I mention her a lot and I probably should make some comments about what happened after Aisha divorced me and, to all outward appearances, ran off with another man.
I wasn't even sure if they were living together or what but they seem to be an item for a fair amount of time after we split up. I went to live in an apartment above Theresa and her husband's in Marin (Bless them). Aisha went to live in Napa about an hour's drive away from me.
It was difficult keeping contact with the children and I struggled, usually unsuccessfully, to stay sober for the first year or two after the marriage. With help of my new girlfriend, who ultimately became my second wife, and Alcoholics Anonymous I got sober. Within 2 years.
In the first years the post-divorce relations were not exactly pleasant but at least predictable.
As the children grew up we had fewer and fewer opportunities to be cast together and I lost track of what was going on with her. It was pretty clear that she did not care too have another husband or partner after Ali.
Unlike most of the other people in the group.
I felt her loss much more profoundly than she did mine, I judged. In retrospect it seems like she looked upon me as a disposable chess piece. A failed experiment. Someone who she had been willing to take on as a quasi student, as someone she hoped would change into the real beloved she thought or thought she saw it.
But I never or only rarely got the impression that she loved me for who I was. Even for the parts that she had trouble with.
And bless her heart, I don't know if she even HAD had an inherent resevoir of kindness and love to give to a husband, or perhaps to any other adult not in her own immediate family.
Her father had had a history of mental illness and at times seemed severely depressed to me. Even though he had wonderful attributes, he came from a hardscrabble dirt floor Saskatchewan farming family.
Her mother seemed to concentrate her love on her two sons, and apparently never had much in the way of expectations for Aisha. She was given chores around the house that they avoided by studying. Just being a hairdresser would do for her.
She told me her mom had never even hugged her until the day she left home for college. She felt that hug the entire journey, and it was like a dream come true.
Her first marriage had ended in betrayal, and she seemed anxious to erase all traces of it. Cutting any kind of contact with Theresa's birth father or his family.
He also had a sort of old boyfriend who was not Sufi, but who loved her, back in Winnepeg, where she was living when I met her. I think she was torn about giving her heart to a man who loved her but not Allah and who was not interested in meeting Sidi.
Torn between him and me--someone she barely knew, who lived in another country and culture, but who had just taken Sidi's hand and who, at least 'on paper', had the better qualifications of the two.
She wasn't in the habit of trusting her own heart, it seemed.
To such a one perhaps the lure of the love of an imagined, powerful, loving God seemed a safer thing than the quest for love from another, variable, faulted humn being.
And Sidi always made a bid deal about Love. And Yearning. And a Fiery, Tumultuous Extinction in the Ocean of Love.
Many of his Subjects read a bit like Spiritual Bodice-Rippers. I'm thinking specifically of "Al Hubb/The Love". It's sexy as all Get-Out!
I don't know what kind of private relationship she may have had with Sidi BEFORE I arrived on the scene, but it certainly didn't trouble him to defy sexual conventions with the two of us!
At the very least, he may have indicated that he was her true Father, and that all her frustrated, unrequited love and devotion could be directed towards him. Did he indicate he was her spiritual husband as well? I don't know.
But she did change her last name to his, even though she had no explaination for that and nobody did so in the Shadhiliya Order. (Her one-time BF Ali may also have given this idea to her, as people in that order DID take the last name of their Sheik).
So, after we split up, she busied herself publishing Sidi's endless writings. It seemed to me unbalanced, unnecessary, and having a lot more to do with her need to keep busy. And in particular, to stay busy and preoccupied serving her Idol and Master.
As the saying goes, "Before Enlightenment, even a whole librsry isn't enough. After Englightenment, even one word is too much."
I'd be the first to admit I've had a difficult time 'forgiving and forgetting' the marriage, Aisha, and Sidi. It was a wild, irrational, unreasonble toss of the dice.
The surprise wasn't that it dissolved in an apocalypse of substances and sex workers on my part and cultic proselytizing on hers.
The surprise was that it lasted as long as it did --14 years. And for that, we owe our mutual love for our precious children.
I was prepared to stick it out, even though I lacked even the hope of ever getting clean and sober. And even though I felt unappreciated and secondary to her committment to Sidi.
I had drunk the 'Marriage Kool-Aid'. I thought we were going to be married for life.
And I thought that, for better or for worse, she was the one I got. And the children were the proof.
And, I must insert here, we never spoke about the dynamics of our marriage again, after we parted.
In the several months where we remained in the same house, I would beg her not to leave me, and ask her wasn't there ANYTHING she loved about me? I dont remember any answer, so, if there was one, it can't have been very convincing.s
I refered to our sexual life together. Which, to me, had been one of the bright spots. And which she often appeared to enjoy as well. I asked her why she had enjoyed it with me, in particular. She said, "I pretended you were God".
I'm still working on that one. God help me, I am still trying to figure her out, even though I doubt she much appreciates the effort.
Throughout the marriage I'd kept expecting to be surprized by love and appreciation and, not experiencing a lot of that, thought that she was mad at me. I felt unloved, but I couldn't admit it. I didn't really KNOW what was wrong.
I'd had it really easy and comfortable growing up the adored only child of a well-educated and adjusted, happy marriage. I expected to loved just for being me. Aisha didn't play that way.
I guess I never fully accepted the fact that Sidi had been TOTALLY MISTAKEN in picking us for each other. How COULD he have been? NOBODY does that!
