Untamed

When Craig and I moved to our home in Naples, we bought a gigantic silver mirror that we found on clearance. We never got around to hanging it. We just leaned it against our bedroom wall and hoped the leaning looked purposeful and artsy.

The day my therapist insisted that my feelings weren’t real, I decided to say good-bye to Abby and remain in my marriage. She was the expert, and she was right. Good mothers don’t break their children’s hearts in order to follow their own.

I sat on my bedroom carpet cross-legged, looking directly into my own eyes in that mirror.

It’s important to take a good look at yourself every once in a while. Not the way you look at yourself while you’re getting dressed or putting on makeup. Not the way you look at your thighs or sunspots or chin hairs. Not that way. I mean you need to look dead into your own eyes—at your real self. You need to make sure there are no lies there. You need to make sure the eyes in the mirror are the eyes of a woman you respect.

As I looked deep into my own eyes, the woman in the mirror and I had a reckoning.

I asked myself: Is the decision to continue abandoning yourself really what your children need from you?

Mothers have martyred themselves in their children’s names since the beginning of time. We have lived as if she who disappears the most, loves the most. We have been conditioned to prove our love by slowly ceasing to exist.

What a terrible burden for children to bear—to know that they are the reason their mother stopped living. What a terrible burden for our daughters to bear—to know that if they choose to become mothers, this will be their fate, too. Because if we show them that being a martyr is the highest form of love, that is what they will become. They will feel obligated to love as well as their mothers loved, after all. They will believe they have permission to live only as fully as their mothers allowed themselves to live.

If we keep passing down the legacy of martyrdom to our daughters, with whom does it end? Which woman ever gets to live? And when does the death sentence begin? At the wedding altar? In the delivery room? Whose delivery room—our children’s or our own? When we call martyrdom love we teach our children that when love begins, life ends. This is why Jung suggested: There is no greater burden on a child than the unlived life of a parent.

What if love is not the process of disappearing for the beloved but of emerging for the beloved? What if a mother’s responsibility is teaching her children that love does not lock the lover away but frees her? What if a responsible mother is not one who shows her children how to slowly die but how to stay wildly alive until the day she dies? What if the call of motherhood is not to be a martyr but to be a model?

Right there, on the floor, I looked deep into my own eyes. I let the Knowing rise and stay.

My children do not need me to save them.

My children need to watch me save myself.

I’d quit using my children as an excuse to not be brave and start seeing them as my reason to be brave. I would leave their father and I would claim friendship-and-fire love, or I would be alone. But I would never again be alone in a relationship and pretend that was love. I would never again settle for a relationship or life less beautiful than the one I’d want for my child.

I’d divorce Craig. Because I am a mother. And I have responsibilities.

I stood up off the carpet and called Abby. We had not seen each other since the night we met in Chicago.

I said, “I’m in love with you. I’m leaving Craig. I’m telling him today.”

She said, “Glennon. Oh my God. I am so in love with you. I’m so happy right now. And I’m so afraid for you. Are you sure you’re ready to do this? We’ve never even touched.”

I said, “I know. But I’m not leaving just because of you. I’m leaving because now that I know this kind of love exists, I can’t pretend it doesn’t anymore. I can’t unknow what I know, and I can’t unbecome who I am now. So I’m leaving—not just because I love you but because I love this version of me. The one that woke up when we met. I have to either leave him or myself. I’m going to leave him. Now that I know this, I have to tell him that I know. I don’t owe Craig the rest of my life, but I do owe him my honesty. It’ll be hard, but it’ll finally be the right kind of hard.”

That afternoon I sat down with Craig and I said—with tenderness but without apology—that I was leaving. I said, “Our marriage is complete. We have been the healing partners we were meant to be for each other. Our marriage has been a great success. And now it’s done. I’m in love with Abby. As soon as I knew, I needed you to know, too.”

He was very quiet, and after a long while he said, “Three years ago, you gave me more grace than I deserved. Now I’m going to return it to you. I want you to be happy.”

We didn’t stay in that place. The next few months were a roller coaster. But we kept coming back to: Grace for you. Grace for me.

Later, when he was ready, we sat down to tell the kids. I’ve hurt many people I love in my life, but that was the worst of it. I looked directly into my babies’ terrified faces and said, “I am about to break your hearts. Over time we will rebuild our hearts, and they will be bigger and stronger. But for now, it’s just going to hurt. Sometimes we have to do hard things because they are true things. Your dad and I want you to live the truth of who you are even when it’s hard and scary and painful. I am about to show you how that’s done.”

They cried. The news changed them, right there on that couch. I saw it happen. We held one another while we let so much burn. Craig told them, “It’s going to be okay. Abby is a good woman. We are going to be a new kind of family, but we are still going to be a beautiful family.”

He gave our children permission to love Abby, which was the greatest gift he’s ever given me. Maybe the greatest gift anyone has ever given me.

We told our families.

We told our friends.

All of that happened within two weeks.

Forty years, five months, and two weeks.