Cleavage, Croquettes, and Everglades

Being in #Miami for the holidays unhinged me: I accidentally lost the keys to my ex-husband’s Miata and inadvertently tore the upholstery in his luxury Mercury sedan when I let his forty-nine- pound #Boxer/Labrador travel unsupervised in the backseat of the car.  My ex complained about my carelessness in a roundabout way by blaming it on our children who also live with him in his two- bedroom townhouse.

He was right.  I was out control, all my hard-earned #Buddhist and zen calm earned from living a six-year hermit like-life in Maine out the window. I immediately traded the buttoned-up shirts I used in #New England for low cut t-shirts that showed cleavage. Then I drove around town looking for #Cuban restaurants and bakeries that served croquettes, fried and rolled bread crumbs with ham, chicken, or cheese, even though I had been vegetarian for the last year or so.

Mostly, I resorted to my old ways of being a tired, burned-out and single mother of two: I didn’t wear makeup and kept my sweatpants and t-shirts on all day after my early morning workouts. I also grocery shopped, cooked, cleaned, and washed clothes as if nothing had changed, as if I had not left town for Maine six years ago, as if my children were not two young adults with their own jobs, friends, and life.

I complained and gossiped to old friends as if they wanted to hear it, as if I could pick up on our old threads of conversations and get the same response, as if they had stayed stuck in some shared and familiar past hurt that we could revisit to prove we were simpatico, but like me they had moved on to new hurts, new friends, new lives, and I did not recognize them nor did they recognize me.

When I went to see #Mary Poppins with my friend Suzy (we see a movie together every year when I’m in town for the holidays) she seemed distant, detached, crabby, and depressed.  Her walk was hesitant and her gaze empty.  All that now concerned her was that I not be late to the movies.

Without knowing it I, tried on my long-ago role of victim (I was once a single hard-working and exhausted mother of two in Miami) and “mean high school girl with an attitude persona” who thought she had every right to dish out all the anger, bitterness, and resentment she could muster because the world and everyone in it was unfair, and I was superior to it.  Still, I could not find any common ground with my past and present self.

There were also other underlying and uncomfortable feelings I could not disregard like my awkward 30-day living arrangements:   My ex-husband had promised to allow me to stay alone in his house with the children while he stayed with his father or girlfriend.  It was the same promise he made the year before when I stayed for two weeks at his house and he stayed too, causing tremendous tensions between myself and the two women he was dating.  

This time, I hated myself for believing him and returning to the same arrangement as the year before—and this time for 30 days.  I chalked it all up to making a sacrifice to see the children because I couldn’t afford to get a hotel after my bankruptcy this last year and the expenses of my twice monthly visits to my ailing mother at a nursing home in #New York City.  The good news was that I could work on my online classes from the comfort of the house.

At some point during that holiday, my ex broke up with his partner and slept with another woman, who had also once been his secretary.  I knew his girlfriend of ten years. She had helped raise our children when they stayed at his house after the divorce.  I also knew he had repeatedly  promised to marry her but never did.

In order to put some distance between myself and the brewing drama, I said I would not attend the #Christmas Day dinner at his father’s house. “That was his girlfriend’s place,” I said with conviction to my ex and the children, who were hurt by my decision.  Still, I started establishing boundaries between myself and the chaos around me. And, I stuck to my boundaries even more firmly when my ex asked if I wanted to have sex with him.

Then I took his girlfriend out to lunch and heard her out.  She told me stories of my ex-husband’s manipulations and betrayals.  I said I didn’t recognize the man she was talking about and, really, I didn’t, even though I had had my own tumultuous post-divorce struggles with him, but I would never share the details of that mess with anyone.  Anyway, I did not want to get involved in their problems.

I told her that when we married at 19, we were supported by his wealthy parents who treated us like self-indulgent children, buying us houses, boats, cars...,  In the 16 years since our divorce we had become different people.

I said I was sorry for what she was going through.  I had heard of their tumultuous relationship challenges which included his sleeping with other women and pitting her against them.  Without taking sides, I focused on her and asked if she knew her boundaries? Did she honor her feelings?  But instead she preferred to talk about how he always hurt her, so I listened.

I also asked her forgiveness for disrespecting her by staying with her boyfriend at his house for a second year in a row.  There was no excuse for my behavior.  Even though I was broke, I should have found another way to be with my children at Christmas by either having them visit me in Maine or taking a cheap hotel in town and staying fewer days.

