I don’t want to write today, and haven’t for a while. I keep thinking that if I put Christmas off, it just won’t happen this year. On the other hand, I don’t want my Advent series to be missing anything, so I’m sure I’ll finish that, too, once I stop feeling the need to push away the baby. It’s people like me that need the baby the most, and right now I can’t stop myself. Christmas has never happened for me without my mother… not once… so why not just stop all the clocks (a poem that speaks to me deeply because even though it is about romantic love, one line is silence the pianos. Some days, I laugh through my memories. Today is not one of them.

I am sure this is a passing feeling, but it’s where I am.

My friends have been over-the-top in their love and care of me, and it is working. But at the same time, there’s only so much other people can say which ease my mind for more than a moment at a time. People have often told me what grief is like when they’ve lost a parent, but grief is as individual as a fingerprint. There is no overarching message, no one-stop shopping to fix it based on learning about the experiences of others.

No one told me that I’d be extremely jealous of people who still have their mothers, especially when they are so much older than me. No one told me that there would be moments I’d actually forget my mother was dead, and everything would all come crashing back as if it was happening all over again. No one told me that I’d feel in some ways as if my future was ruined, not overall, but that immense, intense part where my mother is on the front row of everything I do, cheering me on.

No one told me what it was like to feel like half an orphan, that in a lot of ways, even though Lindsay and I are into our 30s and I will be 40 in September, it feels like my dad is taking on the role of single parent even now. For the record, he’s doing a bang-up job. It’s just that now I have one less person to call, one less person that will talk to me until we both run out of things to say… or, more accurately, my mother transitioning from talking to asking for tech support.

One time she even flew me in from Portland to fix her computer because it was cheaper than taking it to Best Buy. Unfortunately, this is completely true.

Speaking of Best Buy and Christmas, I know I’ve told this story before, but it should be put here as well. You can download Red Hat disc images and burn them yourself to install, but if you bought it at an electronics store, it came with a year’s worth of tech support. I put it on my Christmas list that year… it must have been my sophomore year of college. The following conversation ensues:

Mom: I need a copy of Red Hat for my daughter for Christmas and I have no idea what that is.

Best Buy Guy: Wow! Linux is a big operating system for a little girl!

Mom: She’s 20.

The look on Best Buy Guy’s face was priceless, because he didn’t say anything after that.

And honestly, I can’t say anything more, either.

I just took a big heaping dose of Chloraseptic, just sprayed it down my throat until I couldn’t feel anything, because I have two hours and 15 minutes until I need to show up for choir. I had a conductor once who said never to sing after you’ve used it, because it’s like singing while wearing white gloves. It’s a mask that covers up pain so that you cannot tell what damage you’re doing because you don’t know to stop when it hurts. When I’m on vocal rest, as I am now, it’s invaluable because not only does it make my throat hurt less, it stops whatever irritation is making me cough, and I will take anything I can get in that arena. I have decided that I have been sick long enough that I’m going to go to the doctor tomorrow. My GP is fantastic in that you don’t need an appointment. If you get there before 1500, you can just wait in line.

Now that I’ve been sick for a week, I think I need a course of antibiotics, because now I’m convinced that the stuff coming out of me is infected and this is not just a passing cold. If he’ll do it (read: has the equipment), I also want a shot of Depo-Medrol to bring down all the inflammation in my vocal chords. I know how some of you feel about steroids. Shut it. This is the solution that works for me and has for many years because I don’t do it unless there is a major need for it. I am coughing so hard I’ve thrown my back out and I have a HUGE singing engagement next Sunday. HUGE. It’s not just that I’m in a quartet and therefore featured. It’s that next Sunday is basically a choral festival with no sermon and there are two services, one at 9:00 and one at 11:00. We’re talking two solid hours of singing with very little break in between. It would be “Lessons & Carols” if we were Episcopalian, but instead of basic carols, it’s monster anthems in which my head voice (high range) is in use most of the time. Nothin’ says lovin’ like being this sick and having to pull a high A out of nowhere… meaning that there is no scale up, I just have to find it and hold it for six beats. Finding it is not the problem. When I’m sick, it’s harder to have the kind of breath control to keep it in tune that long, and/or hold it for one beat, much less six. I was kidding the choir that since it’s a capella, could they please just keep getting flatter as a group so that no one notices that by the time we get there, it’s actually an F sharp?

Today’s anthem is The Yearning, by Craig Courtney. If you hear it and you know my mother, you’ll know it is exactly the sort of thing my mother would have picked for her own choir. It has a gorgeous piano accompaniment, which my mother preferred because even though she COULD play the organ, it wasn’t her instrument. They seem the same, but they are most definitely not. The first time I heard it, I heard my mother in it, and I was weeping by the end. After the last chord rang, I turned to Ingrid and said, “did it just get all Christmas in here?”

It did.

It’s been nice to be off the grid for the past few days, but mostly I’ve been sleeping. I have a terrible cold/infection (not sure yet) and it has laid me out. I went to choir practice and sat by myself, because through the magic use of abdomen muscles, I was mostly able to avoid singing from my throat. I would have stayed home, but that was impossible because I’m the soprano in a quartet and we had to practice on our own. It’s pretty much the only time I’ve left the house this week, except that I ran out of peanut butter.

In part, I think my room is making me sick. I have made progress on it, but it’s not the perfection I am seeking in my Virgo/Marie Kondo simplicity. I just haven’t had the energy. However, my coughs are productive and getting things out has helped immensely, especially in the singing department.

It’s been kind of weird being sick during Advent. Normally, I get this kind of thing during Lent. Spring is my least favorite season because even though it’s beautiful, it’s deadly. I have a lot to fill my time, though.

I’ve been doing a lot of updating the church’s web site from my office there, and I am learning a new CMS called Squarespace. It’s not WordPress, that’s for sure, but some of the skills are transferable and some are not. The biggest drawback is that I can’t see real code or style sheets, and figuring out how Squarespace deals with these things has been a lesson in humility. However, it is something so low energy I can do it while feeling half-dead, so I am productive in my misery.

I have done all of my Christmas shopping except for one present, and that’s because I don’t have the address. It will be coming shortly, and I can’t wait for her to see it. No hints as to give it away, but sufficed to say I am good at the gift giving game. I take into account all sorts of things, like what their interests are and the “when you see it, you’ll think of me” factor. The only time I use Amazon wish lists is when I am picking out books. They’re so personal that it’s hard to judge someone’s taste. Better to pick out something they’ve already said they’d read. Although once I bought a book that someone had added as a professional guide, because I couldn’t think of a better gift now than more money later. Then, I hit send and Amazon in their “suggestions” list put up the perfect present. Like, so good I wish I’d thought of it myself, because it was just so star-spangled awesome that I felt impotent in my gift giving ability, because seriously, WHY DIDN’T I THINK OF THAT?

I ended up getting both. Problem solved.

Not many people get two gifts from me, but this was the no-brainer of presents.

The excited and happy thank-you note was the complete indicator that I’d scored big, and it’s to Amazon’s credit.

That didn’t happen this year- all of the presents I picked out were all my idea, and it makes me feel good. Two presents are so particularly awesome that I think they’ll flip when they get it, but again…… Spoilers.

The hardest part was not picking out a gift for my mother. Last year I got her some earrings that were flowers encased in clear resin, a teardrop shape that I thought would flatter her face. I never got to see her wear them.

