The Path travelled

1.   Where does this dirt road go?

Though I was unaware of it at the time, my divorce from Michelle began roughly 5 years ago next month, the two of us standing outside of a Big Bear Diner in  the city of Vallejo, California.     The two of us, with our two teenage daughters,  our stomachs full of breakfast, and in the middle of a 5 day bicycle trip from Santa Clara to Sacramento.   The two of us standing outside the restaurant, and then she says to me  "If you ... like that, I will leave you".

Let me repeat the statement, because even now, five years later, it rings in my ears:  If you grab her again like that, I will leave you.

To be understood properly, that statement needs to be unpacked in so many ways, and of course I can only perform the unpacking as best I can from my own perspective, not Michelle's.    I can only say that - for her to be able to utter that statement declaring a potential end to our relationship, it had to already have been on her mind, which means she had been thinking about it for awhile.    For me though, it was like being hit by an avalanche, an avalanche that I have still not yet recovered from, still trying to find my vertical, and claw my way to the sunlight.

Up until that moment, I could never imagine that Michelle and I could ever be physically or emotionally separate.   We were like the first two fingers on my right hand, bound to each other, and committed for life. When we held our relationship up against other couples, I was always sure that we were the winners.   The ones who knew how to make it work., to make each other laugh, and to be best friends.  I didn't know and could not conceive of anything else, and  when I thought about it at all, I felt myself amazing lucky to have come upon someone in life that I fit with so well.

I don't claim complete innocence in the matter.   Raising teenagers is hard,  and in moments of extreme stress, it takes two parents - if there are two parents -  to be able to form some kind of union of agreement in raising them.  As the saying goes, you either stand together, or you fail separately.    As the natural teenage instincts of resistance arose in our daughters, I fell back in dealing with it to the way I myself was raised, with a sterner hand, and Michelle fell back to her own upbringing, one that was much less noisy and not as messy.   To me it seemed like a withdrawal.   Suddenly both of us different, both of us feeling in the right.   Both of us seeing the other path potentially taken as dangerous in the long run.    

And so our even keeled marriage, and the stability of our relationship the only possible ballast in being able to move forward, suddenly tilted on that sunny morning for me, leaving the smooth pavement we had been on together for 28 years, and turning off down a far rockier path that would eventually lead to dissolution 5 years later.    Pain.

But there is a brighter side.   Stoicism states that rather than be angry at those things that life has taken away from you, it is better to be thankful for the things that life has given you.   I have been blessed in my life with many things, first and foremost being that I was able to raise Mara and Jana and to experience being a Dad to them for 20 years or so, and for that alone I will be forever grateful to life for giving that to me.