Our Part

Last night I got to get away to a meeting, my first once since beginning my vacation almost a week ago. It was a small group in a small Oregon coast town. They each seemed to know each other as the back of their own hands and welcomed me as a visitor without any hesitation. Very informal format which came from the fact that they all knew each other so well. When no one stepped up with a topic, they grabbed one of the daily meditation/reading books and made that the topic: I heard the reading to talk about relationships and the sickening role resentments can play in relationships if we let them. Others heard anything from the 4th, 5th and 6th steps, or an opportunity to share their story of recovery with a fresh face (me) in the meeting.

I shared with them my own most recent experience with deep hurt morphing into resentment and how AA had taught me the importance of focusing on "our part" if we are to find any sense of peace and serenity in our recovery. This experience came during my youngest daughter's wedding reception about a month ago now.

Rachel had asked me about a week before the wedding to give a talk at the reception. This meant a lot to me and for the entire week between then and the wedding, I spent numerous hours crafting the perfect talk for my daughter and her soon to be husband. I never wrote a thing down on paper. I just started drafting my talk out loud in the car as I drove to a from work that week. The centerpiece of the talk was a quote that I had memorized years ago (even before I was sober) from a book called "The Magical Child" by Jonathan Chilton Pierce. I began reading that book shortly after our first child was born and something at the beginning of the second chapter gave me a great sense of peace and comfort at the overwhelming panic I began to experience at the thought of what this newborn child was going to need from me and how little prepared I felt to provide what she so needed from me. The quote was:

Matrix is Latin for the word womb. From that word, we get the words matter, material, mater, mother and so on. These all refer to the basic stuff, the physical substance from which all life derives.

The womb offers three gifts to the newly forming life: a sense of possibility, a sense of energy with which to explore those possibilities and a safe place from which those explorations can take place.

Whenever these three needs are met, we have a matrix. And the growth of intelligence takes place by utilizing the energy given to explore the possibilities given while standing in the safe place given by the matrix.

By the time the day of the wedding arrived, my talk was ready for primetime. It was perfect. I had every word right, the tones and inflections just right. At the end of each practice recitation, I cried. And I knew that my words would strike my daughter the same way. I was ready.

Just before it came time for me to give my talk, my son (who was Rachel's Maid of Honor) and my oldest daughter Katie (who served as Rachel's Matron of Honor) gave their talk to their sister and her new husband. It was wonderful. My son came "this" close to being inappropriate about three or four times, but always stayed this side of the line he's spent years crossing. During their talk, my wife leaned over to me and asked me to walk down to them and take the microphone from them and ask them to "hurry it up". I looked at her aghast and she said, "No, if you do it, it will be funny! If I do it, it will look controlling." I responded that "It wouldn't be funny even if I did it--because it WAS controlling!" Shortly after that, their talk came to a funny and heartfelt end and the microphone was turned over to me to say a few short words to Rachel and Daniel.

I walked down and took the microphone and began my talk. I shared that when I was their age, I discovered what was most important to me to accomplish in life and that was to become a father, a parent. That shortly thereafter, I met Nancy and fell in love. We were married and began having children. And I got scared. Then someone gave me a book called The Magical Child by Jonathan Chilton Pierce.

At that point, I realized that someone, my wife, was now standing beside me. Nancy reached out and took the mic and said, "Mike, can you hurry it up? We only have this place until 10 o'clock!" Everyone laughed, I suppose all of them know I don't have a short story in me. I didn't laugh though because it threw me off balance as I was trying to recite the perfect talk to my daughter and I realized there was no way to finish this talk as I had planned it in my head ahead of time. As Nancy walked away, I knew that my perfect talk had been destroyed but that I couldn't do anything but try to move forward without making a complete disaster out of it. So, I went on to quote most of Pierce's magical words, left off the last sentence and also some other parts of the remaining part of my perfect talk. No one but me knew that their was anything left out. All of them, including Rachel, thought it was a beautiful talk -- very much from my heart, very much Mike. Everyone but me.

Me? I was deeply hurt. I was angry that Nancy had attempted to control the situation -- for whatever reason that might have been for her. I blamed her for ruining my perfect talk, my perfect moment, my perfect gift to my daughter. Ruining something that simply could not be recreated or repaired. That moment was over and done with. There was no way to rewind or
"do over". But I knew that I could not share my hurt with my wife -- it would destroy her. She had put so much into creating the perfect wedding for our daughter: collecting 200 dinner plates from garage sales and antique shops over the last year that would make this a unique event for our guests, finding the perfect venue for this wedding, the perfect flowers, the table gifts for our guests (small Heinz catsup bottles with Rachel and Daniel's names and wedding date--Rachel is a catsup addict), etc. If she knew that her funny interruption of my talk, meant only to keep things "light" when I had a tendency to be serious and philosophical and longwinded, had actually hurt my feelings at such a deep level, it would kill her and destroy her memory of this wonderful wedding day.

