Breaking Love
I’ve been watching reruns of Breaking Bad, a favorite TV series from 2008 - 2013. Bryan Cranston’s character, Walter White, is a high school chemistry teacher who starts producing high quality meth after he is diagnosed with lung cancer. The series explores his meteoric growth in the drug arena while navigating the tensions of having a family, including a wife who feels she has no choice but to go along with Walt, and a brother-in-law who works with the DEA.
As the series is closing out, Walt witnesses a violent personal killing in the desert. As a result, he feels has no choice but to escape town with his family but his wife, Skyler, and their older child won’t go with him. In desperation, he kidnaps their baby, the only person in his family who doesn’t hate him. He later realizes he can’t take the child with him and leaves her in a safe place to be found. He also calls his wife to set things straight.
In the call, Walt is enraged with Skyler. In his most cutthroat tone of voice, he tells her that he is sick of her consistently going against him, that she’s a terrible person for not believing in him and telling him to turn himself in. In addition, he blames her for their current situation, that if she had listened to him they wouldn’t be in danger and he would not have left with their daughter.
About halfway through Walt’s tirade, Skyler’s face slightly softens as she realizes there is something else going on in the call. Walt knows full well that the line is bugged and he is publicly giving her an out by negating her culpability and support of the meth business. Setting aside Walt’s otherwise lack of morals, the hateful rant and ugly words were actually an intentional act of love, from him to her.
While most of us will never be in a situation like this, we will have experiences in which we are on the receiving end of someone else’s ugliness. It can be tough, tough, tough to find the silver lining in such a situation.
The person may well be full of hate and blame or shame us; that’s on them. But what if something else was going on in the exchange? What if we were being told in no uncertain terms that the situation is not a good fit for who we really are and it’s time to shed a constricting layer?
Sometimes it’s not a loved one’s ranting, but a needed job that falls through, or an accident, or an illness. There are hundreds of ways we are negated in this world. Trusting that the negation is actually in our best interest is asking a lot of us. It may take months or even years for us to see that our heart was broken out of love. But once we do see it, we, too, can soften a bit.