Real Property
Over two hundred people have walked through my bedroom in the last week. That's pretty much all I have to say. Two more days to go before the offer date. Crossing fingers....
Also thinking about my women/mama friends who married late and mothered late. We didn't 'grow up' with our husbands. These are marriages after many, many relationships...and previous marriages. We've had travels and lived a long while as single women, found our tribes, formed communitites, explored deeply meaningful, soulful sex. We've meditated and studied, started and left careers. Mostly, we all explored what was for each of us sought after heights and depths.
Approaching forty we married and had babies and find ourselves in more (or very) 'traditional' marriages. And we are all struggling. We all say it's the hardest thing (by far) that we have ever done. Not for the hard work, but for the loneliness. The isolation. The dissolution of self-esteem. The exhaustion of relational arrhythmia.
Other women I know who married young are also lonely, but they do not have clear ideas of what, exactly, they long for.....they experience a generalized loneliness.
It's very particular when you know exactly what is missed. The quality of eye contact that you once knew with another (for years at a time), or the companionship of someone who loved to share in certain shared joys. Or the hands on skin from that one, exactly six years ago in July. Or the house full of friends, melded in all sorts of family structures, who wave to you through the sliding glass door as you leave with your toddler wrapped around your body. They blow kisses and shout and laugh and mouth good-bye as you return for the long drive home to an empty house with one other silent person in it.
It's just another sort of growing up........and it was requested. I sure do get further insight into my mother and all mothers. The island of being a wife and the crucial (and historical) importance of friendships with women.
This is not about men. I love men. I just think the instituition of marriage in today's world, with the combination of transformative and archaic methods for being and living, make it a tiring business.
Labels: marriage, women friends
posted by riversgrace | 12:36 PM PERMALINK
9 Comments:
this is so very honest and real--our childhoods didn't prepare us for this...
Married and lonely is the lonliest kind of lonely there is.
Yes, this is a type of growing up, and yes, the relationship--the basic pact--was requested. But without a fundamental understanding of the price life exacts in return for the institution.
Mmmm. Nothing lonlier than being lonely with someone else. Funny night for me to read this post, as I sit here remembering the hours of emptiness, that feeling of "I can be alone all by my self" and wondering why I've agreed to go back to counseling tomorrow. Wow.
beautiful post.
i have never been married. i still have fantastic and probably naive visions of what it might be like. jh is divorced and all-too ready to assure me that it's not the fairy-tale i've been sold. he has known that loneliness.
your post comes at an interesting time. thank you!
xo t
I miss my women friendships. I have found a new kind in my blog tribe, it is true. But I miss the almost sensual, real touch, real solid, real world relationships I had with women in my "pre-motherhood and wife" days. Well, really, just pre-motherhood. for me.
I think it is one reason I felt two children was it for me. They complete a part of me I could never do without, but I also look forward to having parts like this back again someday.
This is a great post...
:)
Prema, you hit on a favorite subject. Your words remind me of the bewildered student asking Sri Ramakrishna: "Master, if God is all loving and all compassionate, why then is there such hatred and suffering in the world?" Ramakrishna replied: "It thickens the plot."
Marriage is formed in a sacred way - often in a church or the like. It is a gateway to the divine. Thus it embodies the fullest paradoxes of life, more than just about any other endeavor. Irreconcilable differences? Yes, key component. But it is exactly that struggle with the opposites that cracks the cosmic egg, where transcendence occurs, not in spite of the differences but exactly because of them. I am reminded of Liz Gilbert struggling with the morning chant, groaning in bored anguish. Yet oddly enough when she has a chance to find greener pastures she remains in the ashram and she then "slips through the worm hole of consciouness" into a most sublime ecstacy of her own divinity.
The struggles of couples, the loneliness, the bewilderment, they speak of a bleak outlook on one hand, but on another offer a gateway to something extraordinary. I feel that in our commerce-driven existential society - even when we have so much by way of couseling and spiritual opportunities - we have less and less support and encouragement to dive right into the heart of the powerful paradox of marriage to find the ecstasy and union that is possible.
Something we learned early on (from Joyce & Barry Vissell in Santa Cruz) is the supreme importance of "the care and feeding of couples" - keeping that flame of love alive, no matter the demands of work and babies. It is that flame of love that pulled us through the thin. It illumines the dark shadows, it gives the weary heart reason for hope, it contains the power of forgiveness, surrender and transcendence. And it is the goal as well.
OK, my beloved has never given up hope either, at least not for long. It does take two people willing to work and search for answers. Sometimes one takes the lead more than the other, but there does have to be mutual intention and willingness. But one's loneliness can become a call for connection. Conflict can transform into surrender (not the I Give Up kind, but the surrender of the ego to pure love).
Oh God, I have run on. Like I said favorite subject. I hope this ain't preachy. Just my heart's words.
Thank you for musing.
With love,
Seth
"Never have relationships been as problematic and conflict ridden as they are now. As you may have noticed, they are not here to make you happy or fulfilled. If you continue to pursue the goal of salvation through a relationship, you will be disillusioned again and again. But if you accept that the relationship is here to make you conscious instead of happy, then the relationship will offer you salvation, and you will be aligning yourself with the higher consciousness that wants to be born into this world." Eckhart Tolle
Wow, some pretty amazing comments on this one. Hard questions, and I certainly have not aligned myself with any higher consciousness as far as relationships, yet. But I am so grateful to for my friends, for you and your blog and your wisdom. It all makes such a huge difference to me, even though I haven't quite manifested certain things yet. Thank you.
Your women friends are awaiting your arrival with open arms and plenty of wine and cookies. Well, at least two of them.
Love.
Thank you for such powerful honesty. This really resonates with me and I believe with many other women, but not all are brave enough to admit it.
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