My husband and I were playing darts in our basement—something totally new for me.  I’ve been struggling to let go and have fun—something not new for me.  He has been patient and kind and encouraging, and while we’ve been doing this together, we’ve been talking about our plan to fix up the basement and make it ours, make it a nice hang out space.  We already use it as a play area essentially since we have the dart board, the pool table (he fixed himself) and my grandmother’s old bumper pool table.  I also have all of my workout equipment down there and it is a truly transformative place even if it isn’t pretty.  We’ve known for some time that we had some mice downstairs and we also knew there would be an issue with that because of the way the insulation was installed.  They used Silvercote/encapsulated fiberglass punched into the concrete and they used regular insulation on the raised unfinished 2X4.  They didn’t want to fully frame out the basement so they did it to keep the space warm but we live in the country with lots of little critters so they’re looking for warm too.  And what do they do with such cozy quarters?  They burrow and tunnel and pee and poop in it…so when we had to remove a section unrelated to this project and we saw the home these creatures made, we knew it was unhealthy for us to even have it down there.  We removed it with gusto and are now left with the task of putting it back together.    

We’ve always worked really well together on projects, honestly.  Even if we didn’t see 100% eye to eye, we have always understood the assignment and what we were trying to accomplish and we would always find a compromise.  We have fun together, talking about the idea, planning it, getting the materials, and starting it.  With this project something different, something more clicked in me.  Our conversations over the last few months have changed in context as I’m seeing more and more of the things he said he wanted to do coming through.  The things he ways he’s looking for he actually means.  This project is reinforcing the idea that couples who play together stay together, but it’s also shifting perspective about the past.  See, as we’ve been working together on this, it’s very clear that we are taking what the people who lived here before us built and how they did, for whatever reason they had, and we are reframing it (literally) into something new.  It hit me in an instant that we can do the same thing with our past.  A little over a month ago I found out some things were happening that shouldn’t have been and it triggered every raw emotion from what had happened nearly 20 years before—apparently it did the same for him because he started telling me things he’s never told me about his perception and experience of those incidents.  There were things I didn’t know and didn’t remember and it nearly shook the foundation of what I have built these last 20 years on.  I had felt like a victim in so many aspects—some valid—but I was clinging to that identity as a means to skew things in my favor, using guilt rather than growth to build from.

Suddenly things made sense and fell into place, conversations I wanted to have are happening, and we are telling each other the entire truth.  For the first time, I wasn’t angry about it.  Yes, there were intense feelings and sadness and regret, wishing certain things didn’t have to happen—because they really didn’t have to happen—but this was a peak, a catharsis for both of us.  There was no more hiding or resentment or wondering what happened.  There was freedom.  And he looked at me and he told me in absolute earnest that what happened then happened then and we’ve been together for 23 years and we are going to leave it in the past.  For the first time, I agreed on that.  This wasn’t the usual trying to sweep it under the rug and avoid responsibility type of let it lie—this was a we know what happened and we both see it differently now.  Now we are at a point where we have mutually agreed to move forward.  We have this unbelievably complicated, sometimes sordid but often lovely history and now we have come together to bury it.  We aren’t using the past as an excuse to create expectations on each other or to do things behind each other’s backs to prove a point about power.  We’ve mutually made the choice to take down what was there and start anew.  The foundation was never bad, the construction just got sloppy over time and let the mice in.  That can be fixed.  We just need to expose where they got in and accept responsibility for where we made the hole and then fix it.   

With intention, focus, purpose, and mutual understanding, we can clean it up.  Yes, it requires going through the mess and getting rid of all the crap and that can take some time, but once all the muck is gone, that foundation is exposed and we can create something new.  It doesn’t change what existed, those things are very much still there.  But it changes how we look at the entire thing.  It only takes a mistake or a miscalculation of ¼ inch to throw off an entire build so even if the pour is strong, when we start adding to it, if we stud out incorrectly, we can’t hang the drywall properly.  So the point is this: we can take anything and start again.  And if we don’t have to start again, we can always change how we look at what happened.  Sometimes we just need to let go of what was and create a new vision.  Sometimes that original vision is there but we get rid of the crap that skewed the build.  There were lessons in the past as much as I hate having gone through some of them—there were things to learn about worth, self-worth, boundaries, and how relationships work.  We needed to understand what love really means.  It’s neither complete dependence on each other nor is it two separate entities existing under the same roof.  It’s both.  There was a reason we have stayed together as long as we have—it hasn’t all been bad.  We just needed a different perspective.  Changing how we see the past changes what we can see in the future.  And I see an entirely fresh start, creating what we want together from the ground up with nothing hidden in the walls.  It just took a little perspective and sweat.  It took aiming the darts elsewhere rather than at each other and putting the effort into what we want rather than what we can’t change.  We just build up from here.