OF WILD HORSES AND THEIR TRAINERS

I'm contemplating the ways in which I never fully surrendered my singleness. The narrative of Caribbean culture drove home the theme that there are no good men. Men cheat, men lie, men are lazy, and men eventually leave. The narrative of my specific family tree has borne out every one of these tales. Going back generations are relationships fractured by unfaithfulness, male predatory behavior, fathers abandoning their children, secret second and third families, and scorned women taking vengeance on their wayward men.

And so, even in the midst of a Christian upbringing, was a much stronger cultural and familial narrative tightly intertwined into the marrow of my bones---honor your vows but...

...never trust your husband

...never surrender your independence

...never surrender your goals and ambitions for the sake of your man

...always have a backup plan in case your marriage fails

...trust GOD but rely on your own strength even more

Most of these sentiments were never openly communicated to me, but I absorbed them from my mother, grandmother, aunties, and cousins. There are things I vowed to do differently but there are many more things that I couldn't identify as potential roadblocks to a GODly marriage. My blind spots had blind spots.  It remains to be seen how many of them are still obscuring my visual field.

There is certainly blame to share here but that's not the purpose of this piece of writing. This season of my life is about strategically removing every beam out of my own eye and casting them into the fiery furnace. I don't want to keep patterning old creation dynamics and misnaming them as Christlike. Worldly wisdom makes a lot of sense by comparison. It creates a story of triumph that people love to retell. But I claim to follow the most powerful being in the world who chose to share his reign with frail, imperfect beings who often betray and disappoint Him. I will never understand this and I would never do this. Thank GOD that I am not GOD.

Here is where I will land this particular plane. I see myself as a breed of stallion that was partially domesticated and partially reared in the wild. I am fast, strong, and always on the go. I partnered with an inexperienced trainer---a highly qualified and educated one who trained at an Ivy League academy and graduated at the top of his class. He knows a lot of theory about wild horses but only ever dealt with domesticated ones.  He also never owned his own steed before he encountered me. All of this matters.

He made the purchase with confidence and I was eager to be partnered with such a quietly confident trainer. I loved some of his tactics for their unique and clever approaches. But some of those tactics were outright confusing. But because I was so committed to him, I kept myself at bay. Several years in, I began to wonder if this trainer fully knew what he was doing. My confidence in him began to unravel. I began to startle easily. I would throw him off my back, bite him, kick him in the chest, and run away for weeks at a time. I just didn't feel safe. I sustained some life-threatening injuries out in the wild that he had no idea how to manage. I wouldn't even let him get close enough to examine and treat me most of the time. I will end the analogy here before it derails but I hope you get my point.

My sincere hope is that calling out this aspect of our complex dynamic will go a long way towards healing us. I now believe that he has always had good intentions towards me and gave me his very best but it was a very long road getting to this place. The anger and disappointment that overtook me as I began to realize that he wasn't as capable of a trainer as either of us thought coupled with the fact that I never fully surrendered the wildness within me even after sixteen years of marriage has been a crushing realization. At least now we might have a prayer because all of the cards, including the most uncomfortable ones, are displayed on the table.

I still don't know if I was ever truly ready to get married. I have functioned like a single woman for my entire adult life while being deathly afraid of spending my life alone. This paradox caused me to pigeonhole my husband into categories that I felt I could control while I continued to control many other aspects of our lives. My call for separation is about three main things: (1) Breaking the cycle of inflicting deeper wounds on each other as we seek to protect ourselves (2) Giving space for us to partner with GOD to remake us into healthy and whole individuals (3) Forcing our external lives to match the broken internal reality of how separate we truly are so that we can contend with if and how we can discover unity. 

Our status as a couple might not survive this or might take a very long time to make a comeback. But the process of casting down the imaginations that have trapped us in this cycle of death for nearly two decades is more than worth it. Part of our marriage was about bringing our remarkable children into this world, but it was not the entire purpose. If part of the purpose of us coming together was to fully expose and cast down the old creation dynamics dictating our lives in order to yield authority to the new creation way of life, then its all been worth it. The fallacy of self-sufficiency is being broken in my life, in the unraveling of my relationship with my Anglican church as well as in my marriage. For once, I'm going to get out of the way and let it all fall down. GOD is faithful to help us rebuild.