July 3, 2020

30 years.  

30 years since that full-moon Yellowstone night when you picked me up at the ranch and we headed in to Ennis.  We, the crew, were all frustrated at the boss' demands, the late night, the ever-more-important clients who saw all of us as little more than services rendered for the cost of their once-in-a-lifetime dude ranch vacation. 

God, you were charming.  And funny. You showed up in your big black cowboy hat, smiling shyly and saying "a little bird" had told you I wanted to go dancing. My white knight, riding in on your Jeep Cherokee to rescue me from the drudgery of another lonely night in the lodge. My hero. 

It was our first official date. We'd met just a few weeks earlier, when Barbara introduced me to you and the guys in the lodge basement -- you'd been spinning your lariat, doing the same rope trick our son would master many years later. You stopped spinning and touched the brim of your hat; your old-fashioned manners made me think you were older. We laughed about that later, on the night we went to the bar with the rest of the crew and both revealed we were too young to get in. 

After I left the basement that first night, you turned and told the other guys to "back off - she's mine." Or at least, that's what you told me later. At the time, it seemed sweet; now it's just creepy and possessive. 

And so we went to Ennis, that magical town we shared a common love for, and in our Camelot, we danced. And somewhere amid the twirls and the beers, the slow dances and the long kisses, I knew. I was yours. And I decided to love you that night, to give you all of me - not just my body, but to offer you what I loved best about myself: my wild, open heart, my fire and ice intensity, my ever-thinking mind and ever-working body. I entered a dance with you that night, and I haven't danced with another in 30 years. 

At our wedding a short year and two months later, we asked the band to play an Alabama song, "Forever's As Far As I'll Go."  It was the song you'd sung to me during the ceremony - the promise in the lyrics calmed me, moved me, reassured me.  And I believe that back then, you believed your promise, too. 

But Mike and the Montana Muskrats didn't know that song. Instead, they offered another: "The Dance" by Garth Brooks, a wildly popular country singer. I didn't like the choice. It's a haunting song about pain, about love ending, about all the things I thought could never happen to us. But you said it was fine, and not wanting to make a fuss, I went along. Stuffed my intuition down into my churning stomach, probably drank another beer, and stepped out onto the floor. 

        "O-our lives, are better left to chance; 

        I could have missed the pain, 

       But then I'd have had to miss

       The ... dance."

And so here I sit on the back deck of the house I bought without you, trying to write out the pain, bleeding blue ink onto the page and weeping tears and snot down my face. I've cried more in the last year than I ever knew I could, and still a river pours out. I didn't know grief could be this deep and wide and constant. Sometimes I wonder if it would have been better if you had died instead of asking for divorce, instead of replacing me with so many other women. At least then I could have continued to live in the illusion of you being my white knight, my hero, my partner. At least then I wouldn't have had to see what you've become, or what you've finally revealed. 

When I listen to that song now, sometimes I wonder if I should have refused your offer that July 3rd night, if I should have just gone to bed like a dutiful employee. Sometimes I wonder why that girl, for all her intellect and all her sass, was so swept away by your cowboy charm that she ignored the signs of your darker side - the temper, the jealousy, and oh God, the possessiveness. 

But instead I learned to dance with you.  It wasn't easy. You danced differently than most of the partners I had had before - a quirky combination of country swing, clogging and a little square dancing.  Friends who sometimes danced with you commented on how hard you were to follow. But I learned your steps, caught on to the patterns, figured out how to anticipate your moves - anything to avoid the thunderstorm that crossed your face when I missed your hand coming out of a spin. I became expert at dancing your way - stepping backwards to your moves. 

Not always, though. Sometimes I'd try to take the lead, to smooth out the rhythm and even out the steps into something a little less exhausting. Or I'd pull you onto the floor in a burst of joy as a song from my past set fire to me, twirling and spinning away from your arms, free in my own orbit. The first scenario usually led to a whispered growl to "let me lead, goddammit." The second led you to pull me back in, stilling my fire and laughing at my abandon -- until later years, when you really would abandon me, walk off the floor and leave me dancing with myself. 

Or sometimes, I'd be distant, detached while we danced, spinning through the same moves, cycling through the same turns. That pissed you off the most. "What are you looking at?" you would hiss, your grip on me tightening, fingers digging into my waist. "Nothing," was always my response. 

But it wasn't nothing. I was looking at the other couples - wouldn't it be fun to dance like them? To try some new steps? Whenever I suggested something new - whether through dancing lessons or therapy sessions - the response was always some variation on the theme of "What's wrong with the way I do it? Why can't you ever be happy?" And so I learned not to ask and to content myself with your steps; we were often so "in sync" that others commented on how well we danced. It's the princess' job to make the knight look good, after all. To make the dance look smooth and effortless, even if she's doing it backwards with a pasted-on smile. 

