A few years after my first husband ran off with someone else, after living a double life for the entirety of our marriage, I fell in love again and re-married. My children and I were living in a small, remote northern community and it worked out better for my children and I to move to where my second husband lived. My second husband just happened to live near the large city where my ex-husband and I had lived for 5 years when our 3rd child was born, 10 years earlier. He also happened to live in the same part of the city where my ex-husband and I had previously attended church and participated in our faith community. I had only positive thoughts and hopeful expectations when I considered that I would be returning to a congregation of people that had known me when I was married to someone else. After all, I was still me, and I knew that the divorce and what myself and my children had been through was not my choice or my doing – I would have been willing to try almost anything to keep our family intact if that had been an option, but it’s hard to address problems that are being so carefully hidden and avoided, it was far too late by the time I knew about them. It had only been 7 years since we had attended this faith community – surely things would not have changed all that much and I had memories of friendships and a warm, welcoming atmosphere. I looked forward to seeing everyone again and thought that myself and my children would really benefit from being in the familiar setting.
Eleven years later, my children all grown, I left the faith community I had been a part of for a combined total of over 15 years to find another, taking my resentment and anger with me. I’ve spent many hours thinking about what transpired during those eleven years, while I raised my teenagers, built a career, discovered I had married the same problem a second time and finally made the internal shift I needed to leave the emotional abuse of betrayal behind me for good. In journaling about the causes of my anger and resentment, largely felt towards certain “good” members of the faith community I had left behind, I realized that while there were far more people who reached out in love, caring and support to myself and my children during those years, it was the ignorance, micro-aggressions, silent judgements and ostracizing actions of only a few that had left me feeling marginalized, misunderstood, and hurt. And I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
One of the first times we went to church after we moved back, I saw someone I recognized after the services were over. Her husband held a prominent position in the faith community. We hadn’t been that close, but her husband and I had gone to the same university (he was two years ahead of me) and we had all known one another while we were students; it had been almost 15 years since we’d seen one another. I started walking towards her and began to say hello to her, and looking directly at me, she turned her entire body away from me and then turned to face another direction, obviously pretending not to see me. She was sitting alone in a comfortable arm chair with no good reason to do this (by this, I mean, she wasn’t talking to anyone else around her, even though there were several people milling about). A little surprised, I puzzled over why she would do something like this.
Later, at a large out-of-town event, I happened to be sitting at the same table as another woman, the wife of the clergy in our faith community. It was quiet, we were waiting for something and there weren’t that many people around. Our high school aged children had known one another since they were 2 years old, and when we returned to the area, they had become good friends again, attending the same high school and spending lots of time at their home. We’d never been close friends, but we were chatting and I happened to mention something in passing about one of the challenges we were facing with my new situation. Everyone knew my kids were away every other weekend visiting their father – we didn’t live close to him and we spent close to 10 hours driving every other weekend in order to make the visits happen. Maybe I made her uncomfortable, or maybe she thought I had crossed a line in our relationship, which was perhaps much more superficial than I’d realized. But she immediately shut down and the conversation completely fizzled out. I felt silenced. I felt like I was being told to sit down and stop complaining; that, whatever it was I had to say it, she did not want to hear about it.
A couple years later, I was meant to work with the same woman on a volunteer assignment, but over a period of several months and after a consistent effort on my part to make arrangements to get together, I realized she was just avoiding me and making excuses so that she wouldn’t have to work with me. That really hurt. I had never been treated like that by anyone before. When I was married to my children’s father and attending that faith community previously, everyone was happy to associate with me. I had a hard time understanding that even though I was still me and I knew I was still doing my best to be a good person and raise my family as best I could, some of the people that had known me before were not interested in being around me anymore, even though the only thing about me that had really changed was the configuration of my family (and that were going through a lot of difficult challenges).
