Meditation on the Word Cleave

A cleaver is a small green plant that grows delicate white flowers. If you break a leaf off and place it on your sleeve it adheres. When we meet someone we begin the process of cleaving. All you can do is think about that person. We attend to what they say, what they do, and how we feel when we are with them. In love we cleave in the tender sense of the word. The drive to join, or cleave, to each other can lead to living together and soon marriage. In marriage we build assets, we create children, grow memories, solidify a joint venture. Done well, a marriage can work like cleavers in summer. You can put its dainty leaf on your sleeve and easily take it off. There is a balance to its attachment. It is not a burr that will get tangled in the fiber of the cloth.

A cleaver is a blade used to butcher meat. It is not a delicate tool like a boning knife which can delicately separate meat and sinew into precise cuts. A cleaver is a hatchet used to hack through bone. There may be marriages that can end using the more delicate tool. But the first time someone says," I want a divorce," there has been a fair amount of violence done to the supporting structure of the marriage. Unkind words, thoughtless actions, indifferent feelings may be the small cuts to your attachment. It is the meat cleaver of infidelity, power and control, and apathy that can lead a marriage to express the sadder meaning of cleave...to sever. Suddenly the process of all you have built together is divided.

Then, that one word with two differing meanings can turn any good intention on its head. One partner my cleave to the past, sure that with a little more work the marriage can work. While the other partner is drawing a line down the middle of a college ruled page with his and hers in each column. For good measure your duality means that there will be times when you switch roles. Until, finally,there are just two people, deep in pain and anger. Cleaved.

The legal system prefers the blunt instrument of a cleaver. Formula, contract, litigation. If it were just a matter of property, assets and who get to keep the Indigo Girls CD it can seem simple. When you have to negotiate about your children, well, cleave takes on both meanings at the same time. It is the struggle to cleave to your off spring and remain relevant in their lives when your time with them has been cleaved in half or more. This is the thought I had as I sat across my ex-husband as we mediated our parental rights. We function in the system that exists. Sometimes personalities don't allow for alternatives which might be a kinder solution for your children. Time with your children becomes a commodity. So this is where you find yourself: dickering over three day weekends and who pays for piano lessons. Meanwhile there is a sweet kid hanging with his buddy oblivious to the decisions being made about his life.

It is late summer. There is a hint of tired to the greens of the landscape. Some trees show a timid splash of color harkening the coming of autumn. The first few cool days invite a cleaving of their own: bread dough divided to be baked in the oven, logs chopped to provide heat. There is not always pain in division. The duality of this simple word, cleave, can be allowed to express itself in the simple chores which provide comfort and this simple lesson: sometimes a marriage must break apart in order for yourself to become whole.

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