Joan Anderson - An Unfinished Marriage

Contents

For my unfinished man
JA

Every beginning is always a sequel,
after all, and the book of events is
always open halfway through.

Wislawa Szymborska, Love at First Sight,
from View with a Grain of Sand

Prologue

Never did I think when I ran away from home that a memoir, A Year by the Sea, would come from that experience, nor did I expect that thousands of women would write to tell me that my experience was their experience.

I had taken a vacation from marriage, a sabbatical of sorts, during which I hoped to reclaim that raw-material person I had left behind in my youth before I started to play the roles our culture demands of women. It was a bold gesture choosing not to follow my husband to his new job and suggesting instead that I spend some time at our spartan Cape Cod cottage. Some women friends called me brave, others thought I was crazy, and the husbands of most disapproved heartily.

But for once, I didnt take into account what others thought. Determined to shake up my dull life, I was working on pure gut reaction. Words have a peculiar way of slipping out of my mouth before they are formed, and so, when I announced my intention to my husband, I shocked us both. It wasnt until I was standing on the shoreline of my favorite beach that I began to realize the ramifications of my impulsive decision. I had altered my life and was left holding freedom in one hand and guilt in the other.

As resident nurturer of a family of four, I had spent the past thirty years sustaining others while neglecting myself in the process. Now, it was my turn to retreat, repair, and, I hoped, regenerate myself. Was I being selfish or smart? Fortunately, the feminist writer Adrienne Rich answered my question in her book Of Woman Born, where she points out that primitive tribes send their women away to go down into herself, to introvert, in order to evoke her instincts and intuitions, strengths that these cultures value in women.

Perhaps an inner voice was leading me, I thought. Perhaps living apart from people and daily agendas would allow me to reconnect to the internal strengths that once were mine. In any case, alone and temporarily independent, I would have no choice but to be both conscious and aware of what my new world would present. I was ebbing like the tide as it turns itself aroundnot coming in or going outand, as such, I was being made to follow the rules of the universe rather than those of the society.

In a world of broad strokes and neon signs, we tend to forget that true learning comes from our own impulses. The secular age provides few tools to help us interpret the experience of life. Change begins with taking ourselves away from the clutter in order to hear what ones heart needs to say. Many messages and messengers came to me once I was able to relinquish control and offer myself up to serendipity. A chance encounter with a colony of seals alerted me to what was missing in my lifethings like playfulness, vulnerability, mystery, adventure, being at home in my body, and undomestication. Befriending ninety-two-year-old Joan Erikson, wife of the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, offered me untold wisdom about the meaning of identity and lifes stages. Being forced to earn a living and getting a job in a fish market taught me the worth of using my body instead of just my mind. And then there were the long walks into the elements, where the seasons and the shore offered metaphors that helped me understand that all would be mine in its time and season and that relationships and experiences would become fluid only if I were patient enough to wait for the thaw.

In reflecting back on my year by the sea, I realize how much it was about saying yes to such things as spontaneity, risk taking, instincts, and, of course, the natural world. I continue to revel in raw experiences that heighten the intensity of my daysnot unlike a child who is guided by her wonder and curiosity. What has developed over time is a kind of knowing that doesnt involve my head but rather my senses. Ive come to understand that I am as unfinished as the shoreline along the beach. Whats more, my husband, my two sons, and their wives are equally unfinished. That is the great message... to transcend ourselves again and again and to know that those with whom we come in contact are in process as well.

Having reinstated a relationship with myself, it was time for the greater challengethat of reconnecting with another. The reassembling of my marriage would have never happened without my year of solitude. Taking time away from each other was, in retrospect, both necessary and appropriate.

After the initial shock, anger, and discord that occurred around the separation abated, my husband took a penetrating look at those experiences most would choose to buryweeding out self-indulgence and wishful thinkingin order to determine his destiny with or without me. What role, if any, did he play in this turn of events, he asked himself. How much of my decision had to do with his lassitude? Once apart, was his preference to be alone or together?

There was no question that we both needed the space to understand the roots of our relationship and the values around what we had created together. We had become estranged for reasons no more complicated than laziness, indifference, and ignorance. In deciding to recommit, we also desired to fight for an openness in which the faults of the other could be admitted; by doing so, we could unlearn that which keeps us away from the immediacy of our lives and our connection with each other.

So began the continuation of our marriage, minus the fire of old passion and mired with problems and illusions. In The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm says, Nothing, especially love, can be mastered without practiceand practice involves discipline, concentration, patience, and supreme concern. Through trial and error, yielding and resisting, retracing and reinventing, dependence and interdependence, we began the task of reassembling our lives together. The year was spent crawling toward the inexpressible. There was no model to follow. We were two unique souls who merged over thirty years ago, and out of that union appeared an original couple, impossible to replicate. Out of our vulnerabilities a new way of being together needed to be discovered. The unfinished elements of our relationship will forever rise and fall, like the incoming tide, constantly and irresistibly moving within us.

Getting Under Way

LATE SEPTEMBER

The beginnings... of all human
undertakings are untidy.

John Galsworthy

T he night sky has barely dissolved to a pale blue light when I slide out of bed and tiptoe to the kitchen, relishing the early-morning silence I have come to treasure. This is when my thinking is clearest, when I give over to the spirits in the air and let them direct my day. My husband, Robin, seems to know that I need this time and frequently rolls over in continued sleep until I am out the door for my morning walk.

I put the kettle on the stove and wait for its wail while the threadbare afghan I grabbed from the couch warms my shoulders. A few minutes later, steaming coffee in hand, I ease open the screen door, stifling its inevitable creak, step into the morning dew, and take a deep breath of Cape Cod air. Several birds are nibbling at their feeder while the neighbors cat huddles under a bayberry bush waiting to pounce. As I sink onto the stoop, I let the sensuousness of my surroundings take over. The clarity of morning always offers a fresh start.