Traveling Alone

Sunset - Tel Aviv

This year would have been my 31^st wedding anniversary. It is instead the first year of my new life as a single woman. Finding myself at square one again, I feel the sense of surprise and injustice I remember from my childhood when I would land on the longest slide just as I was anticipating winning at Chutes and Ladders. I am on my butt again, starting over. We are encouraged in early childhood to believe that if we work hard and give something our all, we will win, or succeed, or be rewarded. I know that there are other messages we are given as well, such as “if at first you don’t succeed… “, and the one about learning from our mistakes, but somehow these come in on a softer frequency or we hear them as white lies alongside our inherent cultural competitiveness that stresses “going for the gold”, getting the “A” and the “cream rising to the top”.  It is strange that we can see that big slide right in front of us the entire time we are moving forward, and still be so upset and surprised when a roll of the dice lands us there.

My marriage has been the single through line in my life for the past 30 years. I have friendships that have lasted longer, but there is nothing else that has required the same daily attention, constancy, and commitment.  I am confused about what happens now. I have been traveling on one circuitous bumpy road for a long time and now find that the road has ended abruptly.  It does not seem possible or desirable to turn around. There are so many roads that are adjacent but not obviously connected to my old road that my way now seems unclear. I find myself moving on slowly while paying close attention to the changing landscape. I have no real desire to fall immediately into another relationship.  I am excited about having time on my own to get to know myself, my interests and my desires. Yet, I feel the longing to continue on in my life with a traveling companion.  Can I be my own traveling companion?  I miss the relationship part of marriage. I miss the partnership, and the intimate day in day out sharing. Can I create partnership and have an intimate relationship with my self?  Is it enough to share my life, my accomplishments, my joy, and my struggles with my self?

Sometimes I try to retrace my steps to find the place where my husband and I took different paths. Did we begin to go separate ways during a big moment in our lives like when I decided not to go to Israel with him, or was it during a small moment when I was too distracted to listen to a story that he really wanted me to hear?  Was I the first to walk away emotionally without being aware that I had left, only to react later to his frustration when he was not able to find me? Were we playing out old as the hills dramas that we brought with us from our birth families? Were we locked into relationship patterns that were begun many lifetimes ago?  The popular wisdom is that I need to understand what happened and what went wrong so I can shift my behavior, or I will soon find myself in the same relationship with another partner.  I know that this is true.  I can already recognize familiar behavior and old patterns in unexpected moments with other people in my life. I know aspects of myself I would like to change and I am more aware than ever of habits that must have driven my husband crazy. Still, I can’t really say why our marriage did not work for longer than it did. I only know that we both believed in it, that we tried everything we could think of, and even so could not find a way to go on any longer in our lives together. I do not feel like I made a mistake or married the wrong man.  It feels more like we went as far as we could together and then one of us had to turn off and take a separate path.  I am gradually learning the landscape of my new solitary path, and each day I learn a little more about traveling alone.