How Saying Yes to My Ex Changed My Life

On a heart in need of repair.

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How Saying Yes to My Ex Changed My Life

As of last week, my house is lakefront property. That's an exaggeration. But it is certainly now pond-front property, which doesn't have the same ring to it. Maybe, if we ever go to sell it, we'll list it as waterfront. 

When I first walked into this house while it was on the market, I didn't really see it. I was grieving. We had just lost a house with which I had fallen quickly and recklessly in love. That house, much like my mind and heart most days, was in need of almost every type of repair. Roof (mind), electrical (heart), septic (body), structural (soul). But it had stained concrete floors! Established rose bushes! A defunct but rescuable veggie garden! (This turned out to be built on top of the septic, so not actually rescuable at all!) A view of the hills! A second, attached, lot! (With said septic and poisonous garden!)

We moved on. My Now-Husband, feeling like we'd barely escaped grave danger. Me feeling like I'd lost out on the only thing that could make everything alright. Me, feeling like I'd made a huge mistake. Me, feeling 13 years old again, listening to my parents fight and telling me they were getting a divorce and selling our house, the only place I felt safe in an emotionally violent and dangerous world.

Amber and I had been best friends since I was four and she was five. To get to her house from mine, you walked down my street, paused at the stop sign of the road that went left up the big hill, and dead ended to the right at my babysitter's house (whose mom I liked much better, she gave me butterscotch and cinnamon candy, let me touch and open her collection of tiny perfume bottles and would talk to me for hours), then you passed the house of the old people who never came outside, next the house with the cat in the window, and then you turned left down Amber's court. She lived at the bottom, by the dry creek bed and had a hard plastic disc on a rope in her backyard that swung over the canyon left by the creek and onto the steep slope behind.

We had been best friends for half of my life. Then, one day, she stopped. No warning, no nothing. She'd met Anika, the new girl and instant Queen of the Mean Girls. One morning she and Anika were waiting for me where usually just Amber stood on her side of the street. We'd meet in the middle and walk to school. But this morning, as I crossed towards them, they snickered and whispered and ran ahead pointing at me and saying I smelled and I was ugly. For the rest of the year, they would walk the 30 minutes to and from school together waiting for me on the corner so they could whisper and laugh at me from the other side of the street. At home, my father was teaching me how to feel ugly and small, stupid and unwanted. Amber was my respite, my proof that he was wrong. And then I learned that he was right.

I sat at the piano one day, trying to practice quietly (no mistakes out loud until you could play the piece perfectly) and couldn't see the keys through the tears. My mom came over and put her hand on my back and said, "You miss her, don't you?" Then she walked away. We never spoke about it again. This was a woman, I would learn 20 years later, who had been coerced to give up her baby at 24. She knew grief, loss, abandonment. I wonder how my heart would have grown, what different shape it would have taken had my mother sat down next to me that day instead.

The house we now own, the waterfront house, was also a mess when we bought it. Dirty, beat up, it was the aftermath of a good bender where the details are fuzzy, your hair reeks of cigarettes though you don't smoke, your shoes are gone and you're going to have to retrace your steps to find your ID – if only you remembered where all you'd been. But its walls were solid, the wiring worked, it was hooked up to the city sewer and the roof would last another summer or two. So we bought it. Or mostly I stood by and let my husband buy it. I hated it and wanted the house with the view and the roses. The house that reminded me of the one I grew up in.

It's eight months later now and we are being blessed with rain this winter. After two parched years, the gray skies and damp days are a balm. I am hopeful for a summer of swimming in the creeks. For animals that aren't dying from thirst. For aquifers replenished. 

Our backyard looks out over the fence to seven acres of open space, designated as a dog park, built around a water catchment basin. Austin has these all over town - we are a city of water built on a limestone bed which keeps us dry. Until too many people discovered Austin and the aquifer is now lower than it has ever been in the recorded history of Texas. This worries me greatly, but so do most things in the world right now. Even Taylor Swift, or rather our obsession with her. But also, maybe she can single handedly save this country from a dictatorship. Could she be the one who helps us see the threads of commonality that run between us, rather than the blades of disconnect? Taylor for president, anyone?

These catchment reservoirs collect water when we get our tropical deluges, keeping roads and homes from flash flooding. Most are just huge bowls with flat sides cut into the ground, carpeted in grass and groundcover, and in the spring, wildflowers.

The one behind our house is different. Someone made a plan. They included reeds and other water-loving plants so instead of just a holding tank full of anaerobic algae-clogged water that sits for a week, we have a small, mostly year-round wetland in our backyard. There is a resident great blue heron and a visiting white one. A dozen ducks chug around all day long and the starlings come in to roost every evening. I pop out my back door for sunset in late afternoon and watch the clouds light up, a glowing backdrop to the starlings' murmurations as they settle in for the night.

Big rocks, natural to Texas, rise up in groups and live oaks cluster around the periphery of the property and form a mini forest blocking us from the farm road beyond.

This little oasis is maintained by our HOA, which, since we've been here and by the looks of it for some years, has been a hands-off kind of maintenance. Undergrowth stood seven feet high around all the trees and in the mini forest, which was fine with us, it hid our house from view and made us feel cozy and private. 

And then the leaves started to fall and we could see bits and pieces of the pond from our kitchen windows. A view! There was a view! I went out and secretly trimmed a few bramble branches, making a little peep hole through the mess. 

In April, at the same time we were not buying my dream house, my once-husband reached out to me asking to talk. I said no. My heart wasn't ready. I was afraid he'd tell me all the ways in which I'd been shitty to him, all the ways I already knew about, had already punished myself for. The cuts on my legs in the bathroom stall for the way I'd left, the distance I kept from other people for the way I'd stayed, the constant anxiety for all the rest. 

In June, Once-husband asked again – the same week we moved into this house. This time, my intuition told me to say yes. 

And then we had a conversation. He gently poured words over the scars on my heart and because hearts are miraculous, magical things (if we let them be what they truly are and don't try to protect them so much from things that our minds can't handle), mine began to expand back towards the shape it was before my dad and Amber got a hold of it: infinite, smooth, pliable, open.

When Amber left my life, Once-husband came into it. He was my best friend until I was 37. He never believed what my dad and Amber told me, but by the time I met him, I couldn't believe anything but. And his love wasn't enough to overcome that. 

But now, his willingness to say it wasn't all my fault, that he's forgiven us both, it's the leaves falling off the trees and showing me a view I didn't know I had.

Once-husband and I have been talking more frequently, about big things, about small ones. Most of our conversations make me cry with healing and relief. He called a couple of weeks ago, just to chat. We laughed and also discussed violence in films and its effect on our collective psyche. Then called me this past Saturday from a deck in Lake Tahoe, again just to chat, and share the view. It's been 13 long years since this friend of mine has called to chat. 

The HAO's tree trimming crew arrived in force last week. Four trucks, 10 men, several chainsaws. They cleared all the undergrowth away, trimmed dead branches, cleared years and years of brambles and overgrown weeds. I watched as the view got wider and wider, showing me the left end of the pond, the far right end where the water doesn't always reach, the grace of the hills beyond the farm across the road, all the way to the horizon, where the sun sets and leaves it's technicolor show behind for us to revel in.