“Why now?” he asked. Kintsugi, I answered . . . though not exactly that word. “He” asking is my ex-husband. We haven’t seen or spoken to each other in thirty-four years, and here we are together through the magic of Zoom.
I initiated communication the Old School Way – a short handwritten note. If he didn’t open it, the writing of it and the courage to send it would still be a gift of grace to me. Regular postage delivered a note carrying the weight of thirty-four years of shame for my destruction of our marriage. He responded with an Old School note two weeks later. Opening my mailbox at the end of the driveway, I fanned through the usual clump of mail and stopped breathing. There it was – a small envelope in his handwriting. It was Christmas morning when the beautifully wrapped present could hold #1 on my list to Santa or a pair of socks. I padded into the house, poured a glass of gin, sat out on the deck, and reminded myself that I have more courage now than I did then. I opened a note filled with kindness and his apology for failing as a husband. It never occurred to me that he would blame himself. I wrote back, sending some old photos, including of Kinte, our beloved cat. He wrote again, letting me know he and his wife were soon departing for France and proposed we continue with email, Zoom, and WhatsApp.
Here we are on Zoom a few weeks later. We jumped over the awkwardness I anticipated by working together to resolve technology glitches. I feasted upon his face, happy to see his beard still lush and now streaked with silver. But I did not see with my eyes alone. My heart projected the image sheltered in my memory all these years. We settled into talking with familiarity. We shared some of what our lives look like now. He commented with kindness that he always admired my valuing friendship and being a committed friend. Of course, he had been my best friend, and I failed him, but he didn’t say that.
Toward the end of our chatty visit, he asked, “Why now?” His gentle prefacing tells everything about who he is and why I’ve loved him all these years. He emphasized that he was happy and grateful to hear from me; that I didn’t have to answer (he said at least three times). He speculated that maybe I was motivated by pending mortality, but that didn’t seem to be the case. I answered, It has taken me all this time to understand and forgive myself. But that was merely the headline.
***
COVID-time gave me the pause to go deeper into my spiritual life. During 2020, I extended my usual morning meditation and prayer to add a recently learned “Confession” that begins, “Holy God, we are Human: We strive to love, but we often fail.” And concludes:
Help us let go of our failings.
Renew our hearts.
Fill us anew with Your love.
Each morning commenced with this gentleness of a loving lullaby.
I began letting go of my failings – and on this side of 70 years old, there are plenty of failings to unleash. Having always considered the sentiment of Regret to be useless, I spent a lifetime resisting making her acquaintance. But this spiritual practice eventually opened the door to Lady Regret. To my surprise, instead of dragging in wearing mourning clothes, she swept across the threshold in silks of transformation and right behind her were her cousins Truth, draped in the emeralds of healing and Compassion, wearing the blue of Grace by Divine Favor– so different from what I expected. We talked deep into many nights, gathered around soft candlelight. Eventually, Lady Regret and her companions beckoned me to explore my deepest failing – the destruction of this marriage.
***
I explained to them how Joe and I met in Mississippi - he a summer clerk after first-year law school, and me a staff attorney with a civil rights organization. We hung out after work like siblings, and I delighted in introducing him to the Mississippi of the civil rights movement. Four years later, we were in NYC at the same time and spent two days together. Though apprehensive, we decided to explore our relationship by moving to San Francisco – he from Long Beach, CA, me from Washington, D.C. My journal entry of January 15, 1982 sums up the adventure, “There have never been lovers in this universe before us.” My Selves of those years are naked all over my journal pages, recording our coming together and life for a few years after moving to San Francisco.
Certain that I never wanted children and marrying this like-minded man, after five years of marriage, the beginnings of yearning for a baby showed up unanticipated. I remember 39-year-old-Barbara telling herself the insurmountable problem had become wanting to have a child while he did not - but that’s the story of self-justifying memory. Memory is not trustworthy. She often protects me with her gossamer of self-deception and obliterates entire swaths of reality.
A month or so after I moved out, we met at what had once been our home, and he said that he was sure we could still save our marriage. We were both in tears when I told him we couldn’t. He was not the father of the baby I was carrying. That’s the last time we spoke.
I didn’t tell him the pregnancy was unintentional – the consequence of a careless sexual encounter – and that I anguished over whether to continue the pregnancy. There I was a month before turning 40, after three abortions, wanting a baby but not like this. But what if I can’t get pregnant again? I knew that continuing the pregnancy meant that what might have been a temporary separation to sort out my feelings became the end of this marriage. I chose to continue the pregnancy and became a single mother. My heart consumed by my baby, I fought thoughts of Joe that attempted to intrude.
