Identity Crisis
I fall in love easily, it happens to me all the time. Edmond knew this about me, and appreciated it. Once, on our journey, I needed to stop in a post office in a town along the way to Durango, CO—our summertime traditional adventure. We stopped in Lubbock. I had to mail a particular dress to one of our children who was not with us on the trip that year. I came out from the USPS after mailing the package, and he asked me, “Who did you meet? What story did you hear?” And then, I told him about the 85 year old man behind me in line who told me about where he grew up, what kind of shoes and clothes he wore, how hard he worked on his family farm, what kind of trouble he got into, and who he was mailing an important package to because it mattered. I really do feel so grateful for the 5, 10, or 30 minute encounters with strangers that leave me completely in love with the human species. I may never know someone’s name, but my heart is forever connected to theirs.
If you show me your heart, I cannot help myself. I will love you. This certainly happened with my children and Edmond, and it is true of my clients who show up with their aching hearts in hand. With my friends and family, we tell each other “I love you” all the time. I also fall in love with characters in books, works of art and their authors and artists. Do not ask me to tell the difference between a fictional invention and a real historical human. If you touch my heart deeply, even if for only a moment, even if you are a fictional being, I will love you.
I fell in love with author, poet, activist Gloria Anzaldúa seventeen years after her death. In graduate school, I was assigned several chapters from her book, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality (Latin America Otherwise). The chapters were provided at no cost by the professor, and I was so enamored with Anzaldúa’s writing I bought the book.
She wrote in a way and of things that touched my heart deeply. I have been thinking of her a lot as I move through this blurry, muddy time. When I was thinking about my identity in terms of Edmond’s death, I specifically began to think of Anzaldúa’s work, not only because she is a comfort in beautiful imagery and words, but also because she asks us to consider important questions regarding self and transformation.
Anzaldúa speaks of the Coyolxauhqui imperative as it relates to identity and healing from trauma. The Coyolxauhqui imperative is inspired by the Aztec mythology of the Moon Goddess.
The Moon Goddess, daughter of the mother earth, gathers her 400 brothers who are the “stars of the southern sky”. And, in moment of desperation and sense of justice, they attack with intent to kill their mother who has become unconventionally and dishonorably pregnant by a ball of feathers she encounters. In this misinformed move for murder, her newest bother is birthed fully armored and fully grown. Using the ray of the sun as a weapon, he chops his sister into pieces, tossing her head to the sky that becomes the moon, the light in the darkness.
In an effort to integrate and become whole again, the Moon Goddess is the representation of how each of us fragment in the traumas of our lifetime and move through transformation to once again become whole.
The Coyolxauhqui imperative is the drive and challenge to heal and recreate oneself and reform one’s identity from the scattering traumas and fragmentations that occur over a lifetime. It is a way toward wholeness and integration.
Anzaldúa speaks of the practice of wandering by the mestizas, the mixed race women who guide by example. The mestizas wander and explore their possibilities and potentialities, practicing what they will one day guide for others.
Wandering is a willingness to explore the edges personally and then do so again, alongside their initiates. They do it first before they walk beside those they guide, and act of humility and courage. Perhaps, this is what I do now. Perhaps, this pain and anguish and lostness will serve beyond my own experience.
Anzaldúa speaks to the legacy of the mestizas, a particular group of guides who live between the various worlds of multilayered identities within a culture. They navigate and negotiate identity from the margins and live in a constant state of process and liminality. Particularly, in light of the constantly evolving and conflicting perspectives among gender, race, sexuality, religion, and nationality, mestizas’ identity is in a constant state of flux and emergence.
Knowing the terrain on behalf of the collective, principled risk-takers challenge inequity from a compassionate heart and foundation of oneness. Artists and activists are guides and mediators through the liminal in order to ensure safe passage through the difficult path of transformation. I can see that Anzaldúa walks in the liminal with both feet in. She has modeled what I must do now, who I must become.
I feel in pieces, like the Moon Goddess dispersed across the vast sky. Perhaps I took a risk that devoured me or dispersed me across the cosmos. I feel like a wanderer in an unknown land. My identity has been compromised. I would not change a thing. I have no regrets.
The first public writing I shared was four days after he died. The title of that piece was: Who Must I Become Now? The issue of identity comes into question with any kind of loss. Whose daughter or son am I now, after a parent dies? Whose mother or father am I now, after a child dies out of order before his or her parents? Whose lover/partner/spouse am I now when I have lost more than my other half? Because, 1 + 1 = 3.
When do people call themselves a widow or widower? Are those even terms of identity anymore? What pronoun can I use to signify the heartbreak I walk this land with every hour of every day? Have we updated that terminology? Is there is a word for who I am without Edmond? I do not know it yet. Being Edmond’s wife is only part of who I am, yet it was emblematic of my sense of partnership and belonging in the world that I worked so hard to find and know. That is a huge part of my knowing self. Who am I if I am not Edmond’s wife? If he is not my husband? Does his death mean we are no longer married? What if I do not want to identify as a widow, but the wife of a Light Being?
Identity, if it stagnates and becomes rigid, keeps us hostage and less than whole or transformed. We cannot claim to be “saved” and ready for heaven’s gates as long as we take the next breath. Well, I guess we can, but it isn’t the truth. We must not stop at the next iteration of self and believe it is our last, or we will die in a living body and our soul’s purpose will not be fulfilled.
Who must I become? I do not know. I am playing in a place of paradox. I am willing and resistant. I am wife and I am widow, and I am neither of those things. I am being invented in every moment.