Blowing Out Candles

Two weeks ago I helped my beautiful, no-longer-a-baby boy blow out his first birthday candles.  (One candle actually - blown out twice because I think birthdays should be celebrated for as long as possible!)  Once when I was a kid and I loved Mom's heavenly decadent chocolate pudding/ice cream dessert, my grandmother insisted I could not just have this mousse-like stuff for my birthday - - I MUST have a cake on which to blow out candles.  So, bless her heart, she made me a cake.  (This year - for the record - my mother simply stuck candles directly into the dessert, as it is still my favorite.)

Blowing out candles on your birthday is not just a tradition - - it's a necessity - - because it's not really about the candles.  It's all about the WISH.  Maybe my one-year-old was incapable of making his own wish, but I know that the friends and family surrounding him were bursting with wishes for him: another happy year, good health, grins and giggles everyday... And when he IS capable of blowing and wishing on his own, he will.  In fact, if anyone else "accidentally" were to blow out his candles someday, I'd re-light them so that he could - independently - extinguish his own flickering little flames and wish his little heart out.

Fifteen years ago this was my issue.  No - not birthday candles.  Something even bigger.

Fifteen years ago my ex-husband and I were planning our wedding, and we both agreed that we wanted to include the lighting of a unity candle in our ceremony.  Never mind the fact that the minister did not want to do it for reasons irrelevant to this story -- and never mind that when I begged my ex to open his freaking mouth for once and stick up for me so I would not have to be the one arguing about something HE also wanted, he once again kept his mouth shut (so as not to look like the "bad guy") and let me cry and battle all on my own - a story I related to mother through sobs later, punctuating it with the confession that my ex made me feel like shit when he did this (which was often) and to which she responded, "It's a guy thing.  Just deal with it." Which I did.  Because that's what I was told to do. AAARRRGGGHHH!!!!!!!

But the point is that the minister finally agreed, and we planned out how we would light a unity candle.

This, by the way, is where the story becomes both like and very much UN-like birthday candles.

Following the joint lighting of the unity candle - obviously symbolizing our uniting in marriage, bringing our lives together - I wished to symbolically leave our individual candles lit.  Helllooooooooo - - you're still a PERSON after you're married aren't you?  A person committed to marriage to another person, sure, but still ONE PERSON.  It's not as if they surgically sew you together like Siamese twins!  So I wanted to leave my own beautiful candle blazing - as a symbolic wish for my own identity within the bonds of matrimony.  But the minister insisted that we extinguish our individual candles.  And of course my ex's response?  Nothing.  Why would he argue about that?!?  In fact, he didn't seem to have any problem with the fact that the minister then went on to tell my ex, "If she doesn't blow out her own candle, you blow it out for her."

! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

Well, you can guess what I did.

Nope.  I wasn't that strong back then.  And this is exactly why forty HAS to be the beginning of a whole new life because I wasted sooooooooo much of my previous life trying like hell just to please everyone in order to do the "right" thing (and being hideously miserable doing it).

No - I did as I was told.  So during the wedding ceremony, when it came time to light the unity candle, I joined my flame with new husband's, lifted my individual candle to my lips, and extinguished my own candle .  All by myself.  I actually made that choice.

But it didn't matter.  The next two and a half years were such a struggle - trying to understand why my ex shot daggers through me when I made little suggestions such as, "Could you put that vase of flowers one shelf higher?" or, "Why don't you move the cart in front of you so the clerk can load the groceries into it?" - trying to encourage him to get a life of his own instead of making me feel guilty for getting involved with friends and activities so that I always had to let him tag along.  And I finally realized it was because I felt like I had no identity.  I was simply "Mike's wife," just as the unity candle ceremony had symbolized I would be. 

So I asked him for a separation.

I thought if I could just be on my own for a while, I could finally figure out who I was as a person - something I'd never yet done and felt a suffocatingly desperate need to do.  I asked him to go stay with friends for a little while - just give me some space to not be dependent on him.  Let me know what it was like to wake up each day on my own and have to navigate through my life without the security marriage afforded me.

But he said no. 

He really had blown out my candle.

We worked on things - and they did get better - - on the surface.  We were no longer arguing - he wasn't shooting daggers through me just for breathing.  But I wasn't happy.  Deep down, I was excrutiatingly lonely and miserable - still.  So this time when I asked for a separation again, I knew it was for real - and for good.

I was weak.  SERIOUSLY weak.  And it took me a long time before I was able to make the separation stick, but once I finally realized that I DID want out permanently - that it MUST be over - suddenly life got sooooo much better.  In fact, people used to tell me that divorce looked good on me.

I think it was the beautiful, flickering glow of the candle I had re-lit inside myself.