My Life So Far (88 page)

“Ted,” I said, “don’t you mean ‘magnanimous’?”

“Oh yes,” he replied proudly. “I didn’t use to be able to say the word
monogamous
at all, but now I use it so much, I say it by mistake. Pretty cute, huh?”

Before this early crisis in our relationship, I would feel Ted leave me energetically if an especially inviting woman came around. At those moments I would imagine the testosterone washing through his frontal lobe and obliterating all else. After the crisis, I swear I could feel his antennae retracting.

On the steps of Avalon Plantation just after the wedding.

(© Barbara Pyle)

Our Hollywood wedding party given for us by (left to right) Barry and Carole Hirsch and Paula Weinstein and her husband, Mark Rosenberg.

Over the years, Ted and I were given many tools that helped smooth things out in our relationship. We developed better communication skills; we learned the importance of “skin time”—when we would lie together quietly, skin to skin, and have it not be about performing. I discovered that Ted abhorred being presented with faits accomplis, so I tried vigilantly to avoid presenting them. But, sadly, I learned that this was easier said than done. It was easy to consult and discuss things before doing them when the things were relatively insignificant and external, like moving a painting, changing dinnertime, buying a new saddle. But when later in the marriage they were decisions of critical importance to me—having to do with spiritual faith or with spending time with Vanessa when she was about to give birth—I would simply arrange to do what I felt I needed to do. I was accustomed to not having my feelings and needs respected by the men in my life, and I feared that if I opened up such decisions for discussion, I would be bullied out of them or they would be denied me outright—or love would be taken away. (As it turned out, my fears were well-founded.) Those times were very infrequent, but they ended up playing a role in the dissolution of our marriage.

While it was Ted’s dalliance that brought us into the therapists’ offices, I decided that in addition to our couples counseling, I wanted to work separately on my own issues. I sensed that my relationship with Ted, with all its challenges, was my opportunity to heal, and because I so wanted the marriage to work, I was willing to do the needed work on myself. Ted never did the same. Still, given how he was raised, it is extraordinary that he was willing to do as much as he did.

For those of us who harbor old ghosts (doesn’t everybody?), it is in our relationships that they surface, and then we are confronted with a choice: Either we learn to manage the ghosts or we settle for distance or instability. Some can learn the managing part on their own; some, like me, need the help of a trained professional to put the pieces back together.

I believe that the moment I met Ted, I intuited that this man was the one my heart could finally, fully, open to. I thought that all the elements were there for the kind of deep soul-to-soul love that I had never really had with anyone before. Ironically, this was why I fled from him at first and was so skittish when we started going together: I was frightened of the vulnerability that comes with the heart’s opening and was scared of being hurt and steamrolled. With Ted I was determined to put this fear behind me. I wanted us to be two fully authentic people meeting in mutual affection, communication, affirmation, and respect—and I assumed that’s what he wanted as well. After all, he was constantly talking about wanting intimacy and reminding me that I was afraid of it. It never occurred to me that he was too . . . well, not afraid of it so much as incapable of it.

The crisis with Ted was actually a blessing, because it had brought me to Beverly Morse, who turned out to be the perfect guide for the next part of my journey to . . . what shall I call it? Wholeness. Heartfulness. Authenticity. Integration? I had been living for so long in my head. What was essential for me now was to get back into my body, where I hadn’t been since adolescence—to be reembodied. I have discovered that there are different degrees of embodiment, and certainly, with Ted’s love, I made major forays in that direction. But Beverly’s method of using breathing techniques and bodywork—“somatic therapy”—took me to a deeper level. Over the years, with her help and a lot of hard work on my part, I was able to gain confidence. I learned to forgive my mother and so was able to forgive myself for my shortcomings; to know that I had done the best I could with what I had at any given time, just as my mother had; that I was no longer the woman with little love to give. I was learning to love myself. Baby steps at first, a beginning.

When I look back now over the landscape of my ten years with Ted, on the one hand I am struck by how happy I was much of the time, growing stronger and more confident every year. In part this was due to the personal work I was doing on myself, and in part it was because of the positive, centering role I knew I played in Ted’s life. Yet alongside this, behind the closed doors of the most intimate parts of our relationship, I still deafened myself to the signals from my body telling me how
not-
good I felt about many things he did that hurt me and about things I agreed to do to please him even if it went against my own well-being. I would drink to get numb and stuff my feelings in order to be sure Ted felt good. I would accommodate his needs (even when he didn’t ask me directly) out of fear of not being loved. I thought I had gotten over this “disease to please” with the ending of my marriage to Vadim. And, again, when the marriage to Tom ended, I thought, Well, I’ll never do
that
again. But this burying, this betraying, of myself was such an ingrained part of my modus operandi that in each new relationship I repeated the pattern, managed hardly to notice, and convinced myself that somehow the problems would just fade away. Besides, life with Ted was full and interesting, and denial was relatively easy.

