Every year in early January, my first husband and his second wife send out a summing-up of the year just ended, month by event-packed month, focusing primarily on the myriad achievements of their talented offspring, who have always been precocious. At the tender age of two, their eldest, when being tucked in for bed, was asked by my first husband, “Are you comfortable, sweetheart?” To which said child responded, “I make a good living.” For the past several years, the annual letter has ended with a phrase that balances emotions borne out of the concluding year’s experiences with a gathering of hope and courage for the year to come. The family signs off with the tag, “Nothing but love,” and my first husband’s last name, which I never chose to share.
21 February 2024 marked what would have been the 36th anniversary of our first real date, his and mine. It wasn’t our true first date (which has its own story), but it was a date that began in the morning, lasted all day, all night long, and never truly ceased until the morning, eight and half years later, when I packed my car with what we agreed were now my belongings, held his hands, kissed him goodbye in Raleigh, North Carolina, and drove north for nine hours, to begin a different life.
Throughout the time that we were a couple, we marked the 21st of every month as an anniversary. For several years following our separation and subsequent divorce, I tried and failed not to note the 21st of each month. I didn’t even attempt to overlook 21 February itself. In my mind, that date was “ours” for at least a decade, maybe more, until, mercifully, time rubbed down the sandpapery edges of my heart and I got to the place of being able to see the date coming without dread and melancholy.
Thirty-six years on (what can I say? I’m a late bloomer), I feel how it is possible to say and mean “Nothing but love” toward someone who wronged you or whom you know you wronged, or both. Forgiveness and letting go…one of the hardest spiritual practices in my life. I blame my grandmother and my father, who bequeathed their grudge-holding genes upon me. All right, no taking the easy way out: I and I alone am responsible for my actions. That said, they didn’t make it any easier. That said, I know it’s up to me whether I choose to forgive and surrender my tight-held resentment and bitterness.
Earlier this year, the teachers in my district voted to go on strike. When talking about it to friends and family members, along with colleagues, there is quite a bit of bitterness in my remarks, which is concerning. I don’t want to keep living with resentment. It harms me more than anyone, and I’m the only one who can lay that burden down. When it comes to holding grudges, I’m a past master, but there are times when having a crack memory is not necessarily a virtue. Having a good memory for ways we feel we’ve been wronged serves for nothing more than fanning the flames of self-righteous indignation…which only goes so far in keeping you warm.
When the strike ended, one of our colleagues wrote to the rest of us, “Thank you for helping me channel what began as righteous anger into a radical act of love for our students, our families and one another.” I like that idea of transforming anger into love. I’m not there yet regarding the strike and its aftermath, but I’m working on it. As a glass-half-empty kind of girl, it’s not the path my brain naturally follows, but I’m working on it.
Recently, when I was kvetching to a colleague about a new state ruling that is going to have a direct impact on our work, hers and mine, she agreed with everything I said, then added, “Everything is bad, but then I looked up at the sky, and there were no clouds.” The other night I was listening to an interview with a father in Rafah, trying to keep his family alive. He said at one point that he told his children, as they prepared to evacuate yet again, that they were “going camping.” His oldest child wasn’t buying it: “Dad, we’re not camping. If we were camping, we’d have sleeping bags.” He went on to tell the interviewer that he didn’t know when they were going to die, so he wanted them to enjoy every minute of their lives.
Nothing but love. How to get to that place of looking at, of being in the world, in spite of everything. Because of everything.
I still have a few plates from the set my first husband and I received for our wedding in North Carolina, chosen for their unusual color combination and pattern (does he have the others?). We split up the wedding gifts, each of us taking what members of our family had given us. It was a painful process, separating items that had belonged to us together — a literal breaking up of the home — the worst part being the division of books. We had finally, after our third move, joined all of our books together, forming the beginnings of a true library; we put them in categories, viewed them with pride. One of the bookshelves that held sections of those books is in my study. It belonged to my former brother-in-law; for whatever reason, my first husband let me take it with me, and it’s been with me ever since.
There are cracks in my heart, that flexible organ that has never stopped beating, thank G-d, in the twenty-plus years since I left that third home. Scars fade with time but never disappear completely. A parent of a former student recently recounted how she decided to teach her son to stop lying to her. She invited him to draw a big heart on a clean piece of paper. The heart represented how she felt about him, she said, all the love she had for him. Then she took it and crumpled it up. Her son watched her, aghast. She said, “That’s how my heart feels when you lie to me.” She then smoothed out the paper, showing him how the lines were still there. “They are scars,” she explained. “You can’t smooth them away.”
We can’t get through life without hurting those we love, and being hurt by them. Nothing but love might be a tall order for some, including me. I’m grateful to have gotten to that place at least in one part of my heart, in terms of how I remember and think about my first husband and our time together. Some might say my former student’s mother was performing a radical act of love. Others might question her judgment. All I will say is this: her son, my former student, when his mother went to throw away the paper heart, stopped her. “Put it up on the wall in my room,” he requested. “So I can look at it every day and remember how I made you feel, and not do that again.”
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