I am terrified of the silence.

As children of mothers with depression, we have to teach ourselves how to cry because there is danger in the sadness. It feels like giant cavern that could swallow me whole, a darkness that I might never escape. So I flitter around saying, I’m fine! I’m fine! and going to parties and talking and drinking the wine. But I am not fine. I am terrified of this sadness. I am terrified of the silence. 

I have not learned to trust the silence. So every time I cry it feels like I am touching the hot stove, dropping into the underworld, but I always come back up. Why don’t we learn that lesson as kids? My mother came back up. I have watched her come back up over and over and over again. But I guess when you are twelve, eight years might as well be eternity without oxygen.

I think about River leaving for a couple of weeks and I am gutted. Even though I see we are both tired. We are both needing a change. It’s hard for me to trust it. It’s hard for me to trust that the times we sang, “I’ve got the Redstone in me!” at the top of our lungs will carry us through. How can a Minecraft parody hold us? The dinners we’ve eaten out on the back deck while we listened to the tinkle of the fountain and talked about aircraft carriers. He is getting more patient with me constantly bringing singing and dancing into our Lego war games. He is learning I am simply not a serious soldier. I, like Kermit T. Frog, am more likely to break out of a Russian gulag by putting on a musical than climbing through the sewer or stealing a gun and fighting my way out. 

I don’t blame my depressed mother for my fear. She was doing her best. I do feel recklessly devoted to letting my son see my full range of emotion, because it’s silence I must protect him from. I see it’s silence that puts the big questions in his mind. So I get mad when I have to tell him ten times to put his shoes on. And he cries as he asks, “Why are you rushing me?” And we both see the madness of the rush. We absorb it together for a minute. That minute is everything because it connects us instead of pushing us apart. And then his shoes are on and I am full of frustration, because I’ve told him to put his shoes on 7547 times in the past year, but also wonder—that I get another day with him, that I get to be the exhausted one telling him to put his shoes on over and over again. 

I’ve known for a while that if something happened to Rio, my feisty, loving, little purse dog, the thing I would miss the most is the little “cha cha cha” of his tiny claws on the wood floor. The sound he makes moving around the house. I cannot abide the silence.

So tonight I will drop my son off at his dad’s and say goodbye for a few weeks. And I will come home to sit with the silence. The thing I most fear. It's my work to do, that I've been doing these past five years. I am learning to transform the silence into quiet, which is much less menacing. Quiet is something I can live with. Quiet can hold the sadness.

I am [after all,] my own muse.

"Anyway, the clouds are sagging like the roof of a blanket fort. It feels cozy in a way. And writing here feels like I am talking to a best friend or lover. It feels safe. I feel whole. 

I’m watching the leaves of the tree, two houses over, dance in a breeze I cannot feel. Reminds me that each experience is singular. Even this shared experience with the tree and I under the blanket for sky. For I am reclined on a couch behind a wall and the tree is…well…Do trees always stand at attention? I can’t imagine. I think this tree is stretching, plumbing a root deeper into the earth while the wind tickles her cheeks with her hair dancing across her face. 

It’s wholeness and oneness and stillness and night air thick with dew. We are drinking it in. This is a beautiful night. This is rare."

It’s rare that something comes out of my morning pages that I actually care to publish or use in some other piece of work. But this came out a few nights ago. I didn’t get my morning pages done in the morning because I was working on some other things and by 9pm, I was missing my friend. That’s what the pages have become to me. 

When I went on my Artist Date this week, I stopped at a European lounge that just opened in Oceanside. I had just dropped R off with his dad for the weekend. The jazz club I wanted to go to was still setting up, so I stopped into this strange space. The seating was a series of couches, arm chairs, coffee tables and ottomans. An enthusiastic entrepreneur greeted me at the door and let me find a seat. The place was empty except for one group of three women, sharing a charcuterie and bottle of wine, and a lone woman at the bar, working on her laptop, talking loudly to the bartender. I took my seat against the wall so I could watch everything unfold in front of me and I took out my journal to enjoy some dinner conversation with myself.

It strikes me how this is odd. I almost never see people journaling in cafes, and I often get asked what I am writing by my waiter when I do this. It seems we have relegated our work to coffee shops and, while they can be a quiet, relaxing place, I find the energy of a restaurant in the evening to be much more engaging, mostly, for what it brings up in me.

When I ask the hostess for a table for one, they always appear slightly surprised. I believe work travelers probably do this. But maybe not so commonly at the nice places, or maybe they choose to sit at the bar where their solitude will go more easily unnoticed. 

I wonder if the waiter is disappointed when I am the only person at the table, effectively cutting the expected bill/tip in half. But they are usually very kind, and I order a drink and an appetizer (because I find appetizers to be the most imaginative thing on the menu). I order the entree knowing that I will not be able to finish it, but I get a box to take it with me.  

And all while this is going on, I settle into my senses. I watch the rhythm of people in conversation around me: couples looking at their phones, young pairs eating with what’s obviously someone’s parents, two people so eagerly engaged in conversation you can palpate the heat of a new relationship. I observe the energy of all of this and I write, not so much describing what I see but what it brings up in me. “I am [after all,] my own muse. I am the subject I know best. The subject I want to know better,” in the words of Frida Khalo.  

In this way, it becomes a dinner conversation with myself. I eat and sip and watch and write. I engage with each bite like I mean to know it, thoroughly. I tip well. I leave feeling quiet, and full and beautifully anonymous to all but me. 

It takes imagination.

The Nuvaring

Before I got married, I went to the student health center for a pre-marriage gynecology appointment. I was a student at Brigham Young University (BYU), 20 and a virgin. I didn’t think of myself as prude or naive, but I was probably both of those things. Raised in the conservative Mormon faith, I was taught that sex was sacred, reserved for marriage, but also should be fun (Woo-hoo!), and I was looking forward to trying it out. 

At BYU I heard whisperings of women sent home from the initial gynecology appointment with devices to stretch their vaginas, something to make the wedding night more pleasurable, less painful. I wasn’t particularly worried about pain, I just knew I wasn’t ready to be pregnant.

So I got a prescription for contraception. I knew I wouldn’t be good at taking pills every day so I opted for the once-a-month Nuvaring. My fiancé was a little concerned about being able to feel it during sex, a little ring of plastic resting around my cervix. I hadn’t even considered this, but I felt good about the method I had chosen and I was undeterred.

I imagined putting on sexy underwear beneath my clothes in time for my husband to return home. He would discover this and then we would engage in hot-steamy-sex in whatever room of the apartment we happened to be in. Life never really lives up to fantasy.

Pheochromocytomas

A pheochromocytoma (pheo for short) is a tumor that causes high blood pressure by secreting hormones that are normally secreted by the adrenal glands. Pheos are extremely rare, occurring in <1% of people with high blood pressure. I joined a ragtag Facebook group for people with pheos few years back, and in this group they refer to themselves as “zebras,” after the med school adage that goes like this: “When you hear hoofbeats think horses, not zebras,” horses being much more common than zebras.

I was a zebra. And I had been for several years though I didn’t know it. It was these tumors that caused my chronic headaches and exercise intolerance. The first tumor was discovered in March 2005. I had a nose surgery that I hoped would solve the chronic headaches couple of months before this. During that surgery I became very hypertensive on the operating table and stayed in the recovery room all afternoon, while the attendants tried to get my blood pressure under control. I was lucky I didn’t stroke out that day. 

The initial tumor was discovered after a series of tests and I was advised to use two forms of birth control until it could be removed. They said if I were to become pregnant there was an 80% chance I would die. Since then I’ve looked back through medical journals, and I’m not sure where that statistic came from. There are only case studies of pregnant women with pheos because it occurs so rarely. There are not enough data points for a more robust study. But it was clear to me—pregnancy likely equals death. 

So we started using condoms in addition to the Nuvaring. 

I had three more surgeries that year to remove what ended up being four tumors total. One tumor remained. It was located on or in my heart (difficult to determine on cardiac MRI at that time) and I was terrified. It felt like a precarious place and the distinction between on and in felt important. Because it was small, and in a risky place, they recommended it be monitored rather than removed.

There are only case studies of pregnant women with pheos because it occurs so rarely. There are not enough data points for a more robust study. But it was clear to me—pregnancy likely equals death. 

And I didn’t become pregnant. No pregnancy scares. Nothing. My periods came like clock work. But even after the hormone-secreting tumors were removed, I was advised to continue two methods of birth control as my doctors predicted a high likelihood of recurrence. 