The Winston Churchill talking action figure I got my dad was a big hit, too.

Dana prides herself on being right. LOVES IT. So one year I got her a t-shirt that says, “I’m right 97% of the time… who cares about the other 4…” She got the joke and put it on immediately… along with taking the bows off the wrapping and sticking them to her head.

I wish I could say that I’m looking forward to Christmas this year, because there have been so many great presents and moments over the years. But there’s nothing that anyone could get me or say that will erase the fact that a gift from my mom will not be arriving with a sweet card containing all her hopes, dreams, and love for me.

As Lindsay would say, “Mom was the best.”

 

 

 

As you all know, I dread Finnish Independence Day, although now I hate it a lot less now that I’ve started calling it Finnish Independence Day instead of Diane Syrcle‘s birthday. I know next to nothing about Finland, am hard-pressed to name TWO Finnish composers (because there’s Sibelius, and……….) and though I am very adventurous in the kitchen, of the Finnish recipes I’ve read I can pronounce maybe a sixteenth of the ingredients. Pretty much the only thing I have in common with the Finnish people is our shared love of avoiding others.

Finnish Independence Day is celebrated on 6 December because it’s when the official Declaration of Independence from Russia was adopted by Parliament after having been written by the Senate two days earlier.

I didn’t write my own line in the sand on today’s date, but it helps to think that someone else did. This is because on holidays, I still get rattled. 25 years is a long time to celebrate something and then just…. not.

I’ve told this story before, but I’m going to tell it again.

When Diane turned 24, I enlisted my mother’s help. I got her to call a florist so that I could get her a present delivered at school (Diane was a middle school choir teacher then). My mom asked me what I wanted, and I said, “one rosebud.” My mom said, “that’s it? You don’t want to get her some balloons or something to make her room look pretty?” “No,” I replied. “I have this joke I’m going to do and it’ll all make sense.” So my mom orders said rosebud and calls me over to the phone when the florist is ready to take the message for the card. I say, “for all you do… this bud’s for you.” My mom rolled her eyes and paid.

I am sure that there are many more gift stories, but the only other one I really remember is that I got her a GORGEOUS turquoise bracelet at Saturday Market on Festival of the Last Minute. She opened it on Christmas Eve and her joy was palpable. I said, “I figured I owed it to you after totally punking you on your birthday.” What did I get her for her birthday?

Well, first of all you have to know that when people know you like something, they’ll get you anything and everything having to do with it. For instance, my mother liked white geese. I don’t think she got a present for six years after she told people she liked them that didn’t have a white goose on it. Diane was complaining that now that people knew she liked dragonflies, it didn’t matter what the thing looked like, if it had dragonflies on it, people would buy it for her… that the overall aesthetic could be hideous, but if it had a dragonfly on it, it wouldn’t matter.

After (over)hearing this conversation, we were shopping and I found the ugliest “embroidered” dragonfly toilet seat the world has ever seen. Dana and I looked at each other, then wordlessly put it in our cart. We each knew, without saying anything, that this was a legendary find.

Good memories duke it out with bad on holidays, wrestling each other without keeping score. However, I have to remember that just like Finland, I have written my own Declaration of Independence, and the Parliament in my head has adopted it. When I feel sad at what I’ve lost, I simply look at the blue and white flag, and know what I have gained.

 

 

I apologize that this is late- I have been laid out with a cold for two days straight.

---

…yelling doesn’t make a thing any more possible.

-Angie Sage

What if John the Baptist was wrong? He was baptizing people from all over the region and saw the Pharisees and Sadducees coming… but in this pericope, they never speak. What if John lost his ever-loving mind over Jews who had changed their minds?

To put it mildly, he did.

He called them a “brood of vipers,” asking them who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? He is, in effect, shaming them for living these largely sinful lives and trying to get redemption at the last minute.

But did it accomplish anything?

Did the Pharisees and Sadducees walk away humbled at their behavior? Did they act any differently after their baptism than before? Did John’s rant of shame do any good whatsoever?

He thinks that The Messiah is coming to baptize with Holy Spirit and fire, putting the good people safely into a barn and torching what’s left of the threshing floor so that everything burns to the ground and we can just start over with all good people… rather than having to get out there and help the ones that will do better when they know they can.

John got part of the message right- he is not worthy to carry The Messiah’s sandals. The part he got wrong is why. Jesus was not coming to earth as a professional Jewish Superhero who was going to smite all those who sinned against God. He saw no reason not to forgive people at the last minute. Jesus never met anyone he didn’t think was worth something… worth a lot, actually, no matter what they’d done prior to meeting him.

John the Baptist thought that The Messiah was coming to reconcile all our sins…. to put us in our places… to make the miserable and the pious claim their fates.

But the one we’re waiting for, the one far greater, keeps no such ledger.

Amen.
#prayingonthespaces

There’s no rhyme or reason as to what or why I feel right now. Grief is a funny thing in that your mind doesn’t settle on any kind of order. Elizabeth Kubler Ross was right that there are five stages of grief, but wrong in that there is a particular order. It’s more like they all hit at once, your mind a TV blaring with five thousand channels of thought.

My three trunks are myself and my mom, Dana, and Argo. Everything I feel is somehow derivative of one of those three things (my mother and me being the same in her absence).

I’m thinking about how much I love them and how much each of them changed my life and then two or three memories of each of us pop across my mind in a way that I can’t direct them because they are disparate and out of order, or five memories blended together. I can only let it happen. This will get better over time, but I can’t imagine a more unfortunate series of events that would create recovering from mind-altering grief quickly.

The tapes for Dana speed up because I don’t want to think about them. Our bad moments so overshadowed our good ones at the end of our relationship that I’d just rather not deal with it as an overarching problem, just as they come up…. which is often, but less than people who recognize all the things of which I am capable. Dana didn’t want to be married to a writer, and I understand that implicitly; we are prone to wander through life lost in our own heads and because she was in my life, she showed up in my writing and didn’t always like what she saw. However, I have taken the steps to torch my own writing before, and it was such an enormous cost that I was not willing to give it up again. If it was being married or being a writer, the thing that is closest to my true self wins.

As I was telling Lindsay, I’m old enough now that I can picture never getting married again…. which is good, because I am technically married in two states…. possibly the only good thing to come out of the Trump election so that when sanity is finally restored I won’t have had to do any paperwork. #worksmarternotharder

You have to have a small, select group of people in your life that understand how you tick, and writers are impossible to live with. There will always be a couple of people who understand different parts of you, but hardly ever one person that understands it all… and even when they do, it’s scary for them to think they have to put up with it. When I least expect it, I am sure it will happen… that I’ll find that woman who understands the creative process and doesn’t feed the crazy, just acts as a sounding board and calming presence until I become the calming presence while she has her emotions about her calling, too. I don’t think there’s much more to love than that.

I am also dismissive and judgmental when it comes to finding love as a verb because I have impossibly high standards… which leaves me finding the tiniest things that annoy me about a person within seconds. The easiest arrow to my heart is “dumb.” If I find you boring, I’m out…. even though with time the conversations might become more interesting if I let myself breathe.

I have to like your face, and while I am not at all particular about the types of bodies people have, your face must have “that thing.” Maybe it’s a cute little mole on the side of your lip or a scar you got in a skiing accident or the way your eyes look like there are joyous secrets behind them. Maybe I recognize part of your facial features in someone else subconsciously, so your face already feels like home…. or, at least, I imagine it could be.