I wasn't always looking at the steps, wasn't always wanting my turn to lead. Sometimes I just watched the way other men looked at their partners with such joy and delight that I couldn't help but stare. You were usually watching the band, other dancers, your feet - focusing on the steps, the moves, anything to keep the dance moving along within your control. You didn't look at me much when we danced, and certainly not with that look of pure delight. I was a dancing partner to you, but not a woman dancing. 

Our dance? it was complicated - magical and menacing, artful and awful, life-giving and soul-sucking. An image, a mirror, a promise, a hope. 

Our dance gave us seven children: six on earth and one in heaven. They are the treasures in the dark cave, the exquisite beauties among the shredding thorns. They are spiritual beings gifted to us in this lifetime, and being their mom is the most profound privilege I've ever been given. I pray for healed, wholesome relationships with them some day - to appreciate and delight in all that is wild, weird, and wonderful in them, as they do for me. No steps, no patterns - just pure, joyful abandon. 

But our dance also led to devastation and despair. My feet are bleeding from eggshell-walking; my arms are tired from burden-carrying; and my heart is exhausted from approval-earning. And I guess maybe I'm not a good princess after all, because I'm damn sick of protecting your image. 

        "O-our lives, are better left to chance; 

        I could have missed the pain, 

       But then I'd have had to miss

       The ... dance."

It's been a wild ride, a beautiful and awful turn, oh my knight.... but it's time this queen waltzed off the dance floor. 

Cleaning Stalls

In her life-changing book, Untamed, author Glennon Doyle begins a chapter with a quote from one of her previously-published books.  The attribution she writes under the quote is "Some horseshit I wrote in an earlier book."  

I know exactly what she means.  Some of you may be familiar with my only previously-published book, Circling Back Home: A Plainswoman's Journey.  I wrote that book over the course of ten years, fitting in writing between having and raising babies, working outside and inside my home, doing what I could to market and support a horse business I owned with my then-husband, Shawn.  And the writing reflects not only the length of time it took to compose the essays, but also the prolonged denial I lived in during that long period.  Even more so, the year-long editing process of the book, after it was finished and contracted, for me reflects the volatility of my marriage, and my own patterns of sublimating my truth in order to keep peace. 

When someone reads my book, or comments on it now, I want to say, "That's not me anymore.  Someone else wrote that book."  That isn't entirely true, but I often feel the horseshit I wrote in some of those essays completely covers up who I really was during that time.  More to the point, recognizing the horseshit has been a part of my growth into who I am now - in some ways very much the same person as that author, and in some ways not even recognizeable.

Anyone who has stalled a horse in a barn knows that cleaning those stalls involves a constant responsibility to shovel horseshit, scrape up horseshit, cart out horseshit.  In this blog, I'm cleaning stalls.

In some of these blog posts, I'll write directly about the essays I wrote in Circling, and tell the truth between the lines, behind the pages.  I'll go back and look at the ways I thought then, and hopefully remove a few piles of shit in order to gain more clarity now.  I'll tell you the parts of the essays I left out, was asked to leave out, edited out in the name of peacekeeping.  I've decided to be more of a peacemaker instead of a peacekeeper these days, and you can't make real peace until you wash away the shit and tell the bare truth. 

But the horseshit goes beyond my marriage.  It's part of a culture, part of our society.  I was raised in it, taught to value it, measured by my ability to put up with it.  Talking about those patterns is as much a part of the cleaning process as going back to look at my previous writing. 

It's an ongoing process, as cleaning always is.  Just when you think you have everything scraped and shoveled, more shit happens.  And sometimes, in really dirty barns, cleaning and scraping one layer only leads to more underneath, so you have to circle back and do more. 

I'm discovering a lot - about narcissism, about emotional abuse, about unhealthy attachment styles, and about how society - and particularly, ranching culture - measures the worth of women.  Most importantly, I'm seeing the horseshit in the demeaning ways we raise our daughters, and in the crippling lies we tell our sons.  It's all horseshit.  It's going to take a lot of cleaning.  I hope you'll join me, read these posts, comment on and challenge my ideas, and use your own voices to share yours.  Cleaning stalls is always a lot of work, but it goes more quickly when we use many hands to wield the shovels. 

Shirt of Arrows

In her deeply personal exploration of the Blessed Mother archetype, Untie the Strong Woman, storyteller Clarissa Pinkola Estes describes how the old men of her community used the phrase "she wore a shirt of arrows" to show deep respect for a person, female or male, whose eternal soul was untouched despite the piercings of arrows of disrespect, misunderstanding, or even abuse. Such a person bore up under extreme emotional, and perhaps physical, duress, refusing to let those experiences define her or defile her. Too, the description reminds me of part of a hymn I've sung since childhood:  "No storm can come to me, no arrow strike me down; no evil settle in my soul." 

