(Part I is here)

… and at first it felt something like denial or escape. Or a little bit of insanity. Of course it mostly felt like some serious martyrdom. “I’m not going to let THAT GUY bully me around while I sit here and soften. I mean, this is a little pacificistic, don’t you think?”

And then the Beanpa’s car was gone.

“You are KIDDING ME. He went out? He didn’t even tell me where? I mean, who the heck am I now, like his Holiness the Dalai Lama for godsakes?”

And then his car was back. And he was in the house. With a dozen pink roses.

“Happy Valentine’s Day!”

Oh, I was seething. Seething and definitely not soft. But then I forgot why I was seething. It all took a moment to catch up to me. He was gone, now he was back, and then … there were flowers. For me. Pink ones. How nice!

Before I could soften again, though, he explained how he’d not be able to get them tomorrow (which was still a day before Valentine’s Day) because we’d be together all day (family day) and Monday would just be a nightmare to try to rush out and buy some overpriced flowers and so …

Hurumph! Now I was brooding. So he went out and got me flowers so he’d not have to do it on Monday? What the heck kind of Valentine’s day bouquet was that? And was he just trying to save a few bucks now? Where’d he get these ones anyway, Shop-Rite?

And then I realized that the BeanPa is not typically a man of foresight. He is a not a think-ahead kinda guy. I’d always wish he would be … more of, say, someone who thinks ahead. And here he had. Thought ahead, that was. And now I had to go back to softening.

Darn’t.

So I did. And I scrubbed the inside of our sooty oven. I got our child ready to go out. We drove to a restaurant, while I worked on my forgiveness.

When we arrived, I thought, “I can do this. I can sit and have dinner with this man who earlier told me that I’d gotten a whole four hours to myself, as if he were five and I’d taken his last cookie. And I can make this fun.”

And then things got even more challenging, because when I finally mustered the right cheery inflection to inquire after the BeanPa’s fresh mozzarella appetizer, he made a face and said, “It’s okay,” then pouted slightly and added, “Something really stinks.”

Dismayed, I looked down at my Fagioli Vinaigrette, “Must be the onions,” I said.

“Nah,” he replied somberly and nodded back to a table behind him.

My cheery softness fell on deaf ears.

And then the Beannut wanted out of the highchair, into momma’s lap, as momma struggled to eat her damn fagioli. And then she wanted sips of water through a straw, alternating with cooled-down spoonfuls of minestrone soup. … all while standing up.

I looked over at the couple next to us. They spoke in calm voices about household matters and pleasant topics none of which ever seemed to enter my realm these days. They shared a dessert–one scoop of vanilla, one of chocolate–and glanced covertly in the direction of our table while I’m pretty sure they were thinking, “Why didn’t these people just go to Chuckie Cheese’s” or “Maybe we should have taken a seat at the back.”

Sure. Go to your land of child-free dinners, where you sip a glass of Merlot and speak to your husband in complete sentences while he makes eye contact with you and offers you a bite of his veal. Fine. Do that.

I looked over to the BeanPa in a vague bid of support, and none was to be found. His head hung miserably over his bowl of cappelini.

“Do you like it?” I asked, still not completely recovered from my first attempt to bring some levity to this show.

“I thought it was cavatelli.”

“Huh? Oh, I was wondering, because you never order–”

“Yeah, I don’t eat angel hair.”

“Right, but you ordered the cappellini. I heard you say the word.”

“Well, I thought it was cavetelli. I didn’t know it was angel hair.”

Perplexed, I sighed. I watched as he pushed the tangled knot of thin spaghetti around his plate. I hadn’t yet taken an official bite of my own food, which I had no complaints about. Only that it wasn’t in my mouth. My child took her shoes off and threw them on the floor then wrapped all the sugar packets in a cloth napkin …

I watched in horror at the BeanPa as he looked clearly sorry for himself. I was not sorry for him. I was looking for the back of a pacifier to bite down on.

He spent most of our dinner, head down, pushing around his plate of unwanted cappelini as if death were near.

Good god. Did I always have to end up around heavy-hearted dramatists …

Then a hunch came like a jolt that sent my head spinning. It was something I’d been fighting to see. Or should I say, Not see. The old, “It takes one to know one” wasn’t lost on me at that moment. Perhaps I’d been completely off, but I saw myself in that look hanging over the plate of pasta.

And it was sheer gloom. It was the sheer “Why me” of it all when I’d just been doing the same thing, right there, across the table, with a soggy restless toddler on my arm. I was doing it now and I’d done it before. In other relationships. In this relationship. Maybe even last week.

(Okay, maybe not last week; I’d been doing work on myself for some time and deserve a little credit.)

But I’d been there. I’d done that. I was maybe only a few years past it all. I’d certainly been guilty of telling the BeanPa when I thought he’d had just about enough time to himself. And when I did it, it seemed as though I were merely bringing injustice to light. Sure, I’d kept track of time, and I’d done a little score-keeping. I minded how many loads of his dirty laundry I was washing, and how many organic home-cooked dinners were waiting for him upon his arrival from work, and there were times when those things did not come from compassionate places in me even as I wished he could have more compassionately taken care of our daughter without worrying how many hours it was I’d been gone.

And at this. I softened.

I knew I had no choice. If I tensed. If I held on, what good what it do? What would I accomplish? Clearly, I could leave. I could utter sayonara. I mean, I had that option.

