A Different Kind of Journey

I wrote the following post in April 2014, and it has sat in my dormant blog's draft folder for almost nine months. Given that it has been incubating for almost as long as a gestating fetus, I believe it is time for it to emerge and stand as a post signifying a new threshold for "Travels with Pablo."

"Pull a thread on a 20-year relationship and it's amazing how quickly it unravels":  so wrote Tish Hamilton in the February 2014 issue of Runner's World in an short but trenchant article about how running functions during the breakdown of her marriage. The article is entitled "Untying the Knot."

It is rare indeed to read a sentence that so perfectly describes my life in that instant.  I read it as my own 20-year marriage moved from the ICU to hospice.

Since returning from Chile on January 3, I have been on a very different kind of travel than my 5 1/2 months in Chile, though the latter certainly had something to do with the latter.  The trip has been a swift, unstoppable unraveling of my life but it was not entirely unpredictable.  We are trying to untie the knot as amicably as possible, more along the lines that dear Gwyneth Paltrow has bestowed on us this week with the psychobabble-sounding term "conscious uncoupling."  Chile provided us with a way to see clearly just what our differences were and forced us to stare directly into the face of a reality that we had been palliating with the opiates of routine, obligation, and a long tally of mulligans that we were giving one another.

I am going to use this space to talk about my travels. I am not going to speak of my soon-to-be-ex spouse or our son.  I want to use this space to explore this terrain, which is new to me but all too common for far too many other people.  You will not find blame here (because there is none), you will not find acrimony toward another, you will not find salacious details.  What you will find is a man trying to emerge from the "uncoupling" of a marriage (but not the uncoupling of parenthood for either of us) to learn how to be a better person.  I want to learn from this.  I need to learn from this. I want to be a better parent because of this.  And I want to have better relationships with other people as a result of this.

Having a room of my own, with apologies to Virginia Woolf, has already provided me with insight into the last 20 years of my life  (we had our twentieth anniversary in Chile) and I can say that I am not having to try very hard to focus on and appreciate the high points.  We grew up together and discovered a lot of things over the course of two decades.  The last 20 years were not a mistake. They have been part of the journey.  The latest chapter, living alone in an apartment in a pistachio-green building, has been a kind of a retreat back to a standard of living reminiscent of PQ circa 1990.  With better furniture.  I found some mirth in going to Lowe's to buy cinderblocks, bricks and boards to customize shelving for a very weird space next to my kitchen range, but evidently constructing furniture out of building supplies is like riding a bike.

So, forgive me if this seems self-indulgent, but I do want to share what I am thinking and feeling (in a certain way) to others, perhaps because the one person that I used to share those things with is no longer available.