Recover Your Soul

“Hey now, let’s recover your soul”, Elton John’s voice drifted through my conscientiousness as I struggled to wake up. I’d been floating on an air mattress in the pool for over an hour, feeling the warmth of the sun on my back, the cool fresh water on my hands and feet. “Hey now, let’s recover your soul”, there were those words again, telling me to recover my soul. I started to smile, my soul, exactly where was my soul? How does one recover their soul? Can you buy a new one? How do you repair the old one? As I drifted back off to sleep, I kept repeating the lyrics over and over in my head.

When I woke up for the second time, a new song was on the radio and Elton was long gone, but I couldn’t get the words of his song out of my head. “Recover your soul”. Maybe that’s what is wrong with me. I’ve lost my soul. I have a home I love and spent a lot of time refurbishing, a job that I adored and lots of friends. Was something missing? Oh yes, my marriage, it was as Elton John said, “torn and tattered”.

After eighteen years and one crisis after another, maybe it should be “torn and tattered”. Could it be fixed? Did I want to fix it? What would I do, where would I go? Recovering my soul would require me to leave, to go far away. With a husband whose middle name was “crisis”, I knew I couldn’t recover my soul and stay married.

As the days went by I kept thinking about my soul and how I would go about recovering it. I called my sister in New Jersey and told her about the song and how unhappy I was and how the words of this silly song would not leave me alone. She suggested I spend the summer in New Jersey with her and her family and try and put things into perspective. Fortunately I worked at a private school and had the summers off. In just three weeks the school year would be ending. I tossed the idea around for awhile and finally decided I was going to New Jersey for the summer.

My husband wasn’t too pleased and tried to talk me out of it. I tried to explain about “my soul”, but I knew he wouldn’t understand. The only thing he understood was that he would be alone and would have to take responsibly for the house and all that entailed, for the next couple of months.

As the days crept closer and closer to my departure date, I was becoming more and more excited, almost giddy. I felt like I was going away to camp, that for the next couple of months I didn’t have to deal with my husband’s endless problems, I could just think about me. What a novel idea! It’s been years since I actually thought about me and what I wanted and how I felt. I’d been sucked into a never ending drama that centered around my husband.

The day finally arrived, I packed the car with clothes and goodies for the trip and my two precious Yorkshire Terriers, Maggie and Abby, and off we went, to recover my soul.