Because I’m turned on by brains and not bodies, I don’t think I’ve ever had a girlfriend that was classic trophy-wife beautiful. It was that their quirks made them beautiful to me.

Although who knows? Maybe my next girlfriend will be six feet tall with long blonde hair in a power suit with her cleavage showing a little too much… or perhaps leaving the house in Class As that I want to rip back off. But not if her face doesn’t look like home…

because otherwise, I wouldn’t even notice her at all.

I’ve reread a lot of what I’ve written over the past few days, and what’s jumped out at me is the dance of intimacy I present with Dana… how fully fleshed out she is in terms of how much I love her and don’t. I fluctuate between pushing her away and wishing she were here in the biggest breaths of my life. Knowing for certain that she doesn’t want to reconnect doesn’t keep me from wishing we were closer, and it also doesn’t keep me from talking about the bad parts, either, which are what keep me from wanting contact even as laughter envelops me when I think of one of our legendary adventures.

• When I told Dana that when I met her, I thought she was a loud obnoxious blonde woman, she started putting that on her name tag at church.
• When I moved to Houston the first time around, Dana made me a cat at Build-a-Bear, complete with her famous Stitch impression that used to illicit tears… because she said that line.
• Dana drove with me to Houston and flew back. We’re punch-drunk as hell trying to make El-Paso for dinner. We come up with this bit… “Excusth me, do you have a margarita asth big asth my head?” “I want a margarita asth big asth her head, too, ’cause she’sth got the bigger head.” “Yesth, your head might be taller, but mine hasth more circumferenceth.” We never actually did get margaritas that night- we ended up at Sonic. How I let her get on the plane back to Portland is beyond me.
• I remember seriously planning our first child in the moments after our first kiss, because my biological clock exploded as if my uterus was talking to me, telling me I was home.
• Dana used to work at a grocery store, and the first flirt I really remember was that every time I went to the counter, she’d say, “hay sugar” and wink as if I was the only person in the room.
• When Dana and I were in the same room, the air was different… electrified. It not only energized us, but fed others…. mostly by being explosively funny.
• We were Jeopardy! fiends, and constantly amazed each other at the sheer amount of random shit each of us knew. This led us to compete in pub trivia, and one of the moments my pride for Dana knew no bounds was when she won THE ENTIRE THING BY HERSELF…. and she was playing for money.
• One of Dana’s ex’s friends was playing on our trivia team one night and David and Nathan knew something was up. They knew that we were thick as thieves and it was only a matter of time. We giggled in just that way, and just got a knowing look. So, said friend goes to the bathroom and David says, “ok. What’s up?” I said, “we’re so in love we can hardly see straight.” David: WELL IT’S ABOUT GODDAMN TIME. When Dana called her dad, even he said, “I’m surprised it took this long.” And that’s just two people in a two page list.
• I was celebrating my breakup with Katharin when Dana came over and we got trashed to Talladega Nights. I don’t handle alcohol well, and the next morning when I woke up, Dana was gone. In my deepest Southern drawl, I said, “did I do anything last night for which I owe you jewelry?

Looking back on it, that’s when the barrier broke for me, and I couldn’t stop wanting her, when before I was stuck on the idea that all this emotion was just what best friends had. Surely all best friends can finish each other’s sentences… surely all best friends wake up in the morning and snuggle? Surely all best friends are automatically assumed to be a couple wherever they go because they act like it.  Surely all best friends avoid going on dates because they feel coupled enough? Moving to Houston was the best thing for us, because it forced us to realize that the people we loved were fine for someone else and treating us like crap so that the timing for us was finally right.

When I was living in Portland the first time around, Dana was married and I was single and badly needed a friend…. and over time, pushed away dating in favor of hanging with her. When I got to Houston, I had two girlfriends who were both convinced Dana was my soulmate and I was just trying to hide it by being with them. They didn’t give themselves enough credit, because I valued my time with both of them, but ultimately they were right. I was lying to myself because I had to.

I think it’s the reason I remember our first real night together so clearly, because it was so emotional. Everything that had been bottled for almost four years we drank in with laughter and tears, because it was a moment a long time in the making. I went to sleep with tears of joy streaming on my cheeks because I felt home.

In that time and place, she was my sun- accurate because she’s blonde.

 

I just sat down and realized my mother was dead. In an instant I see her as the children’s choir director when I was in third grade with her little skirt and jacket combo… which she later replaced with a scarf because of Liz Claiborne. She’s sleeping next to me in my queen-sized bed and we’re talking late into the night and I see her at McDonald’s carrying a second full order of food because I had already gotten our food, sat down, and she told them they’d forgotten our number. I ate too much Filet-O-Fish but I hadn’t eaten in two days so I didn’t mind… until we went on a tour of the city and I felt like a Sumo wrestler as I walked. There’s the moment at my thirteenth birthday party where she told me I was getting my own phone line and crying at the prose on the Hallmark that she wrote under the obligatory rhyming poem. There’s sitting on a stool at the bar doing my homework while she cooked and I couldn’t do math. There’s watching her call out every name in the house until she gets to the dog. There’s the way she drove, rocking the accelerator so you felt like you were on a dinghy about to get sick. There’s my third grade birthday party set up as a Peter Pan amusement park and I was Peter Pan. There’s my mom after me coming home from a date with a boy and I had a hickey on my neck and failed to convince her it was a curling iron burn. There’s the way she carried the picture of my junior homecoming in which I was wearing a rainbow ring and standing next to my beard for years on end, but said it was just a good picture and it was really the last one she’d see in which I looked remotely heterosexual. I am positive that it stayed in her wallet until she died, along with my eighth grade prom picture I made by myself because my boyfriend went to a different school and I couldn’t invite him…. but there was no way I was wasting that makeup and that hair. There’s everything she wanted me to be and everything I actually was.

Tick.

I’m at a SBX waiting for a glasses shop to open. I love my black and white-checkered frames, but I also really like my blue wire-rims and I think when I fixed them with my own screwdriver, I pushed one of the prisms to a different angle. There’s no appreciable difference in my vision, but of course as a Virgo the lack of symetry is intolerable. It will be my Christmas present to myself, and it may not even cost a thing. I will probably want more frames in the future, because my earrings are semi-permanent and, well, fashion.

Since I have both blue and black glasses, I need a brown pair. The ones I have now are keyhole bridge tortoise shell and way too big for my face. Working Girl is just not what we’re doing now. When I ordered them, I thought they were tiny and cute. When they got here, I thought, “the eighties called. They want your glasses back.” In the right fit, keyhole bridge is timeless… an axiom for fashion. There will never be a time in which sport coats, crispy button-downs, and Converse All Stars™; for whimsy and comfort will suddenly be Right. Out.

I need to take my brown Converse to the shoe hospital because they need to be re-soled and stitched in a few places. The reason I’d rather pay for that instead of just getting new ones is that they’re leather and keep out rain, even when I step in shallow puddles.

It’s funny how I got them. I was shopping at Ross and there was only one pair in boys’ five and a half. This woman was saying out loud that she didn’t think they’d fit her nephew and I said (a little too loudly), “can I have them?” I said it so fast that she started laughing and said, “you clearly need these more than me.” Yes. Yes, I do.

