Framing My Words

An interviewer the other day, smelling blood in the water, tried to get me to engage in the sport of ex-spouse bashing. I almost took the bait, as the question was well-formed and seemingly innocent, but when you peeled away the layers you could see that to give the journalist what he'd be gappy with, I'd have to get out a rusty old warhammer and thrash the ex's good name.

I'm human. I screw up. I have a tendency to say too much too soon and stick my foot in my mouth, but I'm learning. My intentions are not to make people look bad, but to grapple with information in an unfiltered manner, it's part of who I am to be looking for the truth. My curiosity, both intellectual and moral, has led me more than once off high precipices.

Let me set the record straight, while I am well-rested and well-caffeinated.

I do not regret my involvement with anyone. I played my part for a season in many lives where I can see a real gain for them, and as my primary motivator is to do well by others, even to the point of setting myself up as the fall guy if needs be, I can say I have tried. (Or, to quote the poem: "fallen. and have risen. and taken penance given, every mile.")

No, I do not always see a set-up coming. Those parts of me which are most cunning are also the most amoral, so I try to not give them great counsel in my thoughts. The result is, when someone wishes to do me harm, it is pretty easy. But harm, not fatality. I have found myself extremely resilient and perhaps, as one friend has pointed out, that is the very thing that makes me so fearless, emotionally. I do not perceive myself as fearless, but others do, and that is a curious conundrum to me. Anyone privy to my emotional state when Hurricane Katrina wiped Diamondhead, Mississippi, off the map knows well how full of anxiety and pain I can be.

And anyone who has seem the works that have blossomed of the pain brought by my estrangement from my daughter knows how troubled I can be. I say this not for sympathy, or empathy, as I desire neither from my readers. I am merely explaining the underpinnings of my recent moods and works, to frame them as they come to light and discussion.

I messed up my first major relationship, that with Nancy (Psyche). I did it because she had gone over to "the other side" and had asked me to give up my writing. I never asked her to cut out her eyes or submit to a lobotomy. So it seemed a bit one-sided. That I over-reacted in sinking into a blue funk brought on by the Moebius loop of "her versus who I am" by breaking off the enagagement and hopping into bed with the next thing to come along was stupid? Massively. But this is reality, flinty and hard.

My first wife, the Valkyrie, was not so much a mistake as a penance. I needed someone who needed me, and I did what I could to fix what I found broken. That trying to do so in the constraints I was placed was almost totally impossible ripped me further apart only made me more determined to win the day. The mistakes of our early marriage I paid for in a decade and a half of suspicions and recriminations. And, as C.S. Lewis so ably pointed out in "Screwtape Proposes a Toast", a man who is tarred with a label eventually decides to at least embrace the evil that is presumed upon him.

My second marriage was, again, a combination of penance and lust. An attempt to help someone so badly in need of a champion. That, in the end, I ended up doing so much damage to my relationships with my friends, my family and my finances to rescue her is not a statement of what was wrong with her, but what was wrong with me.

And to some degree, remains wrong with me. I am, for what I am, adequate in the extreme. But even as a butter-knife makes a terrible spoon and a wristwatch is poor substitute for a boat anchor, they all have their place and purpose. I have found myself driven by my desire to heal others to the point I have little or nothing left for myself. I expect not your pity, or any reward for doing what I have chosen to do. Self-actualization is its own reward.

My sins are many, my virtues few, but whie I may not be the hero of my own memoir, I am also not the villain that some may choose to believe me in order to justify their own sins. I have been the victim of emotional extortion, which I have given into on more than one occasion, then found myself trapped by my own desire to be honorable and just.

Denied the right to speak the truth, I lied. Placed in so many situations where others asked me to do their lying for them, or to make promises that would imprison me for their mistakes, I became what I was expected to be: a front for others' whims and wishes and sins.

I am not a Messiah. Not a prophet. I'm just a poet, a man, a father, a lover, a friend. Not always in that order.

But, I will keep trying to untangle the Gordian knot of my life and relationships until my run is over.