Sometimes I feel like a transvestite trapped in a straight woman’s body. Heels? They should be high high high. Makeup? Sparkly, heavy, and colorful. And dresses? Yes yes yes.
Self-expression, whether sparkly gaudy makeup, religious beliefs, writing, or spouting opinions is a dangerous and necessary act. If one has the courage to speak from the heart, after the kids and the marriages and the mortgages tell us we better shape up and act like a lady (or at least act “mature), the pressure to keep it all tamped down is pretty strong. But let’s not fool ourselves, also scary as hell.
So today I dare you to do something that is from your heart. For you. Some small secret place you’ve been waiting to open up and tell someone about.
We’re separating, which either means we’re resetting a bad cycle of anger and recrimination, we’re ending the marriage, we’re hanging on for dear life, or we’re merely hedging against inevitable divorce. The meaning and implications vary from minute to minute. The only clear thing is keeping life as regular and predictable for the three girls as possible, keeping them busy with school, and their familiar surroundings, and apart from the turmoil in our relationship.
There is no question in my mind this arrangement has long since become a source of familial anxiety and untenable stress. Add to that new sobriety and the usual challenges of raising three young children, and the family pot is boiling over, burning, and setting off screaming fire alarms.
Should our marriage ever recover from this and our family reconvene, it will be a heartening and inspiring story. It will give people power over their sense of futility and courage in the face of doubt.
But right now we have no such story.
B will leave for awhile, still seeing the girls regularly. I will stay with them in our house, which is warm and safe in the winter, spacious and light with pretty colors and double-paned windows.
I’ll watch them run around the kitchen island, the familiar pattern tracing an invisible path on the silly fussy hardwood floors. We’ll talk over the matters concerning 5 year olds at breakfast — the Christmas play, whether the tooth fairy will leave another $2, what they want for their birthday — and I’ll look at them closely and see this time as a flicker that I cannot grasp or cling to but merely watch float by, already gone. If I close my eyes and open them, they’ll be beautiful laughing 16 year olds rolling eyes and avoiding my presence, but knowing I’m there. They’ll talk on the phone, they’ll argue about curfew, they’ll treat me like beloved wallpaper.
But will they love themselves? Will they feel that they’re beloved? When I look at their sweet faces with small traces of their babyhood still visible around the soft chins and chubby hands, I can see that this is the most important thing I’ll ever do. That failure here will haunt me. I have been given these amazing girls.
What riches!
And how would someone treat such a gift…
I’ve so often joked and pattered on about the problems and challenges of parenting… the drag of it all. But in the last weeks, I really understand that all that hip chat is hiding the essential truth of my life today. I love my daughters more than myself. More than my husband. More than life.
But it is also true that I am completely blinded by the instinct to protect and could be overreacting and using this as an exit strategy for a marriage about which I’ve had ambivalent and negative feelings for a long long time.
Whether this is courage or folly will be revealed…
I share joint custody of the twins with their father and his lovely wife. Ours is not a particularly unusual arrangement these days. Though B and I have the twins most of the time (they go to their dad’s every other weekend), it’s a little like having a back-up team. When our team flags, they come in for relief and advice and perspective. We all share love and concern for the twins and as a group make quite a successful parental pod. I won’t deny that having a grillion parents and grandparents and two homes must at times get confusing for the twins, and the long-term impacts of this arrangement have yet to be seen. But even with that, I’m convinced the girls are lucky because they have so many people (legions!) who love and cherish them.
When I married B 3 1/2 years ago, I longed for a happy ending. A safe and loving home for my daughters and myself. I was partly making up for what I saw then as their deficient life — one with a single mama and a single (at the time) daddy, who were still angry at each other and unable to put them first. I was searching for a port in the storm and I found one. For awhile.
My mistakes this go-round have been many and grave. The biggest one being not recognizing that my neglect and abuse of the marriage would ultimately doom it to rocky shoals.
This doesn’t justify the manner in which the twins have become recipients of marital frustration. Not. One. Bit. Children are innocent and need protection, care, and love, regardless of how low down and struggling we feel.
I will pay, have paid, for my mistakes…but not today.
Today I have a reprieve and am feeling serenity and gratitude my daughters and I have a loving extended family, a home, a port in the storm no matter what happens.
Carol Gotbaum’s story is a tragic one… She was mother to three children under 7 who suffered from severe depression and alcoholism… While on her way to a residential treatment center in Arizona, she died while in airport police custody.
However, I think what was lacking was an understanding of her desperation… a desperation some of us feel occasionally (to a greater or lesser degree)… which culminated in her untimely death..
