| It was Easter 2016, and somewhere in the middle of an extended family gathering, the microwave dinged.
I was standing closest, so I opened it. The exposure to the cooler air created a massive explosion of hot, hard-boiled eggs, and I was instantly burned on my face and arms and covered in a bajillion pieces of egg. I yelled. Actually, I probably screamed. And then…. I immediately blamed my husband. Anyone who puts hard-boiled eggs in the microwave has obviously not tried it before. I already knew what happened based on a roommate’s experience back in college. (We were cleaning up pieces of egg for months afterward.) But here I was, shocked, burned, and mad as can be that he had innocently set up a disaster waiting to happen. I stormed off to try to clean up and calm down. I was humiliated by my outburst in front of everyone and felt the weight of having ruined the fun. Eventually, I gathered myself enough to rejoin the family for the Easter Egg Hunt. But little did I know that this moment would follow me for a long, long time. A week or so later, I received an email from a family member who had been in the room that day. She condemned my behavior. Horrified that I had screamed and blamed my husband for being burned. She told me that if I treated my husband this way in public, she could only imagine what life being married to me in private was like. She told me I was creating low self-esteem in my husband and admonished me not to become the negative voice in his head. Those words were excruciating to read. A one-paragraph email rearranged how I saw myself and my marriage in an instant. I replayed the egg scene over and over, trying to see it through her lens – arguing for my innocence one moment, then shamefully wondering if maybe she was right the next. In the end, I responded with a clear boundary: she was not welcome to give me marriage advice ever again. To her credit, she hasn’t. But that didn’t mean the issue was truly closed.
Fast forward ten years. This past week was my 19th wedding anniversary. While out on a walk, I was contemplating my marriage and, wildly, the egg memory surfaced. I’ve learned to treat returning painful memories as a sign that they are asking to be released. This memory has been quietly formative to my identity as a wife. Despite the work I did back then – setting a boundary, extending compassion to myself – there has still been a low hum in the background of my mind for ten years: “Maybe she’s right. Maybe I really am awful to be married to. Maybe she can see what I can’t.” I paused my walk and coached myself through what was coming up. And what surfaced felt like a rather remarkable insight: One moment in time does not define who you are. This feels obvious. And yet it took me ten years to sit with the simple fact that an outsider cannot know the totality of a marriage she’s not actually in. The truth is, there are plenty of times I’ve reacted, yelled, and cast blame–even without the excuse of being burned by exploding eggs. But there are also so many moments of profound compassion, forgiveness, collaboration, joy, laughter, and deep love. We all have shadow moments, triggers, and reactions. And… We all have moments of extending grace, compassion, and kindness. We are not this or that. It reminds me of an ancient poem written nearly 2,000 years ago called Thunder, Perfect Mind. What feels remarkable to me is that even two millennia ago, someone was articulating the complexity and contradiction of being human. Here are some tiny snippets: “I am the first and the last The text refuses to reduce a person into a single identity. Instead, it holds paradox side by side. I believe the truth of who we are transcends our actions or beliefs… What better way to trick the ego than to just accept all of it. I am a wife who yells and blames. Making space for totality can be the exact healing we need – to lift the one-sided view we’ve carried of ourselves, whether it came from our own judgement or someone else’s. When you are all of it, the scale doesn’t tip. You’re not more good or more bad. You just are. Where have you been letting one aspect define the whole of you? You’re more than that. Here’s to totality. brooke P.S. This excerpt and translation of Thunder, Perfect Mind comes from the seminal book, “A New New Testament: A Bible for the Twenty-first Century Combining Traditional and Newly Discovered Texts. Edited with Commentary by Hal Taussig. Thunder is a compelling text found in the Nag Hammadi library discovery and is one of the most evocative texts of its time, both for its strong Divine Feminine depiction and feminine authorship. While the entire poem can be overwhelming to take in, I have experienced so much healing of my own identity from many of its passages. It’s radical and amazing to see it included in this re-publication of the New Testament as an important voice in early Christian writings. |
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