Lose You To Love Me
Promises are easily made and rarely kept. Very seldom have I found any one promise to be unbreakable. Somehow, somepony always finds a way to break it like a porcelain vase. No promise is safe. Not even the promise made in marriage- to love and cherish one another as long as you both live, forsaking all others for the love of that other pony.
I unfortunately, was the recipient of that broken promise.
Marriage is a commitment to the other pony to love them forever, even when feelings go away and passion subsides. My husband kept that promise for twenty years, before he broke it this past year, walking out on me, our children, and finding somepony else two months later.
At first, I was devastated. I don’t know anypony who wouldn’t be. Spending twenty years building a life with somepony, only to have it crumble to dust as they experience a midlife crisis and find a young accountant half your age to run away with. It’s so easy to point the hoof at yourself, and believe that there’s something wrong with you, that you’re the reason they left. Every flaw you have suddenly becomes blatantly obvious, as does every fault in the other pony.
You suddenly make sense of all these little habits you never noticed before. The way they were taking more time on the appearance, the only slightly longer hours at work (because when they’re a workaholic you’re used to crazy hours), and the few extra bits missing from the joint bank account that we’re spent at a restaurant you don’t remember going to, but remember him telling you he went with friends. Since you don’t know his friends, you cannot corroborate that story. You noticed the signs, but dismissed them, because you were so sure of their love for you, of their investment in you, of the life you’ve made, you don’t think it could be possible. Yet there’s a part of you, a shadow self of yours, that hisses out the idea that there’s somepony else. You, long used to shutting out the shadow of yourself, dismiss this too. When the shadow self is proved right, it hisses, I told you so. You can’t believe in anypony. It always ends in ashes.
In light of my husband’s indiscretions, I feel as if I am a completely different pony. The me I used to be got poured out of my body. It was like cracking the brittle eggshell of my composure and letting it drop out onto the ground. I was hollow inside, not quite sure of who I was without him, and only being filled with rage at myself and depression at my situation. Of course I tried to keep a stiff upper lip for my children, though they are grown. I didn’t want them to see how much this had destroyed me and turned me into somepony I don’t recognize. Children need a strong parent, and when your partner leaves you, you have no choice but to be them.
Of course they know you’re upset. Children aren’t blind to the feelings of their parents. But the fact that they didn’t see just how devastated I was was good. I didn’t want to scare them, not like I was scaring myself. I didn’t sleep for two days after Night Light left me. The bed was so cold and empty that I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. But after that I slept for eighteen hours, got up to eat, use the bathroom, and cry, before going back to sleep. My life at that point seemed a progression of meals and tears. I ate automatically and without purpose or intent. I cried so much it felt like my face was stiff as a board. Days in that time seemed to go on forever, and the nights seemed to be incredibly short. The darkness of night was a comforting blanket I could wrap myself in, knowing I would be undisturbed in my time of grieving. I could sleep and sleep or I could stay up as long as I wanted to write.
When I look at the pages written from that time in my life, I am filled with a mix of sorrow and pity. It is like being torn between two lovers- I am filled with the Sorrow I felt at that time because I can still feel it inside me, where it resides in a part of me that will likely never fade. Yet, now, I look at them with the pity of a mare who grew from that point, because the mare in those pages did not realize how strong she was, nor did she know how much she would grow from the experience.
Rain is what grows flowers, and similarly, pain is what grows ponies. We learn more about ourselves and what we’re truly made of in times of hardship. My concerns when Night Light first left me were mainly centered around my children. I channeled my sorrow and my yet-unrealized anger into making sure they were alright. It worked- for the whole three days they stayed with me. But when they left I was forced to deal with myself and my feelings alone. I wasn’t ready for that, but it happened anyways.
The martyr in me was throwing a pity party that could have rivaled any party thrown by my daughter’s friend Pinkie Pie. She wanted to live it up forever. But her pity party was abruptly stopped by a look in the mirror.
I was passing by my bedroom vanity one day, on the way to the bathroom, when I happened to catch a glance of myself that made me stop short. My eyes were red, puffy, and bagged. My mane was a scraggly mess. I looked thirty years older than my true age. I didn’t recognize myself, and a thought cropped up in my brain.
Who are you?
I wanted to shove that question out of my head the second it came. If I let that question in, it would force me to look into the mirror in my mind, with the image saying things I didn’t want to hear. It would be so much easier for me to play the grieving victim than to take some responsibility for my hoof in this mess. The fact that I was too cowardly to call him out on what I’d seen, Because I was too afraid of asking a question I might not have liked the answer to. I didn’t want to look at myself. I didn’t want to see some very hard truths that I had been avoiding for so long. But now I had no choice. I didn’t know that in doing so, I would grow from all of this. The pain would still be there, but it always would in some fashion. I did not see how I might change for the better from recognizing it.
