By this moment in life, the hope is, we should be looking forward toward the future and not fretting and dipping about the past. Regrets offer motivation, but should not be an obsession.
Who am I?
A question we begin answering in our 20s and 30s. Along the path somewhere between my first High School English teacher and now I became ever more comfortable saying, “I’m a writer.” I’m still working on poet. That one is harder to justify.
“Anything I’d know?”
“I’m big online.”
I’m not big online. My social media following is not influencer-level. Probably never will be unless Oprah discovers me.
“And today, I’m so excited about my next guest here on Super Soul Sunday, author, poet, good single dad, John McElhenney is going to give us some love and light from the trenches of divorce and struggling with an angry and uncooperative co-parent.”
Unlocking an audience could be the start of something big. Not going to happen. Oh well.
I do know who I am. I am a writer. A father. A musician and singer. A poet. Things strike me a bit differently than most. It’s cultivated at this point. I lean into the exploration of memories, unlocking ideas through music, words, images. I then seek to express some part of that “feeling” into a series of letters becoming sentences and punctuation. *This!*
The line is from Gravity’s Rainbow, a book I have no business quoting, as I’ve just started it. I hear he’s very much in alignment with my stream-of-consciousness ambitions. I have not been disappointed in the first few pages.
“You didn’t really believe you’d be saved. Come, we all know who we are by now. No one was ever going to take the trouble to save you, old fellow…” – Thomas Pynchon
And I think I do. I feel it. I thought I unlocked some of it back in high school when Vonnegut’s expansive style allowed me to write micro-stories inside my short stories. Adventures of uncommon strangeness that could be a story, but are just the idea of a story. Let the reader take the rest of the narrative into their own minds, weave in their own story with my idea of a story.
Fred and Wilma, for example, were my two goldfish at prep school. Purchased from the Woolworth’s, the only shopping store within walking distance from the prep school. A small globe tank, an air pump that caused a treasure chest to exhale bubbles every 30 seconds. I turned it off at night help me sleep. Today, I’d probably leave it on for the white noise.
I didn’t realize it until just this week, Vonnegut injected madness into my writing back in high school, and that gentle and encouraging teacher, Mr. Walls, giving me a nudge, an A on the story that contained the other story about Fred and Wilma. The overall story was my recanting of Texas girls, my loneliness, and my determination to take over the world. I took on Kilgore Trout as an alterego. I didn’t really know I was doing this.
In my first real college “creative writing” class my alias was K. Trout. Of course it was. Still, just a few days ago, while reading Kurt’s last book, TimeQuake, I noticed entire phrases, entire metaphors, entire micro-stories, that were direct riffs on Vonnegut. I even have a line, from Slapstick:
“A little less love and a little more common decency please.”
Damn, that one really cuts like a razor for me. It was a mantra for me during my insane asylum years. Same place that James Taylor wrote Fire and Rain. A summer of chaos, rebooting my entire emotional and mental systems with Freudian analysis. Um, nope.
It took a lawyer and a counter-opinion by my first psychiatrist in Maine to get me out once the hospital locked in on my robust health insurance package. My dad came up for a visit. His rescue attempt was malformed and misguided. We all recognized the danger of such a toxically narcissistic father. In one conversation the hospital was going to protect me from further damage. Really rebuild everything about me while feeding me Stellazine, the mind-blanking refinement of Thorazine. I went into my “zine” period. Not much light escapes from those memories. Dark ages. Dark summer.
There was a quick tryst on a Sunday afternoon. A hill on the grounds protected by trees and the comforting older woman was all hands and boobs and kisses and intoxicating smells of perfume, cigarette smoke, and hair product. We rubbed and kissed to completion, never taking off our clothes. Thrilling. Shrouded in a mist of hormones, bad chemicals, and a rush.
I’m only recently aware that my “rush” was not always good for me. Aiming for manic is no longer part of my ambition. I’m serious. And this is late fifties when I understood that a balanced life over 6 months could be *much* more productive and happy than two months of rocket fuel and four months of recovery in a freezing and choppy dark ocean. Icarus is a learning story not an ambitious caution tale.
There are so many ways we seek the rush in our lives. I’m still in search of… Something. Not a high, really. Not fame. (Well, maybe if I’m honest, but there’s something deeper.)
Peak moments. Shared experiences. Laughter with someone along for the ride. Attention. A Reader.
When your kids enter the world there are two reactions I’ve seen:
- parenthood changes everything about your life and soul
- kids are just additional projects, life and lifestyle unchanged
I was the “nothing will ever be the same now that you’re here” dad. I lost my bearings. I didn’t want to go to work an hour away. I wanted to be a stay-at-home dad where I could write, paint, draw, sing, and celebrate our son and then our daughter too. I wanted to get where I am now: with time to write.
Just like three years ago, it’s October and internal energies and spiritual vibes are increasing. My birthday at the end of November is peak me. Maybe I’ve cultivated this idea, leaned into it. My birthday is usually a very powerful season for me. Last time, I landed two girlfriends at the same moment. Thrilling and terrifying at the same time.
I was loving life and it showed. I was doing my own thing, playing a lot of tennis, and enjoying the success of my reemergence from depression surrounding the death of my brother and the loss of my girlfriend at the time, the sex-positive one.
Just as I snagged the attention of a woman on one of the dating apps, I also attracted the “Hello” from a Facebook friend. I used all my mindfulness I could muster and attempted to stay clear and honest with both of them. I didn’t do a great job. I did the best I could. Here’s how it went down.
Well, before I just tell the entire sordid affair I’m going to give you the punchline. The most beautiful woman I’ve ever kissed was intoxicating and stunted by her abusive marriage and her “taken several years off from dating” repose. How she invited me into her proud world, I’m not sure.