She said it was no big deal even though she should have called me out on my own lack of boundaries and self-respect; it was her rightful place to do so.  Her actions made me wince. I was her. She was me, but now her self-hatred was in love with my ex-husband and my newfound and budding self-love despised him for manipulating me now and post-divorce – sex for child support, midnight talks about how he suffered after our breakup, even though he had left me for his secretary, and showing up at my house at all hours of the day.  Worst of all, I had accepted all his bad behavior as if that was what I deserved.

My emotions were out of control, my past hurts, mistakes, and oversights bubbling up to the surface day after day on unbearably hot and sunny South Florida days.  I even envied my daughter’s twenty-year-old friend her relationship with boys, understanding of her limits, and speaking her truth.   This was the young woman I was on track to be until my parents’abuse and violence shred me to an inch of my humanity. Envy felt like a gnawing giant in need of a self-compassion and forgiveness I could not find or muster.

Right after Christmas my ex took off with the children, his girlfriend, and her daughter to a cabin vacation in #Georgia. By then he had made up with his girlfriend, and as in the past, she forgot and forgave his indiscretions.

I stayed behind with the pets, a tabby and boxer/Labrador. I walked the dog, fed the cat, and cleaned the kitty litter and the dog’s accidents, which gave me a rash on my left arm.  Being by myself, though, was a godsend. I needed time to process my thoughts and walk off my mental chaos. The good news was that my body felt freer, my step lighter, and my gaze more confident. Two years of meditation had released long, hard psychic knots of self-loathing and low body image around my spine, which felt looser. 

When I drove to Naples for bird watching, I listened to #Willie Nelson, Hank Williams, and Jimmy Buffett on the radio. I gazed at my beloved Everglades stretched across both sides of I-75. Looking at blades of sawgrass, I was reminded of a guide who on a long-ago airboat ride told me stories about growing up walking across the razor-sharp grass (I had wished then, and still do, of being that wild).

I imagined panthers roaming through the gnarled underbrush and tussling with gators and snakes. I remembered hearing how pythons, which owners could no longer keep, thrived in the park now, unsettling the delicate balance of the ecosystem. Watching white herons flying across the swamps of #Big Cyprus National Preserve recalled a documentary I watched on how in the early 1900's the park's shore birds were slaughtered for feathers to adorn women's hats. The Preserve's deep tropical forest also brought to mind how the #Seminoles, who never surrendered to #President Tyler’s soldiers when they came to remove them from their native lands, hid in the most remote parts of the glades and survived and thrived there.

The sight of air plants in the cypress trees evoked my favorite belief that the orchids in the #Everglades originate from the #West Indies from winds blowing seeds during hurricanes (still to do on my bucket list was taking a hike deep enough into the park to find the elusive #Ghost Orchid). And, dozens of palms squashed against a fence built on the edge of the park and highway awakened a loving memory of the summer after my divorce when my kids and I decided to learn the name of all of #Florida’s 2500 species of palm trees, a project that yielded maybe recognition of ten or so trees.

I made a note to read Marjorie Stoneman’s Douglas’s “River of Grass,” when I got back from my holiday vacation in Florida to my new home in Maine.

When I left South Florida for Maine six years ago, I began a quest to find freedom, healing, and, compassion for myself and others. I dabbled in Buddhism, zen, meditation, and the worship of saints and goddesses. Recently, I asked the Hawaiian Goddess Pele, who represents passion, to take me to the sun, the metaphorical place where I would be reborn and transformed like in the fable of the old lady who lived in a cabin in the woods and all night rocked a tired wanderer until he regained his health and youth rising to become the morning sun. But I didn’t expect my "sun" to be in Florida or that it shine its brightness on what I didn’t want to see or deal with on my holiday vacation.

And what did I see in the "sun?"  All the rubble of pain leftover from my past still lurking in the deepest troughs of my heart.  Like the waxy, tough, evergreen of the ancient Everglades, also surrounding urban Miami with the same sky, trees, bushes, and flowers, my raw truth had always been present, but I had to summon the courage to see it in order to release it.

I started driving to my old hangouts: homes, schools, parks, and the places where I had worked. I stopped to visit my father’s grave, and even embraced my discomfort at my ex and his girlfriend's tumultuous relationship and my part in it. And, at all these places and to all these people, I whispered, “I love you, I thank you, I heal you, I grieve you, I forgive you, and I release you--and myself."