by Jewel
The Family Tree
Mama, I see your face now
In the mirror, it’s getting clearer
Daddy, all those things I said I wouldn’t do
I’ve been drawn to, ’cause I looked up to you
And I’ve loved you through this tangled legacy
Tracing the twisted roots of our family tree
I stayed strong like you did
I moved on like you did
And I wound up tough as stone like you did
If I don’t learn to bend, I know I’m going to break
Like you did
Lover, I must forgive you
I confused you with what I couldn’t see
Inside of me dark things pulling
Not evolving, made a puppet out of me
And you came with your own history
Both caught in the branches of our family tree
I stayed strong like you did
I moved on like you did
I wound up all alone like you did
If I don’t learn to bend, I know I’m gonna break
Just like you did
I love you but I need to look at who we’ve been
Take the fruit but choose the seeds I scatter on the wind
That’s the job of the kid, to do better than our parents did
So I’ll stay strong like you did
And I’ll move on like you did
But I won’t hide from the truth like you did
I’m learning to bend so I don’t break
And you can bet I’ll teach my kid that love will always find its way
just like you did
TO MY SON
long night of the dark soul
what once nurtured me
I must turn from now
yet leave the most tender part of me
behind
half of the time
child
I know you will read this one day
I know you will have questions
I know you will love that which I turn from
dearly as he is a part of you
and so I fear my turning from him
will make you feel as if I turned from
a part of you
as well
this drops me to my knees
even now as I write this
tears sting my eyes
and my lungs turn to iron
too full of sadness to breathe
it breaks my heart
to think you may ever
feel rejected in any part
by my decision
to separate from your father
I want you to love him
as he loves you
so deeply
so undeniably
but what he and I have created
aside from you
has turned from growth
to not merely stagnation
but the opposite of growth
we are reverting
and it is damaging to us both
and compromises us each
to the point I fear it may
compromise you
and so it is with love
that we turn from each other
it is with love for each other
and love for you
though it is hard for me
at this time to feel anything
but sadness for the pain
I fear I inflict on you
I have a hard time forgiving myself
for not seeing things sooner
for not being more perfect
as to figure this out
without leaving
but I suppose
I need to look at myself with the same
kindness I will look at you
when you are older
and you are learning
to form and reform yourself
I must be gentle with myself here for
I never knew love before you
how could I be touched
by something I knew not of in the past?
but loving you has showed me
how to love myself
and in this way your gift is twofold
in my life
loving you has echoed back
and bathes my own love
over me
I love myself enough to leave
I love myself enough to make sure
I am the kind of woman I want you to know
this has set a healing process in motion
it is literally as if
the future washed over the past
to change it forever
and then ripples into the more distant
future
of our family legacy to heal it as well
in ways I cannot foresee yet
but sense
the way an animal senses shelter
is near
it is not about perfection
it’s not about withholding love until
we feel we have earned it
and arrived at perfection
it’s about loving ourselves
in the process of becoming
what we want ourselves to be
it is a work in progress
it is a sculpture
that is not wrestled from stone
immaculately overnight
but the labor of a lifetime
and with hope
we are given a pencil to draw
scratchy lines
and with confidence our family gives us
we find courage to make bold ones
and with self-love
we are given the eraser needed
to scratch out and redraw a more accurate shape
we should not be so bound by shame
that we cannot renegotiate
or reimagine
our selves
we cannot be so bound
by the vision of others
that our own true shape
becomes obscured
. . .
