True Love Stories Never End

Originally posted at The Way of the Rose 54-Day Novena Facebook group December 11, 2020

Novena Day 9

The Glorious Mysteries

I know Perdita usually assigns novena stints at pretty much the last minute, but I find myself shaking my head in wonder at the dates I “just happen” to get. Last time around, I got a stretch that included the twin eighteenth anniversaries of my son’s Zane’s birth and death. This time . . .

Many of you know I’ve written a memoir about my relationship with my ex-husband, which went from deep love to intense loss and betrayal before winding its way back to a different, but no less powerful, kind of love. Mama Mary’s been pushing me to get this book “out there” for a while now, especially now because there are so many people who are dealing with loss. The last couple of months I have been working toward that goal, but slowly and with great resistance—okay, perhaps terror is a better word.

And then I volunteered for a three-day novena stint, thinking perhaps I shouldn’t because I’m so good at procrastination on this project, and Perdita assigned me the three days ending today—the twenty-first anniversary of our wedding.

Coincidence?

I’ve only been a novena guide for 21 days, and I can’t even remember if they were all this year. What are the odds that those 21 days would include the three most significant anniversaries of my connection with the people I’ve been writing about?

These last few days doing novena posts Mama Mary has pointed out to me that even though this is work and seems to be “taking away” from what I’m “supposed” to be doing, it’s actually helping me get where I need to be. Time and again I have found that writing things out helps me process them, and somehow writing for the novena community reduces my anxiety as well. The “what if’s” have receded, and I’ve settled into a calm belief that I can do this.

I can’t think about my wedding day in 1999 without thinking about “resurrection.” Back then Bill and I were very happy together; I had zero reservations about marrying the man I considered the love of my life. We’d had a baby girl earlier that year, so we spent our wedding night quietly at the hotel where we held the ceremony. We got room service for dinner and watched Runaway Bride on the pay-per-view. The movie’s about a woman who literally ran away from four different weddings. She ran because intuitively she felt that none of her fiancés had “seen” her for who she was. It wasn’t until she figured out for herself who she was that she could joyfully say yes to marriage. It wasn’t a perfect movie, but it seemed an appropriate choice for our wedding night because it echoed my feelings of being “seen” by my new husband.

Unfortunately, after our son died, the two of us grieved so differently that we had trouble relating on the same level we had previously, and it wasn’t long before I didn’t even want to know what he was thinking, because I knew it would be about what terrible parents we were to let our child die. I couldn’t join him in that place because I had a three-year-old who needed me. We stopped “seeing” each other because it was just too painful.

It took us years, but we were able to recapture much of what we’d lost before the birth of our second son. By that time, we were in our mid-forties and Bill worked a high-powered job that he both hated and was addicted to. He was in a beautiful garden, but he’d completely lost sight of it. His image of me was so far off the mark at that point in our lives, it seemed willful. No marriage can work for long under those circumstances, and ours was no exception. His answer to aging and job misery was to have an affair with a woman half my age.

Shortly after our eleventh anniversary (the marriage had died the year before) we had such a bad blowup, the remnants of love we’d been clinging to seemed to explode before our eyes. Like the “crucifixion,” it was the inevitable end result of a cascade of unloving actions that never would have happened if he’d recognized a garden when he saw it.

But I didn’t get to mourn for more than a few hours before he showed up at my door, having had the most profound change of heart I’ve ever witnessed. When faced with the loss of the garden forever, he finally realized what he had thrown away. That afternoon (and in the succeeding months) he apologized for myriad actions over the two previous years.

That afternoon in my kitchen marked the beginning of a new type of love between us that rose out of the ashes of the old one. By the time he died less than eight years later, we were the best of friends. But what was his biggest regret? That he didn’t appreciate what he had. In hindsight, he could see there were so many “better” ways the story could have gone.

My relationship with Bill taught me a lot. It taught to believe in the long story; I know down to my toes that the crucifixion is not the “end.” It also taught me that the particular container for love doesn’t matter all that much. What matters is that we keep choosing to love.

Happy Anniversary, M. Guillaume. If I had it to do again, I’d still say yes.

Love, the Busy Princess