This blog is my shirt of arrows.... or at least, that is my hope.  My intention is to explore, describe, lament, understand, and ultimately, triumph, over the arrows that have, after 28 years, brought about the ending of my marriage and my pending divorce from my husband, Shawn. My intention is, through writing, reading, learning and praying, to release the anger and bitterness of the poisonous arrow tips currently piercing my life.  

An archer, in learning her craft, studies not only her bow, but also the weapons she shoots from it.  She learns the weight of each shaft, the shape of each tip, the feel of the fletching.  With the love that only comes from studying something closely, she peers at her weapon in order to learn it by heart, understand how the various parts work intricately together to launch a missile that will efficiently destroy her target.  

In the same way, I intend to use this blog to look at the various patterns and behaviors of our marriage, to understand how they worked together to effectively destroy what I thought was lifelong love. In becoming my shirt of arrows, I hope this blog will help me grieve and release my marriage, in order to move forward with my soul intact. 

I have other intentions here, too, however.  I've joined several online support groups for women going through difficult divorces, and for the most part, I'm frustrated by what I see as largely a victim mentality.  It's true that Shawn was emotionally abusive to me, and throughout this blog, I will tell stories that will illustrate that.  However, I don't intend to join in the "poor me" commentary I read so much of online.  I've tried to always teach my children - both those who are biological and those I've encountered professionally - that one always has a choice between being a victim, or a victor.  I choose to be a victor by learning all I can about emotional abuse, narcissism, and what I know is a connection between these behaviors and childhood trauma.  Knowledge is power, and in learning why these patterns surfaced in my marriage, I hope I can educate younger women (and men) whose spirits are not yet in danger. 

In the year since Shawn filed for divorce - the afternoon after I refused to sign our cattle and horse brands over into his name as sole owner - I have learned that some people suffer from a behavior disorder known as narcissitic personality disorder.  Although I am not a psychologist, the descripors of this disorder are often eerily similar to behaviors I'd become accustomed to in my marriage.  Sometimes I wonder if, somehow, an expert in these disorders was recording my mind-numbing conversations with Shawn.  Behaviors prevalent among people who suffer from narcissistic personality disorder include gaslighting, grandiosity, entitilement, lying, blame-shifting, and an overwhelming inability to feel empahy. Behaviors of narcissists who abuse their partners and children include verbal and physical abuse, infidelity, lack of concern for the other person's individuality or needs, using an extended silent treatment as punishment, various forms of addiction, and blaming the other person for their own inappropriate, even abusive, behavior. Since beginning to learn of narcissistic abuse, I've connected with others who have also been victims, and have begun to recognize patterns.  I've even learned of a male cousin whose first spouse was this way.  I choose to be a victor because I want to learn why I stayed in such a relationship for nearly 30 years - how I, as a woman, was socialized to put up with this behavior, and how many of us who are raised to be good, kind people become easy targets for narcissists. 

I choose to be a victor because I see an acceptance of these behaviors in the agricultural community in which Shawn and I lived for most of our marriage.  I don't mean to say that all  ranchers or farmers live in situations that are emotionally abusive.  I just see certain behaviors being rewarded by the nature of the lifestyle, even being made necessary in some situations, but then carried from the barn or the field into the home.  That is heartbreaking, and marriage-destroying.  I write this blog for the young wives physically and emotionally isolated on farms and ranches, trying desperately to balance childcare, helping on the place, and perhaps earning money with some sideline business. There is a strong current of patriarchal control in the agricultural world, and I intend to peer into the corners of that world and shine a light on the cobwebs that have gathered there. 

I choose to be a victor, ultimately, by shining that same light into the corners of my own world, and by using my beam to chase down the critters that scurry away.  I know I have developed behaviors of which I am not proud.  I know that if I want to move forward with my soul intact, the only way to do that is to look as closely at myself as I look at the other people involved in this story.  Emotional abuse is ugly... uglier than mice that hide in dark corners. And the research will give you many reasons why that abuse happens, why the perpetrators engage in such behaviors.  But for my own healing, one question rises above all:  why did I allow, and even participate in, it?  What about my own self-esteem made me live with such behaviors for such a long time?  In the end, it will be this question, this central arrow in my shirt, that I hope will make me victorious over what is one of the most painful and most demoralizing experiences of my life. 

One caveat:  If you are familiar with my writing from other blogs or from my book, please don't expect more of the same.   That writing was edited for peacekeeping.  In this writing, I choose peacemaking, and from what I've learned so far in life, the only way to truly make peace is to tell the truth, no matter how unpleasant.  This writing won't be whitewashed to cover up any nastiness, and then presented with an ending neatly tied up with a bow.  This writing will be raw, emotional, uncomfortable for both you and me, and real.  This is my truth.  If you aren't ready to know it, then please don't read it. 

Thank you for being here.  You, too, are my shirt of arrows.  In the last several months, many of you have saved me.  I write, at last, for you.