Marriage : The In-between

This is the second post in the series. If you have not read the first marriage post, I highly recommend beginning there.

The zipper was stuck to the cotton stuffing inside the pillow. I could see pieces of fuzz sticking through the closed teeth and for the moment this was all my brain would process. Why was this question hard to answer? I know I needed to answer Larry. I know his question was leading somewhere good but I didn’t want to answer, it felt leading. I was siding with stubborness in this moment but I couldn’t answer. Instead of opening my mouth I stared at the jammed zipper of the Ikea pillow, hugged tightly to my chest. There was also a pillow barricade to my left and to the left of that was Lucas. I created the barricade when Lucas and I had first come and sat down on this awful couch. It was the billowy, soft kind that swallows half of your body the moment you sit down, I wanted to burn that couch. 

The counseling room we were in was calming, the morning light was soft since our room faced west. The sound machine allowed for enough white noise the silence of our sessions felt less deafening. The walls were lined with bookshelves, stuffed with books about grief, trauma, healthy sex, substance recovery, etc. Every session I would scan the shelves and make a mental note, adding another title to my list of “books to read”. Our counselor Larry always sat on a simple, straight back olive green upholstered chair across from us. I liked the way he listened. He rarely wrote down notes and when he did, it was at the least expected time. 

I looked up cautiously at Larry who was gently leaning forward in his chair, like one of my swim coaches eagerly waiting to get a split during a race. His stare was encouraging and warm but insistent. I could feel Lucas’ eyes on me and I responded with a quick daggered glance. He was sitting slouched, heavy into the couch, leaning his left elbow on the armrest with an air of resignation, almost relaxation I resented greatly. “How could he be relaxed?! This question should be for him, anyway.” I snapped my head back at Larry and thought carefully about my response.

We had been seeing Larry for nearly a year at this point. In many ways, Lucas’ and I's communication had become less productive. I was more angry, more bitter, more confused than when we first began. I thought once we would begin to rid the garden of our weeds, everything would line up. Larry was supposed to show us how to de-weed, declutter things, instead he had been showing us practical ways to regulate ourselves when we felt angry so our fighting would stay focused. It did not feel relevant. (It was very very relevant, if only I knew.)

Our session came to an end and I felt relieved, somehow I had escaped answering the question. Larry ended our session with prayer and then we got to the housekeeping portion of our session, which meant scheduling our next appointment. “Hayley, I think we’ve come to a place in counseling where you and Lucas would benefit from individual therapy. I want to continue to work with Lucas bi-monthly and I would love to help you find a counselor of your own. We can revisit marriage counseling in a year or so, depending on how we are all feeling” 

Just like that, Larry had quit me. Not only did he quit me, he had kept Lucas. What. The. Actual. Hell. I wanted to scream, “I AM NOT THE PROBLEM HERE?!” We scheduled an appointment for Lucas and Larry to meet in a few weeks. He handed me a list of counselors he had contacted and knew were ready and available to meet with me. We said thank you and Lucas and I shuffled out of the office, down the long hall, and outside into the icy Seattle air. I dropped into the Camry, shut the door and burst into tears.

You never take pictures on the hard days. This was taken on a ferry ride up to Orcas Island in 2017.

This is the hard part of our story to tell. Looking back, I want to shake this Hayley and tell her to breath, and calm down. Stop thinking the worst of every person and situation and see things would be okay. But I was deeply hurting, deeply alone and desperate to be told I was okay. I wasn’t a problem, the problem to our marriage. My anger was protection from the sadness and grief, the loneliness. I did need therapy for myself, I needed to break the enmeshment from my childhood and see I had grown and learned some things, I was in a safe place.

My anger was also stemming from disappointment. If any enmeshment had been untangled from the past, those tendencies didn’t just dissipate, they rerooted and grew. When a blackberry bush grows, their branches or canes can droop. Once a cane touches the ground, it roots an offshoot which quickly transforms a blackberry bush into a hedge. My anger was growing and a cane simply landed on new soil, that being Lucas. I wanted him to have the answers, be stable enough for the both of us, be the adult.

I was pulling Lucas back to a place that wasn’t safe and becoming an abusive person in the process.This is where I feel most shame and grief for my harshness, my ill-directed hope Lucas could untangle all my pain and fix us. Be our redeemer. Ernest Becker wrote:

“The love partner becomes the divine ideal within which to fulfill one’s life. All spiritual and moral needs now become focused in one individual.. In one word, the love object is God… Man reached for a “thou” when the world-view of the great religious community overseen by God died… After all, what is it that we want when we elevate the love partner to the position of God? We want redemption - nothing less.”

Whidbey Island, 2018

I required nothing less from Lucas and the weight was crippling. We had been stuck in a negative feedback loop that inflamed our worst fears, insecurities and vices. The weeds were fighting back and built a hedge between Lucas and I. And now even Larry stood between us.

We made our way across the i-90 bridge. I ranted and brooded the whole way home, making a silent vow I wouldn’t call any of the counselors. We got home and Lucas and I went our separate ways. I was done crying, still angry and needed something to do. I threw on some running clothes and my Nikes and went for a run, or what I call a “rage run”. I went east and found myself on the same familiar path I’d tread every Saturday. It was a loop run through the neighborhood and around Seward Park. The sky was dark, storm clouds were hanging over the south end of Lake Washington which meant I’d be running through rain in a matter of minutes.

I was listening to Revisionist History, trying hard to focus on Malcolm Gladwell’s voice, anything to stop my intrusive thoughts. But soon my headphones beeped twice and clipped off, they were dead. A few minutes later, hard sharp drops of rain began to fall. And then it all came crashing down at once. I felt hate. I didn’t feel anger. I hated my marriage, I was ashamed of us. I hated Larry for abandoning me. Most of all I hated God, because he was a liar.