The Impasse
Civilian Wife, Veteran Husband
Three months pregnant, I ask my husband
for a sit-down conversation about boundaries—
new ways of communicating. He refuses three times.
I can no longer speak the tongue of war
and family secrets: don’t ask, don’t tell.
Once you see a dynamic, you cannot unsee it.
In a journal, I pen patterns and dysfunctional cycles,
desperate to change them for our children,
but silence is my husband’s language—has been ours.
When I accept his avoidance as inability, finally,
I clear out my office for sanctuary,
assemble a futon, bed, rocking chair to nurse our baby.
I no longer assume our decade-long marriage—
once familiar and now foreign-feeling—
is indestructible, viable without growth.
Languageless in the same homeland,
we soldier on without translation.
I cannot bear armistice or the death of self.
Veteran Husband, Civilian Wife
My pregnant wife asks to brief me
on new family regulations and “boundaries.”
I am a hostage. I refuse three times.
Newly empowered, she no longer follows
the Army code of conduct: don’t ask, don’t tell.
Her voice is demanding as a general’s.
She tracks my accusations, missteps, “disrespects”
in a notebook. I combat her with silence.
Neither of us lowers a flag, but I stake borders.
When she accepts that words won’t work,
she clears out her office for sanctuary:
futon, bed, rocking chair to nurse our baby.
In the once familiar, now foreign,
America of our decade-long marriage
we are at an impasse. No operating procedures.
Hostile on the same battlefield,
we soldier on: left, right, left right left.
Bunkered down, I pray for surrender—or armistice.
NOTE: These poems were written from two different states of consciousness; one is mine, and thus real, and one is my husband’s, and thus, imagined. Taking on his point of view is based on my observations of how we interacted in the first half of my pregnancy. However, it’s important to note that I am only guessing at his experience. This is not his real voice. It is fictionalized.
The fact that there were differences in how we saw the same events is quite true, however.
* * *
During my third pregnancy—eleven years into marriage—my tolerance for marital communication dysfunction changed. It was as if I could not bear both the chronic pain of avoidance and the physical creation of a child at the same time. It was as though the tiny embryo inside me said, you cannot grow a life and the death of self.
The death of self.
I know it sounds extreme. It is extreme, in the way that fear and awakening first make me see in black and white. Eventually situations fall into shades of gray, but in the beginning—especially when heightened emotions are involved—there is a starkness and extremity to the new seeing: this or that. Wrong or right. Here or there.
And the word death is ironic, of course, because it was so opposite to what was happening inside me: concurrent to growing our baby’s life, there was also an ending—the end of denial, of looking away, of pretending.
Now, when I read the poems, I balk a little—at the starkness, the finality, the rigidity—but they also bring me compassion. They were incredibly true to how I felt at the time and what I experienced: my third pregnancy signaled a one-way gate in my consciousness.
A before and an after.
*
Something happened to trigger my awakening.
The situation was not nearly as extreme as my response to it: when I was three months pregnant, my husband and I had an argument before I left on vacation. He undermined me in front of our kids by asserting a unilateral decision that implied he did not trust me.
In response, I did what I do when suppressing or unable to access my truth: I just shut down. I was a toy push puppet, who, suddenly pushed from the bottom, crumbles into beads. I had no stance, just a limp spine and cockeyed view. All the things I wanted to say, my deepest truths, just went blank inside of me. They quite literally disappeared. I lost my voice. I deferred. I pretended. I rolled over with so much passive aggressiveness that I hated myself even in the moment.
My four-year-old daughter watched the whole thing from the TV room. When I caught a glimpse of her, wide-eyed and staring, something inside of me cracked. I knew could not do it anymore: model this stance of unworthiness, of inauthentic deference, of silence.
My daughter witnessing my behavior is what made me find a bottom line. Not my husband’s words or actions; that marital dynamic is more between us. It was that third set of eyes. The small woman learning how to respond to accusations. The little girl asking herself, is this how I should do it?
I did not, in any part of my being, want to teach my children that avoidance, or silence, or indirect aggression, is a healthy way of living. That one should turn anger inward.
And yet, after the encounter, I was filled with so much rage—outwardly at him, but inwardly and more truly, at myself—that I thought I would never feel peace again.
