In the Catbird Seat

I don’t remember exactly when I left Facebook but I think it was last summer. The actual instigating push was something silly (being banned from a group over a misunderstanding, and I was blocked from even seeking clarification, so I just deactivated my entire account). I don’t fit in online spaces the way I used to. There is so much meanness and attack, and I feel myself drawn into it as well if I am not careful.

A big part of leaving Facebook was realizing that my voice isn’t really important to any kind of broader conversation — getting a little older and understanding the limitations of myself and my (comforting) insignificance. I thought, what if I just don’t say anything, and get used to not being there? Overall, it’s peaceful.

I’m in a between-place right now, having left being “young” but as everyone says, I don’t really feel old, just less young than I used to be. I always feel 28, but with more wisdom than I had then. Life has been peaceful and quiet so that I don’t have a war I have to fight every day (other than the war against the army of cups and dishes that seem to gather on my desk all of their own accord).

A few things have happened recently that have pushed me into a new frame of mind.

First, I started seeing a trauma-informed counselor and doing somatic therapy. She is a licensed mental health professional and a licensed personal trainer, and I got to connect with my arms and legs and a deadlift of almost 100 lbs, which felt good. She pressed me to attend classes in additoin to my weekly sessions, and something odd happened after Christmas. I went for a session in mid January, after having seen her right before Christmas as well. I think that the total time elapsed between sessions was 3 or 4 weeks. She made reference to applauding my decision to “come back to therapy” several times during the session, and I realized that she saw downtime over the holidays as me “quitting.” Whereas I am used to only being able to see a counselor once every 4-6 weeks at most. I tried a class right before the holiday as well, and I found that it was just too young for me, and the very kind, earnest 20 year-olds were all congratulating me on my shit-level lifting in a way that couldn’t help but feel condescending. I feel like I have something valuable to offer the world, maybe, but I didn’t have anything to offer that group. If my best (and almost $100 per session) wasn’t enough, then I was going to save my money and just stop. So I did.

I miss the lifting, but I don’t miss anything else. We didn’t talk in much depth, and I found that while the therapy did help me be more functional mentally on a daily basis, it wore me out physically — after a session of lifting, I was typically quite sore for about four days, then there were two days of feeling ok, then another session followed by four more days of pain. It started to really get to me, because the physical pain didn’t get better over time as I continued training.

It was a dull kind of disappointment, and I still feel halfway as though I made a mistake — I should have continued to power through, I should have talked to her about my concerns — but I felt like I was already done, and a denouement conversation would not have had a clear purpose. I also didn’t want to say anything mean to her from a place of frustration, because our incompatibility wasn’t about anything she was doing wrong. I just don’t fit very well anywhere.

Which leads me to the biggest challenge, and one that I can’t really describe without sounding like a straight-up asshole. I don’t know anybody else like me. I explain my situation to counselors and they validate, with wide eyes, and then once I “seem fine” I can feel them disengage. I can almost hear it happen, like machinery slamming to a halt. They will say something like that I am strong, or that I am resilient, or that I have good strategies. I know then that the therapeutic relationship is over. I don’t have doubts about my ability to survive in my current life. I excel in my current life. I want to deal with the things that come crawling out of my memory when I sit still on a Tuesday night. Shame, betrayal, weird religious trauma from a religion I haven’t practiced for 12 years, hashing and rehashing how much of everything was my fault. All of it? None of it? It seems like I will have to dig into it on my own. Which I will do, and lucky for you, it will be in my own private journal, not here.

The birds are back in force this year, with several new species. A grey catbird showed up for the first time ever today, took two bites of suet, and flew off again. I looked it up to ID it, and the bird app said, “tends to stay hidden; will ocasionally feed on suet.” I wish there was a book where I could look up what I really am. I struggle, always, between feeling like I should be quiet and feeling like I should speak up. Then I stand in front of a microphone, not sure what to do, the lights hot on my face, everything a blur out past the apron.

