Maybe if I hadn’t taken those classes. Or if I’d gotten pregnant and couldn’t go to the classes. Maybe if I hadn’t met a new man in those classes. If I’d paid attention to what they taught about keeping agreements. Maybe I would have stayed with Sam longer. Maybe I would have stayed forever.
The classes opened me to a new way of seeing the world. Opened me to a new way of being in the world. The classes weren’t set up to protect the world I already lived in. I wanted a different kind of life than the one I’d set in place before I even considered all the possible ways of living.
Sam couldn’t understand. Why couldn’t we go back to the way we had been?
I was still in love with falling in love. Old habits are hard to break, especially when you can’t recognize them as habit. The new man, Stephen, was unlike anyone I’d ever let myself want. And I wanted him. I couldn’t see that he was another on my well-worn path of falling in love and falling out of love. A distraction from myself and my insecurities and needs.
It took months for me to leave Sam. My leaving was ugly, messy, hurtful. Knowing I wanted to go but not being able to put into words why. No answer would have satisfied Sam. No answer would have made my leaving easier for him.
I tried all the things I’d learned in those classes.
Honesty. “There’s a man I’m attracted to.” Stephen was one of the assistants in the classes. Tall and handsome, and he looked at me like I was someone new.
Integrity. “We haven’t done anything. I just wanted to tell you how I feel.” We hadn’t done anything, that man and I. Not yet. But we talked about it. We met in private. The wanting made it almost as good as the having.
Accountability. “Okay. I won’t leave.” I’d made an agreement to be Sam’s wife, before I knew what an agreement was. I would stay and try to find my love for Sam. But I stopped trying to have a baby and started taking the birth control pills again.
Manipulation. Something they hadn’t taught me in those classes, but I knew anyway. “I’m telling you the truth; I’m just being honest. I’m attracted to someone else, but that’s not the reason I want to leave.” The truth as I saw it then.
Silence. Let the marriage go flat and dry.
Presence. “Live your life as if death is at your left shoulder.” That seed of knowledge germinating. Life can end in a moment. Yes, there was another man. That is not why I needed to leave.
Six months went by.
“It’s over,” I told Sam. Not even four years married.
I went home to tell my parents. Harvest was underway, with Brad operating the combine and Dad running the trucks. I rode with Dad one afternoon, and in between loads, we sat in the shade of the truck while we waited for the combine to come around.
Dad rested his back against the tire. Stretched his legs out on the powder dust left from the tire tracks of combine and truck. “Did he hit you?” he asked. “Was he having an affair?” Trying to make sense of my leaving Sam. “Is there another man?”
“No,” I said. “It’s hard to explain. I don’t want to be with him anymore.”
“We don’t get divorces in this family.” Dad was stunned the way Sam had been stunned. I had stunned myself with my sudden turn from wife to not wife.
A burlap bag hung from the bed of the truck. The bag, damp and cool, held water for the driver. As a girl, when I rode with Dad, I drank the cool water from that bag, let it clear the dry dust of my mouth.
Now, even though it was hot and my mouth was dry, I didn’t take a drink. A small withholding for the pain I’d caused Sam, the worry I had once again become to my parents.