Screaming

Yesterday Janet O. and I had a spontaneous two-hour Thai lunch.  Our temperaments, our politics, and our sensibilities are very similar. We're both conflict-averse, outwardly mild, and slow to anger (at least in the expression thereof).  As we talked, we were angry together, but not at each other.

Afterwards, she invited me to attend a political event, but I was too emptied out from screaming the night before to join a group.

"I have never screamed at anyone in my  life until this year," I told her.  "Not even my children when they were little. I'm not a yeller."

Saturday night I'd had a three-hour phone conversation with Mike in which I screamed, cried, ranted and said mean things--along with some rational and kind things.  It was one of the most healing, cleansing, liberating three hours of my life.

What made it healing, cleansing and liberating was that he (this crazy man, this on-again, off-again mensch)  stayed with me for three hours and listened to every word, every scream, encouraging me to let it all out. He didn't interrupt or say "now, now, calm down," not once.

A year ago, we'd experienced something that devastated us both. For a while we stumbled along the bumpy pot-holed road together, but we ultimately found ourselves at a fork in the road.  He went one way, I went the other.  For months, I've been trying to figure out what happened, walking around in a daze of sadness. On Saturday night, we both finally heard and understood the other's point of view.

As a man, he can't help wanting to fight back when things from the outside hurt him; as this woman that I am, I get a deer-in-the-headlights look on my face and go silent--except for talking about it with my friends and family.  Maybe it's fair to say that men and women have different styles of dealing with conflict?

After I was done screaming, he said, "You're the love of my life.  I love you more than breathing, always will."  That kind of generosity was breathtaking! Anything is better than bottled rage, but it takes a long time to find someone who can "love you more than breathing" even if you yell so loud  the neighbors can hear it.

Twenty years ago, a therapist tried to get me to bash pillows with a baseball bat and scream.  I couldn't do it.  I had nothing against those innocent pillows.

Besides, I've always been scared of anger, afraid that the other person would just chalk me up as a nutcase and leave.  To have someone hold my hands across the miles and listen, without defensiveness or telling me how I "should" feel and still love me?  That was huge!

Who knows where this road will take us?  We're both too battered to know right now, but we love and respect each other, always will.

The soundtrack of our story, however, may be a verse of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah:  "Love is not a victory march, it's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah."

***

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

-Mary Oliver