Tag: Marriage

Reflections, Part 7

Posted on by Gail Shurtleff in Musings and Insights, The Suicide and its Aftermath

The Deconstruction of a Marriage

Somewhere in my reading on grief, I read that in order to do honor to myself and to the relationship, I needed to deconstruct it before I could even consider moving forward and on to another relationship. This made complete sense to me.

Jon’s suicide came out of nowhere, even though I understood suicide to be a reality of being married to someone who had a diagnosis of bipolar 1.

With twenty-two years behind me, I’d been through it, raged over it in a raw form, wound up in my rose room, and found unstable peace.

Ultimately, if I was to do the honest work of moving forward, I had to take my marriage apart. I was about to make the mistake that so many people make: not fully examining the relationship before moving forward. How does someone look under the hood in this situation? You start with the facts that you know about, and then, as those facts are either confirmed of disconfirmed, you move forward with new information. You are boring through the mountain again, but this time the rock of the mountain isn’t placed on the conveyor belt and sent out to be used someplace else. This time you are examining it for content.

What I knew at the beginning was that, overall, we were friends first, and I had married a friend who would engage me in conversations that could go well into the early hours of the morning. Jon preferred sour candy, and I thrived on the sweet stuff of life. We were both adventurous and would try things, either doing them again or deciding against a repeat. He loved his pumpkin pie, and for me it was lemon meringue. It was pie, and we’d have pie instead of cake on birthdays, and it was a good thing.

I understood that he tried to cope with the bipolar as best he could and struggled with doing so in a dignified manner. I knew I was committed to caring for him as best I could, and that meant clearing the house of objects that could be used as weapons on the self. This was hard, and scary, and went along with some sleepless nights. I developed compassion fatigue. I don’t think you can understand how bad it is inside until you’re on the outside of the situation. I recall telling my mother before her death what it was really like. She asked why I hadn’t told her, and I replied that all you would have wanted me to do was to get out. I didn’t like the volatility that bipolar can bring, and yet, I knew leaving would need to be carefully orchestrated. I had sat with this thought and decision for some time. I had considered divorcing him that summer, but I made the choice to stay for the time being. I didn’t know his mind was moving towards a psychotic break that would decide things for him. He’d told me he would not endure that place again.

I came to understand that, while the marriage was not about his bipolar disorder, the mood swings, with their verbal abuse, were a part of the marriage.

In 2010 I made the decision to call him out on the anger and aggression he was showing towards me. Once he could hear it, he was able to work on it and commit to not behaving in that way anymore, and he didn’t go there again. When he began the DBT (dialectical behavior therapy) process, which includes acceptance for one’s actions, things began to level out in new ways.

What was my part in the marriage? As mentioned previously in the piece on exiting the Mormon Church, I was battling some demons of my own.

I needed to understand how everything I was dealing with affected the marriage. Being raised to be a good Mormon girl and woman had a great deal to do with a lot of who I was in the marriage. How did I enter into this relationship?

There was a great deal of suppression involved in the process.

In the first grade, it was the girl who had the pretty white and pink dress and the jump rope. She wore cute little Mary Jane shoes. I didn’t have Mary Janes, and I wanted some. They were so feminine. I thought it was normal to think that way. As an adolescent I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about boys. I glossed over it and, in doing so, sent it away to not be thought of for years.

Because of my disability and experience at church, I had written off the possibility of marriage.

I met Jon when he came to do a house call on my computer. A friendship developed, and after four years we married.

Being raised Mormon meant that I was supposed to grow up and marry a nice Mormon man. I’d hit the jackpot! I’d married a brilliant man who could have powered the world on a paper clip. It was his out-of-the-box thinking that I loved most about Jon, and he liked that I could go to that place as well.

Still, there was this thing hanging around, and it wasn’t spoken about, and I couldn’t utter the words while he was alive. I don’t get men. I’m supposed to understand men, and I’m supposed to feel attracted to them. I don’t. After his death, the guilt that I felt slowly surfaced. It took several years and didn’t surface in its full ugly form until I’d left the Mormon Church and moved on.

I felt guilty for marrying him, guilty for the sex that really didn’t work well. While thinking all of this, I was also well aware that this was not a one-sided issue. Bipolar disorders affect relationships, and in deconstructing all of this, I came to understand that I was a participant, and there was no blame to be had: just understanding. Blame and guilt are so often miscued in relationships. Looking at this with my own therapist caused me to rethink my thoughts and feelings around having married Jon. In safety, I could admit, actually, that there was no way around this: I like women.

Reflections, Part 5

Posted on by Gail Shurtleff in The Suicide and its Aftermath

What I Wore

If there is one thing my sister Beth and I agreed on, it was that Joyce got all the cute clothes. We took the issue to my mother when we were adults, and her response was that Joyce had the personality for cute and bold, and we were pretty and feminine with our clothes types, and so, while Beth could sew and make herself originals, I got pretty from my mother.

To be fair to my mother, she was right. Joyce got the doggie dress that Beth and I wouldn’t have known what to do with. Joyce, on the other hand, would react when someone said that her doggie dress was cute, and then she’d extend the dress to its fullness that revealed a wiener dog. She took delight in the surprise. No, her two older sisters would have failed miserably with that task. Mom just got clothes, and she understood that her two oldest daughters didn’t have the personalities for what Joyce could pull off.  

