Tuesday, May 22, 2018

This Broken Road...




3 years ago, give or take a couple of weeks, my life imploded. It was scary and dark and frightening. All the words in the world that mean, something happened that I didn’t want to happen, and all I wanted ever was for life to just go back to what it had been before.

In truth, I know now that life could never have returned to what it was. No matter what course you ultimately choose to take, life is forever altered. It’s something that I honestly thought that I understood-after all, if you read this blog at all regularly you know that I call Nick leaving the third big terrible precisely because two other big (huge) terribles had preceded it. I know what it’s like to endure a huge hardship, something that could end a marriage, something that could haunt you for years to come, and choose to remain married and to forgive and forget and move along to the next phase of your life. My point is, I thought I was all knowing and wise because I had endured these two huge betrayals in the past, and I had swallowed hard and gone on with life. It’s what you do.

So, along comes betrayal number three, and everything crumbles. I didn’t want it to-obviously-but it did, it crumbled right to my feet and nothing that anyone could say or do could fix the fact that my marriage had ended. Hope, you see, had died. Hope had lied.


Three years later, life is of course gloriously different. If you had told me then-if you had taken that girl that I was in 2015 who was just barely functioning-if you had said, in three years, you will be going about life as if it’s always been this way, as if Nick is just sort of your goofy brother-I might have wanted to believe you, but I would have thought, three years? Why can’t we just fix things now? Give me some little shred of hope, just so that I can get up and function through the day. That’s not how it worked, though.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when hope showed back up, but I do know that it was long after I had learned to get through the day. My days were rote, muscle memory of how to exist in the world and breathe in and out. The one thing that I wish that I had understood, that I didn’t understand until much, much later is this-because I stayed in my house, because my outer life really did not change at all except that now I didn’t have a husband anymore, my experience of my divorce was completely different than Nick’s experience of the exact same thing.

Granted, no two people experience the same thing, right? But I hated myself for how sad the simplest, most routine bits of life made me. I found that I missed things about my old life that I never even thought about before. I rarely found myself crying over the big things, the thing that you would imagine you would remember-vacations and holidays and such. But I can remember of standing in Imlay’s, buying a pair of scrubs, and being overcome with sadness remembering that the last time I had done that, we had gone as a family and the girls had picked out silly shirts for me and Betsy had asked for a real stethoscope for Christmas. And I had this lovely meltdown in the middle of a store, buying scrubs that I wouldn’t need in just a few months time.

All of that is just to say, I never knew when I would fall to bits, I never knew what weird memory would rise to the surface and just undo me. Accepting that this was life now-memories of memories-I fought against it, and then gave into it, and basically wallowed for what surely seemed like much too long (but felt like just the only thing to do), and eventually life actually moved on.

Last night, the girls and I put the flags out at the cemetery, which is something that we have done as a family for years. (This is hard to put into words-I know, why do I struggle to do it? A good question for a different post.) In the past few years, this has made me feel a sadness, because it was something that we did together-it felt like someone was missing. Which makes sense, I think. But last night, I didn’t feel that at all. I still remember, of course, but the feeling that I am pretending at being this single mom, who doesn’t feel abandoned and left to do all of these “family” things alone-that feeling is gone. The girls and I are a family, as we are. No one is missing.

If I had known three years ago that we would get to a place of solace, I would have felt relief. But I also suppose that I would have felt three years a terribly long time. It really hasn’t been at all. In the grand scheme of life, these years, these years where all of life changed and turned me into this completely different person, they are just barely a moment in time. And before I realize it, my girls will be grown up and gone and life will shift again.

Life lately just has me remembering that panic, that sadness, that fear. I suppose that the return of June will always make me remember, in the same way that March reminds me of what it felt like to be the wife of a soldier deployed overseas. Heavens, that was years ago, and still the chill of the beginning of March brings it back to me.