*
Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk, tells a story about anger called, “The Empty Boat.” It goes like this:
A monk decides to meditate alone. Away from his monastery, he takes a boat and goes to the middle of the lake, closes his eyes and begins to meditate. After a few hours of unperturbed silence, he suddenly feels the blow of another boat hitting his. With his eyes still closed, he feels his anger rising and, when he opens his eyes, he is ready to shout at the boatman who dared to disturb his meditation. But when he opens his eyes, saw that it was an empty boat, not tied up, floating in the middle of the lake…
At that moment, the monk achieves self-realization and understands that anger is within him; it simply needs to hit an external object to provoke it.
After that, whenever he meets someone who irritates or provokes his anger, he remembers: “The other person is just an empty boat. Anger is inside me.”
*
The anger was inside me.
It was a lifetime of of staying silent when I have something to say bubbling to the surface. Like a volcano, keeping the secret of my dad’s homosexuality, witnessing my mother stay in a marriage that did not meet her intimacy needs, never discussing these things in adolescence or young adulthood, just erupted inside of me.
I was filled with blame—about what my husband had done, what he had said and not said, how he had acted. But, really, I was searingly angry at myself, for knowing this was a pattern of mine, and not being able to break it.
I wanted to speak my truth but didn’t want to rock the boat.
I can see now that the anger was a messenger—a yellow blinking light signaling unmet needs and the more vulnerable experience of sadness and hurt—but all I knew then was that my daily experience was one of intense, unadulterated anger. While the pregnancy hormones certainly fueled the intensity of my feelings, they did not create them. They merely unveiled what was already there: the outmoded patterns and how they did not serve me anymore. The fact that I could not bear the internal consequences or the perceived harm to my children.
In essence, I was grieving the self who existed in the marital dynamic as it had been, who was complicit in the codes of conduct under which my husband and I had operated for so many years—the “don’t ask, don’t tell” rules. Admittedly, I had agreed to these rules when my husband and I married when I was 22. It was a way of life for me then, before I began to awaken to a new philosophy, a new way of being: the truth will set you free.
The encounter with my husband—during which I did not live this out, but instead kept quiet and filled with rage—was a moment of further awakening, of seeing how difficult it is to walk the walk and just not talk the talk. When I wrote the twin poems above, I was caught between the stages of bargaining ("if only my husband would listen to me” ) and anger (“Damn it, you are not cooperating”). Situating this as grief helps me to find acceptance that this was a necessary part in my own evolution.
That one cannot change, or grow, without with pain of practicing.
*
In her memoir The Dance of the Dissonant Daughter, Sue Monk Kidd chronicles what she calls her feminist spiritual awakening. She talks about how painful it was to “birth herself” as a new woman—about how much had to change with her new definition and understanding of herself. “There had been so many things I hadn’t allowed myself to see, because if I fully woke to the truth, then what would I do?,” she writes in the first chapter. “How would I be able to reconcile myself to it? The truth may set you free, but first it will shatter the safe, sweet way you live.”
It will shatter the safe, sweet way you live.
I cried when I read this line because it carried the gravity of truth—the sense of shattering before rebuilding. I had been on a journey to find my voice for many years before my third pregnancy, and thus my response to my husband was a familiar scene. But nothing has “internally jolted,” me, as Sue Monk Kidd writes, as much as this period of time.
For weeks after the encounter my daughter witnessed, I wrote pages and pages of inventory about what my husband was doing wrong. I organized the behaviors into categories: what was unjust, immoral, harmful. I tracked the patterns. I defined the boundaries I needed to put into place to feel more comfortable within our marriage. It was all one-sided, filled with the energy of accusation.
I could not look away. I became obsessed. The anger became the vehicle to sustain the intensity of looking at things I had avoided for seventeen years. It became a being in my life—an entity that not only followed me, but controlled the camera of what I saw at the time.
It became the narrator of my life.
*
I know that my anger, this overwhelming character in my life, came out intensely, insistently, and doggedly.
After I finished writing my inventory, last September, I asked my husband to have a conversation about what had happened, about some of what I had been processing. He said no.
I asked again.
He said no.
So I asked again.
And again he said no.
I was convinced that “if we could just have a conversation about what was not working” in our marriage, then we would be okay. But just as persistently as I insisted, he refused.
So, I wrote him a letter.
When he shook his head “no” to reading letter, I felt so rejected that I decided to clean out my office to create a space for myself to recharge, reset, and heal. Over the fall, I did this: retreated to a sanctuary to feel my feelings. I burning things in ritual. Threw sticks in the woods. Made phone calls stating my case like a litigator. I worked the anger through my body, very slowly.
