I never gave much thought to psychology and emotions and relationships and baggage until I got divorced and started dating. I assumed we all had baggage and that some of us were carrying it better than others, but that everyone was either trying their best, or in a state of deep denial. Of course, I counted myself among those with an abundance of emotional fortitude and therefor among the emotionally well-adjusted. To many, I had become the easy-going, roll with it guy. Calm and unfazed. Life had thrown me a few curve balls, but comparatively speaking, I hadn’t suffered any deep traumas. It’s easy to not pay attention to something, like baggage, when it doesn’t seem to affect you.
When I first met my wife, I was young, recently out of a relationship, and preoccupied with making my way in life – or so I think I was. I hadn’t read much psychology or self-help and I hadn’t thought much about what makes for a good relationship. If anything, I probably had a disdain for things like therapy and spiritualism… and while I always tried to be a decent person (father, son, husband, friend) I’m not sure I thought much about what it really meant to be those things. I feel like I was sheltered from other people’s experiences of hurt. In hindsight, I feel selfish having walked through life so obliviously. At that age, my mid-twenties, I hadn’t lost much or taken too many hard knocks and so was never forced to think about loss – mine or another person’s.
Last night I arrived in State College, PA. My family has a house there. I was in town to interview for a job one county over. There’s a good chance that job or no job, I’ll be moving there so that I can afford housing (I got locked in to a pretty expensive apartment here in Memphis). As I walked around the house, I was hit by two sentiments. I looked at some of the things that needed to get done (could use new flooring, etc.) and had the odd feeling of missing being a homeowner. There’s a sense of pride and accomplishment that comes with owning and fixing a place up. I also couldn’t help feeling a sense of loss and sadness being in the house. The last time I can remember being there was two years ago for the Ohio State football game. My dad and brother had gotten into a blow-up a few weeks before and weren’t talking to each other. I was at the game with my girlfriend (we hadn’t gotten engaged yet) and posted a picture of us – an ex sent me a text asking if I was enjoying the game – rightfully so, this caused an issue with the girlfriend. My daughter let me know that she would be moving back in with me. All in one weekend. It was an emotionally charged weekend for my girlfriend… she got a good peek under the hood of some family dynamics – and we were not at our best. A few days later, just before we were supposed to go out to San Diego for me to meet her family, she broke up with me. When we decided to work on things, I stopped going to Penn State football games – I wanted to focus on us.
Many years prior to all of that, my wife and I had gone up to Penn State for the game against Alabama. There were some issues with who would sit where – the family was either short a ticket or had a ticket that wasn’t with the other seats, or something… but it was decided (without talking to us about it) that my nephew would squeeze in with us. If you haven’t been, seats at PSU games are tight – there is no extra room to squeeze in an extra layer of clothing, let alone an entire person. During the game, my dad made an off comment to my wife. I told him off. We cursed at each other. He called me names. He was out of line. My wife and I didn’t stay the whole weekend – we didn’t feel like we were welcome there. She never went back. I eventually patched things up with my dad, but in doing so I suspect I lost some respect with my wife.
As much as the house was meant to be a place where family memories were made, it is a shell of its good intentions. My brother has a room in the house, but he and my dad haven’t spoken in two years. I have a room, but haven’t been back in those two years either. It feels oddly frozen in time. Nobody seems to care much about Penn State football these days – at least not in my family, or not the way we used to. Given the state of the world, I’m ok with that – football should take a backseat. But being back in the house was another reminder of just how much has changed in the last few years.
And I don’t know if it was being in the house, or being in the state, or the slight anxiety of the job interview, but I paced around this morning with a surprisingly heavy heart. And maybe it was the 14 hours of driving, the thought of starting over, or going through her new home city, but I found myself missing my ex-fiancée, missing the person I thought was going to be my co-pilot, the person I thought would be with me in big life decisions. I could feel it in my gut. I found myself thinking that I don’t think I can feel what I felt for her with anyone else. It’s odd when stress triggers, and becomes associated with, other feelings and emotions. And I’m struggling to accurately describe the feeling, but I suddenly felt like I understood what she might have meant when she’d tell me she was broken. Every fight, or minor disagreement, every stressor from work probably brought crashing back the grief she felt from losing her husband and her mother. I can’t claim to know what she was thinking or feeling, I can only say that in the living room and in the kitchen, in the nervousness about a new place to live and a possible new job, all I wanted was for things to be calm and for her and I to find our way back to the sense of home we felt with each other (or at least I felt with her). At this point in my life, I had expected to be making these types of decisions with someone else. And when I tried to think of this in the context of moving on or forward or whatever, I could see how one might feel broken. Because in that moment, things just don’t seem to make sense.
I sat down to write about it, but was antsy and had to leave for the interview. The first fifteen minutes or so of my drive, I thought about writing to her and what I’d say. The tone in my mind is much more resigned than it used to be, but I could still feel that tiny spark that doesn’t seem to die off – that wanting someone else in this transition with me. At some point, I noticed the mountains on both sides of the highway and the windmills spinning in the distance. My mind slowly shifted in to interview mode.