Divorce (And ME/CFS)

Finalized in 2025, but there could be confusion…

My blog has been around for ages now and throughout postings folks will encounter my mentioning of my “ex” and of being divorced. I did not officially divorce until 2025, but in my heart and mind, we were divorced since our marriage ended after years of heartache. We did separate for years. Then the economy being what it was and still is, and my battle with ME/CFS, along with the needs of our three children converged as the most defining considerations. After reflecting on what outcomes we needed to nurture, we realized we needed to move back under the same roof in order to launch our children successfully. We literally were unable to legally divorce until 2025, but we gave each other room to pursue other relationships should the opportunities arise.

When we separated, we both felt confident my illness would still give me room to work and move us along to a finalized divorce before too long. However, confidence does not cure chronic illness and my health took a nose-dive the likes of which cornered me into working from the home and limited the time I could invest even in working from the home. I went through the cycles all ME/CFS folk go through where I would establish a fairly reliable baseline of possible activity and then life would pull the rug out from under me and leave me without a baseline, clinging to the couch for weeks or months at a stretch. Divorce became an elusive though sure outcome.

ME/CFS, and any chronic illness, catapults folks into challenging and nearly impossible life situations like the one I reference here where divorce is delayed for, gulp, two decades. If you have relatives or friends suffering serious chronic illness, be there for them. See them. Affirm their challenges and do what you can to help carry the burden. Know, too, that simply “going on disability” is not often an option and has been particularly challenging for ME/CFS folks since it has taken the medical community decades and decades to simply begin to acknowledge ME/CFS as a very real and non-psychogenetic illness. What does this mean? Note the words used here: Acknowledgement of legitimacy has begun and there are still far more uninformed physicians than informed. Medical neglect devastates many of the ME/CFS population and reaches into the legal work of seeking rightful financial relief. Those deciding whether or not ME/CFS is legit enough to warrant disability benefits are influenced by those who still suffer the terrible and often willful ignorance that leads to the abandonment of millions suffering with this real and debilitating disease. So, if the medical community still needs to catch up, the legal professionals deciding disability benefits will often not legitimize the need either. Then there’s the whole issue of whether or not spousal support from divorce will provide just enough financial support to block all possibility of receiving disability. The standards are galling. Navigating the possibilities exhausts and discourages the already weary, and is often weathered without help from friends or family. Be the exception if you’re able to be and roll up your sleeves in commitment to understand, bear witness and be with those sidelined by any chronic illness. The impact of ME/CFS is insidious and extensive, isolating and obstructing lives to the point of often complete alienation. Resolving divorce and income needs with such considerations is tricky work.

Meanwhile, should you be one of those who notes the strange and seeming inconsistency of my mentioning being divorced years and years ago, and then finally declaring our actual move to legally do so in 2025, you’ve likely scratched your head in confusion. You should understand why now. Life challenges can be surreal, and though divorce can take place often times before the actual legal act, legal marital dissolution is a powerful, needful spiritual and physical work. Don’t tread lightly into protracted separation. If you can avoid the limbo of not quite married/not quite divorced without wrecking the well-being and housing of those involved, do it. But plenty of people must continue to live under the same roof due to financial impossibilities. If you’re one of those unfortunately trapped, my heart is with you. Hang in there and get help in any way you’re able to do so.

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Prayer #4 (in the aftermath of rape)

Let me not do more than slam, hammer, pound
and send all the contents smashing against the ground,
the wall, glasses, books, whatever in the vicinity of this holy rage.

Let me not grind my teeth endlessly or linger too long
in the fantasy of obliterating the one who trampled innocence.

Call the gatekeepers, please.

Call the standard bearers, too.

Rouse the warriors against the wave of scurrying human cowardice
that reaches rapidly to blank out, redact accountability
and stroke, stroke, stroke the enablers.

Let me not be so done with children posing adulthood
so fury-blind that I alienate them every last one
in the fallout of the brutalization of one actual child.

Open our eyes to the beasts we pursue in the hopes to subdue,
subsume and subjugate, feeding our own inner monsters
while we weep under the light of the moon
wondering why our children have been devoured.

