One

Things Bigger than Us is a recent post that references two songs which are in some sense proxies for the U2 song One, which spoke to the zombies in my head and helped me begin putting them in the past.

Is it getting better

Or do you feel the same?

Will it make it easier on you, now

You got someone to blame?

This song was released on 24 February 1992. My mind associates it with the parking area outside the fence in front of my parent's house and mixes it up with Two out of three ain't bad because they are both songs about a late night argument with a lover and just how extremely bad the ugly parts of the relationship are.

My quiet, shy ex husband rarely raised his voice but I would scream at him when we fought. The marriage was good for me in part because he was quiet and shy and politely BUSTED me with dry observations.

Once, he asked "Why are they my children when you're mad at them and yours when you're happy with them?" I had no answer and never did it again. But, yeah, I can be a real blamey bitch at times.

He and I had a policy of kissing goodnight and of not going to bed mad. I never once sent him to sleep on the couch and that seems like an amazingly bitchy hateful thing to do. I can't imagine doing that and my mind boggles at this cultural meme which for me simply doesn't compute.

If one of us slept on the couch, it was because we grabbed a blanket and left. This was a rarity and he nearly filed for divorce the day after the one and only time I told him "I'm not doing this. I've just come from the ER and I'm not having this fight with you. I'm going to sleep."

He spent the night on the couch not sleeping and then in the morning met a moving truck arriving with our household goods that was packed on our sixteenth wedding anniversary. We moved from a large house to a small apartment and I was THE BITCH for having four yard sales before we moved and MAKING everyone get rid of stuff and then he was unpacking boxes WHILE they unloaded the truck to try fit everything in.

That's how he tripped across the anniversary present I bought him before the movers arrived and he decided to let it go and stop making me out to be THE BITCH.

But this policy of not going to bed mad meant we routinely fought until the wee hours of the night, unable to get bast the lepers in our heads and previous songs only told me other people FAIL like this too and gave me no path forward on the mountain of baggage that fueled the countless late night fights.

You say one love, one life

When it's one need in the night

One love, we get to share it

Leaves you, baby, if you don't care for it

I was a homemaker, financially dependent on him. The kinds of caretaking homemakers do gets framed like codependency in a dysfunctional alcoholic relationship by much of society, like making sure my husband gets up in the morning and makes it to work on time so we can pay our bills is somehow something bad keeping him from getting over his shit.

And the above lines finally gave me something to think about that didn't tell me I was fundamentally wrong, stupid and broken for caring about my husband and trying to make the relationship work and doing the stuff a traditional homemaker does so a traditional breadwinner can get the job done.

Did I disappoint you

Or leave a bad taste in your mouth?

You act like you never had love

And you want me to go without

And that helped me think about trying to put my baggage down and make my marriage work. You don't get over the pain of the past by taking it out on your current lover and keeping it alive by murdering this relationship.

Well, it's too late tonight

To drag the past out into the light

We're one, but we're not the same

We get to carry each other, carry each other

One

Another take on it's not dysfunctional and codependent to actually make your marriage work. It's okay to do that instead of acting like your husband is to blame for everything wrong ever in your life or the world around you and your lack of career and five zillion other things.

Have you come here for forgiveness?

Have you come to raise the dead?

Have you come here to play Jesus

To the lepers in your head?

Another call to stop actively breathing life into every past hurt, to stop fighting all night all the time with someone instead of having a nice life with him.

Did I ask too much? More than a lot

You gave me nothing, now it's all I got

We're one, but we're not the same

Well, we hurt each other, then we do it again

You say love is a temple, love a higher law

Love is a temple, love the higher law

You ask me to enter, but then you make me crawl

And I can't be holding on to what you got

When all you got is hurt

What was I giving my relationship? Was I giving my husband nothing but pain? Why should he stay with a woman whose whole identity is as a victim of things that happened before he ever met me?

Like Losing my religion, this song makes my list of great art. Without the existence of this song, probably my marriage would have ended a lot sooner and I may well have died as a consequence of that instead of finally getting a proper diagnosis in my mid thirties and being put in a position at long last to leave without it being a sentence of death for me and at least one of my children.