From Heartbreak, Mourning, Loss. Volume One, Detach or Die
The message is clear: I must let go!
I shall remember that morning all my life; she stood barefoot on the porch, barring the door as if I might have the intention of forcing my way in. I was bewildered by her hostility. She had not informed me that Jeremy had moved in with her, and there he was, suitcases and all. I began shivering from head to toe, feeling how she had again lied to me, a lie by omission but a lie nevertheless.
My heartbeat was out of control and my mouth was so dry I could barely swallow. I was standing in the doorway, shivering, silent and broken, handing her the package. Laura was emotionally cold, shut down, unaware that I was about to faint. She called my presence an “intrusion on her privacy, a crossing of her boundaries.”
That was the language she had used many times to talk about her intrusive mother and her abusive father. Indeed, both her parents had repeatedly intruded on her privacy and really did not have psychic boundaries at all. But I had come out of concern for her, absolutely unaware that Jeremy had moved in. I had knocked on the door, I did not break in; I was not spying on her, I was delivering a package.
That cold hostile person in front of me was not the Laura I thought I knew, but the rebellious teenager she had described to me so many times, angry and forced to defend her autonomy against a controlling mother and an irresponsible alcoholic father.
The Laura in front of me was not my equal, not my friend, not somebody who could understand the vulnerable state I was in. She was the fragile, angry adolescent girl, incapable of seeing that I was somebody about to collapse on the floor. She asked me to “leave the premises immediately,” but I was in no state to drive. I was having a panic attack, about to faint. I begged her to come sit with me in my car parked in her driveway, until my heartbeat went back to normal.
I don’t remember in my whole life ever begging for a woman’s compassion like I did that morning. I was five years old again, imploring my mother for help because I was burning with a 104 degree fever and thought I was dying. The coldness in Laura’s eyes was just like the coldness in my mother’s face when I disturbed one of her social events because I was sick, or needed something for class, or had to ask her for something, anything. Laura’s lack of compassion for my obvious physical distress went through me like a sword.
She agreed curtly to follow me to my car, probably to avoid Jeremy seeing me. After a few minutes she expressed again that I should “respect her privacy” and “leave the premises” so she could go back inside to help Jeremy unpack! She said she did not owe me any explanation about her new situation with Jeremy. I left.
The most troubling emotion was not the experience of her utter lack of compassion; it was an uncanny physical sensation of being mistaken for somebody else. I had become like a member of her abusive family. Laura was reacting to her parents, not to the shivering, vulnerable, defeated ex-lover in front of her. She was not with me, not in our story; she was reacting to her past! And so was I, reacting the cold, aloof, ambivalent mother still living in my psyche.
The tension of this trauma was such that it created a “before” and an “after” and as such it was a useful turning point. Before this episode I was still confident that Laura and I could get over the crisis; but now, there is no more “us” and no more “we”. I am hurting, but it is now clear that I am hurting alone. What is even clearer is that Laura’s betrayal is just the top layer of my unfinished business with my mother.