I tried my best to understand and comply with his need to fill empty spaces with movement, activity, or the planning thereof. After all, it wasn’t as if I were a stay-at-home slouch myself. Actually we were rather well-balanced when it came to levels of energy. I still loved winging back and forth among his beautiful properties and being privy to the exciting events that swirled around us. I knew that together we were making a difference. I still found myself smiling when I heard him coming through the door. There were still times of rapture and melting. But the rigidity of our schedules and the constant moving had begun to empty me out.

We would no sooner arrive and settle into one of the Nebraska ranches, for example, than two days later we’d be off to the next one. Every time we’d walk into a new place, Ted would kiss me and say, “Welcome home,” a ritual that I found charming. And God knows I worked hard to make every place feel like home. But
I
felt homeless. Homeless with twenty houses—weird. When saleswomen would ask if the two dozen panties I’d just bought should be wrapped as gifts, I’d laugh. They were all for me, to be spread out among the different places.

We both got a kick out of the extremes of our life, from muddy jeans and waders to tuxedos and gowns and back again within less than twenty-four hours. But with all the yawing between extremes, there was little time to put down the roots I have always yearned for. Nor was I able to spend time on things that mattered deeply to me, like reading, working on the fledgling Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention, or, most important, spending time with my children. If I wanted to see them, I had to ask them to arrange to meet us somewhere along our travel route. I felt their disappointment acutely, and it pained me because I knew they were right in feeling that I was again losing myself, and them, just to make the marriage work. I would have liked Ted to understand and support such needs of mine. And he tried—but only when my needs didn’t interfere with his own. It’s not that I didn’t
know
what I needed to do; it was that I didn’t have the courage to go ahead and
do
it. I was not ready to enter an authentic relationship with
myself
if it meant risking my marriage.

Have you noticed how we are presented with the same lessons, over and over and over, before a tipping point is reached? The lessons we need to learn circle round us, closing in, until finally we are ready to take them in.
Take them in.
Those are the words that matter, because until I had
embodied
the lessons I was supposed to learn, absorbed them into the warp and woof of my being, they didn’t “take”; they remained a head trip and didn’t lead to changes in my behavior.

W
e’d been together eight years, married for six. Behaviors destructive to the relationship had gone unchallenged and become sacrosanct, like squatter’s rights. When I became resentful and would turn inward, he would fragment and yell that I was abandoning him. I had learned not to argue, not to say a word, just to let him vent. It was his safety valve. In spite of this, on Ted’s scale of one to ten (he always rated things numerically), life hovered around six . . . in other words, more good than bad.

To complicate matters, I could feel myself yearning for spirituality in my life, something I had to keep to myself because of Ted’s hostility to anything metaphysical. I found myself increasingly interested in questions about God. What
is
God? What is it I feel is “leading” me? One day in south Georgia a conservative Christian asked me if I had been saved. He was not coming from a friendly place, and feeling his hostility, I chose not to engage. I let him know that I felt myself to be a spiritual person. But his question stuck with me.

I went to my friend Andrew Young, civil rights leader, former UN ambassador, and minister, and asked him if he thought I should be saved.

“You don’t need to,” he replied. “You’re already saved.” And he went on to tell me that the original Greek meaning of the word
saved
meant that a person was whole.

Then I asked my friend Nancy McGuirk the same question about being saved. Nancy is married to a top executive at Turner Broadcasting, and over the years we had spent countless hours at business receptions off in a corner talking about religion. Nancy, a Presbyterian, teaches a weekly Bible class to hundreds of women.

“Well,” said Nancy, “I’ll tell you what being saved did for me—it took me to the next step.” Now, for a champion take-it-to-the-next-stepper like me, that was hard to resist. Yet I knew all too well that Ted would disapprove. Christians were one of the groups he’d apologized to after he’d said that Christianity was a religion for losers. I wasn’t ready to take him on yet.

O
ne day around the time I turned fifty-nine, I was participating in the annual bison roundup on one of Ted’s New Mexico ranches. It was an awesome experience: thousands of the animals stretching out before me in a line so long that it disappeared over the side of the mesa, reappearing miles ahead, lumbering across the valley floor and up the side of the distant mesa. Bison move silently, no mooing like cattle, just the soft thudding of hooves and a deep, purring breath that you must listen for carefully to hear. My horse Geronimo was a black-and-white paint, and I am convinced that the painted ponies Indians often rode during their hunting forays must have been imprinted on the collective memory of the bison, because often one would suddenly charge from the center of the line and rush me full speed while the old cowboys, like the seventy-year-old Till twins, Emmett and Emory, on their plain brown horses would laugh and shout at me for getting too close.

At day’s end I would pile into the back of someone’s pickup with four or five of the cowboys, pop a beer, wedge myself between the old tires so as not to get too jostled on the twenty-some miles of rough roads back to headquarters, sink back against some hay bales, and gaze at the sky, deeply happy. You know the feeling, when you are exactly where you want to be in the world? I thought about how I had played a cowboy in
Comes a Horseman
and about the childhood question I’d once put to my brother: “Peter, who could round up buffalo better, Sue Sally or me?” And here I was coming full circle to where I’d been in my girlhood, only it wasn’t a fantasy or a movie role.