I want to imagine myself boldly
I always wanted to
but you inspire me
even now
at two and a half
to be the best version
of myself I can be
to have the courage to
see myself
so that you may learn to see
yourself also
to imagine yourself
to create yourself in your own image
for you to do that
you need to see it modeled for you
and though it frightens me
I am dedicated to
offering that so you may see
the willingness
to be a work in progress
your father and I came together
in love
and we clung to each other
because each of us
had a puzzle piece
we needed to solve
to the puzzle of ourselves
you were born from love
from longing
desire and purpose birthed you
and our arms
once empty
our hearts
once vacant
now are filled with the song
of your laughter
I know this:
you are with me
but you are not my own
you belong to yourself
you are the arrow
shooting forward into your own life
and
I am the bow that must bend
true
that must be steady enough
for you to go straight into
your own future
without detours through fractures
of my unknowing
you must be free of my past
and supported enough
so that you may hear
your own voice calling
for me to be steady for you
I must heal what is
raging in me
so it does not consume you as well
I go now into my own life
to find the steadiness
so that my past does not become yours
so that our futures have a separate-selfness
so that you can see your own
beautiful shape
not defined by your parents
but sprung forth from us
with love
unconditional
I don’t know
at what age
you will read this
I don’t know what form you will be in
nor do I know the shape
I will be in
I do know
my love for you
will grow
impossibly
. . .
I do know my love for myself
will grow also
I do know I am excited
to watch you unfold the rose petals
of your soul
and blossom
and that though I live with sorrow now
a quiet sense of excitement
is growing in me
to see who I will become
and to discover who you become
and help you on your journey
as steward and vessel
of unconditional love
. . .
for as I am your parent
I am learning to be my own as well
and to provide myself
the space to define and redefine
and if I can believe in myself
the same way I believe in you
I know we will both make
great works of art
of ourselves
and we can laugh and reimagine
and redefine
as we share this journey
together
thirty
i choose love
Ty and I were both kids when we met years ago. We were lucky enough to have a beautiful child. We worked hard on our relationship. But it became evident to me that while we loved each other dearly, we were hurting our love, not building it, and we did not want that to be what our son grew up to see. Ty loves that child more than anything on earth. For me, having a child opened a window into my heart and showed me the kind of woman I wanted to be. Kase inspired me to examine every corner of my heart and soul, and to have more courage than I ever knew I would need.
The failure of my marriage was a loss of a dream I felt incapable of grieving. It was heartbreaking to see the patterns I thought I could escape reemerge in my marriage. When I began to face the fact that our relationship needed to change, I looked deeply inward with all the self-love I could muster. There was still a little broken piece of me that had never seen the light of healing. This part of me continued to look for approval on the outside. It gave another person power over my own sense of self-worth. This wound wreaked havoc on my life until I committed to seeing it and healing it.
Ty and I filed for divorce in April 2014. The shock was staggering. We went for long walks and rode around in his truck, and it was as if the act of saying we would let each other go had immediately soothed many of our struggles. We both wanted a family more than anything in the world, and we both felt so sure we would be married forever. It has been a heartbreak to lose the picture of the family I had so wanted. But something could be salvaged. Ty and I needed to rebuild the friendship that had suffered, and we still got to be a team—Kase deserves two parents who are kind and respectful to each other. Anger and bitterness are not an option when you have a child who loves both his parents more than anything in the world. It has not been easy to do, but nothing worthwhile is.
I found myself in a place I never imagined I would be. A forty-year-old divorcée with a three-year-old. Starting over. Again. My companion of sixteen years was gone. I had few friends and no real place I belonged. I had to move and find a new place to settle down. Suddenly I had three new jobs.
To grieve the death of my marriage,
To examine the dark corners of myself that had yet to be healed,
To be a steady, emotionally available, and grounded mom for my son in this precarious period of transition.
Looking back, I realize that I was so busy surviving and recovering and problem solving since being a toddler that my development as an emotional human stopped at certain times in my life when a crisis stunted it. It’s true for all of us and that’s what inner-child work is—going through the divorce has actually been a lot like engaging in time travel within myself, because for the first time I’m really able to integrate all these parts of myself that didn’t get a chance to grow up. I’m not surviving anything. I’m safe. Parts of us evolve while other parts remain frozen, until our attention allows them to thaw, and our dedication lets them catch up with the rest of us at our current age. I can watch myself now, witness my thoughts, and I can see the historic fears, doubts, and grief that were waiting for the right time to come to the surface.
