Quinn Steele

For each Insider’s Look, I take you beneath the covers for a poem from my Bleed With Me series.

The End

This was about the end of my marriage, when the truth felt too big to accept, when my husband resisted delving deeper with pleas that he was doing the best he could. I didn’t know what to say in response to that, it pushed me against my own guilt for being the one who was away, the one who worked while he was home with our children. He was doing the part I truly didn’t want to do, and I didn’t know what that said about me.

But I also didn’t like coming home to a family that I was on the outside of. I was the bad cop, the one who needed order, rules, and a budget. It was me and my quiet, reserved, well-behaved dog versus my artist husband, ray of sunshine daughter, headstrong son, and chaotic rescue dog. The chaos had been winning for several years, and it was threatening to drown me.

In listening to Brene’ Brown, I learned that a conflict of values is the one thing that you can’t just “get over”, that more often than not, it means a severing of the relationship. She was speaking about employees and employers, but I believe it applies in personal relationships as well. There’s just no faking it, at some point you realize that you’re driving in different directions, even when you’re trying like hell to pile into the same car, you keep finding that you’ve drifted off in different directions again.

And one day, you realize that the gap is just too wide to overcome, and that you’re exhausted from trying to bridge it. At that point in my marriage, it seemed there were no words left. Sometimes there is only the doing part left. It was with that realization that I slipped off my engagement ring (I’d already thrown my wedding ring into the lake several years before…foreshadowing?) and handed it to my husband and began the excruciating task of splitting our family into two homes.