I Couldn't Make Him Wrong Anymore
An Activity of Love Story
I admired the effortlessness of the geese floating in the creek just down the hill from my therapist’s office when I told her, “I can’t make him wrong anymore.”
“Why, because his ego can’t take it?”, she says.
I am watching the geese.
“No…because my heart can’t take it anymore,” I say.
She is watching me, suspended in mid-sentence as we are both ushered into a new way of relating to this same old story I’ve been bringing to our weekly sessions.
Adopting the effortlessness of this new stance did not happen all at once. It wasn’t graceful either - at least not all the time. And it was absolutely painful. Day after day, I was given the opportunity to confront those age-old issues of how he should be doing things differently, seeing things differently, being different.
As often as I could remember, I would notice my mental loop of what was wrong with HIM and started asking a new question. What would love say? And then the deeper question…What IS love, really?
This wasn’t a random question I pulled from some platitude-rich but life-less meme. I was, although I did not know it yet, painting my way out of a life that had no room for me. Original image and word were emerging on the biggest canvas I’d ever worked on, and the whole process was becoming a devotion to love.
“Love, teach me what I do not know”
Layer by layer, I carried this question into everything I was so busy trying to “fix” - in my marriage and in our family.
I have never wanted to be more wrong than I was about the truth that kept arriving, as effortless as the geese floating in the creek. Releasing my loved ones from having to be anything other than who, what and how they were didn’t wash away our incompatibilities. It revealed them. In my life and on the canvas.
I was not the same woman who entered the commitment of marriage as the one who now held the paintbrush. And I wasn’t done changing, either.
My heart was devoted to my children, my marriage, and the life I longed to build within the framework that had been faltering almost from the very start.
I am thinking about the geese.
I dedicated a section of the canvas to represent all the things I wished I could say, wished I hadn’t said and wished others had said, or not said, to me. Those strokes were medicine, and each one brought more daylight to the old tale that I’d been dancing around for over a decade. The due date for the divorce we started some 12 years prior had arrived.
It wasn’t effortless, graceful, or free of pain (at least, not always).
But once I stopped watching the geese from the overstuffed loveseat in my therapist’s office, I started watching the way that a similar sort of effortlessness was beginning to emerge from within the cracks of something precious I’d been trying to hold together.
So much wisdom in this. I just read it a second time. The same section jumped off the page for me again ... about the section of canvas you devoted to words spoken and unspoken. Thanks for sharing!