“Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must be stripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful living must be laid for a foundation.” - Henry David Thoreau
***
Irony is heavy on my mind on this 12th day of Advent.
The chlorophyll in the frozen grass outside my house is barely holding on. The air is fresh and sharp and cold, the sky is a white, grayish-blue. Snowflakes are fluttering in the bitter wind, the ivy my father planted jitters against the old brick of the fenced-in arbour outside my window and it all feels very Himalayan, as if we weren’t out here in the fields of the Indiana, as if I wasn’t writing this meditation in the bedroom where my parents spent some quiet, painful nights as their marriage was splintering.
It’s not easy to write about what it’s like to experience up close the divorce of your parents. It’s not just a matter of finding the words, it’s the struggle of putting the memories together, organizing them, making sense of it all. There’s also the disappointment I feel, shame, to some degree, and regret over how everything was handled. There's the rather long footnote about all the health problems I was dealing with, but this isn't the time for that.
There’s a song I used to listen to during the divorce when the house wasn’t safe and mom wasn’t eating and I’d drive out to nowhere to buy a minute of peace. It’s called "Turpentine Chaser." I first heard it when I was 16 or 17 and dating Big Yellow Taxi girl. She introduced me to Dashboard. I’d forgot about the song until about 2 years ago I was sitting in a friend’s car and she had a mixed CD with a bunch of old, angsty songs from the early aughts. "Turpentine Chaser" was one of them. I remember posting something on Facebook during the divorce like, “You know you’ve had a bad day when you’re 28 and listening to Dashboard Confessional.” A friend commented, “OH MY GOD.” Yeah, that’s Dashboard.
This paint has been tasting of lead
And their chips will fall as they may
But it's not just my finish that's peeling
And it's not alone fleeing these walls
Resentment, anxiety, and fear become palpable. That’s what it’s like to experience up close the divorce of your parents. Resentment, anxiety, and fear. Those are the words. They spread like a virus and they twist you in all kinds of ways and they generate different symptoms in different people. Mom, she stopped eating. Dad, he left the house. Me, I was stuck, and I found any way I could to escape - except for actually leaving. I have a thousand excuses for why I stayed, but fuck ‘em all - the fact is, I stayed.
I watched it all unfold at age 28 while I was working with them both at our family business. Sadly, lots of children see this sort of thing, but I don’t expect it’s as common with adults; most adults have the good sense to leave the house by that age, but my circumstances were different. We moved in 2009, my senior year of college, and we lived where we worked, it was all one and the same, and it’s hard to say no to your family when they need you. It’s also hard to turn down a piece of the business. More times than I care to admit I’ve felt like the young man in the gospels who couldn’t give what he owned to the poor.
Jesus looked him hard in the eye—and loved him! He said, “There’s one thing left: Go sell whatever you own and give it to the poor. All your wealth will then be heavenly wealth. And come follow me.” The man’s face clouded over. This was the last thing he expected to hear, and he walked off with a heavy heart. He was holding on tight to a lot of things, and not about to let go.
Maybe God put the same question to me as he did the young man in the gospel stories. Maybe God put my faith to the test and I too turned away and estimated that money is worth a broken heart. Maybe if I’d taken that Amtrak to the West Coast like I’d planned... Maybe if I’d moved to Houston with Mission Year in 2013 and not let my father talk me out of going... Maybe I could have avoided everything. Sometimes it’s not so easy to tell what is cowardice and what is courageous.
I remember sitting in the driver’s seat of my truck, parked in some lot, my hands squeezing the steering wheel. It was cold. It was dark. It was winter. My breath, water vapor, condensing, visible inside the cab. My eyes, tired, faded. I had a beard because I didn’t care enough to shave. "Turpentine Chaser" on the radio.
Well sooner or later this cold
It's gonna break so our hands will be warm again
But all I want is not to need you now
Yeah sooner or later this code
It's gonna break and our words will be heard again
But all I want are vows of silence now
Silence. There was a lot of silence in the house with me and mom, after dad left. I guess he expected her to move out, too, and leave the work residence to me, as we’d agreed when I started working there. That didn’t happen. Yelling. There was some yelling; when no apartment or house was good enough for her; when she told me, over and over, to my face, that she was eating. She wasn’t eating, of course. She wasn’t looking for a place to live, either. She intended to live there until the anorexia killed her, and I had a front row ticket to the show.
This turpentine chaser's got kick
And the rag that it's soaked in is rich
And the fumes aide the pace of my cleaning
And as soon as I'm done I am gone
Eventually, I did leave. But it was too little, too late. I lived in a haunted house. The air inside was stale and it had an odor and it could choke you, physically. It was like water in the lungs and I drowned in it. I remember, sitting at my desk one morning, I could feel my soul turning, like a gear, grinding and scraping, against my values, against my faith, until I hated the things I believed in - until I hated the things I believed in.
