The night of the full super moon I
dreamed it was my birthday. I was
being taken to a fancy hotel room to celebrate by a big and powerful man. He and I were not lovers, but I was
craving intimacy with him. He kept
telling me what a nice room it was, though I found it to be very ordinary and
dull. At just the moment we were
going to connect in some way, I saw him do something so familiar and sad it
made my teeth ache: I saw him decide to disappoint me. I could see that he hated himself for
it, and I could also see that he thought he was doing me a favor, saving me
from further grief by showing me that he was utterly incapable of love. Just before I woke up I was wondering,
“Why can’t I just leave?”
It wasn’t that he didn’t love me. He was
just broken. Not wounded, not some
injured and vulnerable being waiting for my ministrations to bring him back to
life. It was not about my being
good enough, beautiful enough, woman enough, strong enough, healer enough. He just didn’t have the parts to put
back together. Something was
missing and something would always be missing.
Upon waking I realized, this
relationship doesn’t work. It
never has. It never will. My inner masculine is a bum.
All the years of rage and
disappointment, all the struggle and effort to make him something other than
what he was – what I knew he was because
I created him – all that waste and shame led to this simple realization. What if I just let it be true? What if I listen, finally listen to the
truth that’s been playing itself out over and over my whole life?
It has taken me a few days to
digest this, to let my tired and toughened tissues absorb the bitter medicine
of this truth. The masculine I
have built in myself based on the parts I had available to me is never going to
provide for me, make me happy, or keep me safe. And unlike a real human being, he is incapable of change, a
static construct based on subterranean beliefs about myself, judgments that I
am not worthy of love or forgiveness.
He is a cage built by my ego to keep me hating myself and out of love
with life. I have always had the
key.
So
at this solstice time of year when the sun is strong and I think I am supposed
to be celebrating the divine wedding, the marriage of my animus and anima, the
union of the opposites at the root of all creation, I am filing for
divorce. The sad monster I’ve sewn
together from all my collected failures will finally get to rest, no longer
electrified into being by my fears and desires. If I let him die, something unbuilt will be able to take his
place.
I don’t know what happens
next.
