Peace From Broken Pieces: How to Get Through What You're Going Through

by Vanzant, Iyanla

  If you were to ask me, I would tell you unequivocally that it was all about him: loving, wanting, needing him. Being afraid to love and know him; trying to figure out how to please him. And feeling that I had failed him miserably.

  It started as puppy love. I met Eden when I was a 14-year-old youth worker. He was a 17-year-old senior youth counselor. He was tall and thin. I was short and sort of round. I was nervous and chatty. He was very calm and collected. He walked with me through a several-day process of trying to get the New York City Summer Youth Program to find my records and issue my check. Each day, for seven long days, he made all of the telephone calls, talked to all of the people, and helped me fill out all of the forms required to remedy an administrative blunder. He never got upset with the ridiculous questions we were asked. He never, not even once, got upset when a person in this office sent us over to a person in that office, only to have that person send us back to the first office. Each day he would ask me if I had bus fare. He would also ask me if I had lunch money. When I did not, he would buy lunch for me. Each day that we were together, I grew more in love with him.

  Maybe it was his gentle nature or the way he spoke firmly but softly. Maybe it was the way he smiled or the way he smelled. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but I do know that for the first time in my life, I felt I mattered. He was the first man who ever seemed willing to stand up for me. At least that is what I told myself. Then again, remember, I was only 14 at the time. Eight months earlier, I had given birth to a child. Two months earlier, I had buried her. To say I was an emotionally vulnerable mess would be an understatement. And still, there was something about him. He seemed so willing to protect me, to make sure that I had what I needed when I needed it. That was a new experience for me. That was the hook. Maybe he was all the things I thought he was. Maybe not. Could be. Who knows? There was, however, one slight challenge: He was involved with one of my closest friends, and he had another lover, an older woman, on the side. Or perhaps my friend was his side dish. It was hard to know back then.

  The winter after our summer “together,” he broke up with my friend and married the other woman. They stayed together for 15 years and had five children together, while I watched and loved him from a distance. I never forgot—could never forget—the way I felt when I was with him. I wanted to feel like that again, forever. I made up that it would only be possible with him. That was not the truth.

  Back then, in the beginning, I loved him and everything about him even after he was married. I loved the way he looked; the way he walked; the way he smelled—like sandalwood—behind his ears, in his beard, and on his wrists. I loved the scent of him that lingered in the room long after he was gone. He was the first man who held my hand. When he looked at me, I thought he could see me. In my mind, that meant he accepted me, and I fell in love with that idea about him. I am told that you could see my love for him in my eyes. That love grew from a puppy into a pit bull that would rip pieces from the fibers of my soul for 37 years.

  True love is powerful, though not always in the way you think. Even when your experiences with love have nothing to do with the truth that love is, your desire to know love will have a powerful impact on your life. It will dredge up everything that is unloving within you and around you. The more I loved him, the more unlovable I felt. The more unlovable I felt, the uglier I believed I was. The uglier I believed I was, the more unworthy I thought I was in my own mind. The more unworthy I thought I was, the harder I held on to what I thought I did not deserve. It was painful; loving him and believing I didn’t deserve to be loved. Back then, pain was my drug of choice. It was a vicious cycle that had very little to do with him. A friend said it was almost like I was possessed. And I was. I was so possessed by him that I forgot, on many occasions, to possess myself; to honor me and love me. I was possessed enough to stay with him, knowing, as I did, that there were pieces of me that were badly broken or missing altogether.

  In our close-knit Brooklyn circle, Eden was The Man; someone well known and admired in the cultural nationalist, social activist community. He was the “go-to” man, well connected, who knew how to get things done. If what you needed or wanted had anything to do with culture, politics, or community affairs, he was involved. Although he didn’t own a car and had never worn a suit, he was the one people called upon when there was something of importance going on in the community. I wanted to put on a benefit concert for the refugees of war-torn Biafra. At the time, I was a 30-year-old college student making a name for myself as President of the Student Government Association of Medgar Evers College. I needed connections and contacts, so I went to him. He was more than willing to help and knew exactly who I needed to speak to. We made a plan and walked through it together. In the process, those familiar feelings resurfaced and I was hooked again.

  Before I knew what was happening, Eden and I were talking every day, first about the concert and then about other things too. We were meeting and eating lunch together. We were laughing together. On the day of the concert, he made sure that everyone and everything was in place. He managed the stage and served as master of ceremonies. It was a beautiful event, and we raised over $1,000. We were so proud of what we had done together, and of each other.

