Finding Compassion for the Villain in my Story… in a Mall Food Court

With Christmas comes school events.  One of the first to hit this season was a lunch time concert for my daughter at the local mall.  Her mother and I both made it to the concert which went beautifully.  Being in the holiday spirit, I treated the two ladies to lunch in the mall's food court.  And since it was a mall, the school gave the students 90 minutes to shop around with their friends after the program.  So parents or no parents, my daughter up and bolted as soon as her meal was mostly done, leaving her divorced parents alone together at the table.  No, I didn’t keep my blaster hidden under the table aimed at Greedo.  Nor was any medical glove wearing referee needed.  We actually had a very nice civilized conversation… that lasted three hours….  No this isn’t the beginning of the Parent Trap 3 starring some child actor (and future alcoholic) who brings her parents back together, but it was insightful and dare I say even… healing.   

When my dearly departed wife, up and departed dearly three years ago, I pictured her as one of the valets from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off as they jumped into the vintage Ferrari and bolted off whooping and hollering with joy.  My view was that she saw herself as a perceived prisoner free from bonds and now at liberty to live her life on her own terms.   Yet as we sat there, slowly and openly deconstructing the inconceivable plot twists of the past seven years, this perception I had began to crumble.   We laughed, we cried, we shared experiences and our thoughts as to what went wrong.  Sharing blame and admiration, little seemed to be held back.  As the three hours expired quickly and life called, I left the table with my head spinning.  There was something new up there; a thought or feeling that I could not understand at first.   And then the word for that feeling came to me; it was, in fact, “compassion.”

This feeling was at odds with the narrative of my divorce that I held to be true.  For me, no matter how directly or subtly I recounted the circumstances that transformed me into Brett-the-wonder-mid-singles-meat-market-fodder, the story always had a villain; and it was her.  Sure in some versions she was an attractive victim of circumstance, but there never was any doubt in this story of who the bad guy (gal) was.  Isn’t it all too egotistically natural to assign anyone who is in the least bit adverse to our wants as the black-hatted adversary?  But that is how I had always seen her and felt justified and certain in doing so.

Yet as I replayed our lunch time conversation over in my head and remembered her tears, her self-criticism, her pain, I began drawing parallels in my mind to friends that I’ve met during this new and unexpected journey. I realized that I saw my new friends as the “good guys” in their own stories, no matter the plot line or their role in it.  I condemned their former spouses for both catastrophic and trivial faults.  My friends were good because… well… they were my friends. No, they were not perfect, but they were the good guys.  I was willing to sit and listened without judgment, freely giving the benefit of the doubt anywhere I could.  I wanted to understand their point of view; their pain, their background, their weaknesses and be an empathetic friend.  And while I was willing to give my friends a free pass to transgressions both great and small, I would give no emotional quarter to the woman who bore me five amazing children and whom I promised to love nearly two decades ago. 

Why was I unwilling to grant the same empathy to her?  I guess the answer is pretty easy, I was hurt.  Her story impacted my story.  It caused an immense amount of pain with months and years of doubt and tears.  I didn’t want to see her as anything but the villain.  Yet aren’t some of the greatest stories told of a redeemed antagonist (and by greatest story I of course mean Star Wars)?  And isn’t the story of mankind one or redemption?  Yes, some errors make a marriage unsalvageable, but there really are no errors that make a person irredeemable.  And how do you redeem mankind without compassion? In the case of divorce, not just your fellow man, but the parents of our children and/or the partners of our youth.  And more importantly how do we redeem ourselves with hate and judgment always on our minds and our lips?

So for me it was finally finding compassion for this person who had shackled me into this emotional bondage that finally set me free of this same bondage… somewhat symmetrical isn’t it?  By finding this empathy for her I could begin to take off my emotional hairshirt and see the good in her that I hope to see in anyone. And though the bridges of the past are well burned and toppled into the river, I can finally stop throwing rocks across the water at the person standing on the other side.  While I can’t say that I know of a universal process for healing or if complete healing is even possible.  I can say that I felt the peace of putting down my burden of carrying around the bag of throwing rocks once I saw that all I was aiming at was a fellow soul trying to find happiness, hope, and redemption in her own way and to her own abilities.  And by extending compassion, empathy, and kindness to another, I not only free the villains in my own story, but I freed myself as well.