My mother’s side of the family was filled with women who could sew for themselves, and they all sat at machines and sewed their clothes. But cousin Gwen said it best: “Your mother sews circles around all of us.” She did. While my aunt could create tiny things with personality, my mother created what I came to call dresses with personality, or “dressenality.” She sewed lasting creations that would get stored in memory. I knew when I got it and when I first wore it, and it became hard to grow out of clothes. Well, that’s one good thing about adulthood. Unless I grow, I can wear it for… forever.

A trip to the fabric store was all about the right pattern and the right fabric to go with the wonderful new dress. It worked like this: first look at all the pattern books, find what I wanted, and then, and only then, could I move to the fabric. Rows, and rows of wonderful fabric. If I wanted stripes or pleats in the dress, the dress requirements were much different. Florals? Would it look right? Mom always understood. Sometimes I’d buy fabric and wait for the right dress or top to show itself.  

In first grade, it was the fall colors of the flowers, and the yellow trim, the pleated skirt, and the joy that dress brought me. It was mine, and I loved wearing it. When I was seven, Beth wanted to make the dress. Mom let her. It was a purple twirly dress with long sleeves and a Peter Pan collar. It also had a sash that tied into an incredible bow. I wore it for a “daddy–daughter” night. I also wore it for my school picture that year. Growing out of the purple dress was a sad thing.

As a teen it was the pantsuit. Dark pink pants, a seersucker top that was multicolored, and white slingback shoes that I purchased while working for my father. Working meant I could buy clothes, and I did buy fabric. Why wear what others might be wearing?

When I wasn’t living at home, I’d buy clothes from specialty shops that catered to petite-sized women. They were nice, and I had my sentimental favorite. But, once again, it was what my mother would create for me that made me happy. It was the gift of a skirt and top. The print was on this electric blue background, and the flowers were rich reds, greens, yellows, and purples. The neckline was scalloped, and I had a red belt to dress it up. It was Jon’s favorite. When we moved to Germany, and then to The Netherlands, I thought the sewing would stop. It didn’t. On a home visit, I went shopping at Vivian’s Fabrics. She had to clean out and send it all off to loving homes. Her grandchildren were the recipients of much of the stash. So was I. The last vestiges of my mother: a blue dress that is pure style. I love it. Hopefully, I’ll have it forever. I wear it on special occasions.

With all the happy memories of clothes, how I got them, and where I wore them, I had to tell myself that the one that hurt I could part with.

August 28, 2016. It was the day that turned out to be the worst day of my life. What I wore is burned into my memory. After I showered, I chose to put on a skirt with a black, brown, and white print, and a light tan tank top. Because of the minor stroke I’d had in 2014, there we days when wearing anything with a sleeve wasn’t possible. This was one of those days. It was hot and humid outside.

I wore this as I walked down the stairs to have the final conversation with Jon. I wore this as I binged on Law and Order, and I wore this on that fateful walk into my kitchen—the place I never made it to. I greeted the police in this outfit. I wore it to phone the two sides of the family.

The memory of what I wore on this awful day was pounding in my mind. I was already dealing with trauma: this was the cherry on top. An outfit of a skirt and top had been put into the trauma caldron. NO, not clothes. Gail’s rule number one about clothes is that they are sacred and can’t be damaged. This skirt and top had become tainted.

I tried to wear them separately and together, and even though I wanted to keep them, I finally knew that I’d have to send them off to a home where they could be loved.

When I think back on this series of events now, I realize that it is more complex than just parting with clothes. This is about how we handle parting with something, and also recognizing that there is damage to our souls, and coming to terms with setting it free. This is about doing the deep grief work that is often overlooked in the process of getting to the new place. This is the place where new outcomes and life paths become real.

Jon and I were together for twenty-two years and married for eighteen of them. When you’re with someone that long, it is vital to sort it all out.

At the beginning of the process, all I thought about was that I would never marry again. It just hurt to think about doing that or being in another marriage. By about year three or four, I realized that I needed to take the relationship apart to examine it with no restrictions on what I would not look at. I remember being here at my desk and seeing the sun hit the window on the other side of the street. I started to think that if I didn’t take it all apart, I wouldn’t be able to move forward in a healthy way. Like the skirt outfit and dress that had to go (I sent the pretty dress I wore to his cremation to the secondhand place as well), I needed to be honest about my marriage. I needed to give it a real look under the microscope.

The first big thing I had to come to terms with was that I was dealing with compassion fatigue. While I understood this earlier in the process, I had not allowed myself to step back, pull it out, and dissect it for what it was: trauma. If I ever got to a point in time where I’d want to explore something new, this was a biggie on the road to figuring out a part of my marriage that I needed to see clearly.

The fact of the matter is that many grief journeys omit this step. This isn’t about speaking ill of the dead—though some of that might need to happen. It is about giving the relationship an honest critique, and understanding what made it good, and where the bad points were.

Breakups happen in marriages and long-term friendships. We’d be wise to look under the hood to see where we went right and where we went wrong. In most situations there are always two sides. Being able to look at something and accept the responsibility for our part of the “wrong” is difficult and painful. It is brutal work that needs to happen, and the payoff is worth the pain we go through to get there. This work is not for wimps. Ultimately, when we get through the hard stuff, it brings clarity to everything. Examination also means that we won’t leap into another relationship before we’ve done whatever work we need to do on ourselves to fix what we can.

I think that many people confuse grieving with crying many tears and being ready to move on. NO, the tears and the mess are only a part of the process.

What if the grief process is also a call for a life redo? What if the life we build after a death or loss of a partnership is one that takes us on a new path? What if we’re on a life journey, and this is just one significant stop in the process?