I spent a long time looking in that mental mirror about myself. I had a lot of emotional baggage that I needed to unpack. As with any unpacking, I had to decide what I would keep and what I would leave behind. I kept the parts of myself I liked. I kept the mother in me, the writer, the adventurer, the friend, and the naturally loving pony I was. I did away with my martyr self, and my self-blame and doubt. I let go of the world I thought I knew, and I embraced what my life was then. I had to accept the fact that my life as it was would never come back to me like I had dreamed of in the early stages. I also had to realize that my vision of what a perfect marriage looked like would have to change alongside it.
Night Light and I met at the age of seventeen. At that young age, love tends to be more of a fantasy about two ponies who perfectly compliment one another and live happily ever after. At the end of childhood and the cusp of adulthood, love still looks like a fairytale in our vision. He proposed to me not long after that. We dove into love blindly, with no regard for what trials we might face in the future. We were so focused on one another that we became too entwined, as though we were one pony instead of two. That was dangerous territory. We were so dependent on one another for every breath we took that we forgot who we were separately. We had aspects of ourselves that we kept, but our individual thoughts and emotions had blended seamlessly into one pony rather than two. We didn’t realize, or perhaps simply forgot that marriage was about being yourself, only with somepony else. By that point, there was no self to share. And we slowly began to untangle ourselves from one another to have our own feelings again. He, apparently, had recovered his feelings and found a self I didn’t know existed. I only had the self I had with him.
Falling in love demands that we lose a piece of ourself to the other pony, but what we in our young age failed to recognize was that giving your entire self to another in that kind of way wasn’t healthy. At seventeen, we didn’t know love couldn’t last forever. We still believed in that idea of a fairytale ending. We thought we would be seventeen forever, and we never considered how we both may grow and change, and that our love might do the same alongside us.
The part of me that believed in that fairytale didn’t want to accept that my husband wasn’t who I’d fallen in love with anymore. Even worse, that part of me couldn’t get angry with him or blame him for anything for a long while. It took me so long to realize that although I had a hoof in it for not wanting to see things as they were, that he made his own choices, and the blame didn’t fall squarely on my shoulders. I thought that I deserved all of what had happened to me, because I didn’t use my voice. It took me so long to realize that it wasn’t my fault, and that I didn’t deserve that. Nopony does. It took me even longer to be able to be angry with him about what happened. After twenty years of repressing my hurt or my anger or my upset, I had to gradually take the cap off of my emotions in order to express them. To be able to say that I was angry with him and how he hurt me was an entirely new sensation of power. Finally, I was able to say what I truly thought and felt. Never in my life had I felt so powerful, or so free.
I fell for the promise of the world that he sold me at seventeen. I let him steal my voice, and my joy. I let him get away with things I shouldn’t have, and I let him take who I was and turn it into somepony I didn’t even recognize. I had never acknowledged those faults in him, nor allowed myself to admit that he had any. For the past twenty some years, I’ve always maintained the façade that our marriage was perfect, when really it was showing widening cracks in it’s foundation. No more. It was time to be honest with myself, and face the truth, even though it hurt.
With my admissions now out in the open, I could begin to heal.
Healing is not linear, nor is grief. I was grieving. I grieved the loss of the husband I had known, the image of him I’d held, the fact that my children had suffered, and the fact that I’d been so badly cheated at that point in life. I still grieve about him leaving now, though far less often. I did not know then that my healing would start and stop, then restart, then pause, then continue, then stop again. It fluctuated, had it’s ups and downs as with anything. I had to make peace with myself, and that is something I still work at to this day. I had to find who I was, and learn to love myself with all my flaws and faults, and learn from my mistakes. I had to help my children deal with their grief, and learn to live without their father all while dealing with my own loss. But because of all of that, I’m able to say I love myself and who I am now. I did not like the lessons I learned in that time, but I needed to learn them.
As a writer, I know that the end of one adventure often signals the beginning of another. The end of one chapter often transitions into a new one. It took me a long while to be able to say that I have comfortably closed Night Light’s chapter in my life, but I was able to do it. Now that I have, a whole new world of opportunity awaits me. I get to find who I am. I’ve found the basics again, but now I get to add more to it. It’s a blank page in the book of my life to write however I choose. When I reread the last chapter of my life now, I smile. I wouldn’t be who I am now without it. And when I think of Night Light now, I tell myself one thing over and over.
I needed to lose you to love me.