Dinner with Mr. Ex

I'm dining with Mr. Ex tonight.  I want to come to an agreement on my spousal support without going to trial and I'm hoping this face-to-face meeting will do it. We've batted my proposal back and forth a couple of times and I think we might be ready to agree. It's almost two years since he left me. He and his new wife are having a baby in the fall. I think it's time for the crawl out of divorce limbo--time for each of us to concentrate on ascending to our own separate versions of some new paradise.  I'm ready.

It's surprising how little pain is left. Now I just shake my head and ask myself why I wouldn't give up on a man who didn't want to be with me. I should have given up. But I guess we were both courageous in our separate ways. Him for pulling the plug and me for insisting that things might turn around tomorrow or next week or next year.

I don't want to be negative in any way tonight.  I don't want to utter a single syllable of sarcasm. I hope that no vein of sadness or anger opens up and spills forth tears or venom. I'm trying not to have a plan, to not rehearse what I want to say.  I want to stay open, moment by moment listening and thinking and responding.  As the day counts down, I'm visualizing a door flung open, upturned palms, a rose showing its insides.

Seeking Peace and a Cast Iron Stomach

There was a time when I could eat anything. Nowadays, when I think of eating, I ponder idiomatic phrases like "eat my words," "eat your heart out," and slogans like "eat the rich" while I wonder about all the things I should or shouldn't be trying to communicate to Mr. Ex as we endeavor to settle our financial affairs. I have no reason to really trust this man, but I want to enter into an agreement with him that will finally be the end of us.  And I am seeing it as the end. The idea of being chained to him forever has left me. We are sooo close to sealing a deal and if that happens, I can almost imagine shaking his hand at our daughters' weddings and graduations without traveling backward through all the grief of the past two years. That handshake will just be a moment in a day on a green lawn striped with folding chairs or in a rustic field by an ocean and far more momentous things will be happening than ex-spouses touching hands.  He will have a new baby by then.  I'll have my MFA, a new life with a new love and maybe he'll even be at my side.

Still, my stomach hurts.  Maybe that's the way bitterness leaves the body.  Not through skin or lips, but through our intestines.  Sitting for a bit and stewing and then snaking its way out. Purging us of life's poison and leaving behind peace.

More About Ghosts...and Biscuits

When I was a very young child, I saw a movie version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol and it scared me to death. It wasn't the ghost of Jacob Marley himself that terrified me--the old bearded man looked a bit like Santa and there wasn't anything visually gory or graphic in this black and white classic--it was the idea of dragging your past around like a set of chains. "I forged these chains in life," Marley says.  I don't know if I understood what that meant when I saw this movie as a five-year-old, but I was beginning to figure out that everyone had a past. Previously, I'd thought that God made people in sizes--small, medium & large--and baked us in some celestial oven like biscuits. When my grandmother came to stay with me as my baby brother was being born, she mentioned something about my mother having been a little girl and I got it then. We are all born little--and we all have pasts--and if something goes wrong, that past is going to be heavy and cumbersome and we're going to drag it with us through this life and into the next.

Is it too late to avoid this?  Really?

I want to wrap things up with Mr. Ex and it's not happening. My stomach is in a perpetual state of revolt. (Current fave food that goes down well: wine.) And even worse, I'm beginning to understand that even when (if?) we settle our finances, I will be dragging my past with the man I once considered my one true love around FOREVER.

I forged those chains.

Proposal

I've recently sent my Mr. Ex a proposal to settle our financial affairs before our attorney costs whittle our bank accounts down to the bone. I have a sick feeling when I think of what we are spending to leave one another in this time when so many people are struggling to keep their homes. Divorce and the dragging out of our financial affairs feels like a sordid addiction or a luxury so extravagantly unnecessary that even the desire for it dirties us.  

But he hasn't responded to my email and today when I worked up the nerve to call him and ask him about some things I needed to know in order to file my taxes, I took a deep breath and said, "Oh--did you get my email?"  

"I'm chewing on it," he said.  Chewing.  A rivulet of vomit worked its way up my throat.  The image of some rapacious monster devouring a village, Marie Antoinette and her cake, greedy bankers and fund managers and people reduced to beggars, people who need really need basic things just to stay alive plopped from my mind right into the pit of my stomach. What I am involved in with this man I once loved makes me sick.  

Chewing.  I can't stop thinking about it.  The animal caught in a trap gnawing off  its leg.  The cow with its chambered stomach senseless in  its pasture.  

I think I use this blog to pray.  Cyberspace, for me, conjures an image similar to  heaven. Clouds streaked with the energy  of people's prayers as they rise from earth seeking fulfillment.

Please.  I feel dirty and greedy and I want to be clean.