Another incident that left me feeling unfairly judged happened at Christmastime, after my second oldest daughter had left home to go to university. She was visiting for Christmas, we had just finished our Christmas service and we were standing around socializing with other members of the congregation, enjoying the festive atmosphere. My daughter and I were joking around about how my children had so much fun teasing me while they tried to get me to reveal who my favourite child was by comparing things I did for or with each of them. Another prominent member of the congregation, a woman whose daughter had been friends with my daughter back when we had attended services with the children’s father, joined the conversation and chimed in with a tone of carefully veiled superiority, “Well, in OUR home, we argue over who LOVES each other more…’I love you’, and ‘No, I love you more’…” I could feel and hear in her words that without ever really getting to know me, she had come to the conclusion that I had somehow “done it wrong”, that my misfortunes were my own fault somehow and that she had something she could teach me so that I could do a better job with my family and maybe be more like her. It was terribly offensive. So condescending. How could she possibly know how much I’d sacrificed in order to keep my family together and safe; how I’d done my level best, how unlikely it was that she had some secret sauce that I didn’t know about? No one had tried harder or been more resourceful than me, I knew that for sure.
After awhile, I saw the dismissive, marginalizing, judgmental, ostracizing behaviour all the time when I went to church, I had practically forgotten the real reason I was there in the first place – and it really wasn’t ever for the social life. I remembered how often our family had been included, invited for dinner, how we’d had guests at our home from our faith community when we had attended as an intact family. All that was gone. I was busier than I had ever been, trying to parent my children, build a career, rescue yet another failing relationship and then on my own again. I couldn’t address it, I couldn’t put my finger on how I was feeling. I saw members of our faith community treating my children the way I was being treated, then I heard from another mother in a similar situation as mine tell me that certain women in our faith community that had “intact” families were actually telling their children not to associate with the likes of ours. My anger and resentment grew. But this was not who I wanted to be. People wonder why discarded, betrayed, abandoned women become bitter and resentful – well, now I know. Anyone can end up this way when things go so terribly wrong, when all one’s best efforts seem to only be met with despair; and then, if that’s not enough, there are people that blame, judge, criticize or worse, look right past you. Talk about feeling kicked when you’re down.
Most of the time, the discarded woman hasn’t done a thing to deserve her predicament, and instead of reaching out in the spirit of empathy and inclusion, the “privileged” women in faith communities push her outside the warmth of the community. I had spent my life in this faith culture, learning that we’re meant to all look after one another, to grieve with one another and help one another carry the burdens of life. There were three times as many people and far more examples of people around us that DID respond this way to us – so, why was I still so angry six months after I’d moved to another faith community, and why these specific kinds of incidents and people? How come I couldn’t stop focusing on the hurtful, ignorant, privileged few?
In our communities, in ALL kinds of communities, we hold up ideals. I don’t think this is wrong. But, the inherent problem with this is that when someone just can’t live up to it, how do they NOT feel marginalized or “not good enough”? In a faith community where ALL are supposed to feel welcome, if the faith community holds up the intact family as ideal, anyone that doesn’t fit the mold, is prone to struggle and to feel that they don’t belong. This was my situation. And, this is also why it was the small slights and offenses from specifically the more prominent women, the ones in the faith community that had the privilege of an intact family and the support of a loving husband, that I had the hardest time forgiving their insensitivity. I thought these women should know better, and that maybe they even had a responsibility to be empathetic and understanding towards someone like me. But they weren’t. Instead, they were human. They didn’t really try to understand, they just made incorrect assumptions. Their fear of ending up like me drove them to separate themselves from me by looking for ways that I had brought my challenging, less than ideal family circumstances upon myself. If they could find some identifiable flaw in me (presumed or otherwise) that they could convince themselves that they didn’t have, then they could believe they were safe from the fate I’d suffered. They looked away from me and my children when our grief was unmistakable and written all over our faces because most humans are afraid of grief – we know it’s coming for us, all of us eventually, one way or another, and we don’t want to see it.
In my time away from the people and situations that were the source of my anger and resentment, I got the space I needed to think these things over. The new faith community was in a smaller, less prosperous town, where most of the people were aging, humbled by life and a lot more wise than the younger, perfection-addicted, striving women I was trying to avoid. I knew I needed to do something about my bitterness and resentment – first and foremost, to understand it. I had noticed it off and on over the 15 years after my first husband left, this feeling of negativity and cynicism towards happy newlyweds, or young couples with small children, all smiles and giggles. Don’t they know how it could all end? Didn’t they know that I had done all I could to deserve the same kind of happiness? Then, why not me? The unfairness of it sometimes felt so crushing…
…to be continued in “How I Stopped the Bitter/Angry/Resentful Train and Got Off (Part 2)”
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