Letting go of a process that has been so much a part of my life – a healing process that has sustained me for so long – feels like letting go of an old friend, or a therapist.  But it is time for me to leave the memoir writing process behind. I spent years coming to terms with life issues and taking the time to write my memoir, The Full Catastrophe. I know it will continue to inspire others to do the healing they need to do and to take up the memoir gauntlet, but I know it is wise for me to put it down now. It has served its purpose - both to heal myself and to inform others.

I have always saved short writings to sustain me and encourage me – writings that give me the pithy truths about life. Pieces of time-worn paper carrying Harrison Owen’s “Four Immutable Principles of Spirit,” Mary Oliver’s poem “The Journey,” Patrick Overton’s advice to “step to the edge of everything you have known,” all share space on my bulletin board, right over my desk. Having Ann Brasbares’ quote, “Paths never look straight. It’s only when you look back that you can begin to see the trail – how one thing led to another,” tacked up there,  seemed to give me both permission and the necessity to look back over my life and write my memoir – to connect the dots of my life so that I could finally understand how an intelligent, hard-working, sincere woman ended up with two controlling and eventually abusive husbands.

After decades of feeling as though I had to look to another for permission just to live my life – walking on eggshells, trying to please and stay out of trouble with my two husbands as they, one after the other, gradually took over and controlled most of the corners of my life - I felt as though I had no life of my own. After my second husband died, I went through four years of healing therapy, then met and married the wonderful man I am married to now.

Though I had broken the pattern, I felt it was time to write my story in order to fully reclaim my life. I needed to trace back and understand the path that had led me there, in order to bring me a sense of peace and contentment. I spent about seven years going through old journals and photo albums to re-experience and write, through my tears, the journey of my life and how one thing had led to another. After many rewrites and edits, my book was finally published. I had made sense of things, from my point of view. I had owned my role in my life decisions so that I could move on, empowered.

But then I got the questions, “When is your next book coming out?” “Are you going to do a sequel?” “Are you going to tell the world what is happening to you right now?”  Well, aside from the fact that today, the present moment, is not nearly as dramatic as my past, I needed to figure out when to leave the memoir behind. 

The reactions to my memoir have not all been as positive as the experience has been for me. I have grown children, a brother, sister, an aunt, cousins, a niece and nephew. My niece, who had been in a difficult marriage, was supportive and asked to read my book. My aunt and brother were also supportive and wanted to read my memoir. My sons have each responded differently to my memoir and my “coming out” as a survivor of domestic abuse.

After my second husband had died and I’d gone through therapy, I gained back much of myself that I’d lost. When I married my present husband he saw a happy, intelligent, strong woman who believed in herself. But when we returned to Calgary, the city where I had lived out the last five years of my first marriage and the first years of my second, a cloud descended over me and I slowly crawled back into my old persona of submission and constant guilt. My husband grew more alarmed as the woman he had married slowly disappeared under that cloud of sadness, depression and self-criticism.

That person was the one my sons had experienced growing up. Over the years they saw their father punch me, heard complaints about me, accusations of craziness, heard my second husband constantly scream and yell at me in public and in private, threaten and blame me and insult me with obscenities. They often saw me angry, hurt, and unhappy. I’d thought, naively, that the feedback I received for my bravery for writing the story would be echoed in my sons’ reactions to the book. In some ways, I’d felt I was writing the story for all of us – for all that they also had been through with a violent stepfather and an uncaring father. We had not healed as a family – only I had gone for therapy and I still had to be vigilant about not falling back into old traps. I couldn’t even look at the emails and Facebook messages I received without feeling as though my gut was being punched. I visibly shook when I read them over - so I deleted them – and invited my sons to talk with me, sit down with me, rebuild the love we had lost. Though I have repeatedly invited them to restore our relationship, it has not happened.

In the meantime, as soon as my book came out, I received feedback that my story resonated with many women who had been caught up in the same type of abusive marriages I’d been in. I continually questioned the wisdom of having published my memoir, even as it was awarded a prize for “Women’s Issues” and collected stellar reviews. I received feedback from women about how they related to my story, thanking me for writing the book. Women and men told me about their daughters, their sisters, their mothers and what they had gone through.

I’d had courage when I went through the process of writing my memoir - opening up the past and reliving the trauma. I now understood the change that had happened to me over the years as I’d gone from an intelligent young woman, a capable teacher, a mother and friend, to the woman I had become by the time my first marriage ended and after enduring life with my second husband. There was no longer a mystery about how this had happened. But now, after my sons’ reactions and their distancing from me, I realised that I was still susceptible – I could slip back into that morass of hurt, pain and depression that had dominated so much of my life. I needed to remain aware of my vulnerability to those old patterns.

Memoir writing has been exciting and liberating for me, but also fraught with potholes that I could never have imagined.  I inadvertently thrust the story of my past onto my sons – they were not prepared and did not agree about what had happened. Everyone sees things differently. They had formed their lives and their understanding of themselves, their father, their mother and their childhood.

But now I could see that my memoir and the reactions to it had brought me full circle in my desire to change, to grow, and to heal. I have felt a great peace descend over me. What to do next? I will teach others to write their difficult stories, but I will not be doing a sequel to my own story. I am anxious to get on with my next book - and likely that will be historical fiction. I am ready to let the memoir go.