do I dare to eat this peach? or write about my real life?

If I am going to write a memoir of my actual life, instead of  limiting myself to happy or funny memories, I will have to write stories I can barely access.  I am going to write about my hesitations and anxieties in an effort to write my real story.

When I got divorced, I was, and this surprised me, concerned about being a divorced Catholic.  I had given up on Catholicism when I was in my teens. When I married a man who had also gone to Catholic school all his life, including his undergrad and MBA programs, I slid back into going to church and acting like a Catholic. 

I was very unhappy in that marriage. Church was surprisingly soothing. As a child attending mass a lot, I had never really connected spiritually. Going to Catholic school, having parents active in parish life, my Catholic world was cultural.  Irish Catholic cultural.

I was surprised, during my brief marriage in my late twenties, to find solace at Sunday mass.  My husband, who talked all the time about his Catholicism rarely went to mass. I soon reached the point where I never missed.

When we separated, I talked to my parish priest about becoming a divorced Catholic.  He gave me what is probably good advice.  He told me that a divorced Catholic had to wait a few years to file for an annulment. He suggested that I write my annulment petition then, as soon as I had separated.  He suggested writing it might be cathartic plus it would spare me from reliving the answers years later.

So I did start to write my annulment petition in the early weeks of my legal separation from my husband.  I wrote and wrote and wrote, answering each question I depth.

I was probably 20 pages into my annulment petition when I realized I was writing the fake version of our lives that my ex-husband and I had invented to cover times when we had gaps in employment or had been fighting ferociously.  We had so smoothly told fake versions of our shared life that I was smoothly writing it down for ‘the Vatican’. 

When I realized I wanted a divorce from my false narrative, I dropped the idea of annulment. And that was when I truly stopped being a Catholic.

There, you see, I just wrote another inaccurate piece of my past.

I did completely drop Catholicism from my heart and soul. I was raising a child, however.  When she and I were able to move away from Nebraska, returning to Minnesota where I had gone to law school and had friends, I felt I should give my child some kind of spiritual life.

When we first moved to Minnesota (first time for her, a return for me), we happened to live two blocks from a Catholic church with a spellbinding young Irish priest who gave great sermons. The church had great music. For the year or so we lived there, we went to mass every Sunday. After mass, we walked to a nearby café were Rosie always ordered a bottle of orangina, which she did not actually like to drink. She liked the round bulb of the bobble. It was expensive. Every Sunday I tried to cajole her out of that orangina, then cajole her into drinking it. She never budged.

One day in church, after the energetic young, visiting Irish priest had returned to Ireland, a priest said, in the middle of a hate-speech sermon, “If anyone in this church right now doesn’t believe that homosexuality is a sin, they should leave this church and never come back.”

Thank you, Father!

Rosie and I were seated in the third row, smack dab in the middle of that very long row.  We got up and crawled over a dozen or more right-thinking Catholics.

I relished the dramatic departure. Rosie was glad to get out of sitting still for mass.

That was when I gave up on Catholicism for good.

My baby brother and my best out of four brothers is gay.  I could not attend a church that considered my dollykins Dave a sinner.  Dave came into this world very effeminate. When he was five and I fifteen, I had a moment of awareness that Dave was one of those males I had heard whispers about. I didn’t have language for what I knew about my little brother but I knew:  he was ‘like that’, whatever that was.  After that, no one could tell me people choose to be queer. Dave was born gay.

Then my guiding star for finding a church, for I felt I had to give my child some kind of spiritual exposure apart from my own beliefs,  became finding a church that accepted homosexuals without judgment.  In the mid-eighties, this was not an easy quest.

For some time, Rosie and I went to a different church most Mondays, rejecting them.

I don’t want to write about my attempts to give my child some kind of spiritual foundation.  We ended up in Waldorf, which does not teach anthroposophy, of course, but which became our source for fellowship and community.  We did search for church for some years but left church behind as we grew in anthroposophy.

My point is that annulment petition, how I wrote a fake version of my life.

I veer away from my truths in not-quite-conscious ways. 

Maybe I am too intense. Or maybe I think about the truth of my life in a skewed way.

I don’t know if I will be able to write my real life story but I hope to try. Ever since it came to me that I live behind layer upon layer of white lies and hiding aspects of my being, I feel a tremble in my whole being.

Do I dare to write about aspects of my life I have never talked about with anyone, except for Jane, a psychotherapist I saw every Monday for ten years.  Jane might be the only person I have ever revealed myself honestly to. And that took years.

Jane once said, and she was the kind of therapist that almost never said anything, “I have a strong sense, Tree, that you are dancing on the table here, that you are not telling me about your real life, but the one you think is acceptable.”

Dancing on the table. She was right.

I have been dancing on the table all my life.  Can I stop now?  I trusted Jane as much as I have ever trusted anyone and I couldn’t stop dancing on the table for her. I wanted to but I couldn’t.

It hit me last night, powerfully, that I might be ready to stop dancing on the table.  And maybe, at age 61, it is too late to stop. Too late to be me.  I hope not.

I keep thinking of a quote from George Eliot:  “It’s never too late to be who you might have been.”

I note that I did not write what the true story of our marriage was here. That might be a start.

Something within me seems to want to come out.

One benefit of being dumped by my daughter and even my five siblings, who all live far from me ,and my parents gone is I am free to write my story. Own my story. Write whatever I want in anyway I like. As Annie Lamott has been quoted saying "If people wanted you to write nicer stories about them, they should have been nicer to you."

I am free from the constraint of relatives who might object to me writing my life story