True North

The first thirty eight years of my life was spent with me creating it. Creating my faith, creating my future career, creating my marriage and family. Creating my home and how we lived and got on in this world. Creating safety and memories. Creating. And then I realized I was more controlling my life versus actually creating it. They are hard to split up. Sometimes you are creating and sometimes (a lot of times) you are really controlling. Either way on any given day you are doing one of them. 

It wasn’t until my love affair (that pulled me with the magnetic force field of Jupiter) happened that I realized my whole life had been spent with me controlling almost all of it. I am not good at just letting things happen. I am not good at letting things be messy. I was awful at letting people just be in pain (I would later learn that allowing people to be in- to FEEL their own pain would be a gift I dare not take from them). I had a fierce desire to get in the process with my people and see them through to the other side. Myself and my own problems included. This is my loyalty gene. It’s a gift, but it also needed maturing. So when I decided to allow this planet sized love to wrap me into it, unbeknownst to me, I also decided to start letting go a little bit. I stopped creating (controlling) everything in my world. I stopped curating outcomes, and giving a meaning to why things were happening in my life, my marriage, my christian faith. And you know the strangest thing happened, I started breathing. I started feeling again for the first time in about two years. Of course I had some crazy good love chemicals helping me out, but the fallout of separating from my spouse was so earthquaking that I just stood still and stopped trying to control it all. I just let myself feel all of it.

I learned to listen and to trust my heart for the very first time in my life. Before this event, I really relied on my mind and my faith (only) to guide me. My feelings could be so big sometimes (a lot of the times) and they had gotten me into trouble before (young heartbreak that I was not taught to embrace, but rather run in shame from). So with this earthquake, and the help of my very best friend of twenty years, I learned to feel and trust my heart far above any other source in my being. My logic and reasoning self (my good brain) would learn to get in line with my heart, to come along side and support my heart but not run the show anymore. My body (just this year!) is also learning to speak up and my mind is learning to trust her as well (I will never ever again succumb to the ‘wisdom’ of extreme caloric deficiency in order to body shame myself into a size I was never meant to be).

My heart is the true Northstar of my being, of my life. If I want to fully and truly live this one precious life I have, then I have to stop creating it all the time and let my heart guide me into it. At thirty eight years old my heart won the war and took over. I was no longer able to curate the ending of this part of my story, and I didn’t want too.  I wanted to come along on the discovery, the journey. I wanted to feel it all all the way down. I needed to choose this time based on my wild, wild, fantastically brilliant heart instead of what all my logic was telling me to do. Of course that came with a great cost. A greater cost than even I knew was possible, or bearable to endure.

See when you let your heart guide you, you relinquish a lot of control. You don’t use that side of your brain. You don’t get to plan it, perfect it, or nudge it any which way. Unlike your mind that can be talked into a safer way, a smarter plan, your heart drives free of those limitations. When the heart that was placed inside your body is given the driver seat (which is where it should be sitting) a magic is released into your life. It’s a magic that has the force of Jupiter behind it and it’s contagious and changes everything. You won’t ever want to go back. Well, sometimes when you think your stuck for good you’ll want to go back and you may even curse your heart for leading you this way, but rest assured that’s not the landing place for magic this powerful. Keep going. Keep letting the heart finish her story. 

My heart finally getting the say in my life is why I decided to leave my marriage. I knew I was different, I knew I couldn’t go back to that part of my story. It was over. I had planned all that, and now something new, something bigger was happening. It was terrifying and electric all in the same moment. What I could not understand or control however, was my husbands pain. Even though he had not yet officially admitted to his affairs, I believed he would feel some level of freedom to go find a love story I knew he was yearning for. In part, he did feel this way. But he also felt crushed, destroyed under the weight of my choice to leave. 

It took me the better part of two years to figure this out. Why would a man who was in love with another women (twice over that I know of) be so ruined when I finally called it? My logic told me he would feel a sense of relief that he was free now to go find and have that thing he and I failed to have. My logic told myself, and even him, that we would always have the things we were best at (our friendship, and our boys) but that he could now have the chance at true romance which he so desired. But that didn’t seem to matter to him. I remember him telling me once in his kitchen during a hand off of our kids that he would never ever forgive me for this. My brain could not comprehend this intense emotion of his. He cheated on me. More than once. As in “in deep love” with another woman for a long period of time. He was heartbroken to lose her, but he always lost her. Light bulb. He always lost her, but he always chose to lose her.

My ex husband was taught a very different brand of loyalty then I was. He was raised by New York Italians, in New York. His idea of a man was what was modeled to him. They married and had children, and sometimes they beat their wives, and sometimes they had mistress’, but they never left the family and they never left them in want for anything. A man in this culture was strong because he could provide and strong because he did not cry or show emotion. He did what he had to do and he always got it done. These men are not always trustworthy, but they are extremely reliable if that makes any sense. To this day I don’t always know if my ex husband is telling me the truth, but I know for sure as shit he will show up for my kids and even for me if I needed it. 

Out of respect for my ex husband I will not share his personal story, that is his to tell, but as it relates to mine with him, I will say this; He found that jupiter love more than once while we were married, it just wasn’t with me. Because of who he is and how he was raised (whether I agree with that or not) he never followed his Northstar because of his commitment to me and the boys. That, too him was everything. Something to be respected in many ways. I can think it’s crazy and illogical, and a double standard all day long, but my (or your) opinion of that is not what needs understanding. What I have come to see and understand is that in his mind, in his world, he was willing to continue to stay in our marriage out of duty and loyalty (and he probably held some hope we would get better when life calmed down for us) over his own happiness with another. When I asked him why these relationships would break up, he said “Because I would never in the end leave you.” 

I get it now. I don’t need for it to be right or wrong, or something I even agree with. I just get to get it. I understand his grief was largely in part because I choose my true north over him and our family. I choose what he could not choose for himself. Maybe he had it right. Maybe he was just a man in over his head. Maybe I should not be assigning very complex answers to emotions that live in another. Either way, I now understand that to him our family was more important than his needs and he was never, ever going to leave us no matter how many times he failed our marriage vows. And that is all I need to know for now in order to forgive and move forward. 

The story continues next week…

xoxo 

Pinz

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