So much of marriage is about seeing the other, your spouse, and allowing your true self to come through, i.e. being seen yourself.
My novel, “The House,” chronicles the experience of a woman, Anna Manning, during the last 3 months of her marriage wherein her husband, Edward, has withheld aspects of his true nature from. Throughout their nearly thirty-three years of marriage has been unfaithful Edward, involved in 3 longstanding affairs of which Anna knew.
These affairs, horrible as they were stemmed from vulnerabilities and emotional injuries rooted in Edward’s childhood, and of which he never discussed with Anna.
Much of his behavior during the last three months of their marriage, during which he is dying, indicates he has never discussed these matters of childhood with anyone.
Beyond acknowledging and making it clear that he sincerely regrets his behavior through the marriage, Edward, says little of what he feels led him to be unfaithful.
In so many ways he cannot. Not until faced with Anna’s request for a divorce and then learning that he has interminable cancer, about which he never tells Anna–she discovers on her own–does Edward come to grips with an inner pain he has carried most of his life.
The only child of a poor, single mother who used drugs to carry her through life, Edward never knew his father, though he suspected the man’s identity, knowledge of which further enraged Edward.
A successful international realtor, Edward compensated for his losses, both material and emotional by creating financial wealth and maintaining Anna, in a lifestyle which Edward’s mother never experienced.
Despite not having to work and having her primary needs well attended to, Anna’s marriage lacked much of what the relationship with her mother from childhood to adulthood never touched encompassed.
The only child of a minister and his wife, Elena, Anna, much as in her marriage, never lacked for the primary needs of human existence. Anna’s family was solidly middle class.
In an effort to protect and cope, Anna became adept at hiding her true and authentic self. The role of wife and mother came easy to her. With little effort she gave to her and Edward’s four children the emotional nurturance that she never received from her mother.
This Edward both envied and loved.
During the last few weeks of Edward’s life, both reach out to each other and deeper within themselves and grasp aspects of their essential identities in an effort to create and present the other what their marriage never held.
To see and be seen.
The possibilities of doing and experiencing both exhilarate and frighten us.
What is it about looking into the eyes of another and not only seeing to the core of their soul, but to ours as well terrifies us so?
What is it about meeting weaknesses and vulnerabilities in another that land us in the center of our deepest fears, hopes, dreams and regrets?
How much of a marriage stands grounded on this ability to view the other at their best and their worst and in our response of comforting, we then reveal aspects we despise and wish to alter and modify about ourselves.
So much of my writing stands rooted in self-inquiry. I want to know myself, the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful.
At times it is easier to behold that which need modification, that those fragments that stand pristine and perfect in their own right.
And yet the basis for the experience seeing into myself, much of which I yield through my writing stands rooted in the relationship with my husband.
He is both my Muse and the lense through I behold not simply the other of him, but those aspects of myself too distant and brooding, hidden and tangled for me to grasp but for engagement with other.
Without him I would have not set of eyes in which to behold myself.
And it is in seeing myself, viewing all these knotted aspects that I am pushed, propelled, prodded and pulled into a dance choreographed by my marriage, but arranged and designed according to the music me.