Insurance

The first pheo was removed two weeks before my college graduation. Right after graduation I became a full-time employee of BYU for the marketing department where I had worked as a student graphic designer. Before the tumor, I had plans to return to New York City where I had been the previous summer doing an internship for Young & Rubicam on Madison Ave, but I scrapped this in favor of the excellent employee health plan awarded to full-time 

BYU employees. It covered 90% of my medical bills. 

My husband was bothered that we had to pay for contraception (I think it was $20 per month) and asked me to write a letter to our insurance company requesting they cover the cost of contraception as I had a very legitimate medical reason for using it. 

I wrote the letter; I even had my physician write a letter. It was denied. They generously covered tens of thousands of dollars worth of diagnostics and treatment but NO to a $20/month contraceptive that was, according to all of my doctors, an essential precaution for keeping me alive and safe. 

So we paid for the Nuvaring. And we paid for the condoms. 

Preventing Pregnancy

A year or two after all the surgeries I was chatting with my mother-in-law in her kitchen. I was rattling on about what was on my mind, as I am prone to do. I brought up how I had been considering different forms of birth control and verbally weighed out the pros and cons of each method. 

When I paused she remarked, “I just knew I wanted to have children so I didn’t worry about it.” I believe what she meant by her comment was that it was something completely outside the scope of her experience. She had five children. Maybe she never prevented pregnancy. I never asked about something so personal. 

But at the time, I felt embarrassed for using contraception in the first place. Her comment was a reminder of our shared religion and culture that placed so much emphasis on a woman’s primary role as mother. Mormons do not condemn the use of contraception, but the value placed on a woman’s role as mother is so elevated, I felt I was doing something wrong by preventing pregnancy. I wanted children. But, more than the actual role of mother, I wanted to follow the righteous path. Even with the risk of recurrent tumors, I felt some guilt for playing it safe. Part of me believed I should just have faith, get a family started and hope for the best. Faith precedes the miracle, right?

I wanted the carefree sex lives that I imagined were enjoyed by my friends and family in their early years of marriage.

Another part of me felt envious. This is around the time envy became a quiet companion of mine. You see, sex had already become stressful due to the stakes around pregnancy. I was comfortable on some level with taking reasonable precautions and then letting the chips fall where they may, but my husband was not. He was scrupulous. Understandably so. But I wanted the carefree sex lives that I imagined were enjoyed by my friends and family in their early years of marriage.

Methods 

During my time using contraception (which has been almost the entirety of my adult life), I’ve tried numerous pills, rings, injections and an IUD. Trying the gamut of contraception is absolutely not unusual for women. Contraception has numerous side effects from weight gain and acne to heavy bleeding, depression and mood swings. Most of the women in my life have done the same because, in our culture, prevention of pregnancy falls upon the one with the womb—the one who has the most to lose by incurring an unwanted pregnancy. 

I gained weight and felt impossible depression on the Depo Provera shot. I felt horrible on any of the pills called Tri-. I did better on the consistent low dose pills. But my husband was terrified of impregnating me so any late pill or missed pill threw a wet blanket on our sex life. 

Even then, even while we lived in his parent’s basement, waiting for more tumors to appear, I still enjoyed sex. I just did’t have the freedom around it that I imagined I would—that I wanted.

During those years (more than a decade) I would guess many people within our conservative, Mormon cultural sphere, assumed we had fertility issues. I even had a few acquaintances ask me about infertility directly, like it was common knowledge that was the reason I had no children. I felt guilt around this too. Many of my friends struggled with infertility through those years, and they were looking for someone with whom to share the experience. But that was never the case for me. Our lack of children was due to eleven years of constant vigilance. 

A New Sex Life

I didn’t ever think my marriage was great, but I didn’t think our sex life was part of the problem. I see that differently now. 

Before we separated, and one of the last times I had sex with my ex-husband I told myself, Just enjoy this because it may be the last time you get to do this for a long time—and I did. In the event we divorced, I was planning on keeping my temple covenants by not having sex outside of marriage. I also still carried the belief that masturbation was a sin, so I was preparing for a sexless life.

The sexless life was okay for me for about six months after I separated. During that time, I was extremely stressed and terrified of all the kinds of divorce-related repercussions that might be headed my way. I worried about my physical safety. I worried about how I was perceived by friends and family. I worried about finances. I was working and caring for one-year-old son. Sex was the last thing on my mind.

But I remember when I started to notice I had a natural sex drive. I have to chalk it up to being natural because I definitely wasn’t looking for it. Esther Perel, psychotherapist and best-selling author wrote, “Eroticism is not sex per se, but the qualities of vitality, curiosity, and spontaneity that make us feel alive.” This tracks. I started to sift through my experience as a wife as I was getting out of the marriage. I became very aware of how I had become a shell of a human during those years. I was a walking to-do list, measuring life by accomplishments rather than joy. The weekends felt pressured as I tried to check off the box marked FUN.

I became curious about what would bring me back to life.

I became curious about what would bring me back to life. I was a vibrant and joyful child, and I wanted to reclaim that. So, like I said before, this absolutely tracks with Perel’s definition of the erotic. I began to focus on the present moment, in part because future and past thinking was gnarly enough to demand a reprieve! I found joy in those little moments, sensory experiences like eating breakfast, walking with my son in the stroller at night under the stars and the palm trees, putting my feet into the sand, letting the freezing winter ocean swirl around my ankles and toes. I was moving out of my head and into my body in those moments.

I waited a year and a half after our separation to start dating. I felt like enough time had passed that I was ready to move into the next relationship. I was so wrong. But, I was ready to start that process. 

I had a conversation with one of my close friends who had pre-marital sex experience (being as I had none!). Sex had been on my mind, but I also felt that desire in my body, to my core. I had been putting it off because I didn’t know what to do with it. I brought up masturbation because I was trying to figure out what to do with my sex drive as I had no outlet. She had a different opinion than I expected. She believed there was a place for masturbation. And she sort of gave me the permission slip I felt I needed to explore that which had always been forbidden, and so forbidden in my mind, I didn’t really even know how to do it. 

I sat with that for a while. Around that same time, I learned that the paraganglioma tumor in my neck was growing (paraganglioma is just a broader term for neuroendocrine tumors like mine). It was not secreting adrenal hormones like the pheochromocytoma had, but it was growing— a little reminder that life is precious, and I am not permanent here. As I said before, the whole divorce brought the preciousness of MY life to the surface. The fact that I had spent more than a decade (a decade I didn’t plan to live through at its beginning) in a marriage that didn’t make me happy seemed to punctuate time, but also life LIVED during that time, as the most precious commodity.

Sex was always a good thing in my life, even if it had never been a great thing. I wanted to explore it further. Yes, there was a part of me that was that casual about it. But there was also a deep longing in me, something beyond simple horniness. A part of me knew that it would be healing, but I resisted this because of the covenants, because of the garments I wore every day reminding me of those covenants, because I loved going to the temple, I loved my faith, and my community at church. All of that was on the line—if I chose sex. For the first time in my memory, I chose my desire over all of those other things.

The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands

I left my ex-husband once before in 2010. I felt unseen, unheard and uncared for in my marriage. But I took him back after two weeks for a couple of reasons. The first and most powerful was fear. I believed no one would want a 27-year-old, divorced, cancered woman.  That is what my culture of origin taught me. The worst thing I could be is a spinster. Divorcé wasn’t even on my radar of possibilities. 

And it stemmed from purity culture, like it or not. By purity culture, I mean placing high value on virginity. For example, teaching young women that losing their virginity effectively turns them from a fresh stick of gum into a wad of disgusting used gum. Even though I had followed the rules, I knew in my LDS community, I would be much less desirable as virginity, this one, pristine quality had been lost in my first marriage. I wanted children and a husband, and I believed that if I ended this marriage I would never have an opportunity for those things. 

The second reason was because I was convinced by my bishop (male clergy) and some family members that the problem had been that I was unclear in my communication. My ex claimed that if he had only known how I felt and what I wanted, things would have been different. He believed I kept those things from him. And it was believable to me because of the great lengths I had gone to keep the peace! I knew I had quieted some of my important desires. With the time that has passed, I now see that I had not been secretive or withholding of my desires. Simply put, a girl learns to stop asking when the answer is always No.  

I was convinced to reunite with him, and this was again related to the culture around men and women. Women are taught to expect to be patient with their husbands, to understand that men are not emotionally evolved creatures. I read Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s book, The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands in my first year of marriage. I think my husband recommended it. The premise of that book is that if a woman is unhappy in her marriage it’s most often her own fault, and what she needs to do is be nice to her husband (care for and feed him and put out) and happiness will flow. 