And WE HAD BOTH been totally mistaken giving our power over to him so recklessly.
In her brief 'romance' with Ali, I saw an unpleasant side of her that I hadn't expected. I hated her taste in men. And then, I realized I was one of them.
Ali appeared to WORSHIP her! But he also wanted to be let in on the 'secret'. How come she seemed so SURE of what she believed in? How could HE arrive at the same certainty? I had had the SAME DESIRE!
Then, I began to get the impression she was using HIM to ease her out of the relationship with me. Ibrahim told me she promised she would drop Ali after she had moved out and got settled.
The whole point of this soap opera libretto is to indicate how, even in the middle of a relationship purportedly based on devotion to God, we couldn't manage even the most basic communication.
It felt like we were flying blind the whole of our life together. Oh, Aisha would call up Sidi with some problem or other, often about me, and he would tell her to, "Be Patient", most likely, but that was as close to any kind of therapy either of us got.
Except, towards the end, I DID begin therapy in an attempt to get some control over my drinking. Alas, it was too little, too late.
Aisha had totally made up her mind already. And she hadn't given me a CLUE!
I mean, I know I may have been a SCHMUCK, but I was the ordinary kind of schmuck. I hated myself, and I was looking everywhere for escapes from my unexamined issues--the biggest of which might have been my cultic marriage.
But I suppose I expected my wife would still forgive me and give me another chance. And I really DID want to try HARDER. I certainly would have gone to couples couselling...ANYTHING!!
Plus, I WAS sorry for the children. I wanted them to have loving parents. That was about to be over for them.
And, need I say I was DEVASTATED imagining my life WITHOUT THEM. Although I knew I would see them via court-ordered visitation, I had a very bad intuition that THIS REALLY WAS THE END of my 'having a family'.
I wish I could say I was wrong, but I let Aisha's rejection get to me. I FELT MYSELF to be an interruption, a PROBLEM.
And when she changed their last names, or seemed more than willing to assign my son to Ali, these seemed archetypally wrong. Disturbed. Yes. But part of me bought into the idea that I deserved it.
Wouldn't it just have been easier to let go of me with love? I've seen other women do that. Women who didn't necessarily have ANY spiritual connections.
And here was the Publisher of 'God's Best Friend', who is in the Spiritual Advice business, and she can't find a way to deal with her children's father that doesn't make him a 'problem'?
It seemed like Aisha was just discarding an old farm animal that had outlived its usefulness. Plus, she had a new lover with the SAME FAWNING DEVOTION to her that I had once had.
Even more, she really identified with Sidi's appearance in the West as a kind of Second Coming of Christ. She literally talked about zawiyyas that would spring up all over North America.
Aisha yearned for a New Society of Brothers and Sisters who would think, look, and act as she did. The present world was a complicated, frightening place for her. She envisioned a holy life with holy people with Sidi as everybody's Spiritual Father.
She'd given me 14 years to prove whether or not I would join in her Sufi World and made the correct assessment that I would not. No, I was drowning in self-pity, panic disorder from my immoral escapades, and literally, in alcohol.
I was certainly not much of a prize to show off to the new recruits. Although, I think she made an effort ot think of a way we could live together but not conjugally. WIth my getting a second wife.
But I couldn't get past the fact that she just didn't WANT me, as miserable as I was, any more.
What I never considered is that she wanted God, not man.
And what I still assume, to this day, is that she cut off her willingness to expose herself, to be vulnerable. She didn't feel she had enough of a resevoir of human love and kindness to sustain her if that human love were lost. Therefore, if she was to have any love at all, it would have to be from God.
And so, to this day, she remains an enigma and a closed-off sort. Not someone who easily falls into intimate conversations with others. Not one.
And to be brutally honest, she's not a person that make one feel happy just to be with her. She's unhappy. And can be harsh. At least the few times she's made the effort to communicate with me, she's been harsh.
She allows herself to ignore my communications. She doesn't bother with salutations to me.
For some reason, it still serves her purpose to treat me as the old farm animal. And the part of me that still has residual guilt from the marriage gets hooked. I get angry. I get hurt.
And yet, it so DOESN'T need to be that way. And anybody who has done ANY work in therapy or recovery would know that. Only because she has the Iron Dome of God thru Sidi, she resists anything that might possibly bring to her the necessity to change.
Or suggest that what feels to her like God might be some sort of frozen ideological belief whose activation in her brain triggers synapses that feel like something Divine.
I don't have a seemless holy blanket of belief to wrap her in. I have only a hope that being open to the help of others on an equal basis on the Road of Life is the only way I have found a way out of my own, mostly self-inflicted isolation and misery.
Religion can be a beautiful friend, but it can kill a person's spiritual growth if it becomes an end in itself. This is where I believe my Ex is stuck.
And what's worse, the fact that others COME and ASK for her to help them, to save them from their pains, from their loneliness, is the bait that keeps her in the trap of he own mind. The idea that she is the Teacher. Not accountable to anyone, not to be threatened by anyone, but also, sadly, not loved by anyone, other than her children, either.
My friend got scared that nobody would love her so she gave herself up to God, or rather, whatever notion of God she could make herself believe.
At least something like that seems like the story to me, but its not my job to unwind the story. Thank Goodness. I have enough work on this old character with the ugly typing hands!
I just believe there is more for her that the life she has now. And as her children's father, I would very much like it if she could wake up from this fever dream of a false idol that Sidi told her was real.
And join them, and me, in the general human dance while there is still time.
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