Paula Robles Nettel
Five years have past since those days. Henning didn't kept his promise and didn't contacted me after the three years went by. Last December while I was walking the snowed parks of the Oslo Castle in what I could define as the perfect moment of uneventful happiness with my then boyfriend and my son, I received unexpectedly short mail from Henning, apologizing for the dismissal of our agreement of three years, circumstances were difficult for him to keep his promise. And now, though he felt remorse for contacting me he just wanted to tell me how much he had been thinking of me all these years, how much he missed me and how much he wished he could speak to me about all the things that had happened in his life. That there had been many ups and downs in his life but that it seemed to be better for him and he was hoping my life also had turned out all right.
The more my son grows the more I am convinced that we did the right thing, for his place was next to those children and the life that was going to sustain them growing safe and healthy. Anything else I could say about those years, what he felt then or now would be merely speculation; thought I know well that my writing and the disclosure of such intimate details will not please him, I do it for me, for he moved on in the silence he imposed on us, and I tend to move on in friendship, something that he ultimately denied me when he disappeared from my life. I need to speak out in order to find the freedom I seek, for in the honesty of the things I've spoken about were also years of great growth and joy and not just suffering. After all I realized the true meaning of my womanhood, and to an extent the difficulties of being human in a world full of prejudices. I learned to love with out possessing and to love with freedom. There is nothing left in me to say, I hope the new year brings me the reconciliation with myself that I so much need.
From Oslo Domkirke
31. December 2015
-I-I-I-
Tobias
My days
passed in silence, not a word more from Henning. Silence as a punishment took
over my life. I checked the mailbox of my house for the next three years waiting
for the stones and the cd’s with the music he promised, they never came. During
the month of May, I attended daily the Stavanger Cathedral that was exactly in
front of my office, I came at 12:00 every day I sat to mourn in silence, begging
God for an answer, consolation, an explanation; Henning silence like God’s were
constant. I do not remember another time in my life with more pain than these
days. Despair took me into a state of depression, and in the attempt to numb my
emotions I achieved to block the love of my son that for weeks did not provoked
anything in me. I was totally lost in my mourning, my reality, the heaviness of
my shame, the pain that my actions afflicted on me, and all I could not
understand and so far have failed to fully understand.
The
cathedral became my daily refuge, whenever the storm inside of me was coming, I
left the office and sat there to compose and decompose myself in order to
continue. In all that time I sat there I saw tourists entering the cathedral
behaving like tourists without culture, saw some worshipers and the caretakers
of the cathedral. In more than a month that I attended every day, no one turned to
see the unhappy woman with the hidden shame, with her head down facing the
floor, silently crying leaving puddles of tears on the floor of the cathedral.
One of
those days, maybe one of the worst days of my pain, hidden in the less visible
places of the cathedral, with my forehead leaning on the chair in front of me,
tears dropping to the floor I quietly demanded God to speak up, telling
him I wouldn’t go from there until he would speak to me and give me comfort, an
answer, a reason, an acquittal, I demanded with irreverence for his answer. A
few minutes later, someone touched my shoulder, lifting my head to look up, a man
dressed as a priest with blue and tender eyes said:
“Do you want
to talk?”
I raised my
head suppressing the desire to clean again my nose with the sleeve of my
sweater already wet with tears and snot that somewhere I had to improvise where
to leave. Dressed as a priest, standing by my right side, a man in his fifties,
with kind eyes asked me if I wanted to
talk about something. Seeing his priest robe and after my demanding monologue
with God minutes before, I said yes. The poor priest couldn’t have known that
he was going to be receiver of the greatest vomit of my soul, the verbal
incontinence of a broken heart, without answers, divided between feelings and thoughts about morality and love.
I spoke in a broken voice, incomplete incoherent sentences escaped me trying to articulate some
sentences that could make sense to him “ A bipolar man we became friends, we chatted
online for months after we met, we met, fell in love, I did not know he was sick,
I did not know what being bipolar was, but his illness brought us here both to
church, to God”. I said with tears and cut words, a dripping nose with eyes
full of pain. And continued, “His partner and children, this could not
continue, this had to end to protect others, but I can’t find peace” I told
him.
And finally
I cried without shame in the midst of that church. Tobias touched my shoulder
gently with his hand, he let me cried until I stopped, then he prayed aloud for
me and Henning and handed me his card and said "find me when you have strength to speak", he stood up and said
goodbye. I took his
card and read it while putting the sleeve of my sweater in my nose. It
said
Tobias M.
(Sjelesørg) Pastoral Care.
A few weeks
passed before taking the decision to contact him. I did it first with an email
explaining what had happened in my marriage and then with Henning. The following week I met Tobias in his office.
Before we started our dialogue Tobias told me he had to say something very
important and that he needed clarify this with me before we could started
talking more about me. Tobias told me that because of my letter and the things
I had already told him about Henning’s mental illness, he saw fit to tell me that
he had been many years ago diagnosed as bipolar and had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital when the episodes of his mania showed up. It had already been several years since the last time he had one episode, but that
he thought it was relevant to tell me so I could make the decision of whether
or not to trust him despite his diagnosis.
I smiled at
him and said I wonder if this is coincidence. He then said smiling, “this is
what my people call “Godincidence”. And so, with that comment we broke the
ice and we started a long year of conversation sessions where Tobias helped me
to express not only the pain of the situation that I had just experienced, but
all that I had dragged with me from my failing marriage and some things related
to my childhood and youth that had influenced indirectly why I ended up in this
country. Tobias helped me to forgive myself and establish barriers to protect my space
which was immediately reflected in the way my relationship with my ex-husband
took on a new dimension of mutual respect and cooperation that not always
existed. There were no meetings without tears, but there was always
understanding, no judgment or words that could make me ashamed. What I found in
the office of Tobias was an oasis of expression, a place to come clean, full of
empathy and the comfort for my soul that I much needed.
The fact
that Tobias had experienced firsthand a mental illness, helped me a lot to
understand both sides of the situation in which I had found myself witness in Norway.
The fact that this man had successfully overcome what had must been one of the
greatest storms of his life, and how he was now able to get me (and others)out of the
emotional hole where I was, gave me back hope that these two men that had come
into my life through love and that simultaneously were suffering in their own heavy storms
in the early months of that year, could very well return to a life of
stability and prosperity. My hope for them was not only that, but a concrete possibility.
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