For years and years, when I wanted to write about the affair and everything surrounding it but couldn't, because I was afraid, part of the fear had to do with temporality. I could sense in this gut-deep, true way that if I didn't go ahead and deal with this Extremely Difficult Thing™ that life had dealt me, more blows would keep coming and I would be snowed under by the weight of it all. Like a hoarder house that's been left too long to be recovered, I was fairly certain that I'd start to collect unintegrated life experiences and cart them around with me like an invisible shopping cart: unhoused, except in my own life experience. Not writing about the affair would mean kicking myself out of me: making the conscious decision to never navigate back to center, but just stay out here spinning on my side like a teacup knocked over by the cat.
Funnily enough, this actually happened. When Covid happened I thought: oh shit, it's a global pandemic and we're all going to die, and I never made peace with the affair. When the pandemic became endemic and I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, I thought: oh shit, I'm going to die of colon cancer and I never made peace with the affair. When the colonoscopy was officially cancer-free, things levelled out for a while and instead of writing about the affair, I cleaned out my walk-in closet for the first time in three years and started exercising more regularly and replaced our paper towels with cloth and basically took care of every possible front where I needed to make changes EXCEPT FOR MY OWN BRAIN, because literally every other unpleasant task seemed far more acceptable than just writing. about. the. affair.
But then, on June 22, my father died. It was terrible and swift and let me introduce you to the other major regret of my life: our relationship.
If I could spin this blog off into another space where I could somehow magically deal with his death at the same time I'm trying to deal with what happened in 2014, I would do it, but I just don't have the capacity to give this second yawning maw of desperation more attention than just kicking in a few boxes of Kleenex every so often while keening like an animal at 3 am.
Just a few months after he died, I made this website. And I realized that the two most awful things taking up real estate in my head had something in common: regret. Intense and searing and inescapable but somehow: fertile and instructional and capable of transformation.
I believe to the back of my eyeballs-- to the very limit of my interior spaces and the height of my energetic presence on this globally warmed microwave of a planet-- that regret has something important to teach us. I think that in a way, it's extremely obvious: we regret in spaces where we hold something to be of incredible value, and we fall short of treating it well. In other ways, though, what regret has to teach us is insanely obscured, because I think that every place we regret something in this intense, overwhelming way, we're telling ourselves the wrong story. There's some other lesson there about how we think about it, or why we act in certain ways around it, where we can hold ourselves in compassion and forgiveness rather than self-immolating every day.
Tomorrow is my 44th birthday. It was also my father's birthday. He would have been 82.
And so, though in this space I've been mostly unpacking an affair I had in 2014, life continued on and delivered another face-punch, and tomorrow I'm going to be simultaneously drowning in it while also trying lean into my husband and kids and distract myself from that next Extremely Difficult Thing™ which did eventually come to pass, and about which I'll also write, eventually.
Image credit: My mother.
Image description: This is a picture of me and my dad when I was just a couple of months old. There's shag carpet and a brick fireplace is visible in the background. My father is cradling me in his arms and gazing adoringly into my eyes, and I am staring right back at him with a smile on my face. This possibly the only time our relationship was this pure and uncomplicated. I love this picture.
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