Over the past few years, I had done a lot of work extricating the immature, distorted masculine from my system. I had leaned into my animus as a source of safety and support. I had allowed him to adore me, protect me, believe in me, stand with me.

But I hadn’t really turned toward him.

Have you ever felt like you were holding someone else’s pain as your own?

Have you ever made yourself smaller, to “protect” someone from the fullness of you?

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