While my anger finally subsided, depression kicked in. I felt sad and alone, with a baby who was then the size of melon growing inside me. I cried on the front steps every day, had low energy and high cortisol, had trouble mustering energy to play with my kids. I stopped sleeping.
I began to understand that the anger was covering up the deep sorrow and hurt of being in such different places.
Finally, I asked my husband for help—for more access to communication. When he was not able to do that, and because I was sleeping so poorly, we agreed that I should sleep in the bed upstairs.
Partly, it was a reaction to not getting my way, but more so it was a necessary nervous system reset: I was in overdrive. I knew that part of me was out of control but also knew that this stage had the magnetic force of necessity.
*
It took months of sleeping upstairs, and therapy and recovery work, to see my part and to accept that my husband was not willing, or able, to talk – that his own fear around the conversation was his way of protecting himself. That I am a person of words and, as a someone said around that time, he is a person of “not-words.”
At the time, I kept picturing us on either side of the bridge. I kept yelling for him to come to the other side, where it was better. “Come on,” I’d yell across the wooden bridge in this imagined scene. “It’s so much more comfortable over here.”
He would stand where we had once stood together, shoulders squared, and shake his head. Silently, he would refuse, indicating in his body language that he was “just fine, thank you.”
We were at an impasse.
*
We had been here before. When I got sober seven years ago, I crossed over a bridge, too, without him. Until that point, we had founded our relationship on being in-sync, no matter what the personal cost. We prioritized our togetherness above ourselves.
The military has a term for this kind of unquestioning devotion: unit cohesion. In the 1980’s, the Chief of Staff defined this as "the bonding together of soldiers in such a way as to sustain their will and commitment to each other, the unit, and mission accomplishment, despite combat or mission stress.”
As soldiers in the same unit, we regulated each other in moments of stress. While my husband had the true military experience of this term from his time in the Army, I had a family history of it. We had both been groomed to stay intact no matter what the consequences.
In the years after I got sober, we found ways to skirt what was brewing inside me: the need to be more emotionally honest, to ask, and to tell. We made several attempts at repair, but did not see them through to true reconcilation. And when we had children—those extra sets of eyes—it upped the stakes.
And yet, the issues in our communication dynamic stayed dormant for many years, raising their head occasionally but always disappearing again.
It was the argument before vacation last summer—or more accurately, my hostility and my husband’s refusals to communicate about it afterward, which, in psychology terms are known as states of contempt and stonewalling—that flipped a switch within me.
*
To understand and process the depth of my experience, I wrote a 40-page essay about what had transpired over the first six months of my pregnancy. It included the scenes and the story, the dialogue and the details and the meaning I’d made of it all, including the realization that there was deep wounding caused by the dynamic of silence and avoidance. Likely on both sides of the bridge.
But when I went to post the essay to this blog as an act of *important, true, valuable* self-expression, I paused. Like the dilemma of all memoirists, I began debating the ethics of posting something about my experience with someone else—or, more specifically, posting something my husband has not read at a time when he is not in a place to read it first. That asking him to engage in discussing what had transpired, again, was a set up for both of us.
Something inside of me said, caution:
This story is not over.
You do not have the perspective yet.
The angry, unheard woman is still controlling too much of the camera.
You need a voice, but you do not need to air the dirty laundry to create a story so epic that there is a villain and a hero.
That perhaps the work is to sit with discomfort of un-resolve while also fostering my need to be seen, heard, understood.
That the timing, like the conversations I’ve been insisting upon, is simply not now.
*
As a result of this internal debate, I am posting this blog—a placeholder of sorts—as a way to honor the depth of this emotional experience for me, and also honor that the healing work has not happened between me and my husband—yet, or perhaps, ever. While nurturing my need for self-expression, I also acknowledge the fierce devotion and protection I feel for my family.
I told my husband about the original essay and my decision not to post it. I also told him that if and when he is ready, he has full access to it. But that in the meantime, I was going to post this as an abstraction. Just that basic communication took the air out of it being a “secret.”
I know it is frustrating, as a reader, not to understand the specifics of the situation. In writing terms, this is called “telling” and not “showing” – or relying on exposition instead of scene. The result is often the feeling of being lectured to in platitudes, or “life lessons” without proof—of reading something that feels glossy or watered down. Of distracting curiosity. Projection. Assumption. I’ve had this experience. In fact, right now, I am reading the book, aptly titled Life is Messy, that does just this; the author refers to his “betrayal” and resulting three years of depression, but does not reveal what actually HAPPENED. At times it’s maddening, and I consider putting the book down. And then, he writes something so profound, I ask myself the questions:
Does it matter? What in me needs to know the details of his experience to glean his wisdom?
