Will there ever be a time when talking to my ex-husband doesn’t feel like drinking poison?
Sometimes I speak with him and we laugh and fall into our old familiar banter. It feels good, but also confusing. Of course I want to get along with him, we share children together and we shared a big portion of our lives together. However, I can’t forget how bamboozled I was, that he was betraying my deepest most sacred soul during our entire marriage.
This is why speaking to him usually feels like drinking a bottle of poison, his toxic words literally pouring into my body, burning my insides.
Last night he spewed so much venom over me that the entire house felt dark. I call it the “upside down,” a term from the tv show “Stranger Things” where the air is so toxic you have to wear a hazmat suit to enter because you can’t breathe. When I told my therapist how I envisioned my talks with him, she recommended I get an actual hazmat suit to wear as protection when I speak with him. I have no intention of actually owning a hazmat suit, but I wonder if there’s a way I can protect myself in our interactions?
Last night went like this: He started yelling at me, something about what a terrible person I am. (He doesn’t like it when I say something truthful out loud.)The air went shaky around me as the old familiar feeling of someone spewing hate at me spilled over me. I’m always startled by his venom and vitriol, so I either hang up on him, or yell back that he’s actually the terrible person. I got off the phone feeling shaky and sickened, actually like I had drunk a bottle of poison.
I didn’t know the antidote for the poison, I didn’t know how to shake off the toxic slime.
But then I made dinner for my teenagers. They talked about school and with every word, I could feel myself rising a little bit. After dinner, we all went into the kitchen to do the dishes. They started fighting over who had washed more bowls, and I turned on the first happy song I could think of, which turned out to be, “Walking on Sunshine” by KC and the Sunshine Band. I sang and danced around them while they did dishes which had a double positive impact: it made them laugh and made me feel better. (And before you accuse me of making my kids do work while I don’t, we have a family rule—whomever cooks doesn’t have to clean.)
The wild dancing actually helped shake the poison out of me, like I was in an ancient village and had been bitten by a tarantula, and with no known cure, I danced until the poison left my body or killed me. Did you know this is where the dance La Tarantella comes from? Back in the 16th century in Italy, it was believed that when you were bitten by a tarantula (which actually happened more than you’d think), the venom caused one to fall into a trance, only curable through dance and music. The nonstop, fast-paced music would help the victim sweat out the poison.I wonder if the word “Tarantella” was a medieval code for “Ex-husband?”
In a fabulous plot twist, the “Tarantella” later became a courtship dance. I’m not kidding.
Now at this point you may be wondering, how does she know about a medieval poison cure/love potion? I’ll tell you how. When I was forced against my will to take piano lessons as a child, my favorite song to play was the “Tarantella” because it was lively and dramatic. In my piano book, it gave a little history of the songs I was learning, and I was fascinated by the back story of this song. I hadn’t thought about the Tarantella in years, until I was writing this story, and that piece of music came floating back to me. (My Dad always said my most oustanding quality is my stellar memory lol.)
So in the middle of my frenzied dancing, my kids started a pillow fight that left them on the floor screaming with laughter, gasping for air.
Their laughter also helped brush away the slime.
So I guess, by the end of the evening I did find the antidote for the poison–frenzied dancing followed by a strong dose of laughing. But don’t take my word for it. The next time you leave a conversation with an ex, and you feel like you have swallowed poison, try my antidote and let me know how it goes.