***
I couldn’t emotionally accommodate the joy of being a mother together with the pain of hurting this kind, loving, and beautiful man and destroying my life with him. That explains how the separation became permanent, but it doesn’t explain the leaving.
Even two years later, I stifled a yearning to connect. Kinte, the cat we both loved dearly, was dying. Sobbing uncontrollably, I made our last trip to the veterinarian, holding him in my arms, telling him how much I loved him and what a wonderful companion he had been. Words and tears about Kinte and also about much more. That day, I wrote:
I know he will regret not having a chance to say ‘Good-bye’. I thought about calling him; but then decided it would be too hard – at first I thought ‘for him’, but then I realized ‘for me’. I started thinking about when I first came here with Kinte. Kinte’s antagonistic initial relationship with him was one of our favorite memories. How Kinte drove him crazy playing with the fish food in the flat on Lake Street and how they came to love each other.
***
I shared all of this with Lady Regret and her companions. Eventually, after weeks of exploration with Regret, Truth and Compassion, the most significant influence upon my leaving the marriage in December 1988 emerged. The story of conflict over bearing children was Memory’s protection from the more complicated and messy truth. I shared my journals from that period and found that a few months before walking out of my marriage, I experienced the death of a dear friend. Before he died, I often sat with him in a bleak hospital room in San Francisco as he endured experimental treatments. I was there when his parents came to say good-bye to their dying son, and the expression on their faces as they approached his bed held unbearable fathoms of love and anguish. My journal then filled with anxiety and fears about the future. Instead of sharing those feelings with my husband, I kept them bottled up. Not recognizing the resulting loneliness was of my own making, those feelings and the loneliness became the fuel for my escape from the intimacy of marriage
In making the commitment of marriage, I was attempting consciously to leave behind a Self who embraced self-centered individualism and was proud of never regretting anything— a posture that was the antithesis of the intimacy I sought in marrying Joe. That Self was inspired by the iconic poster of Fritz Perls’s Gestalt Prayer that many of my generation plastered on our dorm walls even as we talked about the collective values of feminism, Black Power, and Justice:
I do my thing, and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
Running away from intimacy and its threat of unbearable emotional pain. I sought a return to the world I used to know of “doing my own thing” with a mantra of “No Regrets” as if it were my religion. A world without commitments and emotional attachments of enduring love that could bring pain.
***
Finally, I had excavated the truth about myself.
Lady Regret leaned upon Compassion and asked me,
“What would you do now if a sister came to you with this anguish and confusion about destroying her marriage?” I would put my arms around all her hurt and hold her close.
And what is the first thing you would say to her? I love you.
Lady Regret and her companions helped me understand that Shame, Lady Regret’s nemesis, should be evicted from my heart. They taught me that we flourish in our humanity when we face and explore the past and ourselves with love, consciousness, and curiosity. We gathered in my kitchen on their final night, and they introduced me to the practice of Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery pieces with visible gold, honoring the idea that in embracing flaws and imperfections, the original becomes stronger and more beautiful.
We collected all my broken pieces and mended them with the Kintsugi concoction we brewed. It took some time for the pieces to solidify.
And then, I wrote a letter.
Barbara Y. Phillips is a social justice feminist whose creative non-fiction is published in Brevity Blog, The New York Times, Southern Cultures, The Citron Review, and others. Formerly a community organizer, civil rights lawyer, law professor, Ford Foundation Program Officer, and president of Black Women Lawyers of Northern California, she was honored as Champion of Justice by the Mississippi Center for Justice in 2022. She now lives in Oxford, Mississippi, and Oak Bluffs, MA. She sporadically posts essays and other tidbits to BarbaraYPhillips.substack.com.
Artist Arlene Tribbia is an artist/poet who works across disciplines experimenting and exploring the boundaries and variations within poetry, drawing, painting, story and sculpture. Drawing is a poem. Every line is a verse. Every color or random mark is a phrase. These lines and gestures gathered create stanzas, stories, drawings and paintings. Stories of hers have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and published widely as well as internationally. Her artwork has been exhibited in unique spaces from dance halls to skyscrapers as well as galleries, including Woman Made in Chicago and the Dunedin Fine Art Center in Florida where Robert Rauschenberg (hero, mentor-in-my-mind and influence) also has shown his work. http://www.arlenetribbia.com/
Beautiful reflection. I’m struck with how this story plays out 40 years later for many women who don’t realize they want children till much later. The details are slightly different but the call, the ache, and the regret live with all the compromises circling around motherhood.
Wow, thank you so for writing this, Barbara and thank you Memoir Magazine for sharing it! I'm here crying because it's exactly what I'm currently experiencing/seeing about my patterns. So resonant and appreciated.