I’m not a man hater. I love men. But also, that advice is complete horse shit. I did my best to properly care for and feed that man for years. And what I received in return was the blame for his inattentiveness. After all, we can’t expect men to be responsible for their thoughts about the naked female form, about their roll in unwed pregnancy, sometimes even sexual assault and rape, so how could I expect this man to know how to listen to me? It’s not in his chromosomes.

...how could I expect this man to know how to listen to me? It’s not in his chromosomes.

It seemed that it was also my job to carry responsibility for the success of household communication. And more precisely, to do it without being a nag, and initiate sex but only at the right time, and to pursue career and personal interests, but only as it aligned with husband’s wants and needs and his picture of womanhood.

So I invited him to move into my apartment after two weeks. He seemed repentant and I was the eternal optimist. It was almost instant after that when he began to punish me with silence and a cold shoulder. After all, it would take HIM a long time to forgive ME….for what? I guess for wounding his pride and humiliating him in front of the very small handful of people who knew about the split.

I took Celexa, an antidepressant, for about six months after the split. It took the edge off of my anxiety, made it easier for me to tolerate my wintery partner and almost impossible to have an orgasm. I regret it now because I didn’t need to be medicated into docility. I was appropriately outraged, wounded and bereft.

Optimism

I accepted that my wagon was eternally hitched to this man. He didn’t want children for many years. Not yet, he would say and then name a dollar amount we would need in the bank or the completion of school, or money for a house, and then retirement…it was always something. 

He told me just before we conceived our only child that he thought he was too selfish to have kids. I insisted we proceed, but I think he was being honest. Again, culture around men influenced my thinking. I expected men to be selfish creatures, their wild nature meant to be domesticated and improved by a wife and children. Insisting upon this next step was my role.

I was 31 at the time, and I felt my biological clock ticking. I also felt the foolishness of all of those years of, what ended up being unfounded, fear about my tumors. Plus, I was the eternal optimist, blindly hoping that a child would give him a reason to think of someone else, even if having a wife, even a wife with life-threatening illness, couldn’t. 

That sounds like I’m answering a biggest weakness question in a job interview. You know, when they want you to state what’s wrong with you so you twist a strength into the format of a weakness, something like, “I just work so hard it makes other people uncomfortable sometimes.” But the dark side of being an optimist is it is tied to the belief that, I am exceptional. I believed I had some power to transform this indifferent creature into a good husband and father. I believed I was special.

He saw me as a wife in the conventional sense, as a helpmeet, a vessel, a source of labor and income and dinner and grocery shopping. And this is why I left. The more I tried to be myself the more clear it became that there was no space for me outside of my designated role.

Why am I choosing to share this very personal story at this time?

Excellent question. I’d love to tell you. I suppose some of my readers are voyeurs and only want the dirt on my life and my marriage. I didn’t write this for them. I wrote it with hope that this meandering tale of marriage, contraception, sex and womanhood would build imagination in my readers. Imagination is the first ingredient for empathy.

I never spent any time studying feminist issues until about three years ago. I didn’t like or identify with the word feminist. It felt like a word for loud, annoying women who want to be men and don’t value family and children. I was raised in a family and religion that places the highest value on those connections, so that definitely wasn’t me, until I realized how those values (the ones I possessed) had, in a very real way, marginalized me directly.

I suspect that some women feel the way I used to feel about “feminist issues” such as abortion, access to contraception and access to sex education. Simply put, it doesn’t affect me directly, so I don’t want to think about it. I get that sentiment deeply—in my bones. Most women I know have a lot on their plate. They are properly feeding and caring for husbands, children, extended family, neighbors, congregations, and communities.

I was raised in a family and religion that places the highest value on those connections, so that definitely wasn’t me, until I realized how those values (the ones I possessed) had, in a very real way, marginalized me directly.

I don’t personally have any experience with abortion, and yet, I found myself crying in the car on my way to work after I learned about the leaked Supreme Court document that revealed a plan to reverse Roe v. Wade.

Let me explain. Women have been socialized to be a vessel. We have been socialized to believe that our central purpose is our use and our highest value is selflessness. What greater act of selflessness is there than to become a mother? A woman gives over her body, her sleep, her food, her earning potential and her hobbies to bring a baby into the world. Sometimes she must sacrifice her friends, her family of origin, work, colleagues, or possessions because she has a baby. It is beautiful. It is important. It is an experience I absolutely wanted for myself. 

The problem is that not everyone gets to do in the way they imagined. I think most of us imagine having a baby with a loving partner, someone who can support us through those major sacrifices. But we don’t all get that. I’m not sure that it’s even a majority of women who get that. 

My ex-husband has always loved our son. He always wanted to be involved, but he didn’t ask to get up in the night to help with feedings and he wasn’t the first one to jump up when the baby needed changed. I didn’t expect him to. I assumed that role. And I took it because I was socialized to do so, by my culture, but also by him who had required for so many years that I provide HIS care before the baby even came. 

I wanted to be a good wife. I believed a good wife was patient, easy-going, selfless, quiet, and small. And I did my damnedest to embody those things. Sisters, do we really believe the pinnacle of the feminine being is without a self? 

For my 20s I struggled because I was not living life for myself. I thought I was going to die of cancer by age 26 so I focused on my role as wife and tried make things easier on my someday-to-be-grieving-widower. At the time I could see that I should be living like I was dying, making the most of my time left on earth (however one does that!). But this was an impossible puzzle, because what I wanted was to be a good wife and a good wife is selfless. The resentment of this paradox festered within me. I wanted to live and I wanted to be good, but to be good, I had to be self-sacrificing. 

When my ex-husband and I started to talk in earnest about divorce, I remember he said to me one night that I had to let all of that resentment go in order for our relationship to have a chance. He was absolutely right, and I knew it. And beyond all reason, when I offered up that resentment to god, because I had no idea how to rid myself of it, it vanished instantly. It was replaced with a keen sense of what was true in the present moment. What was true was that my husband had no intention of giving me space in our relationship to have a self. What was true is that if I stayed I would shrink to nothing, like one of Ursula’s emaciated shrimp that litter the floor of her sea cave. 

Since that realization, my life has opened up. It happened gradually, but I started to believe that if god loved me as much as I loved this little boy (or even more), then my happiness might matter. That was actually my big feminist awakening. I was holding my son in the rocking chair as he nursed from a bottle and peered back into my eyes. It was a picture of selfless motherhood, mother love. Maybe it’s poetic that that is when I could finally hear the voice of my heavenly mother, the divine feminine. She told me I was important. As important as this baby boy in my arms, as my husband, as my father, as my grandfathers, as any man who has ever walked the earth or ever will.

It happened gradually, but I started to believe that if god loved me as much as I loved this little boy (or even more), then my happiness might matter.

I know we have laws for a reason. I hate the idea of killing babies. I hate the idea of abortion. I don’t think anyone, or rather extremely few (to eliminate hyperbole) feel joy about abortion.  Most of the women I know that feel strongly about abortion believe in a higher power. They love babies, others and their own. They are trying to be good and do good in the world. They are kind. They are ambitious and generous and they’ve got grit. 

My argument is that what women are asking for is not unreasonable. It’s not unrighteous. It’s simply to have the ability to direct their lives, to have babies when they are ready to have babies, to explore their ambition and creativity and vitality. 

Sex After Divorce

I chose to break my temple covenant, not because I was horny and needed an outlet, but because I felt like I was missing out on precious years of my life. I was compelled to claim my own sovereignty. I wanted sovereignty over my life in all ways. I wanted to feel the full impact of my choices. I wanted to be completely awake and alive. 

Me! Who never questioned the church, my marital vows and covenants, the culture that told me my needs were secondary if they were to be considered at all. I was complicit with all of those things for 35 years. I lived those values.

I found a man to date who was interesting and interested in me. Our physical relationship progressed quickly. I found myself drawing imaginary lines around parts of my body, places clothes had to remain, the same way I did when I was making out with my high school and college boyfriends. All the same it lit me up in an entirely new way and I found those lines slowly disappearing. 

I was terrified. I was still wearing my temple garments. I was still attending church. I didn’t even have proper panties! I was trying to figure out how to honor myself within the confines of my religion. But I gave myself the space to explore and figure out what was right for me. Sex after divorce was incredibly healing. I needed that experience. I needed to give myself the grace to be awkward, but also hot, sensual, complex and adventurous. I needed to feel whole as a woman. Sex was exactly what I needed, when I needed it.

