Reverse Honeymoon

So I am going to talk a little bit about the breakup between Temple and I.

The first thing I will emphasize - I will not talk about specifics.  Because I love and respect Temple.  And she loves me.  I am not going to say anything that would embarrass her.  I don't blame her.  I don't accuse her.  And if anyone carries the burden of this failed marriage, it is me.  There are a ton of things I could have done better, as a husband, to prevent it from happening.

It is not about plural marriage.  It just shows that plural marriage is like any other marriage, and sometimes marriages - polygamous or monogamous - come to an end.

For many months, Temple and I slept at opposite ends of the bed.  We rarely talked, and if we did, it was to argue.  I tried to stop it, but it was like holding back the tide with your hands.  You can grasp at it it and try to prevent it.  But in the end, all you have are handfuls of foam, and the current slides around you.

She needed space, and so she took the kids to see her family out of state.  I tried my best not to call her, text her, bother her.  It was a tough two weeks, not knowing what was going on.

Martha stood by and watched all of this with concern.  She didn't know what was going on between Temple and me.  But she knew something was up.  Hell, I didn't know what was going on.  Neither did Temple.

"I don't understand what's happening," I said.

"I don't understand, either," Temple would say.

It all went back to that black time when I was in my bed with a wound vac stuck to my foot, and the IV in my arm.  That dark hour when I had dark fluids running into my veins, changing my moods, saying things to my poor wife that I could not take back.  Depression - chemically-induced, or not - does some real damage to people, and those around them.  Whatever the case, the bubble was burst, and there was no bringing it back.

Earlier in the summer, Martha had come to me and suggested that I take Temple out of town for our thirteenth anniversary.  In fact, she insisted on it.  So I secured tickets for New York City and found a room.  We have friends who live in Philly, and so I invited them along.

In the meantime, Temple called me from her getaway.  Even though she was out of state, she had secured her own house in town.  She had been talking about finding her own place in town for a while.  Living on the ranch is spartan.  There are few comforts.  "Town" is closer to her job.  And then there is the mud.  Few people realize that Arizona has a monsoon season that dumps rain nightly for about six weeks.  And when you have five miles of dirt road, rain becomes mud.  Mud, mud, and mud.  It is hard on vehicles - if you can even get out.  Temple was tired of the mud.

So she called me to tell me that she had found a new place, and that she would be moving immediately upon coming home.  I asked her a question on inspiration:

"Will I be moving with you?"

She hesitated.  "I didn't want to tell you this on the phone.  But no.  Not for now.  I need time and distance to think about things."

So she came home on a Sunday, and on Monday, her friends were loading her stuff into a trailer for her new place.  Of course, I helped.  It was strange to know what to think or how to feel.  I kind of knew what was happening.  But it was hard to process.  She moved out on the day before our thirteenth anniversary.

The next couple of weeks, I adjusted to life without Temple.  The boys went back and forth between us, between the two houses.  We were separated, and yet we had this trip coming up to New York, this anniversary celebration.  One day, she met me at the highway with the kids, and we talked about it.

"Are we still going on this trip?"

We decided to go.  I mean, it's New York.

So on Thursday, she got off work, and we drove down to Phoenix.  I had decided that I would not bring up anything negative, or talk about our separation.  I would just go and have fun.  She slept much of the way, because she was exhausted from work and from the move.  We took a red eye to JFK and took the Long Island Railroad to Manhattan.  There, at Penn Station, we met our friends.  When that shooting took place at the Empire State Building, we were one block away - on our way to the Empire State Building.

We had a great first day.  We toured the New York Public Library.  Then we went to Brooklyn Heights and walked across the Brooklyn Bridge.  The Staten Island Ferry gave us a good view of the Statue of Liberty.  And we finished off a perfect day with tandoori at an Indian restaurant.

It had been a great day, and we enjoyed ourselves.  But the whole separation thing was like a monkey on our backs all day - the proverbial elephant in the room, and other animal metaphors.  When we got to our (tiny) hotel room, we sat down and talked about it.  Temple brought up several of her complaints about me over the years.  I listened to her, and they were legitimate.  Any one of them were grounds for leaving me.  I take full responsibility for our break-up.  If anyone wants to know what I did, they can contact me.  I am not hiding my fault in this.

I could see where this was going.  And I could see that nothing I was going to do or say was going to change it.  So I knew what to do.  I told her that I felt like I needed to give her a blessing.

She said something like, "Why?  So that you can 'bless' my feelings away?  So that I can get the same answer as you?"

I told her, "I don't know what I'm going to say.  I just feel like I need to give you a blessing."

And I didn't know what I was going to say.  But the minute I laid my hands on her head, I knew.  I quoted Jacob 2 from the Book of Mormon, where it talks about the daughters suffering at the hands of the men who abuse plural marriage.  And then I gave her a release.

The next morning, I woke up and thought, "Moroni, what the f*** did you just do?"

But in that moment, I knew it was right, and, in that moment, I knew it was what I had to do.

A "release" is the Mormon concept of letting a woman go from the marriage covenant.  In Mormon vernacular, there are no divorces, only "releases".  And I felt to release my wife.

Thirteen years of plural marriage ended in a small hotel room in New York City.

She started sobbing and saying that she was a failure.  I took the woman who was my wife in my arms and comforted her.  We talked for a long time that night.  I had been fasting and praying for several weeks.  Each time I fasted, the answers and thoughts that came to me did not seem to relate to what I was going through.  But as we talked, everything made sense.  The puzzle came together.

For some reason, it was supposed to happen this way.  This experience is unfolding exactly the way it is supposed to, and it is for our own growth.

I have never understood nor loved Temple more than I did in that moment, and I know that she felt the same way.

Temple told me that she knew that I would have a claim on her in the next life, that we would be together.  We vowed to be the best of friends in this life, and to still be a family, to raise our children together.  The only difference - in this life - we will no longer live together as husband and wife.

It was a deeply spiritual experience for both of us, and it is hard to for us to make other people understand what we experienced that night.

From there, we went up to a party on the rooftop of the hotel where we were staying.  Temple was wearing her pajamas.  We ordered a round of drinks and toasted to our thirteen years and kissed beneath the bright lights of the New York skyline.

The next day, our friends must have thought we were crazy.  They kind of knew that our marriage was in trouble.  But here were Temple and me, acting like a lovesick couple on our honeymoon.  Holding hands, kissing, hugging - except that it was as friends, and no longer as lovers.  I felt such a deep connection to Temple.  We thoroughly enjoyed our last two days in New York, as well as each other's company.

I told my friends, "If you are going to break-up, this is the way to do it, right?  Holding hands and taking a trip?  A sort of reverse honeymoon to celebrate your marriage before you end it?  It's a good way to say goodbye."

On Sunday, we flew back to Phoenix, and, from there, made the three hour drive home.  Temple dropped me off at home.  I got out of the car and gave her a tight hug and whispered, "Goodbye."

Then I went into my house to Martha, who was asleep and waiting for me.  And Temple went home to her life.

I did ask her that we take about a week to think about it before we made it public.  I didn't really think that one week would change anything.  But I wanted to know that, after thirteen years, I was worth praying one last time to God and asking, "Is this really what you want?"

But in truth, both Temple and I knew that this was the right thing for both of us.  I still love her very much.  And I miss her every day.  But the understanding that we gained in New York helps me get through every day, one day at a time.