Because I liked the brown ones, I bought the black ones with black rubber as well. Converse for every outfit, although I’m wearing my hiking boots more than ever because they accomodate huge wool socks. I look a bit funny considering that with their classic fit, my hiking boots make my feet look huge…. and there is no euphemism for that. #lesbianproblems

We’re supposed to get cold rain for the next two days, thus Bigfoot. Ugh. When it gets a little warmer, my leather Chucks will be ok again. If I lace them tightly, I even get feeling in my feet.

Again, too cold with no payoff…. no pictures of beautiful trees, no snow angels, no nailing the kid on my street with a snowball for having a Doctor Who backpack out of jealousy.

Last night, I was playing around on Facebook™ and found this quote on my wallpaper changer. Posted it with #INFJ….. Also me: Strong people don’t put others down. They lift them up and slam them on the ground for maximum damage. -Abhishek Shukla

The duality that has lived in me for so many years is finally ready to laugh at. When I walked in darkness, I wanted to. It was an unexplored version of myself that I didn’t know existed. And then I got tired of that duality and show mode melted more than it ever had before. Integrating my compensity for both lightness and dark, it has been an interesting process of rejecting the past and rewiring a ton of neurons that were just dead before. New pathways are growing and I listen to music for it the most, because if you set words to melody, it makes recall mostly instant.

I had that moment with Nine Inch Nails, listening to Closer and ruminating on everything that had happened to me from 14 on. What jumped out at me is how much the song changes when you think of it as the dance between an abuser and a target. It started with you let me violate you, and all of the sudden I pictured every abused child I’d ever known…. My skin crawled as I realized that you let me violate you are the words that create back-door access to someone trying to gain control of you. Because if I let you, it’s all my fault, and that abuser will pull those strings until he/she can’t because you’ve created your own scab over the wound, because no abuse victim gets closure. They just get stronger.

The death of innocence is every big a grief as losing someone close to you, with one giant exception. Your body betrays you. You know it’s wrong, you know you should run, and you are frozen in place with loving the idea of having secrets. Your brain turned off to save you from fear, betrayal is getting wet or hard. Part of the guilt and shame that lasts your whole life is that you knew it was wrong and you loved it, anyway…. because inappropriate or not, nerves go off autonomically and your brain associates this terribly wrong thing with something incredibly desirable. The majority of abuse is done by someone you love, someone you trust, someone you can’t even imagine doesn’t love you in the same way or is even capable of it…. which makes it harder to break away because there are genuine moments in a twisted reality. How do you think they keep us hooked? They twist us into believing they own us…. “pet people.”

As you realize the extent of the abuse, you resent the genuine moments because you learn just how much they weren’t. You let a hacker in the back door because there are no security updates for threats of an emotional nature. As Brene Brown says, and I’m paraphrasing, shame is the one thing every therapist in the world is trying to uncover. You can be absent from your abuser for years, and reestablishing contact opens all those doors you thought were closed. One sentence becomes a rootkit in a matter of hours, and there you are, under control once again. If you are an adult when this happens, you’ll be surprised at how fast you regress.

What adult could not be undone by seeing the person that abused them?

So many people went through much worse than I ever did. The dopamine and sexual rush was all in my head… but not of my own hand. As I have said before, it was a plant that outgrew its pot quickly. I remember with clarity a letter Diane sent me that said, “I shudder to think the depth of emotion you’ve had for me.” Meanwhile, all the time reinforcing our verbally abusive relationship so that I was the one who was always trying to make things right in a relationship that never should have happened in the first place. What child wouldn’t give you more emotion than you could handle when I think I am as close to you as my own parents?

I never thought of her as anything else until she planted a seed in my imagination and my body betrayed me. There are plenty of people out there who absolutely cannot believe this is what happened, but they weren’t there and we were. Who’s we? My parents, my sister, and all of the choir members who saw it happening and didn’t say anything then, but have come forward now that the statute of limitations has run out to say that yeah, they knew something was off, but they couldn’t quite put their fingers on it so it wasn’t worth pursuing, because they loved Diane just as much as me. Surely this person who charmed everyone couldn’t be the same person that was traumatizing me?

My mother was the first to say she wanted to press charges, but for what? She could have gotten a TRO, but it wouldn’t have worked. We found ways to sneak around. There’s nothing that would have broken us apart until I realized what was happening and stopped it. No contact has been the right choice for me, because I don’t spend my time processing what she’s doing and being afraid I’m not there to protect her…. so much love and care dumped into a hole when I was too young to understand why.

I will protect all of my friends to the death, because I know for sure they’d step in front of a bus for me, too…. they know I’ve got their backs. That’s been the biggest revelation in this whole thing…. noticing when I am pouring love and protection into people who wouldn’t do the same thing for me. If there is no reciprocity, there is no relationship anymore.

It’s called (really) the INFJ door slam. We require equillibrium, and we’ll do anything to get it. If the relationship is off to an enormous degree, we will love your ghost eternally while not interacting with you. It’s not that we don’t love you, don’t care about you, don’t wish you well. We’re just done.

There are so few people that fit this mold for me, but the relationships I’ve severed have felt right for me over time, because I realized how much they were draining my ability to practice self-care. I was always pouring from an empty cup. My closest friends know to bring water.

With me, there are so many types of social interactions that leave me drained, and others I could maintain for days. Some people are just exhausting, and some give away their life energy in sync with as much as you’re giving them. It’s this mutual admiration society that keeps me going in the face of enormous obstacles.

My job this year has been to learn to reach out and listen more, talking less. It’s just one more step into being able to welcome someone else in my life, because I am trying to create relationships that have an easy give-and-take like I do with my friends. Being more compassionate all the time won’t hurt, but especially in romantic relationships, I’d rather be ready for one than try to jump in unprepared. Some people believe that jumping into a relationship helps fix those things… I don’t think it does. I think you create the same pattern with the new person that you had with the old, fighting about new things in the old dance of intimacy. Last time around it was the brand of toothpaste. This time it’s the dishes by the sink…. the small issues that are covering up deep wounds.

Let’s start with the deep wounds instead, so that the dance is new- with music in a different key.

In order to understand the past, you have to understand the future.

It was October 2nd, 2016 that I was sitting at my computer, completely in the writing zone, typing 80wpm, when my sister called me to tell me that my mother was dead.

Two weeks earlier, I texted her to call me ASAP. This was not, in fact, a good idea. I wanted to ask her if I should just get in my car and drive down because she broke her foot and my dad was going through a series of surgeries. It was, like, 9:45 and I just wanted to talk to her early enough that I could stil get going depending on her counsel. I emotionally “fell asleep at the wheel,” because why did I have to base it on permission- or at the very least, approval and a heads up that I was on the road? For some reason, she didn’t get the message until 2:30 in the afternoon and by then thought I was mangled horribly or dead. She called me, and I didn’t reach the phone in time. I called her back, and she was on the phone with my sister trying to decide just how much danger I was in. In retrospect, I should have known that if I wrote “as soon as possible,” it didn’t mean “as soon as possible.” It means that I am telling you I am getting mugged at this very moment.

I didn’t keep watch.

I slept through my life as my father recovered from surgery and my mother died instantly. If I’d listened to my intuition, I would have been there. I could have done something… not to save my mother or heal my father but to just be there when our world exploded. My sister needed me and I needed her. There’s no way I could have known that I was coming home to a funeral, but at least I would have been there in minutes and not hours, getting to spend two weeks memorizing my mother’s face before it was embalmed and never the same. Before she died, it had been a year since she’d visited.