For me, this blog post—and I am noting that I’ve titled it “abridged,” like the bridge my husband and I have not yet crossed—is a proxy. It is a stitch where there needs to be a suture, a patch in the tapestry of my life story that needs to, eventually, be sewed in. It is a sketch. An outline. A post-it note.
It says to me, “Return here. But in the meantime, your experience has been marked.”
It says,
This exists.
*
As I write this, I am 38.5 weeks pregnant. Nothing has been “resolved” with my husband in the way I would like it to be, though our daily experience is one of kind co-existence and family functioning. I have regained emotional balance and my husband has softened. But, nothing interpersonal has been discussed, or amended.
I am still sleeping upstairs. I put a mural over the bed. It’s an image of a forest, of tall trees growing toward the sky. In the righthand corner is the sun streaming through—a tent of light and hope. It makes me feel relaxed—the opposite of how I felt when I wrote the twin poems. The mural reminds me that I don’t have to understand, or fix, or manipulate to get someone to save me. That hope does not lie in my husband apologizing, or owning his part, or “coming around.”
That I am not capital-R “Right” and the righteousness of my anger is a block to the reconciliation process.
That staying present to my own part in the dynamic is the hope. Seeing that my behaviors in our dance are just as problematic when I put them under the microscope. That the anger is my responsibility.
And—that in a time of needing deep witnessing, I can turn to an inner circle of people who are able to provide that. Even more so, I will listen to myself, my own words. I will take them seriously and listen to the self that is hurting. I can see my doggedness now as a desperation—as the very limiting belief that I am not able to take care of myself.
As I learn to tolerate my own discomfort without seeking rescue or relying on blaming and insistent behaviors, I am working to become more tolerant of my husband, who also has a side and a story and his own journey. I am seeing that perhaps we are both saddened by being on different sides of the bridge, but express it differently.
As my therapist counsels, I am working to transform my anger into self-love to sustain my willingness to honor my needs, yet to move forward with the compassion that everyone is fighting their own battles. In her office, hangs a painting of a woman holding a heart. It says, “I will hold myself sacred.”
Posting this abridged blog is a way to hold myself, and the integrity of my marriage sacred, too.
But in deepest truth to self, I cannot ignore what I now know. I can proceed more gently, more humbly, but I cannot look away.
*
To ritualize this decision, I printed the original 40-page essay and bound it with a gold thread. As I wove the gold ribbon through the binding holes, I contemplated the significance that it is 40 pages in length. Forty. From a biblical perspective: a period of testing, trial, tribulation. A desert. A wilderness. A Dark Night of the Soul.
Forty weeks of gestation.
Of essential death. And of birth.
Stitched and bound, but not sutured, I placed the essay inside a manilla folder to bookend it, for now.
Then, in the pre-dawn shadow of morning just days before I give birth to our son, I placed it in a drawer below an altar I have dedicated to my marriage. On the altar is a small, live tree to be watered, a broken bowl to be fixed, and a photograph of me and my husband from our wedding. In it, he is standing directly behind me. I am looking up at him. Our faces touch. We are standing in the middle of a wooden bridge.
I knelt in front of the picture. I took a drop of holy oil and touched the through line of our hearts in the still frame and then dabbed the oil on my own beating heart, just above the baby who is now fully grown.
I opened to the heart center of the essay: page 20. I ran my fingers over the words. My eyes caught two lines “I loved—and love—him sacramentally…” and “I was angry, but I understood. The death of self.”
The essential question rose: how are these two truths connected?
Now, going forward, I will need to live out the connective tissue, the answer, the way forward. But putting the essay away, for now, reminds me that the anger, the pain point, is within me.
That there is no birth without pain.
That my pain is proportionate to the idea that I can control the people around me.
That pain is a great spiritual teacher.
That the pain of this impasse might just be the space I have needed to heal my own attraction to avoidance.
That perhaps what I was seeing before as a death of self might actually be a birth of self.
*
On my knees still, with morning rising just outside my window, I touched the gold binding on the essay.
I closed my eyes and said a prayer—asked that the Divine Editor help shape the rest of the story. Help guide and strengthen my voice. Help me trust that, in the darkness of that drawer, and in the active waiting, there is discerned power that does not require insistence, or forcing someone across the bridge when they are not ready.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.
And then, I shut the drawer.
