Unbecoming
I’ve spent a lot of my life saying yes to other people. Call it being of service, call it people pleasing—either way you slice it, I guarantee if you’ve asked me to do something I’ve enthusiastically said yes, even when I wanted to say no.
This post is about my 12-year marriage. I’ve tried to write about it hundreds of times over the last year, but some things take time to process and I sense I’ll be forever figuring this particular relationship out…each time I get the words out, I read through them and find something new to untangle or reconcile. Perhaps this is how marriage works. (This is how my marriage works.)
Upon meeting a nice young man that so patiently tended to my energetic needs, my family said I should probably marry him. He was a University of Alabama graduate, he had a good job, a nice family. When he asked, I said yes. Don’t rock the boat, they said. So I didn’t. Until the boat started to sink.
In the beginning, everything was a celebration: showers and parties and receptions and, not long after, baby showers and housewarming parties and busy, busy, busy. The wave was high on this happily ever after, and over time I dutifully collected all the pieces and parts of “wife” that I assumed (based on what I’d been told) were important/of value. I wore those badges with pride. Look at me! I’m a wife! I can do the things! I am all the things to all the people! I have achieved everything that a wife should be! Boxes, checked.
Once things settled and calmed down a bit, I started to…itch. This stuffy sweater that I’d been knitting for myself just didn’t quite fit. The fabric I’d worked so hard to sew together became increasingly hot and suffocating. I kept telling myself that I needed to be more, that things would air out if I could just be a better version. So I kept striving, tacking on everybody else’s opinion of what might make my marriage work. I buckled down over and over with the attachment to this version of woman that I believed I needed to be.
Then the veneer cracked. The sweater began to unravel. Things fell apart. For several years, I watched the tower of everything-I’d-worked-so-hard-to-build-and-carry crumble and release. I saw no hope in saving it. I floundered. I stumbled and faltered. Eventually, I found myself completely exposed, no heavy suit of sweltering armor left to protect me from the essential task of being.
During this time of…let’s call it upheaval…I left my marriage. Looking back, I’m not sure I had any other choice. Who I was becoming in this all too important relationship was not at all who my heart begged to be, so I left. I told everybody (family and therapists included) that, although I would assume part of the blame, the real reason the marriage failed was because I wasn’t being seen and that we’d both be so much happier if we could just have another shot with someone else. But the truth is, deep down I believed that I was incapable of being loved as a wife because I felt nothing like the type of wife I was supposed to be. And to instead be the woman I saw reflected back at me—angry, conflicted, lost, uninspired, desperate—that’s a weight I could no longer carry. I had to put it down. I had to let it go.
I can tell you that unbecoming does not happen quickly, nor does it pass without touching those around you with a certain degree of trauma. Our family will be forever healing from this. I hate that we went through it. Maybe someday I’ll find grace in it. Mostly I hate it. The sadness, the anger,
Now, to keep things interesting, at the same time my family was falling apart, I was blowing up another foundation: career. That’s entirely another story for another time. Needless to say, nothing was making sense. But also, everything was falling into place.
Call it crisis if you will (or “dissatisfaction with life”), but for me this has been an awakening.
Spoiler alert: when I finally stood up from being tucked beneath all those assumptions of who I thought I should be, I found the courage and the gumption and the grace to simply say, this is who I am. I ripped everything apart in search of the joy of being seen for exactly who I am.