I didn’t keep watch.

It only took one crack in the foundation of my marriages to let the water flow through and erode the cornerstone. I buried myself in other things, convinced that there was no such thing as a Schonanagan or a Bambelanager divorce. Through the years, we’d developed an intricate emotional shorthand and a language all our own. We could have entire conversations with our eyes, as well as conversations no one else in the room would understand… to their consternation that we were just being too “inside.” There were plenty of things wrong that I own, but I do not own that our marriages came apart in one moment. The last moment was just the last moment. Kathleen and I were married for 11 mos, but we’d been together three and a half years before that. Dana and I were married for seven years, having an intense best-friend relationship for almost four years before that which didn’t make a lot of appreciable difference in our relationship after we married except for about a third…………….

The roots withered on our family trees while I was completely oblivious to the role I was playing in all of it. Those things that could have been small, but grew into great big things before I paid attention.

I didn’t keep watch.

From the very first moment I met Argo, her words were strong, secure- so much love and respect that if I could have bottled it I would have used it as hair product. By the time I told her flat out I can’t do this anymore. I have feelings for you and I cannot continue to be friends and stay married to someone else. I can’t look at myself in the mirror, she told me that I was tossing away a friendship like it was nothing. She was willing to let me have my feelings and let them be large and watch the process it would take for me not to feel them anymore. I assumed that the energy I was throwing at her was not the kind of energy she wanted in her general direction, and the assumption cost me, because I stupidly didn’t realize how much I meant to her and how much she was willing to try and understand, even when it seemed impossible. She was willing to walk in my inner landscape as long as I was willing to walk in hers. Again, a crack in our foundation that allowed the water to disfigure our rock.

I didn’t keep watch.

I’ve let friendships go that would have been lasting because I didn’t recognize their depth of feeling for me and let go in my own worthlessness… I could not see that I was worth their time, but they could. I was so attuned to how I felt that it kept out what would have been enormous had I taken it in. I could have had the support system I needed no matter where I’ve lived, but I could not trust myself to open up to create it. My personality type dictates that I have lots of acquaintances and very few friends, so the idea of reaching out to people I did not know well was intimidating.

I attended a youth group trip to an amusement park minutes after Diane’s graduate school going away recital was over. I was crying so hard I couldn’t stand up straight, embarrassed to be emoting publicly and my parents made me go, anyway. Instead of trying to shut off my brain and reach out to the people around me, I went straight from distraught to show mode, because I was fine. I was not open to friendship, because I couldn’t focus on what might be coming… friends my own age who could help me re-focus on eighth grade banalities so that they became reality again.

I didn’t keep watch.

In this first Sunday of Advent, it is this very idea to which we are called, for we do not know when the Son of Man will be lifted up. Our meditations center on the ways we’ve checked out of our own lives, shutting ourselves off to the possibility of what might happen. There is a lot of language about how we, as Christians, need to behave… but they are not just for Christians. It is not a calling out of immorality, but a refusal to do those things which allow you to zone out the easiest. Perhaps in those days, it would have been taken that way, but I have to believe that it is just an example of how not to live our lives with only the instructions on the shampoo bottle… Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

As the sun grows darker, we turn inward, but not in a penitential sense… it is a call to arms, apocalyptic language that says to examine what you are doing that will keep you from recognition of greatness when it arrives. There are two scriptures, taken together, that are our invitations and anthems:

Jesus said to the disciples, “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”

Matthew 24:36-44

The disciples did not know when Jesus was coming back, and did not think it was going to be in their lifetimes. The Epistle, written in the spirit of Paul, attests to this fact because Matthew was not written down until about 50 years after Jesus’ death, borrowing heavily from Mark, indicating that according to everything this “early blogger” had read, we’re still waiting. Note to self: put on pants.

You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.

Romans 13:11-14

It is a story repeated through time.

If you get there,
before I do,
comin’ for to carry me home…

Tell all my friends
I’m comin’ too
Comin’ for to carry me home.

Who are those children all dressed in Blue?
God’s gonna trouble the water.
Must be the ones that made it through.
God’s gonna trouble the water.

To the Freedom Fighters call,
Black, Brown and White American say,
Segregation must fall.
Good evening freedom’s fighters,
Tell me where you’re bound,
Tell me where you’re marching,
From Selma to Montgomery town.

Keep your mind sharp, your bags packed, and your sandals on your feet, because you never know when something is about to happen.

In order to understand the past, you have to understand the future.

Some people were not open to the glorious signs all around them, asleep to the rest of the world. Love arrived with the simple words “I’m pregnant,” such an ordinary thing few would have paid much mind…. unless they’re the family that’s expecting.

We have the advantage of knowing we are. I’ll meet you at the hospital.

I’m keeping watch.

Amen.
#prayingonthespaces

I have a lot to do today that I just haven’t been doing over time. I’ve let it build up in my grief, and I’m to the point that I have to dig myself out. I thought about calling a maid, but then I thought that wouldn’t create lasting change if I knew I could just call someone when I couldn’t figure out How Clean is Your House? Kim & Aggie have long been my inspiration in this area, and I tend to watch a few episodes before I get started. It’s as energizing as Hoarders. It’s moments like this where I wish I still had Shirley, my little Nissan pickup, because there’s nothing like I’d like more than to be able to dump all my recycling and trash into the bed and drive it to the dump, because of course our trash day is on Thursday and tomorrow is a holiday. I am putting this all out here because I don’t know of anyone alive who can manage their own lives in the aftermath of deep grief. I’ve always been a little messy, with the exception of one time in my life. Things got so bad that I reached out to Dana and said, “I need help. I’m too far gone.” When she said “yes,” I made it my personal mission not to ever have to ask her again as a thank you. My apartment was so clean that you could eat off the floor, and I mean that literally. I used Fabuloso,™ which Ralphie May says “gets out Third World dirt.” I still have a lot of the concentrate, I just need to go and get a spray bottle so I can mix it properly.

The common areas of my house are no problem, because I love cleaning the kitchen and the bathroom because there’s no clutter. I can start with cleaning products in an instant gratification sort of way. I spray and wipe and within a few minutes, it’s perfect. I leave the door to my room closed all the time and hope that no one comes in. Interestingly enough, it wasn’t until I watched an episode of Doc Martin that I could even wrap my brain around why. Unfortunately, I cannot seem to find the exact clip I am looking for, but both Dr. Ellinghams go to visit an old man who has just lost his wife. The senior Dr. Ellingham is talking to the patient, and since she is a psychiatrist/psychologist, explains that his hoarding is a function of his wife dying and since he’s lost everything, he doesn’t want to lose anything else, so everything he owns is all over the place… basically leaving everything as it was when his wife died and just putting things on top of the mess.

I took my anxiety medication this morning in order to have some clinical separation in this area; perhaps if I can look at it objectively without emotional attachment, I can finish. But this will not be a short or easy job. First, I need to clean out the back of my car so that I have enough room to put my trash and recycling in it, because I can’t just leave it on the sidewalk today…. Neither do I have enough room to stack the trash bags on top of each other until the next trash day comes ’round. It is my own fault, even if I do come by it naturally. When my mother got depressed, she had the same reaction, stuffing things into closets and drawers and under the bed if she knew people were arriving at the house imminently. As her mental health improved, so did the state of her home.

