No more guilt

The guilt is real; I should have divorced earlier, should have spared the children the years of deterioration. When one is in a dysfunctional relationship and family, particularly having grown up in a very dysfunctional relationship and family, it is impossible to know what is best. I spent years and countless amounts of money trying to 'fix' the relationship. I knew I could not do it by myself. I hoped it would be possible to find whatever was broken, to mend it, repair it. I can understand in my sane mind that I was attracted to someone unwilling to commit because of my early family background, but I wonder if at a younger age when the hormones are raging it is not harder to see that, especially when, as a full-blown codependent individual, one is always looking for a cause to fight, a crisis to fix, a world to save... The things I have understood through years of therapy, workshops, spiritual 'interventions' are not easier to put into practice because they are understood...

But if I am to proceed, I am setting guilt aside. I am explaining from now on not for anyone else but just so that I can understand the process and work, one second at a time, to ensure it is not repeated. I know from work with people in recovery that it is easier said than done. I can only repeat to myself what I said years ago, when I realized, as a wounded adolescent, that someone had to put an end and a stop to the sadness in my family, all the extended families, brought apart by resentments and hatreds and money. Yes, money, in all of them, has been a big part of the problem. In my own family, in the families of my children, all of these things perdure and persist. I wonder if the next thing to do is to take an ax to the dirty 'dishes' in this family and all the 'dirty secrets, resentments and hatreds." I have always been willing, at least as far as I was concerned, to be challenged, hopefully in a space made safe by love. I did this in family therapy, therapy and workshops with my oldest and youngest sons, group and individual therapy with all the children. I have always been willing to lay out my heart, my feelings, my needs, for the common good. Are any of them ready? Do they understand that if they do not do the work now, it will plague their children and their grandchildren? So, for a bit of dark humor, this is something that really happened, several years ago, in the Poconos:

Perduring amid axes and dirty dishes

Yesterday I took an ax
to my dirty dishes. I was in bed
and my daughter and her fifty-seven flavors
of adolescent renegades
had taken my car out for breakfast.
Night before two kids had shown up

at the front door near eleven, car stuck
in the snow, and they had slept somewhere
on sleeping bags or floor or blankets.

The sink was full again.
The toilet in the bathroom that we never use
was clogged again.

I took the plunger and shit flowed.
I coughed, vomited, remembered
the ax.

I have ALWAYS wanted to take an ax
to dirty dishes.
I left messages taped to my locked door,

took the ax to the kitchen sink,
demolished plates, bowls, glasses, mugs.
It was oddly satisfying.

One of the notes on the door said
I had taken care of the dirty dish problem
permanently. I had.

Axes are satisfactory permanences.
They perdure
as I perdure.

Returning home, my son and his Taiwanese friend
and my foster exchange child from Bretagne
were washing dishes... The ax had been hidden.

The house sparkled. I had been gone six hours
and planned never to return (I tend
to overdramatize, it's a genetic flaw).

Small flan or custard dishes had been placed
on a wicker table by the couch, with round
blue candles, a Delft vase with dying roses,
two wooden cats.

I perdure.
The roses aren't doing so well.