The third time I married, I married to secure paternity for my second son (see Do the Work of Womanhood). I’d been my Emirati lover’s mistress for more than six years. He was married to an American woman and had two daughters with her. He’d promised me over the years that she was in agreement to our arrangement, that she wanted him to take a second wife, which is within his right by the tenets of Islam, as he is allowed to take four wives, and even though I’d doubted him many times, I chose to trust we would all find our way through the situation.
We didn’t.
His American wife divorced him and took their daughters to her home country with her. He was bereft and depressed. I was shocked. The truth revealed itself. He had willingly lied to me, and probably to her, too. He had cast me into a character I never wanted to play. It was just a matter of time before I’d find my own way. And it came in the voice I heard telling me to “Go home.”
What is courage?
The willingness to follow your own lead from within when what is about you cajoles to push, direct, and impose a different direction to your movement is courageous. It is not a going against anything. It is a leaning into, trusting, and allowing a coming from within impulse that wants to carry you into new territory of which you cannot yet see or predict. Courage is the willingness to say yes to this inner impulse. It deepens conviction. It sharpens focus. It releases tension as you let go of need and claim forward motion in the flow towards your unknown life. Courage frees you from the past and puts you in the eternal moment that is. Now you are in the hands of life and something greater than anything you’ve ever known.
A dozen years after heeding the voice to “Go home,” which was two years after I finally received our divorce document by mail, I felt ready to write the story. So I did. Then I self-published it as a book. And I’ll never forget the feeling of holding the actual book in my hands the first time. My story had weight. It had become a living thing and it made me cry with wonder. That book eventually found its way into the hands of my third husband’s daughters and the story healed the distance between us. We hadn’t seen or spoken for fifteen years. And I can say now it was likely the primary purpose of the book — to heal, bring together, and celebrate.
In October 2019, four years after they’d discovered and read my book, those two step sisters to my two sons arrived in a room housing a motley crew of misfits bound together by love. The occasion was my elder son’s wedding to the Syrian man he’d met, fell in love with, and vowed to share his life in holy matrimony. For this occasion, I wrote Marry Me and spoke it during their wedding ceremony. Then I offered a feminine version of The Lord’s Prayer before the meal was served at their celebration. During both these moments, I experienced a new presence of power in my body and voice. I could hardly contain it. It would not be still or silenced. It wanted to move through me, as me, for those with me. There was something to be said and I’d been given a sacred stage upon which to say it.
Waves of power lifting from within me rising, rising, rising through my torso — womb to heart then throat into voice the movement force feeling like a freight train rolling over my being. How to hold this, stand in this, be with this?
On the evening of celebrating the marriage of these men, whom I love so completely it is beyond my understanding, I sat at a round table that would have been occupied with my parents and siblings had any of them attended the wedding. The essence of this surreal encounter with my aloneness imprinted me with ineffable knowing — it was time to move beyond my blood ties and claim new connection. This would be my family now. Not at the exclusion of my birth lineage, not only the sons I’d born from my own womb, but an inclusive web of family holding every person in this room and beyond that were somehow being drawn into my orbit for I was the centre and circumference of this expansive circle of life. Some sacred contract of completion was before us in this shared moment in time beyond all time. And I felt it move through my body as locomotion pulling me out of the past, and all I had known, and into the as yet unknown future.
When I rose to grace our meal in prayer, I had to hold tightly to the person standing next to me, my arm around her waist as she steadied me with her arm around my shoulders, so overwhelming was the power breathing words spoken through me. It wasn’t me and yet it was all me. In a moment I will remember forever, I sensed the hardships and difficult journeys of each man and woman in the room. I received a vision of how we had all come through tremendous personal trials to arrive in this moment, together. Here was the human soul! This knowing coursed through my body and the words I heard being spoken as me moved the room. None of us would ever be the same again. We had arrived! And from this moment forward, all would be new in the unknown potential of who we’d become as a community in unity. It was as though some mission had been accomplished. We’d made it!
In this realization, it only appeared that I was sitting alone at a table intended for my family. In truth, I wasn’t alone at all. I was firmly anchored here and this would be the new humanity. And I felt its birth move through me as surely as I’d physically given birth to my own sons. The door to my future was through my own heart. I donned the mantle of Mother to the children of this room, in the presence of their ancestors and their descendants, and it was a seed planted in my own soul that had been gestating since the beginning of time. No longer shackled by oppression of human making, we were all claiming the right and responsibility to be fully who we came here to be. We were standing together in true freedom.
In the kinship of All Creation, each of us must answer to our own soul. Claiming our soul authority is what happens when one acts in courage.
The true authority that says I Am and This Is.
Question for Reflection:
Life is an irrational, eternal paradox and woman carries the space within her to hold and transform it. Who would I be if mine to do was simply to rebuild human relatedness in acceptance and harmony?
Magdalen Bowyer
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