Skip to main content

Set Free

DB's friend M was visiting us last evening. He has an adult son and is recently divorced. From decades of being married, having a home and responsibilities that go with being in a family, he is suddenly alone - free and with more options in life than he ever had before. While he is enjoying his new found freedom, he misses the comfort of familiar things. Being a musician and an artist, he is able to channel his time and energy into passions neglected for years in favor of  chores and responsibilities. We were talking about our experiences going through divorce and being single for years after that - the challenges of trying marriage for the second time. M was making jokes about his Facebook relationship status being muddied by his ex-wife wanting to be friends.

They are still in the early stages of emotional separation where it is hard to let go even if everything is sour, bitter and filled with anger. You want to hang on to rage and the object to vent it against. The door has been legally closed but not so in the mind - at least not as yet. As the evening wore on, we had a few drinks, chatted about things not related to relationship and marriage, M brightened up quite a bit. He was talking about the places he and his band performed, the experiences - he shared photographs he had taken and music he had played. Suddenly, he had gone from M - the lost half of a formerly whole entity to M the person that has recently started to get reacquainted with himself. Strange are the uses of freedom, even if it comes at a great cost.

Sometimes coming out of an old or bad marriage is like the spin cycle of a dryer stopping. The haze clears, the colors and fabrics stand out individually - and then there is dead silence. A person is able to take pause and understand their surroundings ; their relationship (if any) with it. M is in that state right now - in his head the world is still spinning furiously and he along with it. In time the inertia of motion will give way to tranquility.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...