The evening’s dread approach no longer finds solace in thoughts of you… your chill clean sweet release.. your thoughtless escape from all the hurry-scurry. You’re no longer a friend, a secret buoy, a kind invisible force to bring peace. You’ve not taken everything from me yet, but I know you will. If I follow you where you want me to go — to a land of more and more and more…. to a place where just one is never ever enough, I’ll lose everyone I love.
But still it feels like a loss. A huge terrifying loss. Without you, I’m so much less than I dreamed I’d be. So much less. When a beloved friend visited this week, she who is still so free, I sobbed for the way I used to be. Before marriage, kids, jobs, life… How far below joy I’ve fallen.
Rebuilding and crafting change and renewal from this tangle of addiction and craving is so much harder sometimes than at others. When I realize how much I relied on you to get me through. How asleep at the wheel I’d become.
The novocain is wearing off now. I’m girding myself with new people and meetings and new rituals. I’m starting over, every day… Hoping to replace oblivion with real loving (self) kindness.
Whether it’s alcohol, or work, or sex, or kids, jobs, mortgages or in-laws… many of us have neglected to find anything more than mere pittances for ourselves and we’ve completely and utterly lost our way… Remember those wild hopeful girls we used to be? Let’s find them again. Together.
Writing through hard times isn’t easy. Writing through times like this (recovery) is nearly paralyzing… What makes it particularly so (aside from the usual list of who occasionally reads this, what they’ll think of me), is that by putting it down on this screen, I’m admitting it publicly to an extent that prevents going back. To the hidden way… the other darker (but let’s face it, muuuuuch easier) way of being. And since I’m very early in this journey, I’ll happily admit that the other way? Of blocking things out, shutting bad things away for consideration at another time, is much more fun than sitting in a quiet room, shaking, facing up to the way things are right now. Here and now.
I’ve found a place to go every day to talk about my problem with drinking. To listen to others talk about their struggles and fears and recovery. And it is a complete and total miracle. If I’d known how great these meetings would be, I honestly would have stopped all this wine nonsense a long time ago.
But of course I wouldn’t really. Because outside of those wonderful comforting loving meetings, life is once again scary as hell. And this time I’m standing there without my favored weapon. Facing an army of tigers with a pea shooter and one bean, which is how we’re supposed to feel at the beginning (I’m told).
And I feel like the outside layer of my skin (the adult, fake-put-together part) has been taken away and I’m this sea creature –shell-less and shaky–lolling around waiting for sunlight to reach all the long way down to the ocean floor.
At the same time, the grace and gratitude I’m experiencing through motherhood, honestly would have made me roll my eyes and scoff a short 12 months ago. Who knew that cooking dinner for them each night was going to become such a valued ritual that I cling to it and watch the clock just waiting until I can start to prepare their food…
What is here and now for me is this:
I’m 39
I have three beautiful daughters
It is a gorgeous Fall late afternoon in a small town in NW Washington State
I feel hopeful
I feel terrified
If I could be any character in fiction or poem, I’d be a woman featured in one of Pablo Neruda’s love poems…
Until that happens, Emily Dickinson will have to do:
CityMama wrote a thoughtful piece the other week about the trouble some of us mamas face: working too hard, and not having enough fun, wanting to recapture some of the joy of youthful carefree days.
Other times, I bend and reach and find only that I’ve come up short. Terribly short. I’ve been selfish, preoccupied, and completely less than all of the things I so long to be.
I have good vision, but poor execution. And I wonder if I bend more, reach farther, will I reach that point of joy and fulfillment beyond motherhood and work — those two lovely pillars that keep me standing?
******* I’m having much more fun over at Imperfect Parent contemplating fantasy vacations….
After several days of loving up on my girls, we descended straight into Hell. Isn’t that the crux of the challenge of parenting? Just when you think you’ve reached some new state of loving adoration and peace, they learn an evil new trick.
For the past three nights running, all three girls have gotten up 8,000 times after bed for reasons ranging from “I need ice in my water cup” to “I love you bigger than the world” (which, if not told to you at 11pm is a very adorable thing to hear).
I’m a member of the Church of the Early Bedtime. I’m a worshiper of the Goddess of Sleep Ritual and an acolyte in the Parents Free Time is Essential to Mental Health spiritual practice. Kids getting good sleep is my thing. My main trick (aside from acting goofy so they laugh off a tantrum).
The past few nights we all devolved into an exhausted cranky, crying, yelling family from Hell. And I was Queen.
So tonight? Wind sprints and milk with a dash of Benadryl. I kept the girls up one hour later then usual and made them run between the two fences while I counted loudly and cheered.
Part recovery, part self-help, and all real, raw stories of waking up for the sake of your self and your children, Mommy Doesn’t Drink Here Anymore follows one mother’s journey from cocktail mama to sober mama. {read more}