It was my new partner’s unmitigated enthusiasm for my body that transformed me. He was a completely new exploit. I had only dated Mormon men previously, and Mormon men who were trying to stay inside the same imaginary lines I was. This man had no lines. It was freedom I had never experienced.

For most of my sex life, I was criticized—only in small ways, but a multitude of small ways. The hair on my body, that grew from my nipples, was unexpected. My vulva was described as, “so weird” (…that’s right…So weird.) I tried to make sense of that. I had no vulvas for comparison, except my mom and sisters, and I had never examined their parts up close. At the start, I was pretty sure my genitalia was in the neighborhood of normal. But years and years of anything will create ruts in the mind that are hard to grade out.

My new partner looked up at me once from between my legs. I had made some mildly apologetic comment about the state of something down there. He said point blank, “Michelle, this is a world-class pussy.” That moment is cemented into my mind. I remember the part of the bed we were on, the time of day, the lighting—I remember because it was healing.

A big, lingering question was answered: Am I defective? No.

Imagination

I used my imagination to open up life for myself. But I had lots of practice with imagination before that. For all of my 20s, I used my imagination to relate to the women around me. Women who had what I wanted. Women for whom life dealt the hand they more or less expected, a supportive partner, to raise babies with. I used my imagination on their behalf as I watched them face miscarriages and difficult pregnancies, infertility and too many children too soon. I used my imagination to care for them as they faced these difficulties, all while I waited for my own motherhood story to unfold.

It feels like a great tragedy when women don’t use their imagination on behalf of their sisters with other types of difficulties than the ones they’ve faced. I felt compelled to tell my own story so completely because I have realized that I, too, sometimes lack imagination, and I have particularly in the past. What I mean by that is I had a lot on my plate. I didn’t have the mental or emotional space to consider stories of women I didn’t know and, because I was in a fairly homogenous culture, the women I knew, were mostly facing the same things.

Now think about your own story, if you were to write an essay like this. Wouldn’t it take paragraphs and pages to flesh out the complexity? 

• How you thought about sex before you tried it. 
• What your first experiences were like.
• How you navigated sexual desire and its relationship to your own worthiness.
• Finding partners or not finding partners.
• How you handled menstruation, contraception, pregnancy and post-partum. 
• Even things like sexual assault and childhood mistreatment.
• Devastating miscarriages and the shame around an unwanted pregnancy.
• And what about menopause? I’m not even there yet and my story is already long.

Life is messy. How can we legislate the creation of life? Something so personal, something so ancient, something so sacred. Legislation around abortion is something, I am convinced, we as a society would not tolerate, if we had not been, for millennia, swimming in the ideology that a woman, at her highest use, is a vessel. 

My appeal is for the women who read this: Would you lend your imagination to the women who have walked a very different road than you? Would you consider that the lines religion draws around this very personal, ancient and sacred part of life, might not be universally applicable? Making abortion illegal places almost all of the risk of sex on the partner who has the womb. Sex. Something that is also so personal, so ancient, so sacred.

Abortion is only one part of a much larger sifting that is taking place right now. I have a Ruth Bader Ginsburg calendar on my kitchen wall because, without her, after my divorce, I would have needed a male cosigner to buy this house. I would have needed a male cosigner for my credit card, my bank account. She paved the way for me to attend college and graduate school on equal footing with my male peers. I am paid a good salary, equivalent to my male peers, and I had maternity leave and did not lose my job when I chose to have a baby, thanks to RBG and people like her. My life would look very, very different today had our legislative process gone differently in the 20th century. The lives of all women would.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see how life might have been different for you. What would it cost you personally to put down the stone, and write in the sand while the crowd disperses? To give a woman her freedom? It takes a willingness to see oneself as human and fallible. 

It takes imagination.

Moving on.

Sometimes you get an email on a random Tuesday that's really a box of venom and darkness. And it's from someone you can't block. So you write. Not back to them. But to yourself.

Just because you disgust one person, doesn't mean you are disgusting. You are light. You are fire. Burn, baby.

Moving on.

Grieving the life I used to be. 

Everyone is really disappointed, he wrote. 

I said, 

Most of all, me.

February 2022, Michelle Whipple

Moving on, 4.30.22, charcoal pencil and watercolor crayon

Tis the Damn Season

Do I need to rethink my entire life?… Or is it just the holidays?

I found myself texting this to a friend who casually asked me how it was going? 

Not good. Not good at all. 

I mean, there are good things happening. But I think I wandered into the holidays a little off kilter. You see, I had the double whammy of Halloween and my son’s birthday this year. It’s something we probably didn’t think through very well when we set out the holiday schedule in our first parenting plan. 

These two near holidays fall to the same parent each year and this year, felt like expectations were high. I think five-going-on-six, might be the year when kids become fully aware of and have full buy-in to such events. By this age they’ve got a little track record of their prior celebrations and other celebrations they’ve attended, so they now know enough to get whether they are at a fantastic or weak-ass celebration. 

So the pressure was on.

I did the birthday party at the Air and Space Museum and invited his entire kindergarten class because we are new to these people and still making friends. It was a great success but way outside my comfort zone to invite 25 strangers and their parents to a museum to eat cake and open presents. I walked away feeling really thankful for the community we have with school. It was an enthusiastic, generous, beautiful group of people.

The week before that was Halloween. We did the regular thing of changing costumes last minute but luckily it was to the astronaut costume he wore last year. He wanted to be a fighter pilot originally and when we were looking at costumes, I asked if he thought I should be one too. He liked the idea back then (like late September!) but as Halloween grew closer, he grew out of that age where it’s cool to dress like your mom, so my Lucille-Buster Mother-Boy fantasy slipped away and not only was I not permitted to wear the fighter pilot costume, but he asked that I wear NO costume—just regular mom clothes. 

I now see how this arrow found a weak chink in my armor of self confidence. I started to ask him if he was embarrassed about how I dress. I started to rethink my bohemian Free People clothes, not just for their over-pricedness and impracticality….but was I humiliating my son….who is in kindergarten!?!

It took me a couple of days to shake that off but eventually returned to my usual mantra of, Ain’t no man gonna tell me…not even the short one who lives in my house.

Then I made the theme park mistake. 

For Veteran’s Day we were invited to go to Knott’s Berry Farm with some friends. To understand my tentativeness, you’ve gotta understand my theme park experience. I liked theme parks as a kid, but I was mostly terrified of the rides. I remember huddling on the floor of that giant rocking boat, The Tidal Wave, screaming in terror while my mom giggled and implored me that this WAS fun. 

When I graduated high school, someone advised me to make a sort of bucket list of things to do before I graduated college. Roller coasters were on the list. I grew up in Wyoming so it wasn’t like theme park rides were plentiful, but I had never chanced a ride on a big roller coaster and I wanted to face my fear. I planned a trip to Elitch Gardens in Denver. I took ginger root to ward off any motion sickness. And I rode all the roller coasters. I even paid an extra $15 to ride the SkyCoaster, which was really just a harness attached to a cable, attached to a sky arch. I strapped in with two other people and the harness raised hundreds of feet in the air until the employees counted down and one of the guys I was strapped to pulled the rip cord. We plummeted in a free fall until the cables caught, swinging us gently back up toward the sky. I liked it! It was what it should be—exhiliterating. 

After that I learned I liked rollercoasters!  It was within the same stretch of a few years I found out I had these adrenaline-producing tumors in my abdomen.  A while after they were removed, I remember visiting Lagoon in Utah on a slow night in the Fall. The park was empty and we ran from rollercoaster to rollercoaster and the adrenaline reminded me of how I used to feel somewhat regularly with all those little adrenaline-junkie tumors inside of me. 

It was when I became a single mom that theme parks changed for me. Gosh—the dark Disney Land days of 2019! I bought a discount pass via the military because I was still not divorced.  R and I would make the trip by ourselves, he would refuse to ride 99% of the rides, talk me into spending more money on overpriced toys in Cars Land and then fall asleep in the stroller, leaving me to drink alone in California Adventure, until he woke up and we could walk around for another hour before we got in the car to drive home. Those trips were a lot of work with a very minimal reward and they left me mostly feeling very alone. Dark, dark days indeed.

So in 2020, I declared NO THEME PARKS. Ummmm...I guess so did everyone else. 

So by Fall 2021, I felt like I *should* (always a dangerous word) be ready for another theme park experience. And I wouldn’t be going alone. And I wasn’t driving up and back in the same day. So it *should* have been fine. But apparently everyone thought the same thing because Knott’s Berry was packed! Literally a two hour wait for lunch. If we’d have known, we would have walked out of the park and driven to a nice restaurant and then home! It was sort of a disaster. 

