Redefining Happily Ever After

Hello, out there to all you folks with dreams of love and family and happily ever after. This blog is dedicated to you and to the goal of taking the transformational, if not radical, step of redefining happily ever after.

I just saw Wicked for the 5th time. I didn't think I related to either of those iconic characters. Certainly not Glinda. My brand of denial was never so bold and self-promoting. But also, not Elphaba. First off...not green. Also, I can neither belt nor riff and definitely can't do both at the same time! As I sat in the theater this fifth time, a lyric hit me between the eyes.

Something has changed within me
Something is not the same
I'm through with playing by
The rules of someone else's game
Too late for second-guessing
Too late to go back to sleep
It's time to trust my instincts
Close my eyes, and leap

Damn, if that isn't just what happened to me. After 32 years of believing that my superpower was my commitment to my marriage and my willingness to improve myself to make it work...a shift occurred, and suddenly, the conventions I'd vowed to die on blew up. As my therapist put it:

“You were like, ‘I’ve had enough. I’m not going to die prone. Maybe I’ll die running away from this, but I won’t die prone.’ I think you were really fed up with being brutalized, but then it became more brutal because the system didn’t want you to give up your role.”

In 2015, I closed my eyes and leapt. And it got worse. Much worse. The fighting and the direct abuses stopped because I wasn't there anymore. But oh my, the smear campaign was bumped up into overdrive, and one by one, I began losing everyone (nearly everyone) I loved and cared about. No longer weakened by the direct brutality of living with this guy, I was now being sapped by his success in subtly but effectively, discrediting and vilifying me to our closest friends, family, and most importantly, our children. Knowing this was a likely outcome of finally leaving him was a good bit of why I stayed so long.

Too long I've been afraid of
Losing love, I guess I've lost
Well, if that's love
It comes at much too high a cost

He was, and is, a popular and charismatic guy, and he's a winner. Everybody loves a winner. What he so masterfully concealed from all who were in our lives is that the reason he is such a winner is because he'd sooner kill you off than lose. I physically survived all those years because I let him win and let him erode my self-esteem to the near destruction of all I knew myself to be. He all but killed me off, psychologically and emotionally...but there was a pilot light still flickering inside that ignited my exit.

Still, I lost them all save a handful. In trying to play fair, I'd protected him and, in doing so, cooperated in my own annihilation. Oh boy, it's been hard.

I tried withering away, but I'd come too far and lost too much to go down completely. So I wrote. I pulled out everything I'd written over the three-plus decades with the guy, and I read it, and I wrote. While not as dramatic as Elphaba's ascension on that broom, it culminated in the book Escaping the House of Mirrors: Surviving Marriage to a Narcissist. For me, it was a triumph. It helped me claim myself and my truth, and it was my first real step beyond the story that had threatened to eat me whole. It was my story, but it's old now and didn’t end with the publication of that book.

What does happily ever after look like? I know now that there are so many more ways to get there than I ever let myself consider before. So, I vote to step out of the dusty old box that we hoped would keep us safe and grab a broom!