  The first few days after the event, we had to make excuses to call each other. Then it just became natural. One day as we were sitting in my car, he told me about the breakup with his wife. He was sad and, I think, very angry. He was living with his mother in Queens, so I would drop him off at the subway station. It was hard for him to get out of the car that day. It was even harder for me to watch him go. For the next few weeks, I became his sounding board. He talked about his wife and children. He talked about how wrong she was and how bad it hurt. He talked about his hopes and dreams and wishes for his future. He also talked about how difficult it was for him to make the transition from being a married man to being single. I listened and tried to help him see things another way, a better way. I think his sense of pride was hurt because his sense of value and worth was rooted in his family but I also knew his heart was broken.

  Back then, I didn’t know anything about rebound relationships. I didn’t know that it takes a respectable amount of time for one person to get over another person and come to a place of completion. Back then, I only knew how he made me feel. I was really sorry, with him and for him, that his marriage had fallen apart. I was also really happy and really scared for me. It felt like I was about to have something that I really wanted, something that made me feel good about myself. I was happy because, hey, what woman wouldn’t be happy to have a fine-looking, intelligent man in her life? I was scared because I thought I was unlovable, ugly, and unworthy. I didn’t tell him that I felt that way, but I did.

  Then, one evening while we were sitting at the subway station, he asked me if he could kiss me. Can you believe it? He asked me! We had spent so much time talking about his wife, his children, and his plans, I felt like his therapist, not a potential lover. Even back then, I knew I could not be both, so I asked him a question. “Do you want to be in my head or in my bed? You cannot have both.” My response to his response was, I took him home with me that night. The rest is now our history.

  When you want and need something as bad as I wanted and needed to be loved, you will allow yourself to believe anything at all. I made up that the universe had put the stars in just the right place, at just the right time, to bring us together. It all seemed to make sense to me—that’s why he had taken such tender care of me when I was 14 years old. That’s why we were never too far from each other’s reach. That’s why I continued to drool over him for the 15 years that he was with someone else. God and the universe knew that the day would come when he would leave his wife and five children to be with me. It makes absolutely no sense to me now, but at age 30, it is what I told myself.

  I needed and wanted to be accepted. I needed and wanted to matter. I existed on the fringes of the cultural community as a dancer. I was always involved in commun
ity activities, but I was not a member of the in-crowd. Most of the people who knew him only knew me in passing. In his crowd, I was just “the next one.” I did not know I was expected to be friends with his ex-wives and ex-girlfriends. I did not know that an angry, hurt man who was not accountable to anyone in his life was a dangerous person.

  I never thought of myself as being involved with a married man, but the truth is, he was only separated from his wife. They still owned the house she lived in, and they still co-parented their children. They still spoke almost every day, and the truth is, he still wanted her. He was mad as hell at her, but he wanted to be with his family.

  My mother was also the “other woman” in someone’s marriage. She loved my father enough to have two children with him while he was married to someone else. My father left my mother every night to go home to his wife, who lived within walking distance of the place where my parents conceived my brother and me. Undoubtedly, that was when my mother drank. I am told that my father and mother had a tumultuous and sometimes violent relationship. I am told that, in spite of the pleading of her sisters, my mother would not leave my father. I am told that she really loved him. Without even knowing it or me, my mother taught me how to love a man. It was a self-denying, self-debasing kind of love. It became something that I despised about myself.

  My mother was an alcoholic who discovered she had breast cancer when she was pregnant with me. My father wanted her to have an abortion, which back then would have meant a coat hanger and a kitchen table. She refused. As I was being formed in my mother’s womb, my being was being filled with guilt, fear, and suffering, programmed at a cellular level with her pathology of worthlessness and pain. I eventually figured out that this explained why, for more than half of my life, I felt so bad about myself; why I thought I was such a bad person. Eventually, I discovered that my badness was a story that I inherited.

  I think my cultural warrior thought he loved me, and I know he needed me at that time. I was his escape, “a temporary distraction,” as one of his ex-girlfriends called me. I knew I loved him, or perhaps I loved what he represented for me: stability, protection, and acceptance. I was determined to make it work for us; for me. I stayed with him that first time for five years, despite the fact that I spent most of my time wondering when he was going to leave. Eden had several affairs that I knew about, and a host of ex-lovers who were now just friends. He was the father of five. You might ask how I could stay with him in the face of his failure to commit to me or our relationship fully. My first answer would be, I was addicted to pain; debilitating and devastating emotional pain.

  My second answer is that I felt profoundly connected to this man. I thought we were good friends and that we talked about everything. I thought he was a great listener and that his feedback was being offered with care, concern, and compassion simply because he didn’t yell at me. One powerful lesson I learned from him was that just because a man is a good man, it does not mean that he knows how to be a good partner. Then again, it could be that some people, even people who love each other, are simply not cut out to be together. When two broken people bring their broken pieces together, chances are they will never become a whole anything.