So on the heels of that and in the midst of being a kindergarten parent for the first time, I find myself a little overwhelmed. 

The sun is going down at 2:30pm when I walk out of work. 

I find myself complaining about the cold when it’s 66* (but it’s humid! and there’s a breeze!—people in California are suffering!!!)

After a week-long hiatus from the mom gig, while R traveled with his dad, I thought I would be rested and ready for the business of Christmas. I planned to get a tree ASAP (terrorized by some goddammed article on Apple News that  promised they would be scarce and expensive). I took R to Lowe’s (our traditional California Christmas tree lot, since the mountains of Wyoming are no longer accessible). We picked a good tree and got a few other home essentials followed by a full on Kris-Kringle-meltdown on the drive home because I said it was bedtime and we would have to decorate the tree tomorrow.

Rather than giving toys, I have been taking them away all week because it appears I have given birth to the mouthiest kid on the planet. I am tempted to tell him that I AM Santa just so I can garner some of the awe and fear I deserve! (Don’t worry, I’m not a monster…I won’t do that—but I’m not above shoving his precious toys in the top of the closet if it buys me a little r-e-s-p-e-c-t.)

I scheduled family photos this week because the week before Thanksgiving felt too busy (Note: This week was also too busy and there is not a good time to take family photos around the holidays). My friend Nick is an artist with a camera (and a wizard apparently!) because he got several great shots even though I was struggling to look easy-breezy while my kid and dog barely held still long enough for a 1/500 shutter speed in waning light at 4pm. God bless you, Nick. 

I’ve been so out of sorts I took a pregnancy test this morning just to be sure that wasn’t it—it wasn’t. No announcements here! [Including this because it occurs to me that this is something men never have to worry about, holidays or not.]

I’m guessing you are picking up from my tone that I am sort of crash-landing into this first weekend of December, which prompted my initial question:  Do I need to rethink my entire life?… Or is it just the holidays?

In the words of Eleanor Shellstrop: “I mean somebody royally forked up. Somebody forked up. Why can’t I say ‘fork’?”

On Friday I went to the gym today for the first time in two years. It felt kind of gross to me—you know, such a collection point for viruses after the pandemic changed everything. So I was reluctant. But I did back squats and box jumps and hip thrusters and I walked out of there feeling slightly better, which bloomed into decidedly better over the course of a few hours. I suspect because, I finally put the thing that my body and soul had been asking for, for months, at the top of the list—for just an hour. 

I think the holidays are hard because we have the expectation that we can bumble into this darkest part of the year eating garbage food and giving up on the beach body of summer, substituting the religiosity of the holidays for any meaningful spiritual practice. Maybe the extra pounds become the padding we need as we attempt to embrace all the feelings of family and holidays, past, present and future, which, for many of us, are a mixture of beautiful and horrific. 

We stay busy and satiated so we don’t have to feel because some of us are haunted by loneliness and loss. Some of us are compelled to see and talk to people who have inflicted some of our deepest wounds. For most of us, there is a sense of loss that comes with the rift between the life we thought we would have and the one we had to leave behind, or left us behind. 

It feels incongruent with the tinsel T-rex sitting on my bookshelf, the happy-colored lights outside my house, even the nativity of Christ or the victory of the Maccabean army—because those are stories of hope—and sometimes hope feels dangerous.

Cheryl Strayed wrote, “Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.”

Sometimes the holidays feel like a small, quiet room to me, even as I go through the insane motions to make them noisy and crowded. Some of the bustle is just me trying not to notice the small, quiet room. The place where I have to sit with my idea of what I thought my life would be when I was a bright-eyed, silly, enthusiastic, hopeful little girl, and the reality of what it is today, which is actually something much more complex and rich and deep and interesting than what I could have imagined back then. 

That’s hard. It’s forking hard. 

So please, take care of yourself. Let the dark nights and cool whether, drive you to the small, quiet room.

Pain is on the other side of the door. But so is peace.

Can we talk about kindergarten?!

R started Kindergarten at the end of August. I did not know what to expect, but here are my observations so far:

1. Disclosure. Having to do family court about school start probably infinitely increases the stress level around it.
2. Benefits of being a Californian. Yes! We pay higher taxes, but in California, there are no school supply lists, every student gets a lunch for free if they want it, and they also get sent home with a sack of food. I love this because I know there are kids in my community that need that food. It also takes some of the pressure off of me. I’ve been packing lunches for R since he was one year old so it feels like a great luxury to drop him off knowing he has food—it’s there, it’s done. End. Of. Story.
3. School shopping. So school shopping consisted of three new Star Wars t-shirts, a BB8 backpack and a storm trooper lunch box (really not needed because of item #2 on this list—but I send it with him so he can put his leftovers in it). I love that he picked a good guy backpack and a bad guy lunch box, with no help from me. We are honoring the light and the shadow in this strange, little family! [See I’m the Bad Guy].
4. Making friends…and other things. On that note, in week two I learned R already had a “friend” and an “enemy.” These were his words. When we talked about the enemy, he explained how the boy was mean to him and then he was mean back, and back and forth. I offered that he could interrupt the cycle by being nice, to which he responded, “Nah, Mom. We’ve got this.” And so it begins….
5. Hands to yourself! This is the main feedback we’ve received from R’s teacher. I think this is developmentally appropriate, but I have no idea. Honestly, that’s the main thing I have learned from Kindergarten—I know almost nothing. 
6. Other parents. I moved into this neighborhood at the beginning of the covid shutdown, so we haven’t got to know neighbor kids at the same pace we might have otherwise. (That being said, I’m also increasingly introverted the older I get so that’s not to say that we would have met anyone anyway.) But the other parents are an enigma to me. Probably because I think of them that way—OTHER—an overwhelming mass of humans I have to navigate through to get the child to the gate for drop off and pickup. 
7. Other parents, part two. One thing I don’t understand! Other parents, once having navigated the insane parking, the masking, the backpacking, the walking (this all after the morning quarrels over breakfast and clothes and teeth brushing with the kindergartner, the dog AND myself)—they reach the finish line of having deposited said child, either with a hug or tears or a gentle, loving shove through the gate, and their impulse is to stand and watch the children through the fence, like a zoo exhibition. They want to remain in that space. I do not understand this. My impulse, actually my mind/body/spirit mandate is to escape that scene as quickly as I can without screaming or crying or knocking over children as I sprint in the direction of my poorly parked car. This is the main hurdle for me making friends with the other parents. I cannot even see them when I’m in that state. They are part of the mass. Part of the hive mind that might actually consume me before I get to work.
8. Other parents, part three. I’ve had three weeks of practice with this scene now and I’m just starting to soften into it a little. I noticed a woman who lives on the next block, someone we met on a walk during quarantine, with a fellow kindergartener. I noticed her and I spoke with her. I think I appeared mostly human during the interaction. I count this as a huge victory. And I think that’s the strategy I will continue to take. Try to notice one human per drop off/pick up. One bite at a time eats the elephant.
9. The emails. OMG, the emails. I got R registered for school the Friday before school start so I don’t even know what emails I missed before that time, but on the Sunday night before school started, I found myself simultaneously annoyed that I had to read several giant emails pertaining to school, AND that I didn’t already know the information contained in the emails. For this reason, I immediately understood the quandary of school officials. Every parent wants different levels of detailed information—and they don’t want to read the damn emails. I will say—adding the sender to my address book has made receiving the emails a little easier, because I’m pretty sure I missed several because they were going to my spam or promotions inbox. Pro tips left and right here!
10. After school activities. We have the good fortune of attending a school that offers after school care and after school activities, like soccer, chess, gardening, Spanish. Cool, right!? These are available for a small fee. Because of family court and our late registration, the after school care was already full by the time I was able to sign up for it. Okay, I can flex my work schedule to make that work. Then I learned about the individual classes listed above. R wanted to do chess and soccer. Great! It’s something fun for him to be involved in and meet other kids. It also gives me a little more flexibility with work. Well, three days after signups appeared, soccer is full. I went through the spiral of inadequate mom shame for a day or so. And then set my eyes doggedly on the chess club. We don’t play chess. I did watch The Queen’s Gambit, so that’s my one leg up on my 5-year-old in the chess world…but he adorably insists he will learn and then teach me and his dad to play. So I have been checking the chess club website daily. Incessantly. I have emailed them twice through the “Contact Us” form, asking about said chess club. They have politely responded within 24 hours. It now appears chess club is being pushed back to October, (but October is soon, people!) I am living in constant fear that the sign up will appear and fill up in the 24 hour period between my checks of the website. I have developed a twitch in my left eye from the stress of this. [I just checked the site again as I’m writing this…still not up. Eye twitch]
11. Homework. We don’t even have this yet. Supposed to start in October. God, help me. That’s all I have to say. 
12. The bright side.After all this recognition of the hard (let’s not call it complaining!), I have to say, I LOVE this age. I have heard other parents say this along my parenting journey. I have had moments of motherhood that have been absolutely delicious—of course! But I think this is the first time I have seen an evolution in my child’s development and thought, This is beyond cute—this is really fun! He is more independent now. He fixes his own hair in the morning. He builds legos without my help. But my absolute favorite thing is how he talks to me. We have great conversations. Not like, Oh, you’re a cute kid, but actual, real conversations about the fun things and the hard things. I love knowing what he is thinking. I love watching this little person unfold before my eyes. So I’m here for it. Even as this list grows into sports practice and science projects and homecoming dances and driver’s ed. I’m here for it all. 