I also have a lot of dry cleaning to drop off, because I do not have enough living space to set up a full-size ironing board and I like extra starch, anyway. The only problem with this is that some of my shirts cost more than others, because the men’s small will go on a regular-size board, and my boys’ shirts have to go on the women’s (I think). I do have a small, pull-out ironing board that I can use for my Dockers,™ because all I want to do is get the stains out and then put a crease from the knee down. If, eventually, I do move into my own place, a fabulous iron/ironing board and several cans of Magic Sizing™ and lavender Faultless™ are in order.

It was my stepfather, Forbes, that taught me how to iron properly, because no one can teach you how to iron more effectively than a former Marine. In fact, I asked my mother for an ironing board and all the accoutrements years ago when I had my own house, and told her that if it didn’t come directly from Forbes I was going to be very upset. 😛

Ironing is also one of my favorite memories with my old girlfriend, now a good friend, whom I called “Angela the Red” to differentiate her from “Angela the Med.” She told me that her favorite movie to put on while she was ironing was Steel Magnolias, so I bought a copy of it and told her I had it in case her clothes became wrinkled at my house.

In my current house, it is all hardwood floors, but back in the day, my favorite chores were ironing and vacuuming, because they are the best examples I know of instant gratification. It’s wrinkled, and within minutes it’s not. It’s dirty, within minutes, it’s not. The same thing goes for my room when it’s clean. It’s just too small to take long when everything is done in small doses. I’ve just let it get out of hand with my low-energy approach to life. I am slowly coming out of it, a butterfly emerging from her cocoon, but these things take time.

There is nothing on earth that would have prepared me for losing my mother so suddenly, and I am reeling from it. I am running away from all the things that require me to take care of myself, to the point that I will avoid showering until absolutely necessary…. although I can’t blame that all on grief. It is really, really cold here… currently 43° during the day and when I woke up suddenly in the middle of the night, only 28.° Even though the shower is hot, there is really nothing that makes me want to take off all my layers to get into one. I did today, though. Progress. Perhaps I will get a space heater for the bathroom, or at the very least enough candles to warm up the room before I go in. One does not cut it… and Dollar Tree has an amazing selection considering that the jar candles I’ve seen elsewhere are 20 times the price.

You would think that the upstairs would be warmer considering that heat rises, but it’s actually a lot colder. On some days, it is warmer outside than in. Last night I put my ski jacket on over my pajamas and turned on my electric blanket. It worked, but it also made me incredibly reticent to get out of bed…. though I did.

Progress.

Right now, I am making due with warming up my coffee as often as I can, and am searching for the perfect fingerless gloves so that I can still type.

Speaking of which, hold please…………………….

There, that’s better.

The other thing that seems to help is that I have a great pair of Bluetooth™ headphones that act as earmuffs, so there’s little part of my day where I take them off. Perhaps now that I have realized I have tools at my disposal to stay warm, loud music delivered wirelessly so that if I have to go to a different part of the house I won’t lose connection, it will propel me in the right direction. At some point, I need to go to “Targay” to see if I can find a comforter that fits my requirement of insulating the heat from my electric blanket. I have several blankets on top of it, but it’s not pretty, just functional. Perhaps that’s something that needs to go on my Christmas list, but I do need to go shopping to make sure it’s heavy and not one of those “bed in a bag” contraptions where everything is cheaply made. Because I don’t have a cat, it will last a long time, but if I had to put in an adjective, warm would not be one of them. I actually found a Doctor Who set I liked very much, but again, it was cheap. Perhaps in order to find the pattern I want, I’ll just buy several more layering blankets. The warmest one I’ve ever had was an old U-Haul blanket covered in sheets to make it comfortable… the last gift my first wife, Kathleen, ever gave me because it was a running joke throughout our relationship that if we ever got a divorce, I wanted custody of it. She’d already left the house, and when I went to get my own, there it was, folded neatly on a chair. It was just one of the things I’ve lost over time as I’ve “cleaned out my closet” over several moves.

Every move, including this one, has begun with losing everything on purpose in order to truly start over without reminders of the past. This time, however, I cannot get away from it due to the “magic” of Facebook. There are cute reminders every day of who Dana and I used to be to each other, and I alternately cry and laugh over them. I am sure that by now, the dopamine rush of “new relationship” would help me to let go more fully, but at the same time, I have too many memories that plague me to make it fair to my new love, especially someone who thinks that disconnecting from the past “helps.” All people my age come with an incredible amount of baggage that do no good to cover up. I know that memories fade into the background, but the way our relationship ended alternately has me wanting to forget everything and the trauma it caused running through my mind as if it’s still actually happening.

Perhaps the first step is to clean house.

I have it on good authority that I am getting a care package from Portland today. These things are my sustaining grace, those people who care about me no matter where they live. I am alternatively living in deep grief and on top of the world, and care packages are one of the things that rescue me from thinking that things are all bad, all the time. The other thing that has me rising above all of the grief is that I am doing a wedding in August. Since there’s no way I’ll be done with grad school by then, I’ll get myself ordained over the Internet and keep on truckin.’ I want to be ordained for the wedding because it will give me the ability to a) say those special words b) sign a marriage certificate so that I will be on the official record as having done my first wedding ever. It’s the care package I’m giving myself.

I have already done many church services, but this is a special one. I have a few “tricks up my sleeve,” handed down from both my dad and Dr. Susan Leo. Susan and I have had our issues over the years, but I cannot mistake the part for the whole. Susan was the first person that believed in my ability enough to not only hand me her pulpit, but the direction of the entire service as a whole. I even did communion once, to the consternation of the congregation, because they did not know that in the UCC, you do not have to be ordained to do any of the rites. It was the first time I realized I knew the entire communion service by memory. Although I never did it again, because even though you don’t need ordination for it, I didn’t want to make anyone angry, and even in my own mind, I needed to first “wear it like I stole it.”

That moment was when I realized that I started exploring the idea of the confirmed ministry program as opposed to grad school, and I still may deciding on where my life takes me from here. I know within myself that I am not ready to take on a congregation of my own, simply because I am not finished working on myself. However, it wouldn’t hurt to be an associate pastor, soaking up all the knowledge my senior pastor has to offer. In some ways, I think I would make a better associate, because I have the ability to show up and preach, as well as being a part of planning and execution, but not responsible for everything until I am ready to fly solo. I go back to my father’s time at Moody Memorial Methodist Church in Galveston, Texas, where my father served under an incredible senior pastor named Asbury Lennox, and realize that at least for a while, I need my own Asbury. To know him was to love him intensely… especially as a child, because he took me in as my own when my own grandparents lived five hours away by car. Our special date was to go to King’s Candy on the strand, where we would sit and eat licorice laces and divinity.

Good things come from NE Texas, and I am one of them. But I am glad that I also got the chance to live in both Galveston and Houston, as well. For those who are interested, Josh Rushing of Al Jazeera America/ Control Room fame is also “one of us.” Josh’s grandmother was even mayor of Lone Star for a while… the little town in which both my mother and father were raised. As for my father, I don’t think that anyone expected that in a town of 600, he would rise to be a musician of that caliber. In that vein, I cannot leave my mother out of that crowd, either, because she was a church musician starting as a child and rose to greatness at Kilgore College, taught by the same piano teacher that taught Van Cliburn.

