Finally! A full night's sleep. No howling last night. After almost a week of that: falling asleep at 2 or 3 am, waking up at 6 am to the dog howling, listening to classical music on my ipod with the volume turned up to drown out the sound, drifting in and out of sleep until 10 or 11 am . . . what a relief!!
But, we slept through the night. How pleasant and relieving it was to hear our neighbor come home last night, to hear the slamming of the door, the happy, yippy whimpering . . . then, silence. Sweet, wonderful silence! I think out of pure relief I feel asleep early.
Liz explained her hesitation to Felipe's suggestion that they have an affair: ". . . some else inside me put in a serious request that I donate the entirety of this year of travelling all to myself. That some vital transformation is happening in my life, and this transformation needs time and room in order to finish its process undisturbed. That basically, I'm the cake that just came out of the oven and it still needs more time to cool before it can be frosted. I don't want to loose control of my life, again." p. 284
Good advice for an alcoholic like me. Many of us who go through such life-altering, vital transformation wish to "get involved" in our first year - myself included. I was pretty indiscriminate on the number of "affairs" I wanted to have once I was single and "getting sober". I shot right out of the oven and went swimming in the frosting, making messes, causing third degree burns everywhere. I didn't devote enough time and energy to the vital transformation. I didn't leave time to God to do his work. I cheated myself.
But, I guess I wanted my cake and I wanted to eat it too, and the frosting, lots of it . . . and lick the bowl, your bowl too and have a bite of your cake. I had stopped drinking, yes, (on the day of typing this, I've been gifted four years without a drink) but I hadn't found sanity. I was impeding my transformation, listening to my own sick thinking as opposed to God's love, wisdom, and cleansing purity.
So, I chose the harder, more painful path, stringing my recovery out over a long, arduous period of time. But, it finally got too painful and I had to let go of my old thinking and old behavior, completely. I wasn't able to do it all at once. But, as I have let go, so has my life gotten better.
I wonder what's next. The wedding is approaching. Though it doesn't seem so now, I'll blink and suddenly, it will be November. I wonder if my fiancee and I know what we're getting into. We do. We've had a practice run. We've lived together for awhile. We've had our fights. We've made up. We've reached understandings. We've found common ground. We've grown and are learning.
Liz writes something interesting about herself: "I have a tendency not only to see the best in everyone, but to assume that everyone is emotionally capable of reaching his highest potential. I have fallen in love more times than I care to count with the highest potential of a man, rather that with the man himself, and then I have hung onto the relationship for a long time (sometimes for too long) waiting for the man to ascend to his own greatness. Many times in romance I have been a victim of my own optimism," p. 285.
That feeds my fears. Is that what my fiancee and I are doing to each other? One thing I must mention here is before I got sober, she hung on, knowing there was a good person underneath the drunken infidelity. It fed a sick relationship, but her relentless love paid off in the end. We had to break apart to come back together.
It's an illusion to thin we have any control over some one's potential. I don't think Liz was necessarily a victim of her own optimism. I think she was a victim of her expectations. The more I try to force my fiancee to be the great person I think she should be, the more she resists and gets angry. All I can do is support and encourage what she wants to do. And leave the potential stuff up to her and God. And, keep facing my own fears.
If she never changed, would I still love her. I don't know. Probably. I couldn't help it. But, that's a future that hasn't happened yet (and may not ever happen) and I wouldn't have any control over it any way. I ought to love her for who she is (not for who I think she should be) and let God take care of the rest.
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