But sooner or later this cold
It's gonna break so our hands will be warm again
But all I want is not to need you now
Yeah sooner or later this code
It's gonna break and our words will be heard again
But all I want are vows of silence now
I remember the morning it all broke. My girlfriend of 3 years left me for another guy; she walked out of my life and it resuscitated me, it put everything back into focus, like a drowning victim pulled from the sea, I suddenly coughed up all the green water that had filled my lungs. I hacked up the resignation and the despair. I left the house that night. The next morning, I wept uncontrollably as I drove through town to church for the first time in several months. Relief.
The frightening facts
We've been facing our backs to for so long now
Are begging for eyes
To bear witness to lies and indifference
A little over a year. That’s how long it lasted. Dad left in July of 2014. I left in September of 2015. Things didn’t start out so bleak, until I came home one Sunday night from an October trip to Michigan a few months after dad filed. It was obvious my mother hadn’t eaten all weekend. She'd been rapidly losing weight, but that day she weighed 85 pounds. I could see her veins and muscle and skeleton. Her hair was falling out. Her face was gaunt, angular. Her suffering demanded an audience, and eventually, it got what it wanted. My mother's anorexia bears witness to her own neglect, and to the indifference of those around her. Many, many years of it, since she was a teenager. I punched a hole in the drywall of my bedroom that night. It’s still there.
Now we're saying aloud
The things we've declared in our silence
That new coats of paint
Will not reacquaint broken hearts to broken homes
My ex-girlfriend told me that she couldn’t keep coming into that haunted house, that she couldn’t live up to her values around my mother. I don’t blame her. I couldn't, either. But I brought my mother red velvet cupcakes again tonight (she's living in an apartment now and I've had time and space to heal) because she already finished the other half-dozen I gave her on Saturday. This morning I helped her find health insurance. Maybe that qualifies as feeding the hungry and caring for the sick. Maybe that qualifies as loving your enemy. I don’t know. If your values can’t carry you through the fire then what good are they? Somewhere in my mid 20s, on my road out of fundamentalism, I picked up some cheap ideas on love and forgiveness. In my late 20s, I learned the difference between wheat and chaff. I went on a long pilgrimage and I didn’t even leave my backyard. I've kept a picture my ex painted for me. It's a silhouette of Jesus on the cross, his blood dripping to the grass, at the top there's a quote, sort of ironic, "The grass isn't greener on the other side. It's green where you water it." It's buried in my closet.
"The marriage of Randy and Cindy Harnish dissolved." It was in our local newspaper last month. 35 years in just one line. That word, “dissolved.” Like turpentine to paint. I don’t know what it takes to keep a marriage, but I know what it takes to kill one. No amount of shopping, no amount of business success, or collectibles, or completed projects, or stuff, no amount of money, no amount of right opinions, can fix a pair of broken hearts. A wall can only take so many new coats of paint before it’s time for a little turpentine. I carry my parents’ marriage with me. I don’t brush over old coats of paint. I strip the walls bare with turpentine. That’s what this meditation is about. That’s what all these meditations are about. Stripping the walls bare.
This paint has been tasting of lead
And their chips will fall as they may
But it's not just my finish that's peeling
And it's not alone fleeing these walls
Resentment, anxiety, and fear become palpable. That’s what it’s like to experience up close the divorce of your parents. Resentment, anxiety, and fear. Those are the words. They spread like a virus and they twist you in all kinds of ways and they generate different symptoms in different people. Mom, she stopped eating. Dad, he left the house. Me, I was stuck, and I found any way I could to escape - except for actually leaving. I have a thousand excuses for why I stayed, but fuck ‘em all - the fact is, I stayed.
I watched it all unfold at age 28 while I was working with them both at our family business. Sadly, lots of children see this sort of thing, but I don’t expect it’s as common with adults; most adults have the good sense to leave the house by that age, but my circumstances were different. We moved in 2009, my senior year of college, and we lived where we worked, it was all one and the same, and it’s hard to say no to your family when they need you. It’s also hard to turn down a piece of the business. More times than I care to admit I’ve felt like the young man in the gospels who couldn’t give what he owned to the poor.
Jesus looked him hard in the eye—and loved him! He said, “There’s one thing left: Go sell whatever you own and give it to the poor. All your wealth will then be heavenly wealth. And come follow me.” The man’s face clouded over. This was the last thing he expected to hear, and he walked off with a heavy heart. He was holding on tight to a lot of things, and not about to let go.
Maybe God put the same question to me as he did the young man in the gospel stories. Maybe God put my faith to the test and I too turned away and estimated that money is worth a broken heart. Maybe if I’d taken that Amtrak to the West Coast like I’d planned... Maybe if I’d moved to Houston with Mission Year in 2013 and not let my father talk me out of going... Maybe I could have avoided everything. Sometimes it’s not so easy to tell what is cowardice and what is courageous.