If you need to find me, I’ll be the one running from the drop off gate.

My most helpful thought

Last week I found myself rolling back and forth on the ground with a bunch of giggling asian women.  I was in my kundalini yoga class at the YMCA.  We were doing an exercise where we put our hands out in front of us, superman-style, while lying on our stomachs, then we turned to the right until we were on our backs, then back to center/stomach, then to the left.  As I rolled back and forth on the floor with these giddy women, I thought, I live such a rich life! 

One year ago I was entrapped in the agony of my thoughts.  I was just beginning to question whether my thoughts were really true.  But I still had so many to sort through.  It felt like every waking moment was thought-thought-thought-thought, one after another.  I was starting to question them but I still had so many.  There were the thoughts, and then there were the thoughts that were judgments of the thoughts, and then there were some judgment thoughts of those thoughts.  My brain and my ego were really running wild.  And it became untenable.  So I started some intense work on watching and then dismantling my thoughts. 

This brought me into the most disorienting season of my life to date.  I spent almost all of October separated from my son.  He was traveling with his dad for two weeks.  Then, the week I was supposed to have him was interrupted when I got a stomach flu that was so severe I couldn’t care for him.  I had to ask his dad to come pick him up.  I entertained him with TV for much of the day, while I laid in bed without any energy.  I remember at dinnertime he asked me for something to eat.  It took me about five minutes to raise myself from the bed and into the kitchen to pull something out of the fridge for him.  I have experienced this kind of decimation before, but never as a mother and never alone.  

After the stomach flu, I went to NIH for my ten days of testing.  The writing saved me.  I set a goal to blog every day and it pulled me through those days of isolation.  For the first time I allowed myself some introspection on the NIH experience.  I challenged myself to stay open and to find connection there.  And I shared it on my blog which helped me feel slightly less alone during the cold October days.  

The days between NIH and February run together in my memory.  I remember early mornings, where I would wake before the sun, unable to remain in bed.  I walked a lot.  On the days I didn’t have R, I would put on my headphones and room my neighborhood early in the morning listening to Brandi Carlile and Oprah Super Soul podcasts.  I lost weight.  I felt excoriated.  I heard Mark Nepo describe it that way and it felt precise to my condition.  My physique and my spirit were polished away to the essential elements.  And as Cheryl Strayed put it so eloquently, I floated like a rabid ghost through those days and weeks.  

I learned that R would be going on vacation with his dad in February.  With the ghost of the previous October breathing down my neck, I booked a trip to Hawaii to occupy most of R’s vacation days.  I had been studying Mary Oliver’s work prior to the trip and I spent that my time in Hawaii focusing on the present moment.  Nature has a way of pulling me into the present, and I let that heal me.  I returned feeling revitalized.  I vowed to reinvest in regular exercise.  I was also eating a banana with Nutella every day to help with my stress calorie deficit.  

After Hawaii, life kind of crashed back onto me.  I clung fiercely to my commitment to stay open to the good that was available to me.  I walked, I lifted weights, I played with R.  I was trying to stay open at work, which made work increasingly heavy.  I was losing patients to drug addiction and strange accidents.  I was attempting to shepherd heroin addicts toward feeling their feelings.  I was open to all of the pain and it almost swallowed me.  Then I wandered into a kundalini yoga class by accident. 

I had begun to seek out a more spiritual yoga practice.  So when I saw the instructor with her colorful mandala scarf laid out on the floor and the battery-powered candles, I was open.  In the first class I met the true version of myself.  My therapist asked me to name her but all I could come up with was Michelle because she seemed like the purest version of me.  I envisioned her as I went through the exercises, this open, playful, loving, interesting creature.  I kept coming back to kundalini because I wanted to see her again.  I wanted to know her better, this person who had been buried inside of me. 

In kundalini, I saw metaphors for joy and pain and trial and play and boundaries and kindness.  The practice opened me further but it also taught me to protect myself.  I heard my voice in the chanting and singing.  I felt myself in the movements.  I finally located the sacred place inside of me, the part that god put there long ago, the part that is uniquely wise and kind.

My practice helped me understand my role at work.  I wasn’t supposed be a repository for all of the pain my patients carry.  My job was to identify those who were open and to shine some light their way.  For the rest, medication management would be enough.

My yoga practice helped me find stillness.  My mind became quieter.  I began to watch my thoughts with curiosity.  I got better at identifying the useful ones and noticing the useless ones.  That’s how my original thought was born.  I live such a rich life!  

This thought has carried me through my faith transition, a divorce that is still incomplete, raising a little boy through the terrible two and threenager years, worries about tumors, and opening the part of me that is capable of loving deeply.  

And I think rich is the word for it, because there is so much depth in my life.  So many colors.  So much vibrancy.  Some of it has been penetrating darkness. But I am equally opening to joy. I am a rich woman, indeed.

I made this list of things that have changed in the past year and I’m sharing it with you, with the simple hope that you might reflect on your life in a similar way. Namaste and sat nam. 

• I’m better aquatinted with myself.
• I have more trust in myself.  
• I’ve started dating. 
• I am getting my first glimpses of how to forgive.
• I started a spiritual yoga practice.
• My brain is so much quieter.
• I opened myself up emotionally to my patients and then had to figure out how to shut that down somewhat. 
• Eight of my patients passed away. 
• I started to solo travel.
• I was more honest with myself and the people around me than ever before. 
• I kept a toddler alive and relatively happy through the terrible two and threenager years.
• I started painting and drawing again.
• I picked up knitting again.
• I started playing the piano and singing again.
• I began to understand humility.
• I began to see the part of god that lives in me.
• I published 114 blog posts (that’s 112,505 words) and some of you have read every one! 

Floating like a rabid ghost

There are a million reasons NOT to publish and only one reason TO publish. That reason is the commitment I made to myself to write and to be seen and not to worry about whether it was any good or not.  I’m not sure how this phase of the divorce/grieving/soul-splitting process is supposed to feel.  Most of this first week of 2019 has felt like a punch in the gut.  

Today I kept thinking of what Cheryl Strayed wrote in her Dear Sugar column:

“You let time pass. That’s the cure. You survive the days. You float like a rabid ghost through the weeks. You cry and wallow and lament and scratch your way back up through the months. And then one day you find yourself alone on a bench in the sun and you close your eyes and lean your head back and you realize you’re okay.” 

Cheryl Strayed, Brave Enough

Today I am floating like a rabid ghost.  

I just had the strangest stomach bug these past few days.  It was strange in that it only caused nausea.  Lest you think I misdiagnosed it, it’s been going around the family.  The kids had a fever with it.  For me, it was four days of nausea.  Last night, it was strong enough that I knew I wouldn’t sleep so I pulled out a Phenergan tablet left over from an old prescription.  It made me so sleepy that I was out before I could determine if it helped my nausea.  

I wake to my alarm at 5:30 feeling like I am waking from the dead—but not without nausea.  I will myself to rise from the bed.  Dress.  Stop off for some caffeine and drive to pick up my sweet 3 year old, R. 

On the way, I listen to a Jody Moore podcast about faith and magic.  It reminds me of how 2018 started.  I was just beginning to become conscious that my thoughts were optional and that I could direct my feelings by choosing different thoughts.  I was taking my first steps onto the path of awakening.  I wonder if it was worth it.  I wonder if life was better when I was living within the cages of what I imagined others’ expectations to be.  This morning, I am not sure.  