The goldfinches are highlighter-yellow now, and the sun stays up past 7.

Alive, alive, oh

Yesterday, I won full and permanent custody of my two children. I got this concession by agreeing not to talk about child support with their father, not to include any discussion of it in the legal papers for this filing. So, they are safe. No matter the season, no matter how his moods and health and fortunes go up and down over the coming years. With this, an extended era ends for us as a family, and for me, too — the era of recovery. Everything that followed closing the front door on the morning I ran away five and a half years ago; getting my children free as well from abuse, volatility, and a thousand tiny other kicks.

Their life with me has not been and will not be perfect, but it will be a life that considers them key players, and they will know they are important, and they will live in a home that is designed to teach them how to do without me. If I do it right, they will walk out as adults with their heads held high, looking forward, and the only tears will be mine as I watch them go.

Relief brings a lot of tears with it. I’ve been crying off and on all day, in tiny bursts. It is a small benefit of the current times that I get to work from home; normally I would have to duck to the office restroom on the hour to blot my face with cold water, to keep my cheeks and eyes from burning. It isn’t what I want — this. But it’s the best possible resolution to reality as it truly is. And for the first time in a very, very long time, my mind has nothing legal to chew on like a piece of too-tough beef jerky. Gnawing like a wolf.

The biggest things I reckon with now, today, instead, are not the immediate things — the worst of the abuse and mess my life was, and the holes in the wallboard. These things are temporary, and cosmetic, and they go away when I hold them out the window and let go, like scarves. The things I square off with are the things I did myself, long ago, not knowing how stupid they were, not knowing how foolish I was. Thinking the whole time that what I was doing was right.

I know I am not alone in this, but it always felt particularly awful because one of the things that was drummed into my head for my upbringing was that I had a higher responsibility for sacrifice, because I had a higher tolerance for pain. 

You were given a gift.

So when I fail, at anything really, it feels like a double-failure, because I’m supposed to know better, in everything.

It sounds so egotistical, right? To think that I am that important? I’m not. And it’s so nice that I’m not. Living all the way into my own insignificance is what has set me free in so many things.

But to hell with it! I have the signed, notarized forms. I have sat up countless — actually countless — nights, worried about where the kids were at that moment, and if they were okay, and if they would be okay today, tomorrow. Ever. Most of the time they were. Sometimes, they weren’t. But they’re okay now. 

They’re okay.

I fucked up my 20s. I think I’ve redeemed my 30s? In any case they’re almost over.

That little girl that I was back then was doing the best she could. The best I could do was pretty much shit most of the time, but that’s what I honor here–

— crying over a stupid piece of stamped paper. That I’ve spent 5 years trying to get–

I honor the fact that I used all the passion I had available to me to do the things I thought were right. Maybe I was actually living in an honest way then, because that’s what I was then. Maybe I’ve always tried my best, and what my best was just depended on how much truth I’d managed to encounter, extract, or distill up to that point in time.

I had a dream last night that my family and I visited a friend of mine from high school, and after catching up with each other in her bright front room, we heard the air raid sirens, and we only had time to duck — not even time to get under a table, much less into a basement — before the planes came and dropped bombs. One explosion dull and far away, one very close, and then the planes flew over us and dropped a bomb on the other side. We had been spared.

My daughter turned to me, her eyes wide in terror, and I turned to her as I did when she was a toddler and fell and bumped her knee.

“You’re okay, baby,” I said, and she smiled and turned back around to watch the city burn through the window. “We’re okay.”

And I think we are.

Dispatch from Quarantine

My dispatch from quarantine today is odd, because… I’m doing just fine. I have my daily stresses, but that is because my home office at times is a bit too much like the big, bright fluorescent one. I find that people can “drop by my cube with requests” just as easily by Teams as they can in person.

Maybe better?

 

And of course I wonder why. Why am I fine?

So, first things first.

