This is the first chapter of my book: “Unabated Joy: Holding Onto Happiness Through Abandonment and Divorce”. Stay tuned for others. This will be the only chapter posted in it’s entirety.
“This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.” —– Hamlet, Shakespeare
One of the most important things in living a life that makes you completely happy is being true to yourself. I don’t mean being somewhat honest or partially honest with yourself, but brutally honest, brutally true. Many times, we are untrue to ourselves so that we can fit in or appear to be “normal” in the eyes of others and by the standards of society. We lie to ourselves and say things like “well, things could be worse” or “at least I have part of the life I’ve always wanted”. The problem with worrying about fitting in or what it means to be normal is that we end up following paths which we were never meant to be on in the first place. We ask ourselves questions like “what will it take to fit in?” and when we realize the answer, we usually end up doing whatever it takes even if it is against what we really want to do. Even if it is really against who we genuinely are or want to be. This often that leads to behavior that is not in line with who we really are or what we really want out of life.
Living a life of being untrue to oneself reminds me of my father Ed and how his desire to have a life like others caused him to have a life of great suffering. He constantly lied to himself and followed a path other than where he wanted to go and the result is that he lead a completely unauthentic and dysfunctional life. Strangely enough, I would follow in his footsteps as an adult even though he left my life completely when I was very young.
Ed Monroe went to New Jersey one summer to visit his sister Connie (my namesake) after surviving a long and bitter divorce. He was from the west coast and he looked like it. He always wore jeans, perfectly starched plaid shirts and well-polished cowboy boots. In fact, even his jeans were perfectly starched. He always had a smile on his face and something funny to say. He was charming, and in many ways, very different from your average East-coast-type of guy.
When Ed met my mother, she was in the middle of a divorce from her first husband. She had 3 little girls to look after and she was worried about the future. My mother and Ed spent many months dating and seeing one another but not getting really romantically involved. It was the late 60’s and it wouldn’t be right for my devout-Catholic mother to run off with another man when her divorce wasn’t finalized with her first husband. But Ed’s charms eventually won my mother over. Ed was put in a situation where he was without a place to stay when his sister and his brother-in-law were going away to meet people with whom they had plans prior to Ed’s arrival. They didn’t trust Ed to be in their house alone because he had a drinking problem and they didn’t want to risk coming home to some disaster that would cost them money. My mother offered him a place to stay and as they say … the rest is history; it certainly is my history as I am the product of their relationship.
What ensued was a very tumultuous relationship which lasted about 13 years. Ed’s drinking problem only got worse. After one particularly horrible argument my mother decided to go for help. She figured there was something wrong with her having gone through 2 marriages which failed. She was in a very dark place in her life and she was questioning everything including how good of a mother she was to her children. In going for help, my mother learned about alcoholism which was a new term in those days and was still very taboo to speak about with anyone, and especially with a “professional”. She didn’t care about any stigma or what people thought, she just wanted to get help and stop feeling so horrible about her life. She was getting brutally honest with herself. It took a bit of time, but my mother got the help she needed, she held tight to her Catholicism, and slowly she became happier and healthier despite anything going on around her.
Much to my mother’s surprise, and quite a bit of time after she initially sought help, Ed followed. He got sober; he became a Catholic; they got re-married in the church; he became very involved in the community and in the church and was the “go-to” man for things like repairs and assistance with just about anything. All of this happened without my mother asking him to do it. Looking back, I just figured that my mother was sort of leading by example. She became more peaceful and his ranting and raving no longer seemed to bother her. I figured he must have noticed and got curious. Now I think it was my mother who finally got honest with herself and was beginning to be true to herself which changed things around for the better.
Ed found a movement in the Catholic church called Cursillo. It was founded in Spain in the 40s by a group of men training other men to be leaders in the church. He attended a retreat and came back even more joyful and happy than he had grown over the last 3 years of his sobriety. He encouraged my mother to take the female version of the retreat; in fact, he begged her to go and finally my mother agreed.
On the day that my mother was to return from the weekend retreat, my father went out for a night of drinking and ended up at a family member’s house stone cold drunk. He was weeping, and he was sorry, and he seemed sincere about wishing he’d never picked up that first drink. Imagine the heartache of my mother. She had gone for help and believed that Ed was following that same path out of a desire to do the right thing and lead a better life. She had stopped caring so much about what Ed was doing and became more concerned about her own happiness and the well-being of her family. She no longer walked around like an injured, timid woman constantly occupied about Ed’s next move. To her delight he seemed to notice this change in her and decided to follow. As a family we had three beautiful years watching my father become this person who we all could only assume he wanted to be. There seemed to be a groove of life we were all finally allowing ourselves to give into which was much more peaceful than before. I think this allowed my mother to continue searching for her own truth and she was beginning to get comfortable with this new-found life and what seemed to be a genuine happiness. She was grateful, and she worried less and less about any confrontation with Ed which might disrupt this new happiness which was growing and flourishing in her home and with her children.