  There were so many signs along the way that he and I were not going to work. I chose to ignore the signs. Like the time I went to visit a friend in the Bronx and left my keys at home. When I returned at 2 A.M., my children were dead-to-the-world asleep. I walked the five blocks from my apartment to his, hoping to sleep for a few hours until they woke up. I rang his bell for several minutes before he came down. To my surprise, he looked wide awake. After a few seconds of silence, he told me “This is not a good time.” I didn’t catch his meaning until I realized he wasn’t moving out of the doorway.

  “What does that mean, this is not a good time?”

  “It means it’s not.”

  “Why not?”

  “I have a friend over. She’s sleeping.”

  “So I guess you are telling me to sleep in the street.”

  “No. But this is not a good time.”

  “Well, I guess it’s not.”

  I took a cab to my girlfriend’s house on the other side of town. She stayed up with me for the rest of the night as I cried my heart out. By the time I got home, he had called several times. I waited until he called at least ten more times before I called him back. He was sorry. He was so very sorry. I wanted to end the suffering, so I accepted his apology. I never asked him anything about that night.

  Shortly after that, he went back to school to get his graduate degree, and I went to law school. I helped him type his papers. There was little he could do to help with my studies. We enjoyed being together and being good friends, talking and laughing together, sharing money and child care. What we did not do was talk about a future. We never talked about him getting a divorce or us getting married. We never talked about getting a house where all of the children could be together. We never talked about my plans after law school or his plans after graduate school. In fact, we avoided talking about anything that would give our relationship permanency.

  One day, something shifted. We never talked about it, but I could feel it. Before I could figure out what to say or do about it, he started disappearing. If I called him to say good-night, he wouldn’t answer. If I called to tell him to have a good day, he was already gone. I was in such deep denial, I refused to believe that a married man having a relationship with the “other woman” would dare to have another other woman. I was wrong and I was right.

  One Friday night when I should have been studying, I went to his apartment and let myself in. Everything was dark and quiet. I have never been a snooper, so I did not look in his closet or his drawers. Instead, I sat on the edge of the bed in the dark, and I waited—just like I had waited for my father many times before.

  He arrived as the sun was coming up. He had come home to get dressed for work. He was shocked to see me, but I am sure he knew it was coming sooner or later.

  “How long have you been here?”

  “All night.”

  Trying to think of what to say or what to do, I patted on the bed indicating that he should come and sit down next to me. He did. We were silent for several long minutes.

  “Tell me what is going on.”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Well, you’ve got to know something, because you didn’t come home last night. Just tell me what you want to do.”

  “I’m really not sure.” More silence. Then the one-two punch. “Carol always said she wondered what it would be like to be the other woman. And now she is.”

  “You were with Carol?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you two getting back together?”

  “I’m really not sure.”

  I was getting just a bit tired of “I’m not sure.”

  “Well, when do you think you might be able to figure it out?” More silence.

  “The only thing I know right now is that I don’t want to lose you. I love you and I love what we have. But Carol and the children are a part of who I am.”

  I gathered my purse, my dignity, and the little pieces of my brain that were spilling out of my ears onto the floor, and without another word I walked out of the apartment.

  Over the next three weeks, we spoke on the phone just a few times. Many nights when he did not call, I would drive by her house—their house—to see if his car was there. It always was. One night, I left a note on his windshield: I guess you have figured out what you want to do. It would have been nice of you to let me know.

  After that, I fell apart. I slept all day and cried all night. I quit my job and rarely went to class. For all intents and purposes, I abandoned my children on the other side of the bedroom door. Every morning, I would get up and walk three blocks to the Catholic church that was open 24 hours a day. I prayed to St Jude, the Patron of Impossible Causes. I prayed to the Blessed Mother. Sometimes I just sat in the church and cried, hoping that God would take pity on me. This w
ent on for months. I remember that when summer turned to fall, I was still praying in that church. I stopped going when it got cold.

  Between sleeping, praying, and crying, I would call him. I would beg. I would plead. Nothing worked. He said very little. The same way he failed to commit to being with me, he wouldn’t commit to leaving me either—he simply wouldn’t talk about it. I thought about killing myself, but I would not do that to my children. Instead, I made up two good plan B’s. The first was to get evicted from my apartment. I didn’t need to plan that consciously—it is sure to happen when you quit your job and stop paying the rent. Surely if I had no place to live, he would come to rescue me. He had moved from his first apartment and was sharing a duplex home with a friend. I thought it was a good sign that he had not moved back “home” yet, and if I needed a place, he would definitely provide one for me. I was right and I was wrong.

  He told me he was going to Cuba for two weeks and that I could come and stay at his place. Then he told me that when he came back, he would be moving back home. So I implemented my second plan B: I stopped breathing. I took in just enough air to keep me alive, but not enough to move life’s energy through my body; that way, I didn’t have to feel my heart exploding into a million pieces. If I just continued to sip in little snatches of air and spaced them far enough apart, I would not lose my mind. I was right! I didn’t lose my mind, but it went on a long vacation. It took me three years to breathe again.