When the first of January hits I always see that image of a head with two faces one turned towards the past and the other towards the future, maybe this is why the Sade song Kiss of Life is triggering me to tears a lot listening to it in recent days.
I associate the words of the song with when I heard an inner voice telling me to go to a hotel where I ended up meeting my ex husband, Jonathan on 6 June 1993 very close the birthday of my maternal great great grandmother which is interesting has he was from England and so was Eliza (Solomon) Trudgeon.. I ended up meeting him that night over a crowded bar. In my mind’s eye or memory I can still see him standing there in a group and watch him coming over to ask if I played basketball, being so tall.. He came home with me and then the next day I clearly remember going to the park to feed the ducks. As a background this was during one of the darkest times of my addiction in those final years I had that breakdown where I was forceably held down at a friends 30th after someone criticized me, that led me to see a therapist Brian Hunt and being offered a sober person to take me to AA which I refused then. I remember the guy was gorgeous and a film producer, a friend of a friend.
As a compromise I went into therapy alone in about July, I must have only done several sessions with Brian before he told me he had to go into hospital for an operation, what a trigger that was to the grief over Dad dying and his treatment of me in the years 1982 to 84 when he died, (not that I was conscious of any of this until very recently). I ran out of the therapy and it took me just over a year to get sober and in 11 months Jonathan was in my life and after a short courtship, mostly conducted by letters he moved to Sydney to be with me and we got married on 16th of October 1993.
I had to do the work to get sober, but seeing the pain my drinking caused him was honestly what made me realise IT HAD TO STOP and I can still see him sitting in a chair with his head in his hands crying in desperation… I got sober soon after our honey moon on the 6th of December 1993 and did not look back. We had some very peaceful and happy years but I still was foundering emotionally and as you may know six years later we ended up moving back to Cambridge so that Jonathan could be closer to family and I started Jungian therapy and then for a brief time the psychological astrology course in London before deciding to return to Oz in late 2001.
As I look back I feel for my ex husband… I think of how tough it was for him not understanding my emotional issues and of how resistant I was to moving closer to my own family once we did come back to Canberra due to the past trauma I had endured that was still so buried at 8 years sober. After all I had left my home town at the age of 23 only to return for a couple of months at 25 and then move to Sydney where my addiction worsened until the age of 31 or so…and had not lived there since only visited my Mum and family from time to time.
the song Kiss of Life reminds me Jonathan helped me so much to be grounded and connected in life but where the problems came was we both had suffered similar things in life we had buried : losing our fathers at roughly the same age and having partners abandon us shortly after then moving overseas alone… but when I started to deal with my grief I was told I was not happy enough and so not acceptable or lovable enough… and his family also told him I was not much fun due to not drinking so I guess the writing was then on the wall.
After we split in 2004 a good friend we made while living at the coast for the years 2002 to 2004 told me Jonathan appeared to him to be one of the most closed people emotionally he had met.. That was affirmation in a way as, of course I have blamed myself a lot..most of all for giving up on our overseas life but then when I think of how coming back did enable me to be there for Mum and my older sister Judy before she died on one level I do not regret it entirely but my feelings will always be mixed.
This is the part where the face of Janus looks back at my past which naturally starts as I face a new year which comes with new opportunities as well as the chance to explore deeper levels of relational and attachment and self value wounding with Venus continuing its retrograde transit of Capricorn.
As I look ahead now I see a person more recovered emotionally than before (myself) but one who still struggles… especially in the family when loved ones go down knowing that, at times, my decision not to move forward had effects on them and having carried hurt that often gets displaced on others (only naturally mind you.).
My brother made another impromptu visit again yesterday. There was a lot of affection between us this second time and my anger is more conscious less rageful. I shared some photos with him from when Mum and Dad were a lot younger and of him and Judy as toddlers he loved seeing them.. Asking him questions always gives me a deeper insight into my brother as a person separate to me who born nearly 20 years earlier is blind to a lot I endured, it helps me to see that he, as a result, has a different view on things.. And at times he probably sees me as not having lived a very good active in the world ambitious life, and yet I have been so strong in other ways.
While he was here we tried to talk to my sister who is now in hospital again after yet another fall and has the onset of Parkinson’s disease due to all the medication, energy issues she struggled with in our family. She stayed mute during the whole call.. as she apparently did when my brother and nephew went to see her in the aged care home on Christmas Eve.. We just told her we love her but it all seems so woefully inadequate and I cried while my brother just looked helpless. He also put a call through to her older son which was challenging, to see they have more control over her than anyone but only because she has surrendered it.. It was not easy at all, feeling and questioning did I abandon my sister, did I do all I could do? But everyone says I did.
So it is today as I look back, as I remember, as I feel both the gratitude and sadness as well as a deepening understanding and acceptance around the so called ‘failure’ of my marriage I also see the hope.. my bridges with family are not burned but we do live in different realities.. And yet they are my blood..
Today is my older sister who passed in 2014 birthday too.. I think of how she derailed and how full of life and vibrancy she was and of her four beautiful sons who I love dearly. I see what a difficult family it was to be the youngest in with great extremes of wealth and poverty and a month out of my sober birthday I feel less pain and more gratitude as I bear in mind we all have two realities we live within, if not more.. the first where we make assessments of and try to come to peace with an understanding of our past in order that we can re-orient the sails of our wings to move forward into a new and most appropriate direction, as we also center within to make space for all of the complex emotions that so often, so sadly were so deeply challenging to deal with.
Emerging From The Dark Night 