So I kept my hurt inside and tried to rationalize it away. I thought of ways that I could get around this unfortunate situation without talking it out with my wife: i.e., I could formalize my talk "in full" onto a plaque and give it to them on their 30 day anniversary, I could "let it go" and move on, etc. But the hurt remained and within two days it had morphed into a full blown resentment. Resentment is a decision to hold on to a feeling beyond its normal lifetime. And that's what I did: I held on and more, I nursed it and fed it. And it grew. By Monday, all it took was some little annoying comment made by my wife before I snapped at her with far more feeling than her comment deserved. And she snapped back with deeply held hurts/resentments of her own. Because we were in the company of other family members, we covered over our anger "until later".

When "later" arrived that evening after all family and friends had left to return home, Nancy look over at me and asked, "Well, are you going to apologize for what happened today?" I looked at her and kept all my vicious responses inside my head where they belonged and said nothing. Silence is my favorite weapon in battles like this--although at the time, I really don't realize I'm using this as a weapon -- I am just trying not to hurt someone I love and the only way I know how to do this when I'm feeling such strong and powerful emotions is to be silent. Of course, that silence is the one thing that hurts Nancy the most.

So, she then asked, "Is this apology going to be something that comes in a day or so, or after a week?" I keep my silence as long as I could and ended it by saying the kindest thing I could, "I'm leaning more toward a week...." Amazingly, she didn't reply with anything other than her own silence.

The next day, I got up early and went to an early meeting before heading to work. It was a step meeting and they were reading Step 4 from the 12x12. For some reason, this morning, the whole chapter spoke directly to me and what I had been going through in the last four days and unfortunately, it was all about looking for my part in this whole ordeal. I didn't want to hear anything but "her part" but I realized that focusing on her part was what I had been doing for all of the last four days and all that had gotten me was more and more suffering and more and more pain. As I surrendered to the idea that I could get relief from this suffering and pain only by taking a serious and careful look at "my part" did things start to change for me. I briefly shared my discovery of my part with the group: my part was all the expectations I had placed in coming up with the perfect talk, giving that perfect talk at this one point in time and history "no matter what", my thinking I had some control over the outcome of all my preparations and planning and efforts, and, most of all, my decision after my wife's interruption not to go ahead by reciting exactly what I had planned without any edits or rushing things! True, she interrupted my perfect talk, but I'm the one who changed the talk from that point forward. Not her. Me. God, I hate it when I'm wrong!

I drove to work as usual, but I spent the time again reviewing my part in all of this and seeing that I needed to make an amends to her rather than holding on to the falsehood that she owed me a huge amends... That night, as I was leaving work (trying to avoid the inevitable I suppose...) I texted her and told her that "I was going to be home around 7, with humble pie and an apology." She replied quickly that "Blackberry would be sufficient...". I knew it was going to be alright then. That night, I started off my apology by telling her that I needed her to understand that what I was going to tell her that night had NOTHING to do with her or anything that she had done. I had discovered earlier that day what had been bothering me for the last five days was something that I had done, even though I had been mistakenly thinking it was something she had done to hurt me the day of Rachel's wedding. I told her that earlier that day, it dawned on me that it wasn't anything she had done that had really hurt me, but rather, what I had done myself that was the true cause of my hurt. That said, I told her the story of what I saw happening the night of my "perfect talk" and how hurt I was by what happened that night after her interruption.

As expected, my sharing this information with her hurt her deeply and profoundly. She stood up crying, saying that I had ruined the memory of this wedding for her... All feelings that she had a perfect right to have and to feel and to share with me, but none of which really had anything to do with me (thank God I'd learned something in these years of recovery!). After a few minutes of some painful sharing, all things between us came back together and we were reconnected again in no more than 10 minutes. My irrational fear of her feelings and reactions has always been a self-constructed roadblock to me being myself and expressing my feelings to this woman who I love and adore more than anyone on the planet. You'd think after more than 30 years of marriage I would get over this.... But then, if you were thinking that, I suspect that you don't have 30 years of marriage!

By the time the next night came around, she was able to share with me that earlier at work, one of the nuns at her school walked up to her and said that her favorite part of the whole wedding was when Nancy interrupted Mike's talk (this nun was my former Department Chair when I taught religion at this same school where my wife is now principal...) --- sure, Mike's talk was great and touching and "pure Mike!" it was Nancy's lighthearted interruption that brought a lightness to the whole event that made this one of the perfect Mike/Nancy gatherings. And we laughed. And then I began rubbing her feet --- a self-imposed penance that I've lived now for nine and a half years of recovery and expect to be doing for the remainder of that recovery and for the remainder of this life/marriage.

The freedom gained by focusing on my part has been great to be sure.

Take care!

Mike L.