Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story (41 page)

to have the courage to

see myself

so that you may learn to see

yourself also

to imagine yourself

to create yourself in your own image

for you to do that

you need to see it modeled for you

and though it frightens me

I am dedicated to

offering that so you may see

the willingness

to be a work in progress

your father and I came together

in love

and we clung to each other

because each of us

had a puzzle piece

we needed to solve

to the puzzle of ourselves

you were born from love

from longing

desire and purpose birthed you

and our arms

once empty

our hearts

once vacant

now are filled with the song

of your laughter

I know this:

you are with me

but you are not my own

you belong to yourself

you are the arrow

shooting forward into your own life

and I am the bow that must bend

true

that must be steady enough

for you to go straight into

your own future

without detours through fractures

of my unknowing

you must be free of my past

and supported enough

so that you may hear

your own voice calling

for me to be steady for you

I must heal what is

raging in me

so it does not consume you as well

I go now into my own life

to find the steadiness

so that my past does not become yours

so that our futures have a separate-selfness

so that you can see your own

beautiful shape

not defined by your parents

but sprung forth from us

with love

unconditional

I don’t know

at what age

you will read this

I don’t know what form you will be in

nor do I know the shape

I will be in

I do know

my love for you

will grow

impossibly

. . .

I do know my love for myself

will grow also

I do know I am excited

to watch you unfold the rose petals

of your soul

and blossom

and that though I live with sorrow now

a quiet sense of excitement

is growing in me

to see who I will become

and to discover who you become

and help you on your journey

as steward and vessel

of unconditional love

. . .

for as I am your parent

I am learning to be my own as well

and to provide myself

the space to define and redefine

and if I can believe in myself

the same way I believe in you

I know we will both make

great works of art

of ourselves

and we can laugh and reimagine

and redefine

as we share this journey

together

thirty

i choose love

T
y and I were both kids when we met years ago. We were lucky enough to have a beautiful child. We worked hard on our relationship. But it became evident to me that while we loved each other dearly, we were hurting our love, not building it, and we did not want that to be what our son grew up to see. Ty loves that child more than anything on earth. For me, having a child opened a window into my heart and showed me the kind of woman I wanted to be. Kase inspired me to examine every corner of my heart and soul, and to have more courage than I ever knew I would need.

The failure of my marriage was a loss of a dream I felt incapable of grieving. It was heartbreaking to see the patterns I thought I could escape reemerge in my marriage. When I began to face the fact that our relationship needed to change, I looked deeply inward with all the self-love I could muster. There was still a little broken piece of me that had never seen the light of healing. This part of me continued to look for approval on the outside. It gave another person power over my own sense of
self-worth. This wound wreaked havoc on my life until I committed to seeing it and healing it.

Ty and I filed for divorce in April 2014. The shock was staggering. We went for long walks and rode around in his truck, and it was as if the act of saying we would let each other go had immediately soothed many of our struggles. We both wanted a family more than anything in the world, and we both felt so sure we would be married forever. It has been a heartbreak to lose the picture of the family I had so wanted. But something could be salvaged. Ty and I needed to rebuild the friendship that had suffered, and we still got to be a team—Kase deserves two parents who are kind and respectful to each other. Anger and bitterness are not an option when you have a child who loves both his parents more than anything in the world. It has not been easy to do, but nothing worthwhile is.

I found myself in a place I never imagined I would be. A forty-year-old divorcée with a three-year-old. Starting over. Again. My companion of sixteen years was gone. I had few friends and no real place I belonged. I had to move and find a new place to settle down. Suddenly I had three new jobs.

To grieve the death of my marriage,

To examine the dark corners of myself that had yet to be healed,

To be a steady, emotionally available, and grounded mom for my son in this precarious period of transition.

Looking back, I realize that I was so busy surviving and recovering and problem solving since being a toddler that my development as an emotional human stopped at certain times in my life when a crisis stunted it. It’s true for all of us and that’s what inner-child work is—going through the divorce has actually been a lot like engaging in time travel within myself, because for the first time I’m really able to integrate all these parts of myself that didn’t get a chance to grow up. I’m not surviving anything. I’m safe. Parts of us evolve while other parts remain frozen, until our
attention allows them to thaw, and our dedication lets them catch up with the rest of us at our current age. I can watch myself now, witness my thoughts, and I can see the historic fears, doubts, and grief that were waiting for the right time to come to the surface.

