nearby and she loved them dearly, but they did not guide her. She guided herself. The voice within was the one she answered. This simply amazed me. For me, she was an inspiration who breathed life into my soul and spirit.
Chapter 11
A Woman’s Search for Meaning
I am a grandmother for the first time. It is amazing what feelings and emotions are arising within me since Zack and my daughter-in-law, Monica had their baby girl, Jane.
How sad, how sweet, and how wonderful it is to take a female form. And yet, this is what this little girl has chosen. As I wandered through the early years of my adult life, I felt totally at the mercy of my hormonal urges. I believe, as young women our bodies betray us more often than they aid us. I can only pray that sweet baby Jane will have more wisdom than I possessed as I wandered through those years.
Back then, I was a single Mom, a homeowner and a breadwinner but I didn’t want to do it alone. Even though I was successful in all I was doing, I felt a failure because I was alone.
I wanted a relationship. It was the mid 70’s and though many women were claiming their independence in every way they could -- I wanted to have someone want me, love me, and complete me. That was the dream world I was living in back then. So, I found a fellow who was also divorced and had kids the same age as Zack and Todd.
He wasn’t a bad person, and was actually quite nice to his sons and mine. I just didn’t love him enough to want to try to make a relationship work. But I mostly didn’t love him because I still didn’t know how to love me enough to want the very best for myself. I was compromising in order to not be alone. After a particularly rancorous weekend, I asked him to leave. Being alone seemed better than dealing with someone else’s problems as well as my own.
I decided to see a therapist who I’d learned about through NOW. She was a brilliant woman who was a political refugee from South Africa who had fought Apartheid and been imprisoned. She was strong, clear, and wise. Life had taught her many lessons. She was just the kind of woman I needed to help me see -- even if it was only ever so slightly -- who I was in my own right. She had survived so much. I needed someone like her in my life now.
My therapist first helped me forgive myself for all the guilt around my parents’ deaths. I learned that all children feel some sort of guilt when their parents die. I’d held the belief deep inside me that if I had only known more, I could have done something -- anything --and they might have lived.
She also suggested I read a book entitled Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl. She thought it might help me with the fears of my childhood that still haunted me regarding the extermination of six million people, most of them Jewish, like myself. I didn’t think I could survive such a terrible ordeal if it were to ever happen again.
Frankl was a holocaust survivor. He had a transcendent experience in a camp that helped him see that there was a way to survive anything at any time. He was able to connect with his wife in spirit as she was dying. He hadn’t been with her in years, but he knew in that moment that she was fine and in a heavenly realm filled with Light. After the war he founded a new branch of psychology that incorporated what he had learned in the camps. He had found a way to survive.
Man’s Search for Meaning showed me that even in humanity’s darkest hour, a connection was possible. Whatever this connection was, it could comfort us no matter how difficult life might be.
This book set me on a quest. I would have to know what he had learned. I didn’t know how I would do that. Even though I felt that something was caring for me as I was muddling along in my new life, I didn’t know how to call it to me and directly communicate with it. I just felt that it was there.
As I began this quest to find this something that could comfort me, I was hired away from the advertising specialty company by a typesetting company that wanted a manager for an art supplies department. It was a fun move, but not very profitable, so I decided it was time to earn more money. I went to a women’s organization in Cleveland to see if they could find work for me. To my surprise, they sent me to a Savings and Loan that was looking for someone to head a new marketing division. Here I was, with no degree, continuing to land on my feet in a business world where I really had no clue what the heck I was saying or doing! The S&L set me up in a branch office to begin outreach programs to build individual savings accounts.
My first day on the job, I was examining my new desk and I felt a button on the inside leg of the desk. I pressed it. In minutes, the bank was surrounded by police. They had their guns drawn. I’d set off the alarm. I was too embarrassed to let anyone know what I had done. I sat there in silence as the building was checked and the staff was quizzed. Why hadn’t anyone explained to me what that button was for? Why hadn’t I realized that I didn’t know enough to be sitting behind that desk in the first place? I was in over my head. I lasted six months at the job. I just couldn’t sell savings accounts to save my life!
An old friend of Barry’s who’d remained a friend of mine worked at an employment agency. He saved me from my own misery by finding me a job with a company that made decals and labels. This I could do. I could sell decals and labels. I breathed a sigh of relief!
As I was having all of those experiences and was beginning to stand on my own, I became even more attractive to my ex-husband. Barry began to seriously pay attention to me and to our children. He said he knew he’d made a terrible mistake abandoning all of us and hoped we would let him back into our lives.
I wanted to believe him with all my heart. I also wanted to believe that I could forgive him for everything he had done to us. I certainly wasn’t entertaining the thought that I might have contributed in any way to the collapse of our marriage. He was the defective partner, and I was quite willing to assume that as my truth too. My therapist couldn’t seem to make a dent in my mind regarding this.
I took Barry back. We remarried -- and lasted about a year. I hadn’t forgiven him. I couldn’t. And he tried, yes, he tried to make it work. Only after we were remarried did I realize that somewhere deep inside I actually hated him for dragging me through all we’d been through together. We had been through it together, but I still saw it as his doing. I’d only been the willing victim. I had started smoking pot again, now that he was back in my life, and that certainly didn’t help. One night, after we’d smoked together, he complained that after I smoked, I was too tired for anything else but sleep. He knew that pot always made me sleepy. Why was he complaining now?
His complaining surprised and angered me. I didn’t hesitate to share that anger with him as I explained to him that after a long day at work and caring for the kids, how could I have energy left for much of anything else? I let it all out. All the hate, pain, and anger. I wouldn’t have been working full time in the first place if he had stayed with us and cared for us as he should have. We’d been abandoned. I’d made a new life. It was exhausting to do all I did now, but I was doing it. Where had he been when I needed him the most? He was stunned. So was I. – With that, our marriage was over, once and for all.
A few days later, Barry came to Zack, who was only seven at that time, and told him that things really weren’t working out after all. I saw my son collapse emotionally for the second time. Zack didn’t cry, or protest. I just felt him fall apart inside. Somehow he already knew that it was over. In fact, years later he told me that he had seen his father with a neighbor in a romantic embrace while we were still married and had hidden the information away inside him. It took him years to retrieve it.
