My Words Were The ‘issue’.

When I was married it was my words that were the ‘issue’.

It wasn’t specifically the words I’d choose or let loose, spit out, spill, dump, let fly or even the ones that would slip out between the cracks in my teeth. It was more how I’d string them together. A flowing brook, stream, river, avalanche, cascading rock-slide of thoughts would roar out of me and hit a brick wall of misunderstanding, readily explained away by the fact of my delivery. So it wasn’t what I’d say but how I’d say it. Naturally it followed then, that with this basic premise in place, his rationalizing when things ran amuck was effortless.

Of course for me, entering the high speed thought chase of talk – a reciprocal, exponentially catapulting, feedback loop of thinking, lip flapping, listening, feeling, and ultimately seeing, and then tumbling, falling, galloping into the next level of interacting with all of it – was intoxicating. But that wasn’t the point. The point, at least the point my then-husband insisted was the essential, earth stopping reason for whatever might be going south in the moment, was that I talked wrong. It was my kind of speaking he said. As if there was a kind of thinking, expressing, being, that was just essentially too … well, too something. So starting right down at the foundation where all connection begins (I’d personally call it the basement, the cold cellar, the long term storage of human interaction), he thought I’d open my mouth and skew things up. It’s not the basic ingredients he’d assure me, the words themselves were fine. It was the total me that encompassed them - the core from which they flew - that created the space between us.

If our argument had been a Russian Borsht, the onions, beets, carrots and beef would have been perfectly adequate, possibly even organic. It was the soup base itself he must have thought flawed – the essence in the liquid one slurps first from the spoon – as if the stock came from some alien, foreign refrigerator. Picking out words one by one, he’d pause like one who savors only the carrots, while surreptitiously feeding the rest to the dog under the table as if nobody could see. And in fact, I couldn’t. I thought I must have been doing something wrong. I was utterly convinced if I could just talk yet faster – be more inclusive, reach farther, probe deeper – that somewhere in the mental melee I’d find a combination of words that would rebuild the bridge between us. Maybe he didn’t like Borsht. I could try Potato Cheese or Mushroom Leek. But the bad taste seemed to have something to do with my pace. As if the roiling connections, the references to various sources, and the odd bits of history added too much spice for his palate. Whatever it was, I certainly didn’t win the Betty Crocker cooking award at the County Fair of talking, at least not during the years he was the only judge.

He called it ANDREASPEAK and eventually refused to participate.