1. Am I fooling myself? I don’t think so. I don’t want quarantine to end for a lot of reasons. I do want to be able to leave home, and I know rejoining the world will have a lot of positives, but let me say in 100% certainty that I love not commuting to work. No one can really be objective about themselves, but I think I really mean it when I say I’m secretly doing well.
2. I have jobs I can do from home. The transition is one that requires irritation and adjustment, and nothing more dramatic than that. No doubt that this contributes greatly to the fact that I’m good.
3. I have food, there is no intense outbreak in my city, and while it is somewhat nerve-wracking to go into public, it’s not like it must be in New York.
4. And I am quarantined with several people and a dog that I love.
5. I have a house that is big enough, and a yard.
6. And I have the means to get what I need, with only the inconvenience of slowness to irritate me. Which is almost nothing at all.

And all of these numbered good fortunes highlight the things that have prepared me for these times — the ways in which I have been quarantined before — 

 

1. As a child, before I was old enough for school, my sister, mom, and I lived a very isolated life. We went to the grocery store, and we went to church, and we went to the library, but usually we stayed home all day, every day. I didn’t play with other kids except my cousin, and him only on special occasions. Sometimes Mr. Rogers was the only person who said a nice thing to me all day, and Grover was the only one who made me laugh. Even really young — two, three — I had to dig deep to get through the day, and so I learned how to excavate the riches that exist inside me, like spiking, glittering crystals in a geode. I learned how to read very early, and books and stories opened life up even more inside that tiny trailer.
2. Summers, when I was in my early teens, before anyone had a car, we stayed home all day while both parents worked. Hot, rolling thunderstorms, fights, hunger, sweating, bugs, dirt between my toes when I went out to get the mail. The last few years before internet. There was never cable. I wrote letters to my friends, called them sometimes if I could. No restaurants delivered, there was no corner store in walking distance, no sidewalks out on the highway — just a long, winding dirt road back into the woods, and I walked it a lot, sometimes in bare feet on the wet clay, like walking on a pie crust being pressed into the tin.
3. New mom, stuck inside for flu season before the baby was allowed in public. Born early, his immune system wasn’t done baking yet, and so I was instructed: He does not go to church. He does not go to parties. If he goes to the grocery store, he goes on a Tuesday morning at 9am, when there are not crowds. The family scrubs in, up to their elbows, to hold him, and they change clothes if they have smoked, and they stay away if they have any symptoms at all, of anything. In many ways this period of time was extremely similar to what we do now, although this feels easier to me. Other people are doing this too, now, and they understand. I am not fighting off people who say “Oh, I had strep throat, but I’m on antibiotics, it’s okay,” or the person who sneezed indirectly onto him while I carted him around Target. I’m not washing all the bottles myself, so to speak. And in fact, I haven’t had to wash the dinner dishes in months. I do, sometimes, but it’s a choice to pitch in, not an hourly battle against a cold, greasy tower of hell. There are no recliners in my house, and no husbands to sit in them and demand a better grilled cheese this time, throw this one away. No one to stomp outside and angrily chain smoke because I am “letting” the baby (who won’t stop crying) cry. And my friends have not just all jumped ship a few months before, after many years together as sisters, if only in my imagination. I owed them loyalty for their decision to stay my friend in spite of how weird and embarrassing I was, they said, and despite repeated warnings I would not apologize to them for them having to talk down to me, and worse I would not agree and obey. The dread of sunset when the PPD would kick in really hard. Hiding my tears because I was not allowed to be sad With All I Do For You And The Baby How Dare You Be Sad. // A lot of memories that I’m remembering again, now. The view from inside looking out is so different now. Better and easier.
4. Working from home, with an infant and a preschooler, with a toddler and a preschooler, with a preschooler and a preschooler, bouncing a gurbling teether on one knee and typing student feedback with the other hand, fake sleeping until everyone else drifted off and then tiptoeing to the computer to finish the work by 2am, 3am, then back up at 6:30 the next day, because if I worked while he was awake, he felt I was working at him, to criticize him, and if I didn’t work I didn’t get paid, so more or less never sleeping when the baby sleeps (the most useless advice I ever heard in my life). All the grocery shopping, doctors appointments, cooking, and cleaning. Forcing order into my work days. Cultivating discipline to hit my targets with no one looking over my shoulder. Avoiding the trip from the desk to the kitchen because if the kids saw me, they would suddenly remember all the things they needed, and that they only needed them from me. Carving out a professional identity from an environment that wanted me to be a faceless, thoughtless, emotionless, sexless blob of utility, the living equivalent of a pair of cargo pants. Taking a selfie in the bathroom mirror before front-facing cameras were a thing, just to remember what my face looked like. To remember that I had a face, that I was not just a pair of hands.
5. The constant vague threat of death, nonspecific and maybe-not-a-big-deal-but-also-yes-definitely-a-big-deal, in the early days of the restraining order I woke up every morning ready to die, ready for him or one of his flying monkeys to pop out of a bush with a shotgun, to find me in the parking garage stairwell with a piece of piano wire, to burn the house while I was double-locked inside, all the ways I died in my dreams and then woke up alive again, not sure if that was the better deal. Learning to make friends with the fear, and let it show me what it would show me, like Aunt Polly says to her brother Tommy Shelby, “When you’re dead already, you’re free.” I lost everything but my life and my kids and on that rock I built my home again, from the inside out. A constant knowledge that nothing in life is guaranteed, and then — that open, sweet lightness that floods in when there is nothing left to be afraid of.

