Resistance
On United flight 511, delayed three times over, I surrender. Stuck inside a steel bullet, idling on a tarmac, I am a mix of acceptance and the breezy promise of south-facing wings. I am headed to visit my best friend for a weekend of yoga and slow-drip expresso. Nothing about the trip has gone according to plan—delay, re-route, more delay—yet, as I gaze out the airplane window, I feel the spacious, empty calm after meditation: and so it is. My brow and grip are soft. I know that nothing I think or say or do will affect air traffic control’s decision to stay grounded amidst such high winds, so I breathe.
The static click of the captain sounds. “Another fifteen minutes,” he announces, which sets off a flurry of exasperation. The woman next to me two-thumb texts the person she’s leaving—or going toward. STILL WAITING.
Time sinks like pennies in a pool. I will only have 17 minutes to make my connection in Washington, but I am placid as a summer lake. What is it about the corseted safety of this moment that fills my veins with cool, fresh water?
*
Ten hours before the flight, I am the opposite of a placid, summer lake. It is 5:03am and I wake like a jack-in-the-box. A text from the babysitter dings. She is sick. Can’t make it. I have a noon flight and no child care. My mind is a bobbin, weaving and darting with possibilities: call X, offer Y; call Y, offer X. The algorithms swirl like flocks of swallows. It is 5:23am. I would call my father, but he is away. My old neighbor? It is 5:42am. Care.com? It is 5:43,5:44,5:45,5:46,5:47. I know I cannot do anything at this hour, yet my mind clamors with the hungry desperation of problem solving. At 5:53, I loosen the elastic of my husband’s shorts and initiate sex.
This is not the kind of woman or wife I want to be: offering sex to escape my anxiety, to smooth my departure, to achieve some motive. In fact, I have been working on not doing this—on not initiating sex unless I desire it, on listening to my inner woman’s readiness, on treating sex as sacred and spiritual instead of a marital duty or placation.
All week, I have “been too busy” to do the deep work of connecting to my inner woman and I am about to feel the consequence. She knows she’s been abandoned the minute I touch the V of my husband’s abdomen; I can feel her telling me in the yellow light blinking behind my eyelids. She desires grounded-ness and connection, but in my ravenous relief-seeking, I desire escape and dissociation. This is a childhood strategy I have outgrown, but its pull is strong and I have the muscle memory of a race horse.
I ignore my inner woman’s caution.
Within two minutes of being body-to-body, I am filled with impatience and rage: I don’t have time for this, I say over and over to myself. And yet, I’ve initiated it. I feel the familiar clutch of control and the urge to run: get.me.out.of.here. My inner woman has fled from me.
Suddenly, I am outside of my body. I am a spider in the corner—tangled in a web and watching.
My husband can tell that not all of me is there. He is trying to call me back, to hurry for my sake. This breaks my heart: that he knows I am somewhere else, that I have regressed, that I am figuring something out. “I just want you to enjoy sex,” he has said many times, his dejectedness palpable enough to slice like a cucumber.
Between the sheets, as my husband ripples above me, my muscles are knotted rope. My breath is a kite caught in a tree, pushing and pulling. I still need a babysitter. I could ask Mary to cover nap, Robyn to cover snack time, and my mother-in-law to cover dinner. The more my husband kisses my neck, the more I feel like a jet-fueled missile. The listing begins. I need to: FIND A SITTER, get to the 9am meeting, meditate, dress, get the baby dressed, give the baby a banana she won’t eat, elastic the feather in my hair, show my husband how to work the car seat, pack lunches, prepare dinner, find head phones, charge the iPad, pack vitamins, load suitcase in car. I clench my fists to come back into my body.
To the spider in the corner, this looks consensual and quiet, but inside, I think I might explode. FUCKING FINISH, I want to yell, but I don’t. I seethe silently. My anger, of course, is displaced; I am not angry at my husband, but at myself for violating the contact with my inner woman: I have not protected her. I have not listened to her. As I clench my teeth, I remember something my best friend told me the other day: “There’s always a moment of surrender during sex—that moment I realize I’ve been resisting and I just accept what is and let go.”
Even this, I resist.
*
On the airplane, the silver wings shudder as the engines rev. Ground water skitters across the concrete. I will miss my connection, and yet, I am the texture of loose sheets. The captain comes over the loudspeaker. “We’ve been cleared for take off,” he says. People applaud. Outside the duties of mother and wife, I feel free and floating and not in charge.
The plane lurches forward. I look out my window and something catches my gaze in the green island between runways. I squint. A set of yellow eyes squints back at me. An owl? An owl. There—at peace amidst the matrix of locomotion—sits a large, white owl.
Later, I will read that snowy owls migrate through the Boston airport because the turf looks like tundra, but in this moment, I know only know the white-feathered creature as an ushering back. A reconciliation. With my ability to surrender, my woman has returned.
“Be prepared for turbulence,” the captain warns about the inevitable response of force meeting resistance. While I cannot name it in this moment, I feel the gravity of today’s caution: abandoning my inner woman, forcing her out, creates my internal resistance. And resistance is the opposite of surrender.
In surrender, I am present. In presence, I am embodied. In my body—when I listen to the still, small voice of my woman, of God, of my intuition—I am united and whole.
The horizon blurs as the plane rises over a smattering of blue, placid lakes. I close my eyes and rest my head back, sinking into the uncontrollable power beneath me. I breathe in a way that makes my bones feel light, hollow. I am not a spider. I am here.
***** Post script: I warred about whether to upload this post for a week. I am deeply afraid of hurting my husband’s feelings in the process of writing about sex. While he is supportive of this blog—has only ask that he not be named—I sit with the question of whether it is right to post such intimate details of our sex life, even anonymously. Such quandaries confound and side bar me.
If he chooses to read this, will my husband be angry that I posted before I could articulate my experience to him? In asking myself this question, I have learned that my process works in the reverse: because words feel safer, less risky, they help me to understand my experience—to clarify the unconscious and habitual responses I have to intimacy—before I speak it. In writing, I am unveiling truths about myself, my reactions, and the patterns that no longer serve me. I am giving voice to my unconscious, to my woman. The writing often precedes the talking.
But there is also a deeper truth to why I didn’t want to post this: it is a look at the messiness—at my messiness. It is the first time I have written about what I consider a “regression” in my awakening. It is no wonder I spent a week agonizing about whether to post; it is easier to worry about my husband’s response than to worry that the people reading this might reject me. Such concern is as old as I am. So much of my adolescence, my drinking and bulimia, was centered on hiding—on shame. If people knew the things I had done, who I really was, I told myself, they would not love me. And if people did not love me, I would be abandoned.
Last week, one of my mentors told me that we create our fears. What irony that this post is about the consequences of my behavior when I abandon myself.
If this post could talk, it would say, “Here I am—the real me. The flawed, imperfect, behind-the-scenes me.” This exposure scares me, but the desire to be known—to be seen and understood and really, really known speaks louder than this fear.
And so, after much prayer and contemplation, I am posting. This, I realize, is my stage of healing.
For today, the posting is the work. *****
