Beginning with my June 2008 post "It's Been Five Years," the following is the continuing story of my travels from the United States into Micronesia ~ Pohnpei, Guam and Saipan ~ and my life since June 2003.
Epilog ~ Present Day ~ Guam
It's been five years... A lot happens in five years....
I wish I could say there is a happy ending to this chapter of my life. But there isn't. At least not right away. Or maybe a better way to look at it is that there is. But like I said, not right away.
I left Lynn in Guam the end of December, 2003, and began what I then hoped to be a new chapter in my life, where I hoped to recover from a series of bad choices that had seemed to plague me for years, years before I had come to Micronesia.
I spoke to Lynn nearly every day while I was away. I cannot say this was another of my bad choices, but a few months later, I brought Lynn to the States for a short while, long enough to conceive a child. We had intended to see if we could start a life together in the States, and to bring her girls with us when we settled, but it became necessary to send her back to Guam to deal with family matters. Unwilling to give up on either Lynn or Micronesia, I followed Lynn to Guam in early May 2004, unemployed at the time, but hopeful. Within a few days or so of my arrival in Guam, I found employment in the Guam Attorney General’s Office. Lynn and I set up house with her two daughters, and awaited the birth of a son in December. Although fraught with more inter-cultural and intra-family conflict, those days were perhaps the best of the times Lynn and I were to spend together. Work was challenging and rewarding for the most part, and my nights and weekends were spent acculturating to life among Pohnpeians in Guam.
I liked Guam. A lot. I liked the people, the work, the sense of community, the food, the scenery, everything about it. I felt immediately at home there, more so than I’d ever felt at home in Alabama; and proud to be there to help shape it and watch it grow. Although Lynn had many family members in Guam, including her mother, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews, she longed to return to her own island.
My professional life was enjoyable, but Lynn was jealous of it, and domestic life for Lynn and me was anything but serene. Rarely did I spend time in the company of Americans except at work. Things were as idyllic as they could possibly be before my son was born, but after he was born our lives together became increasingly difficult. It is difficult to point to any one reason, except to say that my American and her Pohnpeian sensibilities were in constant conflict, and she was very unhappy, because she longed for home. In the end, try as we might (and we did try), coming from such diametrically opposite cultures, we could never adjust to one another’s expectations of each other, and we parted company when our son was around 18 months old. Not by agreement, or by my choice, or with any warning, although in retrospect the signs were there. And I grieved considerably for it all, when it happened, and for a long time after. Because I thought I had invested so much in us, and I could not understand why or how she could throw it all away, or what she thought she was throwing it away for. All over again, my life made no sense. And the depression that plagued me in Pohnpei, and even perhaps for years before I came to Micronesia, returned.
Depending upon your point of view, I endured either many more hardships or adventures in the year and a half that followed Lynn and my separation. Particularly painful to me, I was to be separated from my son for months at a time while I tried to find yet another fresh start in Saipan, in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, with the idea being that my son would join me there eventually, when I got settled and could send for him. It never happened. And I grieved the more, alone in Saipan. Because Saipan was not Guam. And Saipan was not my home. And because my son was without his father. In my grief and depression, old ways of thinking returned and I was overwhelmed by forces and emotions I could not understand. And although I did not believe at the time that I had created the situation, nor do I today, and even though I was powerless and helpless to do anything about any of it, I still felt responsible for all of it. Those are chapters of a different story, to be told another day, if at all. And I may. Someday.
A lesson that apparently had not sunk in deep enough in Pohnpei ~ that no matter where you go, there you are ~ needed to find expression and be repeated many times in different ways before I could finally understand it and come to terms with it. I would return to the States twice more in search of answers. And I would find only bits and pieces of the answers at a time, returning to Saipan thinking I knew the answer only to leave in deeper desperation and despair than when I’d left before. But eventually, I think I did. Find answers. And a kind of peace and an understanding. And I eventually came to realize that knowing the answer to the question “Why?” doesn’t make it better, nor does it ever really make anybody happy. Because the answer to “Why?” doesn’t really have anything to do with happiness. Or love.
On September 21, 2007, I returned to Guam, unemployed for several months, longer than anticipated this time, but eventually, in January 2008, I found simple, honest work that suited me, researching the law and drafting legal opinions for trial court judges of the Superior Court of Guam. It was less than half the pay I was making when I worked on Guam the year before, but very satisfying. I would and do see my son often, and through new friends I am finding a spiritual connectedness that had been missing for longer than I could remember. My focus during that time, and now, was on learning the lessons of humility, many that had been forced upon me, and many that I have come now to embrace. In this time, I have learned to welcome those lessons. And I began to learn gratitude, and the power of surrender and acceptance.
In February 2008, I took and later passed the Guam Bar exam; in August, I took and passed another part. I am to be sworn in as a full member of the Guam Bar on October 8, 2008, only days from now. Completely unexpectedly, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Guam asked me to assume the role of Interim Public Guardian, managing the personal, financial, medical and legal affairs of over 50 individuals with mental disabilities that impair their competence to manage their affairs for themselves. I have recently been invited to return to the Guam Attorney General’s Office. And there are many other blessings in my life today, including finding love again, but those too are stories to share, perhaps, another day.
Lynn and I have made our peace, and though we have not been together for a long time now, we have found a way to share more apart from one another than we ever did when we were together ~ a son whose parents may come from different worlds, and who are devoted to making sure he receives the best of both of those worlds. For all our faults, our son is a reflection of the best in both of us. And we are doing everything we can, each in our own ways, to see to it that he grows up happy, and healthy, and strong, and balanced, and beautiful, and loved. Most importantly, loved. And he is all those things. And I am blessed.
I am beginning to appreciate what it means to live in the present; to believe and have faith in something bigger than myself, to rely on something other than myself, what some call God; and to transform hope and faith from thought and word to deed. Those, too, are stories to share another day. And I will someday. Because sometimes, even in the middle of a life, there can be a happy ending. We need to know that there are happy endings, no matter how much pain we may endure along the way. Maybe that’s what life is: A series of happy endings along the way. Depending upon how you look at it and where you look.
You see, you can look at your life in all sorts of ways, from all sorts of angles. You can dwell in the past and the pain, or you can learn and grow from it. The way I look at my life then, is tempered by the way I am learning to live my life now. And if there is anything I am learning from the difficulties I have encountered in any small part of my life, is that it is just that: A small part of a life. And that's okay. I would not be where I am and who I am today but for the past. But I no longer have to live there. That is the choice we make. We are meant to be happy in this life. And we can be. Sometimes, sometimes a lot of times, we just need a little help and the passage of time to understand.