Good things come from NE Texas.

The way our family ended up in NE Texas after living in Galveston is that the senior pastor at First United Methodist Church in Naples died suddenly and my father was sent there in an emergency appointment. We stayed there for five years before we left for The Heights near downtown Houston. It was a great place to grow up as a child, but we left just in time. The only reason I say that is junior high and high school were when my friends started to experiment with drinking in cow fields, very much the picture of Friday Night Lights. They turned out to be responsible adults, but it was just not my scene. I went on to join a fabulous band at Clifton Middle School, and to attend The High School for Performing and Visual Arts. Though I went there for instrumental music as a trumpet player, I was exposed to all kinds of art. The only program they started after I left that made me a little melancholy was creative writing…. because you know I would have been terrible at it.

Through those experiences, I learned that there was more to life than I ever thought existed, because even though I left HSPVA after two years, I wouldn’t have traded being in marching band and taking mission trips to Mexico for anything in the world. I learned more Spanish through immersion than I ever did in school… my apologies to my Spanish teachers, but there was no substitute for being forced to speak Spanish… my favorite phrase being habla despacio, por favor. I could understand most anything if everyone would just slow down.

I would like to do more immersion over time, because it would thrill me to be able to preach in Spanish.

As the weather gets colder, my heart gets warmer.

Good things come from NE Texas. I am banking on the fact that I am one of them.

Amen.
#prayingonthespaces

This title is going to mean a whole lot of things. The literal interpretation is that my coat sleeves came apart at the velcro, the only thing that was keeping wind from blowing up my sleeves. I wasn’t able to get it as tight as I wanted, because the foldover made the velcro unstick. However, I was able to make it where the sleeve straps weren’t blowing in the wind, and I have several good leads on warm gloves. I don’t know if it’s supposed to snow soon, but I’ve gotten word through weather.com that it’s about to get a lot colder… 28º, to be in fact. As I have said before, I am not a big fan of that kind of cold when there is no payoff, like snow angels. Despite the fact that I do not have a trench, my jackets are doing fine by adding skiing silks under my dockers.

I also need a new pair of jeans, because they’re thicker and my old pair has a habit of coming unzipped. Perhaps a tailor could fix it for me, but going to Goodwill would be infinitely cheaper, and I might find a steal, like Lucky brand… my favorite because when I actually do find that special relationship, when you undress the denim on your fly has a patch that says, “Lucky You.” I take care of my jeans, so even if I don’t find that woman until Jesus decides it’s time to come home, I’m still golden.

I am so scared of this new life. I’ve been friending a lot of straight women who are only looking for female friends, because that’s about my speed. I want to tour DC like I’ve never been here before- even the places I’ve discovered a thousand times over. I want to recreate the picture Lindsay and I created at the Jefferson monument where it looks like we are literally holding up the towers. She arrives at the end of the month, and I am picking her up at BWI. She has a work dinner that night, so we’re still deciding if we want to hit up the Inner Harbor before we make our way to the hotel. She said I could stay with her, and I am looking forward to a few days in the lap of luxury. You mean they’re going to clean our room? Sold.

Plus, they will almost certainly have HBO, and I’ve discovered Bored to Death. Don’t read anything about it, just jump in. You won’t regret it.

And on that note, it’s time to head for choir and possibly some time with Matt, who gave me an incredible compliment… could you edit my book?

Ummm, yes. It’s the superglue that will make us stick.

This morning while I was cleaning the kitchen, I was listening to On Being with Krista Tippett, an interview with Mary Karr that I keep going back to because it’s a reflection of me. I never had the type of abuse she suffered from her parents, but there are parallels in that we both ended up in the “Mental Marriott” in order to have our nervous breakdowns… although in her words, every mental breakdown is a mental breakthrough. There became a point, a clear one in my mind, where I realized that being hospitalized for PTSD was inevitable- two sentences from Argo that gave me the strength to come undone in hopes of rising from the ash, not taking my friends down with me. They were:

1. Can’t you see the common denominator is you?
2. Why do you expect everyone else to fix you?

I could see the former, but not the latter until she brought it to my attention. I was too far down in grief to be able to see that I had any power in the situation, and her words gave it to me. I knew that I needed a safety net, but not that I was beyond the type of help that my friends were able to give, because they were not trained in psychiatry or psychology. I thought I only needed someone to listen to my frustrations, when in reality, I wasn’t getting the responses I needed to really improve, because my problems were too big for the amateur eye.

That second sentence gave me back my power.

Scared out of my mind, I sent Argo a voice message by attaching a sound file to an e-mail that thanked her for kicking my ass in all the right ways, wishing I could also send her a picture that indicated I was where I said I was, the place I needed to be, so that she would know for certain that her words had the desired impact. The moment after I read that e-mail, I called my insurance company to get pre-authorization for treatment, and my dad drove me to the hospital so I wouldn’t have to pay for parking. Between my fear and the fact that they were about to take my phone, I’m sure that the voice mail sounded scary. I was talking a hundred words a minute, because I didn’t know how long I had before the nurses came to collect my things, even my clothes because there are special outfits you wear so that you don’t have the capability to hang yourself. I wasn’t in that place, but I was definitely on the cusp, because I couldn’t see the mental breakthrough I needed to realize “this, too, shall pass.” I made so many plans without carrying them out that I knew if I didn’t take care of myself, the next stop was a SpongeBob SquarePants headstone. I only wish I could say that I was just being dramatic. When I got to the ER, my pulse was over a hundred, and my reactions had been cut down to “wounded animal.”

I honestly didn’t think I would get any better, that being Bipolar II would always be a downward spiral, because my particular brand is very few ups and long, drawn-out downs. Whether it was wrong or right, I felt so worthless it took my breath away, because arriving at the hospital was the realization that it would be so much better if no one had to worry about me anymore. Of course my friends and family would be sad, but they would have moved on without this constant need to check on me and make sure I was stable. It wasn’t reality, but it was real to me. As my friend Phil says, and I’m paraphrasing, depression lies… and it always knows the very best lies to use against you. The biggest lie my depression ever whispered in my ear was that suicide wouldn’t be a permanent solution to a temporary problem, because my depression wasn’t temporary. It would be my, in the words of Dexter Morgan, dark passenger as long as I lived.

I wanted to be the person that carried light in both of my hands, the one capable of leading people toward peace and social justice, but how could I ever justify that goal when I couldn’t even keep my own life together? When I couldn’t take care of my friends? When I was so anxious that fight ran in circles around me while flight was still putting on its shoes?

In the same way that I wouldn’t talk about my emotional abuse as a kid because I thought I was powerless, this situation was no different. I cracked under the pressure of being emotionally abused and having those feelings spew out like Pandora’s Box because they’d been stuffed down for far too long, and then my wife and best friend in the world hit me harder than I’ve ever been hit. I owned that I escalated that situation far and above what it needed to be emotionally, but it was Dana that broke the physical barrier and I could not let her get away with it (even though I recognized later that she might have thought hitting me that hard would take the fight out of me and it would be over).