Now, I have more power and agency and ability to connect with others than I did when I was a young child, a car and the ability to take a walk on my own, for miles if I want, that I did not have when I was a teenager, the company of everyone else who is conscious of the risks of this virus, which I did not have when I was a new mom, children who can keep themselves occupied while I work, and rejoin as a family in the evening when I’m finished, which I did not have while working from home with small children, and things I can do to mitigate my risk of death, including the right to stay safely in my house, which I have now, which I did not have when my life was literally in danger. 

The fact that other people are suffering too — and so those in power choose to recognize the suffering — is what is making this so darn easy for me.

That and the fact that I have passed through all of these gates at least once before.

And this time, I am not passing through alone.

#coronavirus #covid19 #quarantine #lockdown #preemie #WAHM

bad grief/good grief

In my most lucid moments, I believe the piece of wisdom about narcissists that even though our feelings about what they do to us are valid, and the things they do are horrible, and wrenching, and everything else, those experiences are really valuable because they are a perfect roadmap back to the things we still need to heal. Narcissists can only get their hooks into preexisting wounds. Understanding that is a kind of exhalation, and I step back and I can see things more clearly.

Of course, it doesn’t make anything okay, really, per se, because then all you have is a map to Pain Town. But at least then you have an idea of where you’re going, and if you’re lucky you have some ideas about how to get there. And if you’re really lucky, you have a belief that there will be something after Pain Town.

It’s been hard sending the kids back to their dad for his weeks, but only lately. When I first let them go, I was so tired from everything that happened that I relished the silence and the sleeping in. I still do, but lately the kids are so much fun, and I feel like they need me in a different way now. I worry about them all the time, but especially when they aren’t with me.

I met someone recently who also shares time with his kids, and he talked to me about how hard it was to give them back, and I let myself feel it too, a little. And I felt a lot less alone.

And then he faded. In that millennial way, although he was a little older than me. Shorter replies, less initiation of conversation, and with no real explanation he was gone without being gone, and when I named it to see what was really going on he disappeared completely. Today is a lonely day and there’s some slow, dull grief that’s been building all week.

