YWBB

Displacement


The new fun thing to do on the widow board these days is to take male profiles from a dating site called Plenty of Fish and post them to the social forum for other women to see and comment on. The comments are invariably cruel. The kind of stuff that passed as fun back in one’s high school or college days. It really wasn’t acceptable back then either, but there comes a point in a woman’s life where it crosses the line from dubious fun to simply a telling commentary on what kind of a person she has become over the years.

One of the less helpful side-effects of emotional pain, of any origin, is the tendency to redirect it. Often we take aim at those closest to us, but our targets can be stereotypical too. If we are suffering from insecurities related to our physical appearance, we might develop a habit of poking fun of the overweight in the form of jokes and snide remarks. People suffering rejection in matters of romance and relationships fall back on unflattering gender stereo-typing and bashing. When we see ourselves as completely misunderstood, we gladly cloak ourselves in martyrdom.  The professionals refer to it as displacement and, lately, I seem to have less and less patience with this in others and in myself.

Try as I might to always put a correct name on the vagueness that is my grief experience now, I am still not always successful. A week ago I turned fear into homesickness and as a result upset my husband rather needlessly. We talked it through and as it turns out I was homesick, but I wish I could sort out my emotions in a more articulate manner. Words are a timesaver that I don’t appear to have when it comes to how I am feeling and it frustrates me. When I watch the schoolgirl boy-bashing on the board, it occurs to me that it would be more productive for those engaged to just admit that they are afraid they are too old or unattractive and with personalities that are an acquired taste for any man to be attracted to them now that they have been thrust unwillingly back onto the “market”. It would certainly be easier to tell them to quit being so stupid if that were the case than to try and wade through the thinly veiled loathing of their situations, and point out to them that what they are doing by ridiculing these poor men is tearing them down in an effort to build themselves up. And that just can’t be done. Self-esteem is not built on the crushed bodies of others. How do I know? I used to be one of those women who engaged in similar sorts of slamming. It was before Will. And it didn’t make me a better person. Nor did it fix the real problem, which was me.

My problem now is to find a way to express what seems inexpressible. Those moments of sadness that feel connected to my now and aren’t. Take today for instance, I had to drive into Sherwood Park to the RCMP to have my fingerprints taken for a background check that Immigration needs to process my residency card application. For some reason, I felt like crying after it was all done. And it had nothing to do with being homesick, though I am a tiny bit, or with Rob and our relationship because I can’t imagine myself anywhere but wrapped up in his arms. What it comes down to is that it is another step away from Will and that past. The trigger was not the fingerprinting, but a conversation with my daughter before we left for the police station. She wanted me to dig up her father and bring his remains here, so she could have a place nearer by to visit him. The other day she insisted that we call him “Will” now instead of “Daddy”. One step and one step more. Thankfully I was able to track down the source and talk with Rob about it when he came home for lunch, and I felt better. It’s not always that easy. Caregiving as long as I did and watching Will die for as long as that took, I couldn’t allow myself to feel everything that wanted or needed to be felt in the instance that it did. Feelings were diverted and renamed for survival’s sake. Useful at the time. Not so much now.

Knowing what is wrong is half-way home to fixing it, I guess.

Chapter Two



I am not much of a fan of the term, or the idea even, of a Chapter Two where life after being widowed is concerned. It implies that I didn’t begin my life until the day I met my late husband,Will, and that everything and everyone who preceded him was but a prologue to actual living. I was 35 when we married. I had lived quite a bit of my life, and it was not a half-existence. There were many chapters in the Book of Me before that day arrived. The idea that Will was my chapter one and Rob is now chapter two is almost archaic but in a quaint sort of 1950’s Ronald Reagan sexist pig sort of way.

I didn’t realize until today how much I resent this chapter motif as it relates to marriage and widowhood. I was/am significant as a person, a woman and a wife. No one facet of who I am defines me so utterly that it negates another part. Not woman, wife, mother, teacher, writer, runner, friend, sister, daughter, aunt or any other title I wear, mostly simultaneously, on any given day. 

I don’t know why this angers me so much. It has been a near constant theme running through the various forums at the YWBB since I began posting back in the fall of last year. It is not just the idea of a second chapter to lives that were already books by the time our spouses came along, but also the deification of our dearly departed that sets my teeth in a barely stifled snarl. One woman today wrote something along the St. Husband line today that nearly goaded me into to a rather cold-blooded response. 

“…..we were loved so completely, purely, intensely, simply, and eternally by our spouse…”

This is such a load of crap that I don’t even know where to begin with it, but I doubt that Mary Magdalene had it this good with Jesus Christ. 