Even at a little over a hundred pounds lighter, I still couldn’t wrap my brain around not standing up to a bully. Dana’s weight had never been an issue to me in terms of the way she looked… until I realized how our fists could not possibly carry the same weight. Plus, Dana was the receiver at a liquor store, so not only was she heavier, her arm muscles carried far more power than mine ever would. The thought that I needed to kick her ass so she’d know I was not one to be messed with was strong, overpowering my need to deescalate the situation and run away. I rested in the idea that sometimes what bullies need is for someone to stand up to them, because it may be the only thing that gets them to back down. Fight or flight covered up any chance I had at grace and mercy, because cortisol and sin were racing through my body, rendering me unable to disconnect from my emotions and calmly plan out my next move.

The thing is, though, that it didn’t work. She knew she was bigger, she knew she was stronger, and if anything, I just made her more angry instead of being willing to back down. How in the hell I ever thought fighting back was a good idea is beyond me. I just didn’t want to cower in a corner, afraid to stand up for myself. It got so bad that she put her hands around my neck and started to squeeze down as I choked. When she realized what she was doing, I was so angry I decided to return the favor… and that’s when all the adrenaline ran out, because I truly realized how small I was. My hands wouldn’t even reach around her neck, and there was nothing I could do to, in my mind, hurt her the way she’d just hurt me. Her hands were just too powerful, my neck too thin. I crumpled on the floor, hoping that my neck wouldn’t have those semi-permanent marks around it. The whistle had been blown, the fight was over, the goalie had the ball…. or so I thought. I didn’t even see her fist coming as it slammed into my glasses, so there was no way to duck or put my hands in front of my face. Luckily, I was wearing a plastic pair, so the damage was less than if I’d been wearing wire-rimmed. If that’s not cold comfort, I don’t know what is.

The one thing I didn’t say that I should’ve is “get out or I will call the police.” Because I didn’t, Dana pulled the classic “I paid my rent. I am entitled to everything in this house,” so that I was the one that had to run away from her… because obviously, this was all my fault… I just ran into her fist. I couch surfed and went to the house to get my things while Dana was at work so I wouldn’t have to run into her… and in fact, I wouldn’t even have done that if I hadn’t left my psych and sleeping medications in my office. We tried to make up so that sharing a house was at least a possibility until either one of us found a new place, but I didn’t count on the emotional swings growing much larger. I was sitting on the floor of the hallway, doing nothing but chatting about my time in the hospital, because I thought that as my friend, she’d want to hear it. That turned into her asking me deep and probing questions, and I would start to answer them, and she would say “stop.” Then, she’d have another question and when I began to answer it, she’d say, “I told you to stop.” Then, she asked me another question and when I began to answer it, she told me that if I didn’t stop, she was going to call the police…. but she didn’t. She called my father and told him that I was having a psychotic break. How she jumped to that conclusion is beyond me. I had taken all my psych meds, so I was as chill as I’d been in months. I gave her her own space- she was sitting on her bed and I was sitting way out in the hallway, never raising my voice. Neither my dad nor the police, had they been there to witness what had actually happened, would have agreed with her assessment. My view is that it was hypocritical to ask me questions and emotionally kick me while I was down. I realized that she didn’t want to listen. She only wanted to talk at me instead of with me. This was no equal meeting of the minds, and I didn’t understand that then. I thought that by laying out my vulnerabilities and the new context I’d been given while working with my cohort in the hospital would give her some insight as to everything I’d been through.

But she didn’t.

She put every emotional gun she could think of on the table because while it was clear she wanted me to listen, she was hell-bent on not returning the favor. There were moments in time later that it got better, but they were isolated incidents and not an overarching peace.

I don’t think I would have been as quick to leave town if she hadn’t raised her hand to me and dealt with the aftermath in a way that said to me, “we’re not okay, but we might be one day.” And by that, I do not mean that I would’ve wanted romantic reconciliation. I mean that Dana and I had an incredible capacity to be friends, and it would have been worth sticking around to see if that kind of love came back over time.

Even in leaving town, I chose a place where our paths would be parallel so that it wouldn’t be impossible to patch things up to that degree. But there were several shady things that have happened in the meantime that make it impossible. For instance, she told my sister that she was coming to Virginia, and I don’t know why but I have a pretty good lead. My guess is that she wanted my sister to tell me, and she didn’t until months later. Then, one of my friends told me that she was flying in, and I was butt-hurt that she didn’t reach out until I realized e-mail went both ways and reached out to her. She didn’t even respond, just asked her sister to respond for her, which was basically “please don’t contact Dana again through any means.”

I reached my “fuck you” breaking point in that moment, because it was underhanded and weak. If Dana didn’t want any contact, she should have said so herself. To sic her attack cat on me was just unnecessary after she’d been talking to my sister and my parents for months via social media…. or talking at them, because they wouldn’t reply (at least to my knowledge). I can’t help but feel that since Dana thought our breakup was all my fault, my family would, too… I mean, why wouldn’t they want contact with her after the last time we were all in the same room together, I had a bruise under my eye? She thought she had it wired as the victim in this situation, and because we’re not friends, she can stick to that story as long as she wants. It is, in my own mind, delusional, but that recognition isn’t mine to make.

Shortly after that, my parents unfriended her on Facebook so that I didn’t have to see her love pour out for them while she made a point of excluding me. Every good feeling I had about that relationship went down the drain, slowly robbing me of any regret in the actions I took to get out of her life and stick to it.

The only moment we’ve had in the past few years that’s been positive is when I called to tell her my mother died. She was gracious and caring, and then we hung up… back to no contact, not even showing up for the funeral of her mother-in-law for seven years. Although, I have to say that I didn’t even think about it until it was brought to my attention. I sent her a text message saying that if she’d like to come, I didn’t want her to feel unwelcome. No reply whatsoever, and when I got my answer, I didn’t dwell on it. I focused on my own friends, my own family right up until her absence was noted as disrespectful. My mom and dad had been divorced for over a decade and my dad still made it… even with all the bandages on his face from cancer surgery. I wasn’t angry in the moment, but looking back in retrospect, it just stings. What, did she think I was going to try to make a play for her in front of my mother’s casket? This was not about us. If anything, it only reinforced how little my mother and me meant to her, and it was yet another sign that I’d made the right choice to start my life over in a major way…. that I was justified in grabbing onto Argo’s belief in me and ditching the person who literally told me to my face that I’d never amount to anything.

Although I didn’t grab onto Argo’s words in a way that was tangible. We’d each done a number on each other and neither of us were eager to repeat it. I grabbed on to the memory of those words, because if she could believe in me, eventually, I would, too. As my life in DC began to take shape, I realized just how much I believed Dana when she, in not so many words, called me a loser. I couldn’t decide whether she was projecting her own lack of self-worth onto me, if she was parroting all her parents’ negative thoughts about me, or if those words, to her, were Gospel truth. In the end, thinking about it isn’t even worth it anymore. I did not need that temperature in my life, but friends who would see the life I was trying to create and help me get there.

I am certainly not blameless in the ending of our marriage, but to claim yourself as the victim when you also have stuff to own is unacceptable. I am worth more than the shit sandwich she handed me, and I wish I could have seen it sooner. As I get further away, I get angrier and have to deal with it to get it resolved, because I didn’t let myself get angry then. I was too much of a fixer/pleaser to let that happen. It was a delayed reaction to realizing that I very much got the short end of the stick, because communication problems can be resolved with work and time. Thinking you have the right to start a physical fight with someone and claim they deserve it is something I will no longer tolerate from anyone ever again.

I wrote it down.