Stop the generational wreckage smash and crash
rolling through the fast lane in the here and now.
For once, end the long game, the one where the children pay
and pay, and pay for the violations of the fathers.

Keep us all sane, keep us all open to being better people
so the ones who’ve paid a price not their own,
can know safety in our presence.
Make our lives, our days, our minds, our hearts
and our actions a refuge from delusion and insanity.

Waken the dead, the walking dead
who thrive more in pretending love
than the doing of care, of forethought, of protection.

Wash over the blistering wounds made,
the whispering haunt and the innocence fade.
Conjure from the cracks a tree more resilient,
refusing that perpetual derision as it rolls downhill,
mocking how precious the sighs and pulse
of our children, our heritage, our hope.

Conjure creation’s cure, a resounding war cry,
calling from the heart of mother and father divine a raging justice,
insisting growth, smashing lies and building newness in the after.

photo by j. ruth kelly, all rights reserved

 

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Power Over

“What posturing and performance share in common is a deep disconnect between the inspired heart and our gut instincts, between rising up and sensing ground where all life dissolves into the rich humus of earth. Make no mistake white bodies are capable of sensing deeply and can become conscious of the insidious ways that colonization is held within our flesh and blood. We may squirm and distract ourselves, but we have what it takes to dissolve these century-old impulses to cage, control and power over body. With awareness, we can begin to recognize our conditioning and through attention we can allow our primal impulses to grow a capacity to dissolve the distortions and claim life-supportive gestures and expressions.” Liz Koch, excerpted from the post on her website, Core Awareness, titled “White Bodies, Psoas, & Gesturing Power Over”

We colonized the land and the people of the land we now call the United States of America and we colonized our own bodies. Power over is the rabid beast created when we divorce ourselves from being soft, hairy animal human. We infused our religious beliefs with power over. We insisted on obedience like we insisted on this land, raping and violating the bodies of children in the name of discipline and good behavior and, for some, godliness. I can say that my daughter and two sons have birthed me because they broke my heart open and opened me up to my own tenderness and the validity of the wild human. I could not fathom how the sort of discipline inflicted on me, and on my sisters, in the name of Jesus was anything remotely connected to love and that realization occurred when a baby girl came out of my body. Everything changed. Who was this sacred creature? How could you thump her on the forehead for speaking her mind or challenging you at the dinner table? How? You must be divorced from your own body, colonized from head to toe to soul if you do this and you must be addicted to power over. Dethroning the inner tyrant anchored on the seat of the heart and placed there by fear, that is a work on which to commit a life. Enshrining love as a fully-muscled set of doings and thinkings and makings of solid evidence of love and value decolonizes the body, rids the mind of toxins long dormant. And the work never ends. There is no arrival. I don’t know what I’d do without people like James Baldwin who lives though he’s gone and Liz Koch who is here and now shining light on needful truths.

Here’s to freedom from power over and losing all the baggage that goes with it.

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Revelation 3/9/17

“Love… Thy will be done
I can no longer hide, I can no longer run
No longer can I resist your guiding light
That gives me the power to keep up the fight

Love… Thy will be done
Since I have found you, my life has just begun
And I see all of your creations as one perfect complex
No one less beautiful or more special than the next
We are all blessed and so wise to accept
Thy will, Love, be done

Love… Thy will be mine
And make me strive for the glorious and divine
I could not be more, more satisfied
Even when there’s no peace outside my window, there’s peace inside
And that why I no longer run” (Martika)

Let this be so for all who discover a long-buried essential element of their souls, a suppressed or feared aspect of their being. I stand with every layer in celebration, and in gratitude for inclusion in each gentle and courageous revelation. Love, thy will be done…

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The Church of May

You leap beyond all
despair and hopeless falling.
Fiery woman, live;

no spire reaches
past your own sacred lightning,
flaring out fierce love.

Stomp and squeal delight
against a night of constant
yearning. Your love’s dance

blurs us past façades,
awakens all our hoping
towards sun’s warm call.