All I know for certain is that life has changed all for the better, and I wouldn’t trade where I am for where I was. Letting go (truly letting go) of my old life led into this new life of complete and unabandoned joy. And it took years to do, but there the hope lies.


Tuesday, May 8, 2018

Days We Lay Dying...





My dear and most beloved Gidget and Moondoggie.

I am so profoundly sad to write this post.

Gidget Catherine and Moondoggie Heathcliff came into my life on December 24, 2003. They were brother and sister and never spent one day apart from each other in their 14 years on this earth. They loved each other, and us, hard. They wanted nothing more than a lap to lay in. They were my Gidge and my brave soldier.

When they were little, they tore up everything in my house-anything that was within their reach, including my kitchen floor. They remain the most anxious dogs I’ve ever known-they are scared of closets and the toaster and Moondoggie is even afraid of stairs.

They loved running and barking and protecting my house from delivery people. They loved Betsy and Felicity once they figured out who these tiny creatures were that we brought into the house. They were intrigued by Anakin.

The past three years they have been cared for by my parents, beginning when I went to work full time but in the past few months, my parents have cared for them day and night. I carry an incredible weight of guilt over that but I do know that there is no one more loving than my parents, no one better to take care of my dogs and spoil them rotten and make their last years on this earth full of love and treats and kindness.

I love them to the moon and back and will miss them every day. In my lifetime I have loved my dogs fiercely, and I dearly miss Caleb, Mandie, Mollie, and Zoe. I dream about Zoe every so often (I was the one with Zoe while she died) and I truly believe with all of my heart that Gidget and Moondoggie will join them.

Carry on, brave soldier, and take care of your sister.

Saturday, May 5, 2018

Someday These Will Be The Good Old Days...




Six months ago, I wrote a blog post that I titled “Defying Gravity” in which I said that I was feeling happy-and that I didn’t quite know what to do about that. I loved that I was feeling happy-there had been such a long stretch of time where I could feel content but just not quite happy.

Writing that blog post scared me. I was terrified that the minute I claimed that profound joy as my own, it would all dissipate. Such had been my experience before, when I would imagine myself beginning to see the end only to be overcome by a wave of grief more intense than the last.

Instead, six months later, I am delighted and a tiny bit scared to say that I am still quite blissfully happy. There are days, of course, that aren’t quite as wonderful as others, but most of my days anymore are completely sated with a degree of joy that I just didn’t think was possible for me anymore. I thought that I was too jaded, too skeptical, too full of doubt and questions about where life was going compared to where life had been.



I have lived with my twin issues of depression and anxiety, with a nice bit of co-dependency thrown in, for nearly all my life. My depression first settled into my soul at 14 and I have cycled through ups and downs with it ever since. I can’t recall a time when I didn’t live with anxiety, though there surely must have been a young age where I wasn’t consumed by worry. I honestly cannot imagine life without them.

My divorce, though, going through my divorce was like living with depression and anxiety on steroids. Looking back, I wish that I had had the sense to be more patient with myself. I knew where I wanted to be-I wanted to be in a place where all that mattered was that I had my girls, my family, my friends-I knew to my bones that I was blessed beyond measure but I just couldn’t feel that anymore. I felt numb to the world, I felt such sadness that I had never experienced to that level before-and I just couldn’t see an end to it.

But now, today, nearly 3 whole years since that third big terrible that ripped life apart, I wake up every morning so incredibly grateful that I had this experience, this time of such complete sorrow and loss. It's a strange thing to be grateful for, but I feel like such a stronger person, a happier person, a person capable in spite of such obvious deficits.

So, so many blog posts to get to what of course has been true all along. This was always my story, this was always my fractured fairytale.




So, dear old world, I am so lucky to be alive in you, to paraphrase my favorite literary heroine. I never would have dreamed that I would look back on these past three years with anything but sadness. But such is life. Joy slips in even when you aren't expecting it. Even in the midst of crazy, sad, out of your mind grief. The joy is there.