Resiliance

A dear friend mailed me her copy of Resilience to read. I read it all in less than 24-hours, basically in 2 sittings - which is saying a lot with my 2 kids. I usually have about 9 books going and take a while to finish anything, but this was a great book.

There are many beautiful passages from this book, but I wanted to post a few here.

"What believing that (her husband had an affair) did to my mother I will never forget. I read about it perhaps a dozen years after it happened and it was still as raw, maybe even more so, as when she wrote it. It undid the beautiful face and the ferocious intelligence; it mocked the family dinners and the Charity work. She could be replaced in the most intimate of her relations by a face, likely a face not as pretty as her own, by a physique also not likely to have matched my mother's. She believed that whatever gifts of charm or generosity or intelligence she brought to their marriage, it had not been enough to compensate for baby diapers and dishes to wash. Someone without those responsibilities could laugh and fawn. And could take her place. As Navy wife, she gave up all that she might be - which for her was considerable - to be with my father, to travel where he was assigned, to live where he was quartered, to raise their children to reflect well on him....Mother kept looking for where she had fallen short. And the looking took its toll. She would swing from it being a failure of hers - she wasn't pretty enough; she wasn't as carefree as he; his mother never accepted her because she was a widowed Protestant, not a virgin Catholic, when they married; a hundred things it clearly was not - to its being a failure of his - how could he do this, he wasn't the man she thought he was, didn't his family mean anything to him, didn't his career matter. There was never a satisfactory place to settle, so she lived all those decades still loving him, but with something deep inside her that would always be restless, even after he died. "The trust was suppose to be deep. The smiles were supposed to last forever."

We make sacrifices as women. We give gifts that perhaps no one asks us to give. We take care of our families and when we are betrayed we wonder why and can't understand it.

It's not about us.

The universe is bigger than that.

What husbands chose do with their dicks does not determine who we are. It would be nice if they had more respect. And by respect, I mean honesty. No sneaking around. It is the lying that hurts more than anything else.

But ultimately, the behavior of a spouse is not a reflection of us or our failures or anything else. It's about their need. Their ego.

And I've come to believe that possession of anything or anybody is fruitless. The only thing I can hope to control is myself. And even that doesn't always work out.

"In the end the way to view all that has happened is that I did my very best. I felt with every part of me. I loved with the whole of me. I ached in a way that reminded me that there had to be a corollary somewhere of incredible joy to balance the universe. And if I had loved less or doubted more or avoided the pains, I might not be assured as I am today that I have done in every circumstance what I would hope to do. Not every circumstance, surly. I have been angry beyond reason. I have been lost and unsure. But in every way I might have expected of myself, I have been true to that sense of what was true and right and clean. Maybe others had a better time, more intimacies, more skin pressed against skin, but this life is mine, these children are mine, this home is mine, and this imperfect man is like me. I am his and he is mine. And in the end, what we want from life is too dear for words, for paper."

This is a beautiful book, with so many truths in it.