Cringe. And that’s the first hit — I’m a grown woman, I’m not supposed to mind when someone almost-ghosts me. (All the Marie Clare articles say to be grateful it ended early, and to start a new hobby.) And I’m certainly not supposed to talk about it. Not write about it, for heaven’s sake. Talking about it makes me crazy, like Wayne’s crazy ex-girlfriend Stacey who makes him a gun rack and brings it to him at the doughnut shop, right? What kind of crazy person minds when there’s another piece of invisible grief added to her big old pile of invisible grief (it looks a lot like Laundry Mountain on top of the cabinet by the kitchen). And what kind of unhinged psycho actually speaks about it?

And that’s when I realized it. The whole point of this blog post. It’s time to come out about my grief — the specific thing that keeps breaching out of the water and nosing my boat back toward some ugly lonely shore — I have always attracted heavy, invisible grief and people who fade out when push comes to shove. And I have a hard time grieving things that I can’t see. So I have to make them corporeal with my words. Pixels on the page show like bruises never would.

I was emotionally abused as a child. From a very young age. Brutally, at times. And some physical abuse as well, although that was less brutal, and less frequent. The pages of the book keep turning, and there are so many stories of an afternoon, an evening, a car ride, a death march to confession, curled up on my bedspread in fetal position, begging for the criticism to stop, curled up on my bedspread wishing I could plug my ears and stop hearing the gory physical details of what adult life is like, unable to make it stop. Crying, saving up my allowance to buy gifts that were critiqued as soon as the paper was torn off. Raising my brother and then being cajoled into isolating him, too, for breadcrumbs of approval. Made to take care of adult problems at home and backstage, when I was still too young to drive. Never being protected from any of it. Because Lisa is So Grown Up. There are so many pages of the book to read, and remember, and tear out, and burn. So much verse to spit into a microphone.

And yet I’m not supposed to say these things at all. I’m the wrong one. I’m the one who is causing people to cringe. I’m the vindictive psycho. I’m the hysteric. My stories would peel the paint off the walls if they were spoken aloud, one after the other, so I’m the one who needs to keep quiet.

Bruises have been blooming on my skin since the day I was born. All of them invisible. She always hit with open hand, she explained. There’s no need to leave marks on a kid. That’s what’s brutal. Not the pain; the bruises.

I’m a comic-relief psycho with bad hair and a homemade gun rack.

I didn’t think I would be grateful for the slow fade. It was kind of excruciating. But it tore off the last veil and now I have a map to the grief and coincidentally, now that I’m fully single (again/always), plenty of free weekends to go hiking down the fucking path.

The Stabby-Knives Theory of Abuse Escape

There is not much that is more frustrating than watching someone you love struggle with an abusive relationship. It seems so clear from the outside — Just leave him! Just dump her! For heaven’s sake, what would you lose?!

But the answers are not that simple. And to help someone truly break free — or more accurately, to support an environment that can facilitate someone breaking free — you have to be aware of the subtler details that lie beneath the ground of the relationship.

To help provide a framework for this kind of understanding, I would like to suggest The Stabby-Knives Theory of Abuse Escape. This theory might break open some of the mystery of why people stay, and how you can support the idea of leaving.

Everything Hurts

The first truth to understand in the SKTAE is that for the person in an abusive relationship, everything hurts. Everything in the person’s daily life is a stabby knife. The morning alarm (after being kept up half the night with circular arguments), the mirror (who is that exhausted, sad hag?), the sneer and critique of the partner, traffic, the hunger from not quite enough lunch, the guilt for spending money to buy food, the worry about the kids, the house, the dog, the car that is groaning and squeaking. The worry about money. Fears about safety creeping in sometimes. Quickly pushed away, then they creep in again as the news is full, daily, of stories of ex-partners who go crazy and kill. The stories of the kids who are left behind.

