Episode 41: Shall We Dance?

Episode 41: Shall We Dance?

Excerpts from "The Petty Chronicles" Every Monday (rerun)

It’s hard to re-arrange your life when you don’t have a set of blueprints to follow or even some shred of a plan. You just have to feel your way along. You start out as a solo act, adopting various dance partners along the way until one day, bam! You meet the partner you never want to stop dancing with. Eventually, you tie the knot, set up housekeeping and begin the process of finding your way through the day-to-day maze of married life. You become attuned to his inner and outer rhythms, and he to yours. You become a duo — hopefully a dynamic one — and you boogie together through life. That’s how it’s supposed to be, at least that’s the ad campaign I grew up on.

So let me tell you, it was a painful moment for me when my husband lost his grip and began stepping all over my feet.

To this day, I could strangle my mother for not telling me about the conversation she and my husband had during their first dance at our wedding. He told her it was time I knew who wore the pants in the family; that he was going to be the boss of me. She told him he was dreaming if he thought that was ever going to happen, which was well and good, but she could have saved me a lot of heartache had she informed me of my new husband’s 180 degree pivot from boyfriend to control freak. She didn’t have the heart to mention that I had just said “I do” to my worst nightmare; it was supposed to be the happiest day of my life, after all, and I guess she thought he’d come to his senses. Unfortunately, he never did.

I believed, for the longest time, that if I wanted it badly enough I could make our marriage work by the sheer force of my tenacity and will-power. But I spent so much time tap-dancing around the fact that he had completely changed that I lost sight of the reason we had begun our dance in the first place. We had been in love once and this determination of mine to lead us back to that blissful state was going nowhere fast.

When we finally called it quits, I had no idea how I would bridge the gap between my married life and that of a newly single woman, but step-by-step and inch-by-inch, I finally managed to regain my footing and I feel like I’m back on track at last. Of course I am tripping the light fantastic on my own but I’ve come to find it’s a lot less painful that way because the man who changed from a fantastic partner to one with two left feet isn’t stepping on mine anymore... and that, in itself, is a big relief.

Check out new episodes of The Petty Chronicles every Monday.

Click the following to learn about The Petty Chronicles and its author, Rachel Gladstone