In the car, my stomach burned from too many onions and beans. The BeanPa was still gloomy, and the Beannut began shrieking at the top of her lungs, hating the carseat, wanting to be home, wanting to nurse. Some god-awful Guns and Roses song was on the radio and we pulled over so I could get in the back with the Beannut. She was crying so hard, I took her out of the seat and moved her to my lap and nursed her right in the back seat. After a couple minutes, the BeanPa asked if I were ready.

“I’m nursing her,” I said, coldly. He wanted to get home. Our Valentine’s family dinner was not what I hoped for, but few holiday family dinners are, I suppose. We could have made it better, though.

And in many ways, it could have been worse. I could have gotten angry instead of holding back. I could have really ruined our night, pissed off and feeling vindicated since it was clearly HIM who was ruining our night.

But at least now we were still talking to each other.

At home, it was well past the Beannut’s bedtime–a major stressor for me. I let it go. The next day was Sunday. I sat on the floor while the BeanPa tried to rearrange the mess we’d made earlier from switching some mattresses around. The Beannut opened books and closed them. I read a few passages, and I sat breathing in the oily sweetness of her head. I asked the BeanPa to sit down with us and our daughter, between us, beamed at our proximity and attention on her.

I wanted things to be good for us, but instead they were complicated–complicated by our vulnerabilities, our pasts, our hurts and fears, and our stubbornness, our desire for intimacy and the sheer terror of it, our deep hunger to reveal … and to be accepted.

Really, the BeanPa was a mirror for my own imperfections. Looking at them was hard. Hard enough to make me want to run, to find a better mirror that cast just a little more flattering light. I knew, in the right light, I could look good.

Though, I figured, it was the inside that mattered more. That glow needed to come from in me. I thought of it as my heart-light.

And with that, I took a deep deep breath, my exhale caused the hair at the crown of the Beannut’s head to flutter, and I softened.

Last year, I dressed up the Beannut as cupid while the beanpa was stuck in a hotel during a massive snowstorm and couldn’t get home. We made footprints for him out of salt dough.

The year before that, the Beanpa was super sick and I was pretty pregnant, and I wouldn’t let him near me. So he brought me some of my favorite ice cream and a bunch of roses, and I used a lot of lysol after he left (we hadn’t yet moved in together at that point…)

This year, I have resolved to love better. Me, the beanpa, my “spiritual teachers,”–the general populace of annoying others out there in the world who drive slow, get on my nerves, step in front of me to grab the last treadmill, act insane, don’t stay home when they’re sick, lie, and dress a little too trashy. I’m just going to try loving them.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going out of my way here or anything–at least not for the random trashily dressed girl who induces a kind of low-level dread in my heart (will my dear beannut ever have the gall to wear such a thing?) or certain family members who really think it’s a great idea to share their opposing opinions to my child-rearing with an “I’m-older-and-I-have-more-kids” air about them. I’m just going to … soften. I think that’s the word Pema Chodrin uses when she talks about the tensing of your body in the face of a mean comment thrust at you by some other person … by some passing-by spiritual teacher.

Softening takes some work though. For me, it takes a state of faith. And it takes a little bargaining. Maybe there’s something in it for me?

Shozan Jack Haubner in his article, “The Angry Monk, Zen Practice for Angry People” writes “We monks shave our heads because if we didn’t we would surely tear out all our hair in despair from having to live and work with one another. Anyone who’s ever been married or had kids, or coworkers, for that matter (work and family—those other group practices), probably knows what I’m talking about. It gets real when the illusions drop away, doesn’t it?

“… nine times out of ten the reason we get so irritated with the people who are closest to us is that they show us that we do not in fact correspond with the ideas we have of ourselves. We are meaner, weaker, dumber, and less interesting, tolerant, and sexy. In short, we are human, which typically comes as extremely disappointing news.”

Holding on when someone is being pissy gives us a little cover… even if we’d behaved similarly only two days (two hours!) before.

Today the beanpa woke up the beannut from precious napping time. Her naps are like marathons that I hope reach the two-hour mark. Both for her sake and mine. He was banging around some dishes, and I accused him of waking her up. He denied it (Strike one!) And then mumbled that she’d slept enough (Strike two!) and that I had four hours to myself this morning anyway (AGH! Divorce! And we’re not even married!) … I stormed into the room to fetch my woken child and I was pissed. P.I.S.S.E.D

The bubble atop my head looked something like, “How very passive-aggressive of you, my darling, for waking up the child because you decided I’d just had about enough time to myself! Hurumph!”

And then I remembered … to soften. But no. This couldn’t be right? Soften? How? Why? That was more for like bad jokes or something, right?

I tried it. My very first attempt. And a miserable attempt it was. I was biting the back of a pacifier (a habit of mine to ward off stray cursewords and protect the pure baby ears of my daughter) and thinking, “There is no way. There is just no way. Not this. This is it. This is THE END.” And then I moved … my body. I took all 130 lbs of it to another room and the movement seemed to stir something. It stirred a desire to not feel the old woe-unto-me-how-the-heck-did-I-end-up-with-this-one anger. Frankly, cause it’s getting a little old. I’m looking for a new feeling now. That one’s kind of out of season, a little nubbly from wear. And then with a bit of spontaneity and a bit of grace, and a slight bit of will, I did it. I achieved my own interpretation of soft.

To be continued …