I had a code of ethics. “You can only kiss one person at a time.” If you’re looking for an honest partnership, you’ve got to exhibit accountability for your actions and goals. I don’t know that I was 100% on-track, but I did assume the higher ground. I would show my true colors by being transparent with both of them.
Except I wasn’t.
This is not a confessional. More of a near-miss story.
Now, maybe I don’t need to tell you all of it. Hmm. Here’s the part I wanted you to see.
I was over at VS (Victoria Secrets) house, an early Friday evening. I was enthusiastically kissing and rolling around with her on her couch. I was a goner. “I could just stay here kissing you all night,” I said, expressing my joy and moment of pause.
“I want to go take our clothes off in the bedroom,” she said.
“I can do that.”
So much for keeping things clear and going slow and sex later. I knew sex was powerful and important in any relationship I had no idea what I was tiptoeing into.
Wait, I’m not going to do the cinematic scene yet. I will tell you it was somewhere between Tarantino (thumping sound track and anticipation of violence) and Wes Anderson (whimsical, iconic, absurd). Her dog, big golden named, Bodhi, of course he was, had a bandanna when I first met him. Lovely dog. Shared the bed with VS. Wanted to share our bed too. (Yes, it was Patrick Swayze’s Bodhi in Point Break that inspired the dog’s name.)
One of the troubles of dating significantly younger women – points of reference.
“Can we just put him out of the room?” I asked.
“He’ll settle down. He’ll stay on the foot of the bed on the blanket.”
Hilarity ensued. The playlist kept informing my sense of humor and my camera-angle mind. I will dig around for this one a bit later. I’m going to stick to the point: she was nuts.
To get to this point I had to break up with the other “lovely” woman of potential. I texted her, “I’m going to take a break. There’s another woman…”
For the rest of our relationship…
Oh, I need to tell you I texted her a few days later, “Can we meet for coffee?”
“This is going to be good. I can’t wait to hear your excuse. I really just wanted to play tennis.”
The last part was a line. Not a lie. Just a fishing line. It worked. For almost three years, this Halloween would be our anniversary. She never ever forgave me for breaking up with her.
“I have never been not picked,” she said. I didn’t get the foreshadowing at that time. I get it now. She had never been rejected by a boy. And even when I said the words, “This is me breaking up with you,” she didn’t want to accept it. So, she didn’t.
I’m not sure she knows who she is at this point in life. Somehow, she began to believe I was the missing part of her happiness. Um, that’s not how it works. Friends would remark, “She’s carrying a lot of sadness.” She began, later in our relationship, to avoid my gatherings of friends. She just didn’t like “game night.” She didn’t want to go to Sunday potluck. It was a school night and she was a school teacher. “Yes, but it starts at 5:30, we could leave by 7:00.”
When someone begins to pull back there will be signs. Sex will become less frequent. Invitations for shared experiences are declined. There is a narrowing of opportunities for connecting to each other. And then, you both stop listening to each other.
I was trying to be clear. I was asking for what I wanted. But change is hard. Forced change is not possible. People will always do what they want to do. But, sometimes, people don’t know who they are yet. They might imagine that someone else holds the key to their joy. It’s a long fall from that idealistic trope to what really happens in relationships. As she declined invitation after invitation I tried to ask questions. Open-ended questions to get her to spill the truth.
For someone to be honest they have to understand their own truth. Her sadness was still a shroud that blurred her vision. She saw something in me, connected with some part of my joy, that provided her refuge from the inner yaw of pain. We’ve all got our existential pain. Either you befriend and ride that pain, or you become it’s bitch.
Over time, I could not deflect the warning flairs going off all around me. She was not happy. I could not make her happy. Her unhappiness when aimed at me began to erode my own joy. For a while I will negotiate, discuss, and flex into new ideas and opportunities for understanding.
When a person does not know who they are by now…
Even as I’m sad by the loss, I understand it was a blessing. We had a few months to uncouple. I did my best, as I did at the outset, to protect us both from unnecessary drama.
From the first time she blasted me, “I can’t believe you broke up with me by text. You are such a coward,” to “I don’t deserve this,” she’s wanting to pin the blame on me. Okay.
I tried to explain our first breakup and my use of texting. “If I had called you on the phone it wouldn’t have gone well.” We had this conversation at least ten times over the course of the next three years. I was never forgiven. At the same time, she did not gain any insight from my attempts at clarification.
“We’d have never reconnected if I’d called you on the phone. Your anger would’ve made that impossible. I knew, somewhere, that not having a conversation was actually the compassionate thing to do.”
“Bullshit.”
“Okay,” I said.
I have no regrets three years later on October 2nd. I learned so many wonderful and valuable things from her about being loved, about being securely attached, about my own time/writing/alone boundaries. All of these lessons I take forward.
Thank you.
What I won’t take forward is any guilt or shame about my behavior. I guess it’s best if we roll old lovers into enemies. It’s a hard full-stop. From confidant to infidel. I still want to wish her a happy birthday in a few weeks. It’s best if I don’t. I wanted to buy her a pumpkin and some flowers, just to say, “I still love you.” I won’t. I do.
I’m aware that any contact at this point is painful and unproductive. What would I be giving? What would she be receiving?
If the first sentence isn’t, “I love you, I made a mistake, let’s get back together and enjoy the rest of our lives together,” there is no point. I don’t need to heal from my wounds. I need to sit in my feelings, understand and extrapolate new lessons.
I know for the first time what a “securely attached” relationship feels like. BAM. Non-negotiable. I’m also able to let go of things about her I really loved. I am in the moment of STOP, REBOOT, and REBUILD.
For this moment, today, I release both of my October epiphanies. The kisses I still fantasize about and the loving embrace of a beautifully disconnected princess.
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