My late husband was a really nice guy. Ask anyone who knew him and they will tell you that he would give the shirt off his back for a friend. He was a good husband too. He put me and our marriage first. But he wasn’t perfect. He lost his patience and his temper from time to time. He didn’t plan for the future and actually it was a tooth-pulling exercise to get him to consider life beyond next year or the year after, let alone plan for anything like he or I dying unexpectedly.  He was a smoker, despite my asthma, though he tried time after time to quit. He loved me, but there were times when he didn’t “get me” at all. The one time that I did manage to pin him down on the subject of the future came during a road trip the two summers before we got pregnant with our daughter. We were heading home from visiting his best friend’s family in St. Louis and we were talking about who we would name as guardians for the children we wanted to have. The conversation eventually came around to what we expected of the other should something “happen”. Such a silly euphemism for what amounts to a complete up-ending of one’s whole frame of existence but those were innocent times. 

“So would you remarry if something were to happen to me?”

“Yes,” followed by a sidelong glance in my direction when the silence made him realize he might have answered that question a bit too quickly. “I’m only 27. I love you but if you were gone would you want me to spend the rest of my life alone? Look at my mom and how unhappy she is.”

He went on to say that he expected me to marry again. Actually, he made it sound like an edict, and I understood why. His mother had been widowed at 32. She never married again. Her late husband just couldn’t be replaced. A truer statement than you know because Will’s dad was a violent alcoholic but with widow-goggles he became a knight all agleam and resplendent. I would never have known this but for Will. Both my mother-in-law and his father’s family had sanitized his father’s memory past recognition, and I was actually shocked to learn the truth from him. But it taught me something in retrospect and I am distrustful of people who have nothing that sounds “real” to say about their late spouses or marriages. Having been married, then and now, I know that there is no such thing as perfect. We may marry people on the most perfect day we have ever known but we live with them on all the other days for years, and hopefully decades, to come. 

I guess I understand why so many widowed people downplay the idea of falling in love again. Opening yourself up to the possibility of a new relationship is scary and it can be a cause for self-reflection. It is hard to look at yourself honestly and realize that the things about you that aren’t that attractive may have been things that your late spouse simply put up with gracefully because they loved you. 

It’s hard to admit that you aren’t perfect either. I had a hard lesson in that when I asked a widower friend on the board to review one of my first online dating profiles and his assessment was essentially  along the lines of “I am sure someone will find that intriguing”.  And I knew exactly what he meant. I was completely myself in that profile and unfortunately when given the chance to express myself via the written word, I am myself in THX. Will loved that I was a cut to the chase kind of girl, but I am more blunt than the candlestick that Miss Scarlet used to knock off Colonel Mustard in the drawing room. I know that. Still it hurt to be reminded that Will was an exception and I would have to put some effort into meeting such a man again. 

Rude awakenings await most widowed people. The knowledge that  you were loved not in spite of your “flaws” or even because of them is a concept that even the most elastic mind will have trouble wrapping around. Our late spouses simply loved us for all of ourselves because the option, not being with us, was as unbearable as our loss of them would eventually be.

Regina Widowbago


Saturday we stopped in Regina, Saskatchewan to meet more of Rob’s family. His mother and sister both live there. It is his mom’s hometown actually. Regina is really quite pretty, especially the streets and park around the Parliament. The first thing I noticed as we traveled down Albert is that many of the streets are tree lined on both sides. I just love that natural canopy effect. On sunny days the light dances down from the leafy ceiling in a way that seems to sparkle.

We headed into the downtown which was much like any other. Shannon, Rob’s younger sister, works at the Ramada near the Civic Center, and she had booked us a hospitality room so we could swim and use the hot tub. Her manager greeted us when we arrived and told us that Shannon had popped home for a bit because we were running late, but she would get us the key to the room. Between the wedding that had invaded that day and the renovations it was an obstacle course to the suite, but we arrived and Shannon and her children, Robert and Randi, soon followed.

Shannon has eyes like Rob’s, and his eyes are very striking. She isalso very animated. Never stopped talking, which is a good thing because Rob and I listen more than we speak anyway. Shannon has a self-deprecating sense of humor, but I am beginning to think that might be a widow thing. I didn’t mention she was widowed, did I? Seven years and still grappling with that widow tendency to wonder where the map is. Still waiting for life to begin again. “Wait, I have to do that, right?” she asked though it wasn’t really a question. We all know the drill on that score, but the practice of it is tricky, elusive even. People seem to think that it is simple. That there are certain things, like re-coupling for example, that magically make all other aspects of life fall into place, but it is not simple as both Rob and I can attest. It is simply getting up every day and living it. One foot. Another foot. You can’t wait for life to come back and take your hand because, like time, it moves forward only, and if you don’t follow along you can easily be left back and forgotten.

It wasn’t until we were on our way to Rob’s mother’s home that it occurred to him that we had just been to a Widowbago. It certainly had all the elements. A gathering of widows (Rob, myself and Shannon) and our children for dinner and swimming and hot tubbing (which I know is not a verb). Interesting, eh?