We All Start Out Knowing Magic

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I know I said I was done this week, but I just remembered another story from this week I want to document. 

While speaking with my aunt on Valentine's Day, she mentioned a couple whose marriage had survived a spell of infidelity. I knew them, but who I really knew was the sister of the wife in that marriage. In fact, she was a good friend and we worked together.

I don't recall exactly what day, but sometime that Valentine's Day week I found my friend in the Junior High School staff room. I honestly had no idea how to broach the subject ("Hey! So your brother-in-law cheated on your sister, eh? How'd that go?), so I didn't think I would. In any case, I was happy to sit a moment and just have some company.

My friend was getting ready to teach a class on writing (she's a beautiful writer, I loved wandering into her classroom during the lunch hour and reading any examples she had slapped on the whiteboard). She had prepared a handout with a segment from the book "Boy's Life" by Robert McCammon to help them see how storytelling can be lyrical, beautiful, more than just getting a reader from point A to B. Since she was busy, I knew now probably wasn't a good time for a conversation so I asked if I could read the handout. This is what I read:

"I wanted to set my memories down on paper, where I can hold them. You know, I do believe in magic. I was born and raised in a magic time, in a magic town, among magicians. Oh, most everybody else didn't realize we lived in that web of magic, connected by the silver filaments of chance and circumstance. But I knew it all along. When I was twelve years old, the world was my magic lantern, and by its green spirit glow I saw the past, the present, and into the future. You probably did, too; you just don't recall it. See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God's sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they'd allowed to wither in themselves.

"After you go so far away from it, though, you can't really get it back. You can have seconds of it. Just seconds of knowing and remembering. When people get weepy at movies, it's because in that dark theater the golden pool of magic is touched, just briefly. Then they come out into the hard sun of logic and reason again and it dries up, and they're left feeling a little heartsad and not knowing why. When a song stirs a memory, when motes of dust turning in a shaft of light takes your attention from the world, when you listen to a train passing on a track at night in the distance and wonder where it might be going, you step beyond who you are and where you are. For the briefest of instants, you have stepped into the magic realm.

"That's what I believe.

"The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another. It's not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You don't know it's happening until one day you feel you've lost something but you're not sure what it is. It's like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you "sir." It just happens."

I don't think I made it to the end of the first paragraph before the tears started to fall. I didn't know the words to describe it, but I too have always believed in magic. My patriarchal blessing describes me as "having an exuberance for life." I love it here, and I've done my best to carry what little magic remained from my childhood into my parenting and adult life. But there I was, every day that year getting "... farther away from the essence that is born within us." My magic had been stripped and broken down into something unrecognizable. I didn't even realize it until I read that. I was in survival mode and I didn't know if I would ever feel the magic again.

Imagine my friend's surprise when she looked up to ask if I liked it and she found me with tears running down me face. Part of me thought I could pretend I was crying because it was such a beautiful passage, fortunately I was saved from playing the fool when my friend asked, "Oh no! What's wrong?" And I just went for it, "How did your sister and brother-in-law stay married?" 

Truthfully, I don't really remember a lot of the conversation that followed. I summarized the state of affairs in my marriage. I explained how my aunt mentioned her sister as the gold standard to follow. She shared how hard it was as a sister to watch her endure that pain and remain faithful (there's something about sisters I tell ya, they want blood). I took two things away from our conversation:

1. The transgressing spouse has to have a massive change of heart. They have to want back in. They have to also choose to repair the marriage.

2. The importance of emotional "pallbearers." You never see a casket being dragged to the final resting place by one person. I don't think the task can even realistically be accomplished by less than four people for a deceased adult. All I did was talk with a friend for roughly 10 minutes and the figurative coffin of my dying marriage felt more bearable. There was nothing she could do for me besides listen, maybe pray, but just by her knowing what I was going through, I felt lighter. We really aren't meant to carry heavy emotional loads alone, just like a casket cannot be transported by a single person. At this point going forward, I began to slowly invite loving friends and family members to be pallbearers to the heartbreaking burden I was carrying. I'm so, so grateful to the people in my circle who stood beside me, took a handle, and made my burden lighter.