I remember sitting in the driver’s seat of my truck, parked in some lot, my hands squeezing the steering wheel. It was cold. It was dark. It was winter. My breath, water vapor, condensing, visible inside the cab. My eyes, tired, faded. I had a beard because I didn’t care enough to shave. "Turpentine Chaser" on the radio.
Well sooner or later this cold
It's gonna break so our hands will be warm again
But all I want is not to need you now
Yeah sooner or later this code
It's gonna break and our words will be heard again
But all I want are vows of silence now
Silence. There was a lot of silence in the house with me and mom, after dad left. I guess he expected her to move out, too, and leave the work residence to me, as we’d agreed when I started working there. That didn’t happen. Yelling. There was some yelling; when no apartment or house was good enough for her; when she told me, over and over, to my face, that she was eating. She wasn’t eating, of course. She wasn’t looking for a place to live, either. She intended to live there until the anorexia killed her, and I had a front row ticket to the show.
This turpentine chaser's got kick
And the rag that it's soaked in is rich
And the fumes aide the pace of my cleaning
And as soon as I'm done I am gone
Eventually, I did leave. But it was too little, too late. I lived in a haunted house. The air inside was stale and it had an odor and it could choke you, physically. It was like water in the lungs and I drowned in it. I remember, sitting at my desk one morning, I could feel my soul turning, like a gear, grinding and scraping, against my values, against my faith, until I hated the things I believed in - until I hated the things I believed in.
But sooner or later this cold
It's gonna break so our hands will be warm again
But all I want is not to need you now
Yeah sooner or later this code
It's gonna break and our words will be heard again
But all I want are vows of silence now
I remember the morning it all broke. My girlfriend of 3 years left me for another guy; she walked out of my life and it resuscitated me, it put everything back into focus, like a drowning victim pulled from the sea, I suddenly coughed up all the green water that had filled my lungs. I hacked up the resignation and the despair. I left the house that night. The next morning, I wept uncontrollably as I drove through town to church for the first time in several months. Relief.
The frightening facts
We've been facing our backs to for so long now
Are begging for eyes
To bear witness to lies and indifference
A little over a year. That’s how long it lasted. Dad left in July of 2014. I left in September of 2015. Things didn’t start out so bleak, until I came home one Sunday night from an October trip to Michigan a few months after dad filed. It was obvious my mother hadn’t eaten all weekend. She'd been rapidly losing weight, but that day she weighed 85 pounds. I could see her veins and muscle and skeleton. Her hair was falling out. Her face was gaunt, angular. Her suffering demanded an audience, and eventually, it got what it wanted. My mother's anorexia bears witness to her own neglect, and to the indifference of those around her. Many, many years of it, since she was a teenager. I punched a hole in the drywall of my bedroom that night. It’s still there.
Now we're saying aloud
The things we've declared in our silence
That new coats of paint
Will not reacquaint broken hearts to broken homes
My ex-girlfriend told me that she couldn’t keep coming into that haunted house, that she couldn’t live up to her values around my mother. I don’t blame her. I couldn't, either. But I brought my mother red velvet cupcakes again tonight (she's living in an apartment now and I've had time and space to heal) because she already finished the other half-dozen I gave her on Saturday. This morning I helped her find health insurance. Maybe that qualifies as feeding the hungry and caring for the sick. Maybe that qualifies as loving your enemy. I don’t know. If your values can’t carry you through the fire then what good are they? Somewhere in my mid 20s, on my road out of fundamentalism, I picked up some cheap ideas on love and forgiveness. In my late 20s, I learned the difference between wheat and chaff. I went on a long pilgrimage and I didn’t even leave my backyard. I've kept a picture my ex painted for me. It's a silhouette of Jesus on the cross, his blood dripping to the grass, at the top there's a quote, sort of ironic, "The grass isn't greener on the other side. It's green where you water it." It's buried in my closet.
"The marriage of Randy and Cindy Harnish dissolved." It was in our local newspaper last month. 35 years in just one line. That word, “dissolved.” Like turpentine to paint. I don’t know what it takes to keep a marriage, but I know what it takes to kill one. No amount of shopping, no amount of business success, or collectibles, or completed projects, or stuff, no amount of money, no amount of right opinions, can fix a pair of broken hearts. A wall can only take so many new coats of paint before it’s time for a little turpentine. I carry my parents’ marriage with me. I don’t brush over old coats of paint. I strip the walls bare with turpentine. That’s what this meditation is about. That’s what all these meditations are about. Stripping the walls bare.
Thanks for reading.
***
Note: Things are better now, a year later. The past is in the past. I'm managing the business and living at the residence, as planned. Mom found an apartment in November of 2015. She's trying to recover. We're on good terms. Plenty of hugs and cupcakes. I'm moving forward, lessons learned.
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