Photo by J. Ruth Kelly, All Rights Reserved, 2016
Photo by J. Ruth Kelly, All Rights Reserved, 2016

“May” is one of my daughter’s nicknames. On this day, pictured here as blurred trees and a church held steadfast against our movement, Marion drove us around to see some of the more lovely parts of Pittsburgh. Our trip to see her began with her trademark spontaneity and abandon when we drove up to her home. She leapt up and out the front door into the 1am cold night air and squealed with joy and then down the stairs, doing little run/skip/dance moves out into the street to reach into my car for a huge hug. And that is the best of the “Church of May.” She reveals, at her most fiercely loving moments, what we’re all made of and what we’re all here for … no matter how dark the time. We are the sacred, spiritual, divine-as-love.

 

 

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Sweet Journey

At this time 21 years ago, I was in labor with my first child and only daughter who, in a handful of years, managed to birth parts of me I had never known before. It has been such a beautiful path with plenty of challenge and I’m sure more adventure and growth for us both to come. But in the meantime, it feels right to get back into the swing of blog posts by acknowledging the celebration and gift of Marion’s life.

I am a rich woman!

J. Ruth Kelly, 2016, All Rights Reserved
J. Ruth Kelly, 2016, All Rights Reserved

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BirthGiver

Mother’s Day conjures up the many names by which we address our mothers…

Mama (my favorite)
Mom
Mother
Ma
Mommy

to name a few.

My youngest son took to referring to me as “birthgiver.” I can’t read or say the word without chuckling. He has a flair for the dramatic and while he doesn’t literally call me that very often, it’s memorialized on his iPod. He receives texts from “birthgiver.” And then there’s “momnoms…” one of the often-used nicknames my middle son loves. I can’t decide which I like better. It’s a spin off from “nom nom” and appropriate, I’m thinking.

We mamas give birth, are consumed – some of us literally giving sustenance from our own bodies – and then our schedules, our energy, the old identity all of it consumed as we watch our children grow from adoring little creatures to sometimes scornful boundary-bucking beauties. And it is, all of it, beautiful. Ok, most of it.

For obvious reasons, the phrase “birthgiver” hit me today as I looked over pictures from way back before my own mama gave birth to me, to my life…

Happy Mother's Day
My beautiful Mama…

And as I reflect on mamas and life and birth and giving and consuming it strikes me how we are, all of us, capable of becoming birthgivers. I think of at least one man when that word hits my brain. So many give birth to offspring of the soul, nurturing, conjuring and calling forth dormant aspects of our personalities, our potential. It’s a beautiful truth.

My own children have birthed me in ways no others in this world, in this lifetime, can ever lay claim to… My own Mama has gifted me with a bounty of love-awareness no hiccup in our relationship can ever destroy. She is a beauty, inside and out.

j. ruth kelly, 2014, all rights reserved
j. ruth kelly, 2014, all rights reserved

And then there is the sense of a dance eternal, of a weaving and woven tapestry reaching back into fields and lifetimes centuries back…so often I have thanked my children for finding me, for choosing me to be their birthgiver. For that is what we are here for, all of us. We’re here to give birth to each other by our love and support, our encouragement and courage in truth with each other. We can choose what we allow and what we refuse to birth. Such a beautiful handiwork we can, each one of us, make of our lives and of our interactions with each other in love.

It’s an especially wonderful gift to be able to receive from those we are supposedly “in charge” of, to receive on levels that nurtures their awareness that they, too, give birth and especially that they give birth to vital parts of our own souls … just. by. being. And especially by being encouraged to question everything.

So here’s to all of the birthgivers out there and the momnom yummy folk who have nurtured soul, encouraged confidence and facilitated independence… we are all grateful for the dance.

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Eternal Patterns

For sun’s song through trees’ outstretched arms
and
the most supreme grace of hugs
from three birthed
but birthing me,
I turn towards each day
regardless of,
because of all the challenges
surreal and intriguing.
Life is precious fleeting
but pulsing eternal patterns,
a tapestry of wholeness felt
as love unfolds us all –
when we reach with hearts of faith,
refusing fear.

j. ruth kelly, 2013, all rights reserved
j. ruth kelly, 2013, all rights reserved

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