Home and Healing

This blog has been a place where I've chronicled my journey with B3. You were there with me when I first wondered if I was dating or not. You walked with me as I struggled to trust that this relationship wouldn't harm or betray. I know you were all cheering for me. 

I want to acknowledge that focusing time and energy on this relationship has cut into my ability to form or maintain other friendships in the way I would like. And I've felt guilty about that. But I also knew that building this relationship was important for many reasons beyond whether B3 and I would make it or not. Nevertheless, I want to apologize to those I've let time slip away from. And thank you for allowing me the space to find my way. 

I also know that each of you probably have some expectations around this relationship. I say that because I've been there too: being on the sidelines of someone's relationship and writing the perfect fairytale ending to it and then they inexplicably change the story on you. What? You have the nerve to zig when I had you zagging? True Story. 

There is a complication with the future relationship between B3 and I that most of you won't understand or even be aware of. It's religion. (I know I'll lose a lot of you here and that's OK. Feel free to check out). 

Let me preface this by saying, I've spent most of my years explaining my life to people. It's never been normal. Teenage parents. Abandoned by both. Raised by my maternal grandparents. Married off to the first available prospect. Thirty-four years of stuff I'll never talk about. Then a divorce. The unbreakable thread through my entire life has been my faith. I was brought up in a conservative church. The same one B3 was raised in. As our lives progressed we digested these values in different ways. He maintains his core belief in God but he has rejected religion. I guess I've done that too but I did so in a much less black and white way and took a much longer road to do so. And here is perhaps a good time to tell you something I believe unequivocally: Religion and Faith are two entirely different things.  What I have emerged with is a faith that is my foundation. My load bearing wall. My refuge and retreat. My safe place to fall. Religion, is what I'm surviving. Religion is one of the reasons people hate church and Christians. Maybe I'll write more about that at a later date. But for now, I'm focusing on one religious pronouncement that I'm struggling with. That I'm trying to survive. 

You see, B3 and I are taking some significant steps into a whole new adventure together. We had talked very casually about "the future" a few times. Very casually. Imagine two tremendously independent people who both brought fears of rejection to the table. Then one day it all changed. On a lark, we walked into an open house. A large character home in Comox with .4 acres rife with fruit trees and garden beds. Neither of us have ever experienced what happened to us when we walked through this house. We found ourselves home. It was a rushing, gushing tsunami of head-over-heels possibilities. And we both saw our future. Together. Here. In this house. To say it was a LONG road to buy it would be an understatement (and the grist for several blogs that will likely never be published but I had to vent somewhere) but when we looked at each other and tried to sort out what just happened, we were a little stunned to find that we were on the same page. He was surprised I felt the way I did "because you had never indicated you were thinking this way" he said. That would be my expert self-protective instincts in full bloom thank you very much. It was then I said to this dyed-in-the-wool bachelor "if we are going to make this huge financial commitment together, then I need a full relational commitment too". (What? Me? Asking for what I want? Shocked me too.) He didn't run screaming from the room. 

But this is where I'm struggling. 

After my divorce, it took me a long time to decide if I ever wanted to be married again. I did everything I could to make my first marriage work. In particular, I did all the right religious things to make my marriage work. And there are A LOT of things a woman is told is "good and right". And in trying to fulfill all those expectations and mandates, it only inflicted harm on me. Exacerbating an already bad situation. It heaped a mountain of guilt upon my shoulders that I didn't deserve but carried anyway. My decision to finally call an end to my pain was met with the exact religious response I had feared would happen. I was rejected and shunned by the church I was attending, many friends, and my daughter. Divorce is one of the big unforgivable sins in religion. The bible doesn't take kindly to it. And for women, divorce is a death sentence on their character and future. I was told by someone that they might consider forgiving me if I went back to my marriage and begged forgiveness from everyone I had hurt. Then maybe - maybe - that relationship might be mended. What that person didn't understand is that our relationship could never be healed under those circumstances. Never. I could and would no longer subjugate myself to another person to exist in a humiliating relationship filled with shame. 

I'm not certain how this person reconciled that edict once my ex-husband remarried a little over a year after our divorce was final. 

So - according to religion - and the popular interpretation of scripture - me, being a divorced woman is never allowed to remarry. The word adulterer (and all those secondary insinuations) is clear in those references. 

All this ugliness was one of the reasons I emerged from my divorce never thinking I would ever meet anyone again. That no one would ever want me. And I never wanted to put myself in a position where I would be condemned this harshly ever again. 

Yet here I was faced with having to decide what I wanted when it came to a future with B3. Did I want to be married? If so, why? And how would I reconcile all that judgement. You have no idea how peoples expectations weigh on me. Some, I know, only "want what's best" for me. And that is, they want someone who will love me and care for me and be kind to me. They want me to be happy. For others, they want the religion adhered to for any of it to be valid. As usual, I feel I'm in a position to have to explain my life to others again.  But there's a lot of reasons I have for some of my decisions that I can't and won't divulge. Ever. So I know I can't make people understand one single thing. 

But apart from trying to make people understand, I am trying to reconcile religion, marriage, and my unspoken broken. And it's been becoming more and more clear to me over the past few years that while religion strangles and stymies; pitting people against each other, Faith - and by that I mean God - frees. Jesus stated just that. "I have come to set the captives free". Faith doesn't harm. It heals. While religion can't find it's way to forgiveness, Faith embodies it.  

All this to say - B3 and I are buying a house together. We will be moving in at the end of the month and merging two households. Two lives. And, we will tie the knot at some point. Sooner rather than later. Just don't pressure me about why and when. Just don't. Let me and God sort it out please.