Walking the Wall

(Yes, this is another entry in response to The Mermaid Chair.)

“In the middle of my marriage, when I was above all Hugh’s wife and
Dee’s mother, one of those unambiguous women with no desire to disturb
the universe, I fell in love with a Benedictine monk” (1). I could have
written this word for word, minus the Benedictine monk. This called out
to me because here was my story of awakening, it is a story that was
not apologetic–well, apologetic for the pain that infidelity
inevitably causes to the spouse, but not apologetic for what invariably was necessary. Jessie
says, “I dove with arms outstretched, my life streaming out behind me,
a leap against all proprieties and expectations, but a leap that was
somehow saving and necessary. How can I ever explain or account for
that” (3)? Where was she diving from though? That I understand
amazingly well, later when Jessie paints a picture, there is a little
girl in what she first thinks is a magic room, but she looks closer and
realizes, “The little girl was not in a magic room, a lovely room. She
was in a box. The same girl who would grow up to express herself through diminutive art boxes” (308).

I wrote this poem in 1996 when I was in the middle of my own dive to
the bottom of the ocean, my own life struggles were the catalysts
to force myself first down, and then up and out into life:

Inside  
9/24/96

Trapped tight inside a small, square box–
 Four walls that close in dark;
There is no need for clasps or locks
 No mutiny will spark.

Curled up in this self-made haven
 First girl… then woman lay.
Knowing not she’d made a prison
 And sees not light of day.

She views life from a tiny hole,
 A picture box, a stage,
But never lets it reach her soul
 So deep inside its cage.

Her mind roams free to worlds unknown
 Through books and vivid dreams;
But always knowing she’s alone
 And bursting at the seams.

One day her spirit grows too much
 To keep all locked inside;
And slowly reaches out to touch
 The world that lives outside.

You can see, I think, why I have such an incredibly strong
connection to this story. Half of me lived in a box, the other half
felt trapped up on a pedestal, perfect mother, perfect wife, perfect
daughter,
perfect Christian–I had all the right words to say, I was a picture of
strength with my child’s illness, but I could not live down
in the box where the air was so thick, and I could not live up
there on the pedestal where the air was too thin to breathe, so like
the quote of Yeat’s
poem from page 195, I fell and found, “Now that my ladder’s gone, /I must lie down where all the ladders start, /In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.”
I found a certain freedom in a small town knowing all my improprieties,
a freedom in the fall, once I realized that everyone was aware of my
fall, when I walked free of secrets and free of even respect, the
aftershocks were so similar to what the author wrote:

These paroxysms were, I realized later, a kind of
aftershock. They would come and go for weeks, moments of violent
disorientation in which I couldn’t recognize myself, completely
breaking apart how I understood my life, all the joints and couplings
that held it together. It was the peculiar vertigo, the peculiar
humility, that comes from realizing what you are really capable of.
Those aftershocks would gradually taper off, but in the beginning they
could almost paralyze me. (201)

The fall almost killed me, literally, but on a particular
night when I was “this” close, as we like to say, I realized that there
was nothing and no one that should ever make me despair to this point. I
understood then, the preciousness of life, even the preciousness of my
own life however tattered it might be. Like Jessie, “I
could even feel how perishable all my moments really were, how all my
life they had come to me begging to be lived, to be cherished even, and
the impassive way I’d treated them”
(190). It was time to live, come what may, to be wholly alive. I think
that my infamous (to family and friends) “list” was born on that
night–that sense of grabbing onto what I wanted to do, the big and
little things, and doing them, or at least attempting to do them. I
eventually rebuilt my marriage, started college (my very first “to do”
check off), recaptured my spirituality as something that is my own and
not belonging to any religion, jumped out of an airplane, plan to take
belly dance lessons, dance naked under the moon when I’m old and
wrinkly, swim in a pool of ping pongs (among other things), and now, in
a salute to this book, certainly to go skinny dipping.  While I
wish that my catalyst hadn’t hurt my family, it is a
time in my life that I can never regret. Sometimes it takes something
very loud, very frightening, very embarrassing, or very painful (for
me, it was all those things, I’m a bit dense at times) to force people
out of “just getting by” into “really living.”  Life is begging to
be lived and embraced and life isn’t found in
numbness and shutting away the soul, it really is meant to be lived
large and out loud. Too bad I couldn’t combine some of my things and
skydive naked under a full moon into a lake covered with ping
pongs…now that would be a sight!