Sleeping Solo: One Woman's Journey into Life after Marriage by Audrey Faye Read Free Book Online Page B

stuck in a sandy beach somewhere—these
things are very real and in some ways, because they contrast with the
happiness, I feel them more deeply.   I try simply to let these things that are not happy arrive, to notice
and be gentle with how I feel.   I
will never make a good Buddhist, but honoring what rises up in my body matters.
    And then I invite happiness back.   If I’m feeling stuck, I go find a bossypants wind to help me find fluidity again.   If I’m drifting in ugly conversational
circles in my head, I go walk under the moon to my cove and let the waves lap
my toes and carry the nasties out into the great
primeval waters.  
    I let the light sneak back in.
    Because the thing is this—I can mourn and be happy .   I can be sad for the things that I have
lost, and that my children have lost.   I can have moments where the missing of these hits the back of my knees
or the front of my heart so hard that I just want to wail into the merciless
universe.
    But those moments come—and then they go.   They are honest, and they’re mine, and I
do my best to rest easy with them even when they’ve crash-landed into one of my
happy days.   Honoring grief matters,
especially when there are two little people watching and they’ve lost something
too.
    But there is no dude with a clipboard taking notes and
keeping track of whether I am sufficiently miserable.   The quality and importance and value of
my marriage doesn’t have to be defined by the scope of
my grief.   Moving on doesn’t mean it
didn’t matter.   It simply means that
I’m making a choice to visit grief’s house, rather than live there.
    I got walloped the other day, watching a sweet old couple
hold hands at the beach.   They were
sitting on a bench, watching the waves stirred up by the summer breezes and
sharing a drink of something pink and bubbly.   She reached up to adjust his ancient
straw hat and then took his hand in both of hers.
    I wanted, desperately, to be him—to know that someday,
when the lines are etched far deeper in my face, that someone will want to hold
my hand, and perhaps to fix my hat, too.
    And who knows, maybe that will happen.   But I won’t be sitting there with the
father of my children—and that’s worthy of grief.   My children will never see us sit there
together, and that stirs up sorrow for me too.
    And knowing all those things, I can still choose to be
happy.   Not every moment, not every
hour—but enough of them that the painting built from these brush strokes
will be one I like.
    Because, let’s face it.   It’s got to be a lot more fun to live in the painting called Woman Caught Dancing than the one named Woman Mired in Grief .
    The need to dance.   Let me start off by saying something that anyone who knows me will swear
to be truth.   I am not a
dancer.   Not even close—I’m one
of those kids who hung out on the walls at the school dances and tried
desperately to avoid certain humiliation.
    I feel music.   I
have rhythm, I just have no idea how to translate that
to my awkward hips and limbs.   I
have not shimmied anywhere in my life.
    But at some point in this journey, I promised myself I was
going to try new things, even ones that seemed like they might be two hours of
non-stop cringing.   I was also still
on a quest to find ways to be more present in my body.   And, if I’m telling all the truth, as a
girl who grew up with Flashdance and Dirty Dancing , I have long
harbored the secret hope that I am not destined to be this awkward forever.
    I don’t remember how I tripped across the website of one of
the local 5 Rhythms dance teachers.   I do remember it was when the muddy,
uncomfortable, seed-cracking days of early spring were giving way to early
summer glory, and my body was very, very restless.
    5 Rhythms isn’t a typical dance class, and I’m not going to
do it any justice by trying to describe it.   So I’ll just tell you what it felt like
to be there.  
    The first time I