I was driving the other day, feeling a lot of anxiety. I took a moment to check in with myself and ask what it was rather than just living with it. And suddenly I thought,
I really miss having a husband. I really miss having a mom today. I feel small and scared and I wish I had a mom to hold me or to call
. A tremendous sadness came over me and I cried as I drove. But I was self-aware too. With the divorce, there is a new layer of grief and a feeling of being so alone in the world. I can allow myself to feel deeply while at the same time witnessing myself. I’m not worried about holding it together anymore. I know how to do that. I’ve held it together, and worked and showed up and been a soldier and a professional pretty much my whole life. Now I’m learning how to let it go when I can, so that the grief doesn’t build up and spill over into the rest of my life. I can tell my grief is escalating when my anxiety surges. Anxiety makes me feel I’m vacant, and so this time I have been actively dealing with my grief and feelings of betrayal in healthy and adult ways, like writing, meditating, taking walks in nature by myself, and therapy. And being still. I want to be a present, happy, and engaged parent for my son, to keep what I am going through from spilling onto him. To do this I make moments to be alone to let myself unload. My mind does not have all the answers. But I don’t need answers to feel safe. I just need to feel my heart beating inside my chest and the beating heart of my son. No one has all the answers. I am learning finally to trust my own ability to know them when I need them. And to know all is well right now. In this second.

I still make sure to dedicate time after I wake and just before I go to bed for my prayers of gratitude. There is always so much to be grateful for, and pain causes us to lose sight of that. It’s important to see how much
good there is in the day, and that it always outweighs the pain. My son is such a beautiful miracle. Ty and I are both committed to being great parents and finding our way with love. I am healthy. I have a job I love.

And I have Lee. When I was sixteen, I told him I was headed to the Talkeetna Bluegrass Festival five hundred miles away to sing. He asked how I would get there, and I said I’d hitchhike. When he asked who I was singing with, I said I would just find a band onstage and ask if I could sit in with them. He was there when I returned a week later and told him that I did indeed get up and get to sing. He was by my side as I wrote my first songs. I wrote him letters when I was lonely at school, and told him first when I got signed. He was by my side as I toured the world. He has been through the turmoil with my mom, my romances, the birth of my son, and my divorce. All the major events in my life. He lives with me still, and helps me with Kase, and nourishes us in so many ways. He plays never-ending games of dragons, and reads the same book to Kase a thousand times in a row, and gives hundreds of horse rides on his knee to my little boy. Kase loves him. Lee sticks by my side in whatever is next in my life. If love and partnership mean being a witness to someone’s life, and loving and supporting them the whole way through no matter what, then Lee is my surprising love story. We create our own families in life, and he and Kase are mine. Having Lee’s support during my divorce has made a stressful time manageable. I feel so blessed to have him as a friend. He is the embodiment of an Every Day Angel.

Life is simple right now. Simplicity is where happiness is for me and where I can heal from. I get up and get my son up. I feed him and brush his teeth and we play before I take him to a few hours of preschool. While he is there I work half the time on my job and half the time on myself. I employ all the skills I have learned with time, and the first one is being here now and asking, What do I need today? What does that part of me
that is sad need? Often it just needs witnessing, some room to be seen and known and experienced. Unfelt feelings don’t cease to exist; they stay bottled up in our minds and our bodies. They dissipate when given expression. A heart can break only if it is closed—if it remains open there is nothing to break. I am learning to be a whole human who has the internal permission to allow myself to find expression without editing.

The divorce is teaching me to be impossibly supple and open. I know I am strong enough to see the truth and handle it now. I feel energized. This is life. Happiness is not a perpetual state. It’s not like saying, “I found Europe. I’m living in Europe now.” You have to get happy with the process. To me, there’s a real peace in accepting that, and being able to say life is never one thing. It’s all things. The whole universe is expanding, stretching, tearing down, and creating, and we are made of the same stuff. We expand, contract, decay, and grow all at once. We are mirrors of the universe and the natural world and what created us. We are made like trees, with our roots firmly planted in the ground, and if we can see we are built to bend and give, then the winds of life will pass through our branches without breaking us. Some days it passes through with fury. Some days with a gentle caress. Each morning I wake with gratitude that I can have the confidence to meet these ups and downs without being uprooted. The faith to step into pain when it comes and the courage to let it ravage me and pass through instead of hanging on to it and letting it tear me down. Life is ever-changing. What is consistent is knowing I am up for anything. That I am never broken.

•   •   •

M
Y STORYBOOK ENDING
isn’t one written in Hollywood. I didn’t get to ride off into the sunset with a cowboy. But I do get to ride off into the sunset with my son, myself intact, full of optimism for what I might
experience and accomplish in my future and for what I will be able to teach my son. My innocence is not lost—it has been converted into wisdom.

The sensation we call “breaking” is the pain that comes from resisting truth. Life broke parts of me that needed to fall away for me to live an open and truthful life. But the only things that broke away were the things that did not serve me anymore. Life demanded that I get rid of my ego, my facade, my contrived safety nets, until I was reduced to my true nature, so it could shine unhindered. I needed to know great darkness to know my light. I needed to understand extreme constraint to know my freedom. I needed to face shame to know my own worth.