me: I feel all of this anger since this recent financial f*%! up by the Outgoing Husband. Since I found out about it, I’ve been all clenched and angry. I don’t want to feel like this – I haven’t felt this way lately. In fact, I thought I was letting go of feeling like this.

therapist: Where do you feel it? What does it look like?

me: In my jaw. It’s tight, like metal. It reminds me of some combination of my dad [he was a class jaw grinder] and William F. Buckley.

therapist: What’s its job – this metal jaw?

me: To protect me and help me do “the right thing”, especially with regard to money. It’s directly in opposition to Alex’s laissez faire attitude about finances. He’s Jerry Garcia and I’m William F. Buckley. I don’t want to be William F. Buckley, but I don’t see much choice; someone has to keep us from going down the dark hole of utter indebtedness.

therapist: So the iron jaw has a worthy role, but what’s the drawback? Why don’t you like it?

me: Well, it’s basically all about fear. Fear of not having enough. Fear of screwing up. And even when you do well, you figure it’s because you’re doing the “right” thing to overcome the fear. And it just keeps you clenched like some Boston pinstriped guy.

therapist: So is there anyone else – another part of you or an archetype – that could do some of the same work, take the pressure off the jaw so it could rest or even retire?

me: [thinking, thinking....] Well, oddly, the first person who comes to mind is Julia Childs.

therapist: [laughs and raises an eyebrow]

me: She’s funny and has this great joie de vivre–I mean she was a gourmand and a spy. Yet she had amazing drive and passion. And the organizational genius and determination that it took to get The Art of French Cooking published after nearly a decade of writing and editing and being turned down by editors who thought she was nuts – well, that’s all inspiring. 

therapist: I think you’re on to something.

Post script: I’ve admired  Julia Childs for awhile. Two winters ago, when I had the clever idea of attending a grief workshop over a long snowy weekend in another town, only to find myself trapped with older women who were grieving husbands or long dead children – not their relatively youthful fathers – I had to tell the group who the one person was from history with whom I’d most like to have dinner. As the women went around the table, I knew my choice was overly creative. “Jesus,” said at least five of them. “Gandhi,” proffered another two, and “Roosevelt” a few. So, when I said, “Julia Childs in the south of France on the terrace of her house” (I’d come up with the entire menu, but decided to forego it as everyone else had said they didn’t care what they ate), I sort of bonded with her as a personal hero.

Today, the more I talked to my therapist, the more I warmed to the Archetype of Julia. Flustered as I am at the moment by all of the financial and organizational work ahead of me, I’m comforted to think of her pegboard system for pots and pans. She was so dang cheerful, but I doubt she got pushed around much. And she knew how to enjoy life while also wearing layers of woolen coats in post-WWII France in her under-heated apartment. So here I am, ten hours later, with a new Angel to lead me out of the Valley of Divorce. Long live, Julia! Bon Appetit!

Yesterday I wrote some very mean things to someone I love. He suggested I don’t love him. Perhaps someone who can write such things isn’t capable of love (my thought, not his). I don’t like writing mean things – too much of the f-word makes me queasy, too many bitchy accusations and whining questions drain me. Is there any way to do anger with dignity?

I am awash in anger right now. If I let it, I can ride it all day – slamming down my laundry basket, unable to write, snarling at the dog and at my kids. It exhausts me and makes me feel, as I did yesterday afternoon while I pressed SEND on one black and blue email after the next, like a character from The Sopranos. A minor character. A character who will be whacked soon.

My seething ebbed in and out of self-pity, but I came to a quieter place late in the day when I talked to my dear friend and godmother. She told me that her husband–they were married just two weeks ago in one of the most beautiful ceremonies I’ve seen– has pneumonia and that her 96-year old mother is choosing to die. “She’s lucid. She’s ready.” The words snapped me into equilibrium, not out of sadness but out of anger. Anger is such a selfish reflex. I told her I was ashamed to have been hiding out in its immense shadow all day.  ”You deserve to feel anger,” my friend allowed me, “A lot of people have been letting you down. But don’t let it drain you of your beauty and light.”

Letting me down. Draining me. Confusing me. 

I try to sort the knotted chains that led to this angry space:

• The husband who has been away more than he’s been home, who is going to Africa for eight months, “and nothing you can say or do will change my mind.”
• The lover who said beautiful things, who exposed his heart so nakedly and then took it back, placing it at the feet of the woman – his wife – to whom it rightly belongs. When he read to me how they’d made love in an alley, how small she was beneath his hands compared to me, how she’d come to love him anew, I sank.
• The father who died, planning his entire funeral without asking for my input, who made his final slip into unconsciousness when I was out of town, although I’d been there every day, week in and out for a year.
• The therapist arrested on child pornography charges.
• The long distance romance who said of me: “I was never attracted to you.”
• The dear friend who after making love to me once said, “I will never love you. I could never love you.”
• The boyfriend who upon breaking up with me said, “I never loved you. I just said that because I knew it’s what you wanted to hear. Because you were pregnant.”

Yes, there are many ways to be heartbroken, abandoned, deceived. And many situations that will bring mean and ugly things to the surface. That’s the not the place where I want to live. But I don’t want to live in such sadness either. 

“Don’t react from scarcity,” a friend told me recently. “Act out of fullness.” I’m trying.