I was driving the other day, feeling a lot of anxiety. I took a moment to check in with myself and ask what it was rather than just living with it. And suddenly I thought, I really miss having a husband. I really miss having a mom today. I feel small and scared and I wish I had a mom to hold me or to call. A tremendous sadness came over me and I cried as I drove. But I was self-aware too. With the divorce, there is a new layer of grief and a feeling of being so alone in the world. I can allow myself to feel deeply while at the same time witnessing myself. I’m not worried about holding it together anymore. I know how to do that. I’ve held it together, and worked and showed up and been a soldier and a professional pretty much my whole life. Now I’m learning how to let it go when I can, so that the grief doesn’t build up and spill over into the rest of my life. I can tell my grief is escalating when my anxiety surges. Anxiety makes me feel I’m vacant, and so this time I have been actively dealing with my grief and feelings of betrayal in healthy and adult ways, like writing, meditating, taking walks in nature by myself, and therapy. And being still. I want to be a present, happy, and engaged parent for my son, to keep what I am going through from spilling onto him. To do this I make moments to be alone to let myself unload. My mind does not have all the answers. But I don’t need answers to feel safe. I just need to feel my heart beating inside my chest and the beating heart of my son. No one has all the answers. I am learning finally to trust my own ability to know them when I need them. And to know all is well right now. In this second.
I still make sure to dedicate time after I wake and just before I go to bed for my prayers of gratitude. There is always so much to be grateful for, and pain causes us to lose sight of that. It’s important to see how much good there is in the day, and that it always outweighs the pain. My son is such a beautiful miracle. Ty and I are both committed to being great parents and finding our way with love. I am healthy. I have a job I love.
And I have Lee. When I was sixteen, I told him I was headed to the Talkeetna Bluegrass Festival five hundred miles away to sing. He asked how I would get there, and I said I’d hitchhike. When he asked who I was singing with, I said I would just find a band onstage and ask if I could sit in with them. He was there when I returned a week later and told him that I did indeed get up and get to sing. He was by my side as I wrote my first songs. I wrote him letters
when I was lonely at school, and told him first when I got signed. He was by my side as I toured the world. He has been through the turmoil with my mom, my romances, the birth of my son, and my divorce. All the major events in my life. He lives with me still, and helps me with Kase, and nourishes us in so many ways. He plays never-ending games of dragons, and reads the same book to Kase a thousand times in a row, and gives hundreds of horse rides on his knee to my little boy. Kase loves him. Lee sticks by my side in whatever is next in my life. If love and partnership mean being a witness to someone’s life, and loving and supporting them the whole way through no matter what, then Lee is my surprising love story. We create our own families in life, and he and Kase are mine. Having Lee’s support during my divorce has made a stressful time manageable. I feel so blessed to have him as a friend. He is the embodiment of an Every Day Angel.
Life is simple right now. Simplicity is where happiness is for me and where I can heal from. I get up and get my son up. I feed him and brush his teeth and we play before I take him to a few hours of preschool. While he is there I work half the time on my job and half the time on myself. I employ all the skills I have learned with time, and the first one is being here now and asking, What do I need today? What does that part of me that is sad need? Often it just needs witnessing, some room to be seen and known and experienced. Unfelt feelings don’t cease to exist; they stay bottled up in our minds and our bodies. They dissipate when given expression. A heart can break only if it is closed—if it remains open there is nothing to break. I am learning to be a whole human who has the internal permission to allow myself to find expression without editing.
The divorce is teaching me to be impossibly supple and open. I know I am strong enough to see the truth and handle it now. I feel energized. This is life. Happiness is not a perpetual state. It’s not like saying, “I found Europe. I’m living in Europe now.” You have to get happy with the process. To me, there’s a real peace in accepting that, and being able to say life is never one thing. It’s all things. The whole universe is expanding, stretching, tearing down, and creating, and we are made of the same stuff. We expand, contract, decay, and grow all at once. We are mirrors of the universe and the natural world and what created us. We are made like trees, with our roots firmly planted in the ground, and if we can see we are built to bend and give, then the winds of life will pass through our branches without breaking us. Some days it passes through with fury. Some days with a gentle caress. Each morning I wake with gratitude that I can have the confidence to meet these ups and downs without being uprooted. The faith to step into pain when it comes and the courage to let it ravage me and pass through instead of hanging on to it and letting it tear me down. Life is ever-changing. What is consistent is knowing I am up for anything. That I am never broken.