As I buckle R into his carseat, he looks up at me and says, “You don’t want to be with our family.”  I’m sure this is him trying to make sense of something he heard from someone at some point.  

I think, “This is how it’s going to be.”  I tell him that I want to be with him and that I love him.  He smiles at this and we get on the road heading home.  

I go through the motions of getting myself ready for work and R packed for the babysitter.  I drive to work.  I sit at my desk.  I speak to my coworkers and patients.  I picture myself as the rabid ghost floating over my body.  

I have an extensive conversation with one of my patients about his “wife, Naidu” who exists only in his mind. She directs him to use methamphetamine.  She gives him a female connection.  He speaks about her with a mixture of the love of a devoted husband and the admiration of a deity.  

He has been refusing medication since he was enrolled in our program.  He is on probation.  He uses drugs, tests dirty, goes back to jail, comes out and repeats the process again.  Case managers keep telling him he needs to be on medication but he wants to know how medication will help him.  He talks about others he has seen that take medication, “They are spent.”  He likes his manic energy.  He feels he has work to do.  Naidu gives him a purpose.  

I take all of this in and he is convincing.  I’m not sure that, for this man, the real world has more to offer him than his alternate reality.  I’ve had these conversations before though.  Risk of re-incarceration.  Risk of re-hospitalization.  Risk of harming self or others.  Grave disability.  These are the reasons for medication.

For many people the alternate reality is much worse than real life.  For many, the constant sensation of being watched, hearing other’s thoughts, feeling judged, feeling hunted presses in so close that sedation or jitteriness or insatiable hunger caused by the medication is tolerable by comparison.  But for my disciple of Naidu, that’s not the case.  

I decide that risk of re-incarceration is my best bet.  I carefully and respectfully explain how his functioning in this alternate reality plays a role in his repeated jail stays.  I offer that medication might help him to avoid those behaviors.  He names the two women who accused him of sexual crimes.  He looks me directly in the eyes and tells me that he never pimped that woman.  “All I did was ask her to sell my DVDs.”  It’s impossible for me to know the truth.  

I bring up the medication again.  He gives me a knowing look.  I’m trying to take away his fantasy.  The medication I’m offering might kill Naidu.  I remind him that our program is voluntary.  The treatment is voluntary.  He refuses the medication but he continues talking.  He likes the audience.  He likes the face time with a female who exists in the concrete world.  I stand up as he speaks and open the door.  I walk out of the office and encourage him to follow me down the hallway.  I have other patients to see and he will never stand and leave if I don’t.       

I finish my notes and drive home.  I know I should eat.  I eat six cold, cooked shrimp from the fridge.  I walk to my bedroom to change.  That’s when the tears come.  I feel the tearing ache in my chest.  The pain that comes from a broken heart, broken over and over again.  I sob and prostrate myself on the bedroom floor.  I think of the dam with all of the water behind it.  I remind myself that I need to let this water out.  So I stay there, on the bedroom floor and sob.  I’m already late picking up R so after a few moments, I pull myself together enough to finish dressing.  I grab an Rx Bar and walk out the door still crying.  

When I arrive to collect R, he is still napping.  Rachel sees my face and wants to know what happened.  I explain the recent events, but this feels hollow.  I’m crying about the pain of years.  I’m crying because, on this, my second chance at life, I’m wondering if I’m screwing it all up yet again.  I’m crying because I’ve carried so much sadness in my heart for so long.  I can’t bear it.  I pull myself together again.  I picture the rabid ghost floating over my head.  It occurs to me that maybe this is why Prozac exists. 

I finally go to wake R.  He’s out of sorts.  It’s the one time in his life when there are no Goldfish crackers available and there is nothing to quench his dissatisfaction with the world.  I bait him out of his bad mood with some chocolate chips.  We drive home and I remember that there are some toys in my closet, given to us by a kind neighbor who always thinks of R and me.  I tell R we have another Christmas present I forgot about.  He is delighted with the toys.  It’s a mix of toy tools and some real, small scale tools and flashlights.  There is a kit to build a car out of balsa wood.  R is most excited about that.  It comes with a set of paints so I put him at the kitchen table with the paints and he goes about decorating the wood car pieces.  When he’s finished, I set him up with a cartoon and some saltine crackers (maybe he is still dealing with some nausea too).  

While he is engrossed, I call my mom and dad.  The tears return.  I’m sitting in my bedroom crying softly into the phone.  My dad is quiet but present.  My mom speaks up with words of empathy.  It’s the pain of years spilling out of me.  I’m not sure why I need them on the phone but maybe sometimes one needs a witness in order to bear the pain.  After not too long, R finds me.  I say goodbye to my parents and I try to feed him some dinner.  I need to go grocery shopping.  There is no produce in my house.  I offer him a quesadilla and he puts it down after one bite.  I’m not sure I have the strength to battle over dinner tonight.  R goes back to playing and I wander around my apartment considering various things that could be cleaned up or attended to.  Then I realize that all I want to do is sit.  So I sit on the couch and R finds my lap.  We watch a cartoon together.  We play with his tools.  I am the rabid ghost, but I like the feeling of his soft, curly hair on my lips and his perfectly-sized thighs in my hands.  I sit. 

It’s time for bed.  I read him a story after teeth are brushed.  He seems tired but restless.  I sing him a song and we give kisses goodnight.  I float like a rabid ghost to the couch and write.  

This post is too long and too tedious but it’s true.  And my only hope is that after floating through the weeks and clawing up through the months, I can one day find myself alone on a bench in the sun and close my eyes and lean my head back and realize I’m okay. 

Benediction

Remember that part at the end of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation where Clark Griswold goes on a rant about his boss?  That's how I felt walking out of my divorce settlement conference tonight.  It's over.  The papers are signed. The orders are written.  It's over.  Hallelujah!  Holy shit!  Where's the Tylenol?I wrote this last night and it's a good thing because I am completely spent tonight.

On this, what I suspect will be, my last evening as a married woman, I want to write a little about what my marriage meant to me.  I entered into it as a smart, naive, 20-year-old woman.  I intended it to last forever.  I was willing to work, and I worked.  Oh, how I worked.  I poured every bit of work I could muster into this.  I reduced myself to putty to fill in the holes and surround the sharp edges.

I worked.  I learned several occupations.  I learned finances, grocery shopping, cooking, laundry, housework.  I learned how to navigate medical insurance and billing.  I learned how to live with less.  I learned how to change a car tire and patch a bicycle tire.  I learned how to shovel snow.  I learned to trust an old car.

I traveled.  I learned how to live with the contents of a backpack.  How to show up in a foreign city without a place to stay and trust that I would find one.  I learned how to navigate the country with an atlas.  I learned to sleep in places I never imagined I would.  I learned to walk.  I learned to carry a heavy load.  I learned how to endure heat and cold.  I learned how to start a fire and fire a gun.  I learned not to be scared as I walked in the woods alone.  I learned how to paddle a canoe and bait a hook.  I learned to notice the birds in the sky and the fish in the river.

I studied.  I worked more. 

But mostly I waited.  And the sun set as I was waiting and then it became dark and I knew it was time to be done.  So I walked away, into the night, into the most painful and fearful moments of my life.  And in this dark, I have learned to trust myself.  Even that naive young woman who decided to jump on a ship that would ultimately descend beneath the waves.  I have been changed for good.   

Accelerated carousel of mommy guilt

I’ve been kicking around ideas of what to write about all day today.  And now, as I am finally summoning the courage to write what I’ve been avoiding, I’ll probably get this posted about the time you are all headed to bed.  But no matter, it will be waiting for you bright and early Monday morning.

We had a non-conventional Thanksgiving.  Because it was just my mom, R and me, and because I didn’t feel like cooking, we decided to go out.  We actually had a really nice day.  We went for a walk in the morning, then to Cabrillo National Monument for some tide pool exploration.  Then we went out for dinner at a restaurant that served a nice Thanksgiving dinner.  It was a good day, even though I felt a little off all day. 

On Friday, I decided that getting a Christmas tree and decorating it would help things feel more holiday-ish so we loaded up and went to Lowe’s to pick out a tree.  We found a decent one.  The cashier gave me $20 off because the universe loves me (look for evidence—it loves you too!).  We brought it home and Mom helped me get it set up in the tree stand.  I did this all by myself last year and I’m not even sure how I did it! 