A day or two after Ed fell off the wagon he was gone and over the course of the next 25 years I would speak to him only twice and I wouldn’t see him until I was 35 years old; I was 10 when he left and he managed to never provide any type of child support. But Ed’s disappearance from my life was a blessing in disguise. I had already seen some extremely dysfunctional behavior when he was married to my mother. In his drunken rages he would often hit my mother. He would rant and rave and my sisters and I would go running to a quiet part of the house waiting for it all to be over. Many people thought his leaving and complete lack of any monetary support was an outrage and perhaps it was. But the benefits of not having to deal with his dysfunctional behavior far outweighed any monetary support he could have given.
Over the years and as I grew older my mother told me everything she knew about my father. She remained as true to his story as she possibly could. Good, bad and indifferent information was given to me about Ed and it was clear to me that he was dealt a rough hand from the beginning of his life. His mother died when he was 18 months old and when he was 6 years old his father married a woman who didn’t want children. Ed was put into an orphanage where he was adopted by a terrible family who wanted only an extra hand on the farm and whose head of household abused him for years. Persuading his biological father to sign papers allowing him into the Navy a year or two early, he always claimed “the Navy was my mother”. Ed loved the Navy and felt at home there. It is where he learned how to starch press his clothing and take care of himself. His favorite station was in Guam where he wished he could live for the rest of his life. Except he was married to a woman who resented him being away for months at a time. Challenges with having children and then having them and not having my father around was a major challenge for Ed and his first family. He left the Navy to please his first wife and they ended up divorced anyway.
Years later when Ed met my mother and converted to Catholicism and became sober, was he really only trying to please her, attempting once again to lead a “normal” family life that he himself never had as a child? At some point did he realize that he didn’t want to be doing any of that? What would have happened if he had remained in the Navy? How would Ed’s life have been if he had been true to himself and in the way in which he wanted to live?
At some point shortly after he left, Ed ended up in a detox unit. No one knows the circumstances that got him there. He was allowed a phone call to my mother as part of his recovery. Apparently, he’d been given a large dose of therapy and one of the recommendations was to apologize to those people in his life who he had done wrong. My mother had continued on her path of truth. In the time Ed left, she ended up securing a spot in a nursing program and thanks to my father’s lack of support, was able to get funding for the tuition. Being a nurse was something she wanted to do from the time she was a little girl. My mother was advised to reject any form of support if Ed had some turn around and decided he wanted to give her money. When the call came and Ed apologized, he asked if they could start over again. But my mother explained her new-found fortunate circumstances and said she couldn’t be involved with him anymore. Once again, my father wasn’t being true to himself. He should have never made that call because he wasn’t sincere about it. He only wanted to be discharged from the detox center. When Ed heard of my mother’s situation he cursed her to high heaven. A gentlemen took the receiver from his hand and told my mother how sorry he was for disrupting her day. He truly thought that Ed was ready for this, but apparently he had a long way to go.
I contacted Ed in 2004 via telephone; on Father’s Day no less. It was the day that my soon to be ex-husband had moved out of the house to mark the beginning of our separation. My sister Colleen who stayed the first night with me for moral support asked if perhaps I should “sleep on it”; meaning that maybe I should reconnect with Ed at another, less stressful time. In that moment I had a very grand feeling that life was very short and that I couldn’t waste any time in being true to myself and the things I wanted out of life. My thought was that if he didn’t answer or if he didn’t sound like he cared or if he wasn’t sorry then at least I would have known the type of person he turned out to be. I’d spent my entire life wondering if he thought of me. Why he chose not to see me, communicate with me or help me financially. Particularly because of the way he had been treated as a child. Didn’t he want a better life for his children than the one he had? How would he know whether I was getting a better life or not if he didn’t even speak with me?
When my father picked up the phone, I said that I was looking for Ed Monroe. “This is he” Ed answered. I simply said hello and that it was his daughter Connie and I waited for a response. There was total silence on the end of the line. My sister sat at my kitchen counter with her beautiful blue eyes huge and wide open. I looked back at her and shrugged my shoulders. And then I heard a sniffle, and then sob. “You called me today?” Ed asked. “I don’t deserve this” he said further. I wished him a happy Father’s Day and asked how he was doing. That was the beginning of a 7-year relationship – mostly over the phone – that would teach me the importance of having good closure in life, not to mention the importance of being brutally honest with yourself.