It's Harder to be Friends than Lovers

Most every day for lunch, I plop in my earbuds, and I set my iPod to random.  Today was no exception. The first song to pop up was Liz Phair’s “Divorce Song,” a remnant of my first marriage.  My ex-wife was quite the Liz Phair fan, right time, right place, right age (or rage). 

One of the side effects of getting married was merging our music libraries.  At the time we met, iTunes was just coming out; needless to say, our music collections were on CD.  Merging the libraries consisted of nothing more than shelving the CDs on the same rack in alphabetical order for easy retrieval.  After almost 5 years of marriage, though, the library wasn’t as easy to untangle; we gave away or sold any duplicate albums, and, as is the case with a lot of things in marriage, it became difficult to remember distinct tastes after time.  My solution was to digitize the lot of albums by loading them, one disc at a time, into the iTunes that had become commonplace by 2008.

If marriage, in theory, is the joining of two lives into one, then divorce, in theory, is the separation of one life into two.  Two lives rarely merge into exactly one, especially when divorce is an option, but one shared life never cleanly separates into two.  There are always fragments that remain.   One of the fragments that remain for me is the struggle to avoid absolutes like “always” and “never.”   There is a vindictive part of me that revels in using them today, but I use them here because I now see that absolutes have a place, albeit rare, in this world.  I know through experience that it is impossible to completely separate myself from my past; this goes for any relationship of substance in life. 

These relationships leave their mark. Like water, they are silently transformative, a power in nature; I often don’t notice the change until after the fact in periods of reflection on who I am and who I was. My first marriage has proven to be the past relationship that changed me the most.  (My current marriage is still changing me... in very positive ways!)  I've burned plenty of bridges in my day, but I hope that I've learned from them.  I don't talk to my ex-wife anymore; she made it passive-aggressively clear that she didn't want to hear from me again, but I reflect on that relationship from time to time.  I'm still learning lessons about marriage, and I think I'm a better spouse because of it. 

A handful of remnants from my first marriage are painful: I consistently seek validation that my cooking is up to snuff, and too often I correct the grammar of others.  The majority of them are neutral: I occasionally refer to right and left turns as “Rodney”s and “Louis”s; I answer aloud in the form of a question when I watch Jeopardy; I "own" every R.E.M. album.  My favorite remnant though, and the one that tied my iPod to today, is the one that I mentioned in yesterday’s blog post: my first son, Calvin Robert Holm.  Calvin was stillborn on Nov. 17, 2006.  He is, by far, the best thing to come out of joining my life with my ex-wife.  Cal taught me many things about the human capacity for love and for grief.  The experience of losing Cal brought me lasting friendships and an ability to cherish the gift of each day with loved ones.  He is, by far, the greatest accomplishment and lesson from my time with Erin.  He reassured me that I was capable of being a father, that I wanted to be a father.  He gave me courage to be a father to Grayson.

The line that sticks out most to me in the Phair song is "that it's harder to be friends than lovers."  I've wondered for years now why Erin and I can't be friends, why we can't put aside the hurt and our differences to celebrate Calvin... I assumed that her pain was too great, that I was too large a monster, and that our relationship was just too broken.  What I've come to realize over the last few months, though, is that forgiveness needs to start with me.  I don't need to forgive her, though... I've had to forgive myself.  So I did.  And I stopped being vindictive (for the most part).  I've unblocked her from Facebook, and I've started to remember the love we shared... the love that created Cal.  It has made me a better spouse to Stacy and a better father to Grayson.  All I had to do was forgive myself for not knowing what I know now.

That was a pretty good remnant, and I've got Cal to thank for it.