R was soooo excited.  He was down on the ground with me, tightening the supporting screws around the tree.  He was testing the branches by hitting them with a ruler.  He was chattering about Santa Claus and snow and presents.  When we opened the box of ornaments, it was all my mom and I could do to keep him from destroying the breakable ones.  He wanted to inspect them all.  We had Christmas music playing and I was frantically trying to get the lights on the tree so we could unleash R with the ornaments.  I think it was our personal record for fastest tree decorating.  R jingled all of the bells and cuddled all of the angels. 

As I’m describing it, it sounds really fun—the wonder and magic of Christmas for a 3-year-old playing out in front of me.  But the truth is, I felt held back.  Damn foreboding joy.   

I got R to sit down and eat a little lunch by putting on an Amazon Prime movie about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.  Then it was time to load him up to go to his dad’s house.  When I put him in the car he cried.  He looked at me with those big, brown eyes and clearly said, “I want us to be together,” meaning his dad, R and me.  “Don’t leave me, Mommy.”

Words fail to describe the heaviness, the crushing weight, of that phrase falling from his precious, innocent lips.

I paused, with him in the carseat and me standing by the open car door.  I told him that I understand his wanting that.  I told him that his dad and I love him very much.  I told him that we had a long car ride and that I would be with him in the car.  This last pieced seemed to satisfy him.  After a few minutes on the road, he asked me, “Is it okay if I take a little sleep?” He slept the rest of the drive to his dad’s house. 

Sometimes we don’t get what we want.  Even if it’s a beautiful desire.  Sometimes it’s a no.  And it’s heartbreaking.  How would I explain to a three-year-old the twelve and a half years his dad and I tried to make it work?  How could I convey the sense of self that I sacrificed to that relationship? Of course, it’s impossible.  But it’s also not his to know at three.  It’s something that he will come to know over all of the years he walks this earth.  He will add to it his own experiences.  And this might be one of them—his first Christmas with the consciousness that he doesn’t get to have it with his mom and dad together in the same house. 

There are not many perks to having a divided family, but I count this as one—perfect is not an option.  Any idea that we are carrying on a perfect life over here is immediately laughable.  We are all just people, doing the best we can.  And sometimes our best is pretty terrible.  But it is our best. 

In Daring Greatly, Brené Brown wrote a chapter called “Wholehearted parenting: Daring to be the adults we want our children to be.”  I came across this chapter at a time when I really needed it.  It’s easy to question how well I’m doing in the parenting department.  This time in my life is an intense struggle for myself, let alone the little human, with whom I’m entrusted.  I don’t always show up how I want to.  On days when I have R, I often feel overwhelmed and tired.  On the days I don’t, sometimes I miss him like a piece of my soul is gone.  It’s like being on an accelerated carousel of mommy guilt where the highs and lows are too dramatic to be fun. 

Brené encourages us to focus on becoming the adults we want our children to be, rather than parenting in the right way. 

“As Joseph Chilton Pearce, ‘What we are teaches the child more than what we say, so we must be what we want our children to become.’  Even though the vulnerability of parenting is terrifying at times, we can’t afford to armor ourselves against it or push it away—it is our richest, most fertile ground for teaching and cultivating connection, meaning and love.”

So who do I want R to be?  I want him to be resilient and hardworking.  I want him to see the world as an abundant place where he can do and become anything he wants to.  I want him to be kind, both to himself and to others, even when they fall short.  I want him to feel connected to friends and family.  I want him to be spiritual, to see the divinity within himself.  I want him to understand respect.  I want him to feel love and to feel loved.  I want him to know that love does not require the sacrifice of self, but that it celebrates and champions the self to become as big and complicated and beautiful as this diverse, messy and wonderful earth God has set us within. 

And so this is my work—to become.  God, help me.

Evictions and invitations

After I wrote my last post I have been using, “I’m just going to dance,” as a mantra.  It’s been quite useful, but because life is what it is, it’s been a struggle to keep dancing. Just wanted to reality check that.  I’m still repeating, still working to do it.  I do feel like I’ve risen to a new level in this process I’m working in but, as I keep learning, progress does not equal comfort. 

I’ve been through a meaningful clean-out this week.  I passed on most of River’s baby items to people who could use them.  As someone who waited a long time to have a child (“long time” qualified as such by nothing but my own expectations) and is now facing the possibility that I might not have any more children, this was emotional.  I also sold my longtime companion car (read here if you missed the tribute).  It was time for the car to go and I felt ready, but the experience of selling a car on Craigslist was a little harrowing.  Nothing bad happened but I felt extremely vulnerable, standing under a streetlight in the otherwise dark, holding River, while three grown men examined my car and then haggled with me over the price.  It’s an experience I never anticipated having and I hope to not repeat.

All of this moving-on business has prompted me to think about evictions. 

When I was about 11 years old, a big shift happened in my family.  Around this time my grandpa was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.  His prognosis was poor.  I was young so I don’t understand everything that played into this, but I know it broke something open in mom. She began spending long periods of time in her room, in bed, with the door closed.  When I came home from school, I was met with a serious expression and relative silence.  Before this time there had always been pleasant chatter and busy flow of housework, homework, errands and dinner prep. 

Glennon Doyle described this kind of experience as an eviction from your life.  It’s a point in time in which something changes in a way that makes it impossible to return to your previous existence.  Effectively you cannot go home.  You cannot return to your previous way of living because something fundamental inside or outside of you has changed.

I think my mom would identify this time period as one of her life evictions.  It was my first.  It was the first time I remember understanding that life was bigger than my childhood problems.  That the adults in my life were facing things that were bigger and more complex than I could understand.  I searched for a way to make sense of it and my role within it.  This is when I started to worry about getting good grades.  I started thinking about college.  I started to TRY to get along with my sisters.  I started to believe that if I could be and do enough good, I could control my life and, to some degree, the lives of those around me.

Eviction #2 happened about ten years later.  I was 20 years old when I got married.  Five months after the wedding, I had a septoplasty and turbinate reduction surgery. This was to help me breathe better but was mostly in response to recurrent, severe headaches that had been going on for years.  It was an outpatient procedure but I spent the entire day in the recovery room.  My blood pressure became very elevated during surgery and it took hours to bring it down.  The surgeon advised me get this checked out by my primary care doctor.  I was a BYU student at the time so I went to student health and told the doctor what had happened.  Thankfully she took it seriously.  She began ordering tests to evaluate my cardiovascular and endocrine function.  After a bunch of tests and a misread CT scan that was thankfully given a second look, a tumor was found in the back of my abdominal cavity behind my pancreas. 

I had an incredibly invasive surgery to remove the tumor, followed by another incredibly invasive surgery four months later.  This was my second eviction.  I dealt with this in a similar way to my first.  I put my head down and went to work.  I looked for things I could control to take care of the things I couldn’t.  I went on like this for 11 years. 

I was 31 when I became pregnant with R.  I waited a long time to have a child and I was so excited to be pregnant and bring this little human into existence.  I don’t think it matters what you circumstances are, having a child is an eviction from your life!  It’s something you can’t adequately prepare for, no matter what.  Having R was the best kind of eviction.  Holding my sweet boy, feeling the incredible love I felt for him and believing that God’s love for him was even more perfect than mine—that was the impetus for me.  That’s when I started to believe that God loved me and he wanted something more for me than my self-mandated, contrived existence. 

This is when I realized I couldn’t continue—I couldn’t fulfill the measure of my creation, within my marriage.  This marked the most meaningful eviction to that point.  That’s the thing about evictions.  They are uncomfortable.  They are supposed to be.  During the past two years, there have been several times when I have longed to go home.  To return to some feeling of normalcy in life.  But whenever I think about this, I try to picture what that would look like and where it would be.  And I realize, it doesn’t exist anymore.  I cannot go home.  Like those whose homes were destroyed in the terrible fires in California this past week, I could return to the lot and I would find a field of charred and scattered debris.  What was there before, only exists in my memory.

This is where the invitation comes in.  An eviction always comes with an invitation.  An invitation to rebuild, to grow, to expand, to understand, to let go, to reach.  These are invitations that I would ignore without the preceding abrupt eviction.  Life in the status quo, however comfortable or uncomfortable, is familiar and it is so hard to let go of the familiar.  I don’t think God provides these evictions.  The world and life and biology are chaotic and complicated enough to ensure that we will find our necessary breaking points.  But God is always the inviter.  God is the one that invites us to turn shit into gold.  It is up to us to accept the invitation—to “trust the inviter,” as Glennon suggests.

When have you felt this eviction/invitation?   

Today my invitation is, not to wait for the downhill stretch, but to get comfortable in the climb.  To stay open.  To love.  Namaste.