The Rubik’s Cube of Divorce

I once sat with a trusted clergyperson and touched upon various things from my first failed marriage.

I said to them, like I have said at times to a few other people:
Divorce is like a Rubik’s cube you cannot solve. You just keep turning and turning over all the various parts – where did this go wrong – what if I hadn’t married this person – then I wouldn’t have my children – what if this?…what if that?…did I fail them?….did they fail me?…how did we fail one another?…did I have a biblical basis to end this?…how did something that held such hopes and dreams and memories formed together end up here???

They responded back:
Rubik’s cubes can be solved. Divorce is like a Rubik’s cube where somebody rearranged all the stickers.

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I would agree. God hates divorce and for good reason. It is such an upside-down violation of His most basic expressions. Yet, I have to imagine that God hates a lot of other things, too. So sadly, divorce seems to sometimes be the best sub-optimal choice for a number of reasons.
In a divorce, ultimately there are never any winners.

Yet divorce forces such an unnatural game of violations.
Such an unnatural turning of some metaphorical Rubik’s cube where it might seem that the best one can do is to get as many of the colors to align again as best as possible?
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As a twice-divorced person now with the twice-distilled same accusation leveled against me – that I didn’t meet intimacy needs – I am giving lots and lots of thought to these kinds of statements and ideas as part of my processing.

During the five year period between these two relationships, I had read a book called The Seven Levels of Intimacy which resonated so deeply with me. I can recall in marital therapy around 2017 they angrily said, (paraphrase) “You never read that book, you have no idea what is in it.”

At the time, I had the book actually in my hand referring to it, with dog-earred corners and highlighted pages.

It didn’t matter. I had never read this book. Never. Never read it. Never listened again on Audible. Never.

Recently, I learned, through a strange post-divorce interaction not initiated by myself that “I was no picnic, either.”

Hmm. I’m on a quest to find out why I’m “just no picnic.”

Apparently, whatever it is that I offered up to these people, was just pretty poor of a picnic.

It would only be logical to find out what the smorgasboard expectations were, I suppose…as though it mattered…now…lol.

I mean, I get it. I do. People like me are a number of non-picnic-like things, I suppose.

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During my second divorce I read that the level of anger in a divorce process is equal with the level of attachment to that person.

I found this very interesting. It is easy to project qualities on to others in the early phases of attachment to anyone and in retrospect I clearly did this with both marital partners. We see what we want to see. And when we see something else, we dismiss it as the anomoly, rather than the other way around.
I think I have a pretty clear picture of my attachment style with my own father. Most of us probably feel a bit uncomfortable pondering such things for fear of wrong associations – yet I think that this is a deeply biblical idea found in the poetic account in Genesis, pre-dating any other ideas about this most basic truth about most human beings.

Perhaps in formative situations of early life where there is some blurring of typical attachments to each parent, I could see where this might be one potential “sticker-switcher”on that strange Rubik’s cube, but I do not know.
I think I know myself fairly well, yet have twice failed to achieve the type of mutuality and intimacy I desired.

To me, grief is like childbirth, too…in a number of metaphoric ways. It’s gotta come out sooner or later…

Right now I am creating space for myself to grieve. At any hour that it comes to me.

I find the daytime eclipses some types of deeper thoughts I might have upon waking up after each sleep cycle at times…I suppose I had slept about an hour and a half before awaking during this night…and as I was turning some things over in my mind, I decided I was just supposed to go to my computer and continue the process while it can be expressed in raw form.

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I seem to have been formed as some type of emotional wound-licker, for lack of a better metaphor. This may not be a bad thing. I have a high amount of empathetic traits, but yet these very things have led me into two very awry marriages and divorces which lacked mutuality in the deepest sense.

Yet left me with various gifts including my two precious children.

Around the time of my first divorce upon the 20 year mark – I have read that this mark is a highmark for marriages to break down as most are in a stage of life where they must decide whether to endure it out or end it, while they are still on the younger side of middle age – I remember also saying to friends that I would do it all again, every single moment, just to have my sons exist and be exactly who they are from the moment of conception.

I must say also – (almost) no one marries someone they don’t love or don’t believe that they love and no marriage of any length is 100% bad, otherwise it would have broken down much sooner, I believe. Though, this too, is complicated by the fact that for many marriages, one person is holding things together more than the other.

And of course, the debate over which person is actually doing this is probably heard in marital therapy offices quite often.

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During some difficult times in the first marriage I also sat with a trusted clergy person. Among a number of things discussed, I gave a glimpse into my relationship with my father, as an only child born to a couple that had been married 10 years. My father was 49 when I was born, my mother, 39.

Among the few descriptive stories I shared was a memory I had of putting curlers in my dad’s hair, playing beauty parlor with him when I was probably seven or eight years old, while he sat silent in his big chair, watching TV, in a home filled with a lot of trauma (and drama) from my mother.

The clergyperson said that was such a beautiful and precious image.

I said, “I must have been like a daffodil blooming in November to him…I followed him everywhere…in his gardens…in his workshop…always yick-yacking and saying ‘I’m bored’ and him finding something to occupy me…sorting pennies….arrowheads…helping him fold the laundry….or grind up deer meat and freeze garden produce…listening at times to his own woes he couldn’t contain and found himself mumbling a few weighty woes to a nine year old…”

The Pastor responded to the image of a daffodil coming up in November and said to me, “hold on to that thought.”

Below is an image I designed around the time of my first divorce when I was in various stages of grief and reflection, it is the image of a green spring daffodil being covered up by fall leaves.

As part of my grieving and open processing – because that’s what those who write do, they leave some sort of trail for themselves and for a variety of others, perhaps, as they work through things toward some type of (ongoing) resolution – I have purposed to start sharing some of my personal writings here that go back to other times in my life.

I think there is too much white-washing of grief and other things in our culture – I like to believe it is right to sometimes break silences and the shame sometimes associated with open sharing.

The reason to write and share is not because one’s grief is unique, but because of the basic commonality of grief.

Why write anything – If we don’t write and express about the most meaningful things from our own perspective?

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This poetry writing was inspired after listening to a podcast series on the book of Lamentations and grief – the speaker lay out a number of ideas and images of a biblical-war-torn spector-like-brought-to-the-dust-Jerusalem-in-exile(I hope I am recalling and stating this correctly) being she is “like a widow…like a slave…like a mother…”

Because of things I was dealing with in the second marriage, I was inspired to attempt at writing something that might mimic those ideas and that expressive Scriptural genre – insertingmy own story into it.

It was simply a therapeutic expression and exercise I did for myself, and I had only shared it with my therapist and a few other people at the time.