Sifting and Sorting (and Quitting)
An entire week has gone by. Or maybe two.
I’ve been writing things down, but the words stumble and stop…
Some days are harder to process. Some days I have to sift and separate the parts that are safe for me to absorb from the parts that are better left alone. Adulting can be a tedious process at times. This is a tedious time.
The week was a whirlwind of busyness, the highs including opportunities to participate in events surrounding Magic City Classic (a Birmingham institution I’d yet to experience and one that I’ll never miss again), the opportunity to return to my Charleston community to lead a group of more than 40 women on a glorious Witches Ride that raised nearly $2,000 for a neighborhood need, and the opportunity to take my sons shark tooth hunting (not their favorite activity but one they will entertain me with as long as I don’t make them stay more than 15 minutes).
Hunting for shark teeth is, by far, one of my favorite activities and I’d do it every single day if I could. It’s fair to say that I have to be forced to leave the water’s edge because I just. can’t. stop. searching, hoping to discover one more tiny treasure to add to my mason jar collection. But eventually, I do stop. I know when it’s time to quit. I stand upright (rather slowly these days, because, adulting), brush off my sandy feet, put away my jar and drive away from the water.
Trigger alert: I’m processing things. Deep, dark things. I always tell my boys, words MATTER. They do. They really, really do. For example…
Early on in our engagement, my ex-husband called me a quitter. I’d driven over to his house, sat us down at his dining room table, and emptied my heart by telling him how scared I was of how often we fought and how bitterly we wounded each other. I told him I needed to stop pursuing this courtship because it hurt my heart in ways that felt unsafe. When he opened his mouth to respond the word “quitter” left his lips and filled the air between us. I grabbed it quickly, stuffed it in my mouth and swallowed it, shook my head in protest, no no no I am not a quitter! I remember feeling angry—and challenged.
You can call me many things but “quitter” is a word that has a special sting. I’m a stubborn Taurus who has always been the shortest and last in line (having a last name that starts with “W” ensures you will always sit in the very back corner of the room). Perhaps it’s the conditioning from years of trying to show up and stand out and maybe it’s modeled behavior from two parents who worked their butts off during my childhood (a necessity and also a love language). I was raised to never give up, to stick with it, to always give one to grow on. It wasn’t until much later in life that I began to allow myself to abandon tasks or jobs or friendships that added nothing to my life (or worse, took away from it).
Looking back, I realize that when this word was said and I decided to take it, swallow it, hide it in my heart—I willingly handed over a piece of my power. (I’d end up doing that quite a lot over the next 15 years.) As someone who’d rather bathe in fire than disappoint another person (chronic people pleaser over here), I grew into the need to prove myself, to prove that I could (and would!) move mountains to keep my family together, to prove I was lovable (many times changing myself to fit into whatever version was acceptable), to prove that my actions were deserving of respect, to prove that I was motivated by love. It was an exhausting dance, and over and over again I committed. Whatever it took, however much I needed to shuffle—I would never quit this marriage, my happily ever after, my nuclear family. No, no no!
Even in the last 20 months, during separation and a messy if not disgusting process of divorce, I have continued to behave in ways that serve to prove we are capable of a mature and respectful coparenting partnership. Patty People Pleaser has been in full effect—certainly, I’ve told myself, I can carry this for both of us. As if I can control another person’s thoughts and actions...No, no, no, there is a better way! We don’t have to break each other! See me! See me fighting for the best in us! Please just let me fight for something good between us! It’s the only fight I have left.
Well…
The moment arrived.
Sparked by a conversation that started out as an attempt to find some middle ground on a co-parenting topic, the tension between my sons’ father and I completely combusted. I erupted. Literally.
For a few brief moments I lost all agency. Picture, if you will, the outrage and fatigue of a woman standing in a shadow of herself, showing up to be seen, one last time. My white-knuckled devotion to not be a quitter erupted as it expired, and there was no stopping the purge. The breaking poured out of me, like a volcano of red-hot volition, emptying from me every last bit of bitterness that had been absorbed throughout the lifetime of our marriage. I lashed out. I yelled. I threw my hands about into the air like a woman possessed with sadness. I let the waves of raw grief pour out of me and I unleashed a buried fury that had been billowing from my hips to my belly to my throat…
It was exactly what I needed.
I completely let go and I made a mess of my grief. And oh, how messy it was. (Here is where the tedious task of sorting through what’s left ends and begins. Here is where an unraveling occurs.)
I quit trying to fix it.
I quit trying to change.
I quit begging to be seen.
I quit believing that this is all my fault.
I simply quit.
I heard a lovely prayer on a podcast during my drive back to Alabama—let us pick up the stones on which we stumble and build an altar—what a beautiful way to free ourselves from our frayed and fettered failures.
It was not all bad, no—the marriage, that is. The marriage gave me my two sons, which is the most beautiful, most delicate, most cherished gift I will ever love. But it was a remarkably challenging experience, and it became a collection full of stones over which I stumbled, stones that both of us threw at each other, stones that I sifted and collected and held in my heart, my own secret altar of hardened hopes.
In a matter of minutes, I emptied myself of all the things I’d swallowed and stuffed down in hopes of being deemed anything but a quitter. And in this new void, I dared myself to see things differently. Quitting, failing, letting go, releasing, unraveling—these, I think, could be actions of power.
I walked away, dripping in sweat.
-
Some days there are more shark teeth on the beach and on those days I put a heavy handful of them into my jar. On other days, the teeth are elusive, as if the sharks have decided they have no teeth left to share. Then the tide comes in and out and in and out until the beach is once again replenished with sharp little pieces of calcium phosphate that can be found by picking up a handful of wet sand and sifting through heaps of shell shards to find that shining sliver of a tiny treasure.
It may take me years to sort and sift through the undoing of my marriage. So be it. There are many treasures to keep, and I am grateful for each and every one of them.
To sifting. To sorting. To stumbling. To discovering. To quitting—and all that comes with it.
Until tomorrow (or the next day…or the next).
x—
lk