Even when abuse isn’t overtly physical or acute, or when it isn’t bad enough to push the abuse target above the veil so they can really see it, everything still hurts. It’s just a low-grade pain that is hard to detect. Before Jabberwocky got violent, he was just plain mean for a while. I chalked it up to depression at the time, but just for kicks one time I tallied up his criticisms of me in a 20-minute period during which I was packing my things and trying to get out of the house to do some grading. I couldn’t grade effectively at home during the waking hours because the kids would come to me for help even if he was “watching” them, and he required my attention on an as-needed basis as well, sometimes perching himself like a parrot on the corner of my desk as I sat, an hour and fifteen minutes before my midnight deadline, trying to talk to me, asking every five minutes when I would be done, making me report how many papers were left, how many minutes per paper, and whether I was maintaining a consistent rate of grading, when I would be free to sit beside him while he watched Vietnam War movies. I would often lie beside him until I could tell he fell asleep, then slowly and quietly inch my way out of bed to the computer to finish grading.

You never have time for me, he said.

As I packed up my laptop and notebooks that one day, I counted seven critiques in 20 minutes. One every three minutes. And that was just for that stretch of time when I was choosing to be conscious of it. I shrugged off and curled up against dozens and hundreds more criticisms at all hours. A long and positive day of nothing but sunshiney interaction would turn to garbage when he asked me for a backrub at 11:45pm and I was too tired to oblige. Suddenly I didn’t care for him at all, didn’t do anything for him ever, and was ungrateful for the paycheck he brought into the house. And this was long before I ever considered it abuse.

Everything hurts. The good things, if they exist, are small and finite, and more often than not, have to be hidden in some way so as not to excite suspicion or attention. An extra piece of cake. A favorite movie. A friendship. Relationships become fraught because of how preachy lucky people with good partners are, how little they understand what it is like to be ugly and lonely inside of a marriage.

Too often, very well-meaning friends can become yet another stabby knife, aimed right at the tender flesh of the abuse-target friend. The stabby knives of daily life already hurt, and critique from a friend insisting that they leave the relationship just becomes one more in a sea of angry metal points, ready to draw blood. They become indistinguishable. Pain is pain, and not-enough-ness is the same whether it’s inspired by the abusive partner, the weather, the passage of time, or the friend ready to lay down the ultimatum: You have to leave him. What are you doing.

The Obvious

Sometimes when we’re looking at a friend’s life, we only see the obvious stabby knives. The mean husband, the lazy boyfriend, the cheating wife. The mean comments, the siphoned dollars, the DUIs. Those would stab, yes, and they would hurt. But we see to the other side of the pain so quickly that we skip over the hidden knives. These are the weapons aimed at the abuse target that genuinely make it hard to leave, or even to see the situation for what it is at all.

Underground Pain

The critical facts of an abuse target’s life when it is time to make a decision about leaving are the blades under the surface: the underground pain.

For example, if the target leaves, they may lose the following:

• Money – Not just the partner’s but their own as well. Joint accounts, joint bills, joint debts. A wild and reckless partner can tie a person’s finances up and make everything seem hopeless, without even doing anything illegal.
• Security – A jilted abuser can and often does become violent, start stalking, or even kill a partner. Having to go to bed every night not knowing if someone is out in the world literally planning to kill you is not part of good sleep hygiene. Getting a dog or a gun doesn’t fix this; it’s a feeling of being hunted at all times. It’s very real, and it isn’t irrational. The first three weeks after leaving an abuser are the most dangerous, and the time during which a target is most likely to die.
• Dignity and Pride – No one wants to be a public failure. Walking away from a long-term relationship or a marriage is very humbling, at a time when the target is already drastically humbled. This is made worse when the words of friends echo in the target’s ears: She was never good enough for you. You’re better off without him. To the abuse target, for whom everything already hurts, this sounds like “I always knew he was bad. I’m smarter than you. You’re dumb. You did this to yourself. Everybody knew but you.” The chance of sidestepping that “told you so” moment is enough to propel a person back into their abuser’s arms to try for success again just one more time.
• Investment – Time, money, energy. Youth. All these things will bring a zero percent return if the target walks away. Often even a negative return. But the target thinks if they just hold on for another season, the creaky old house of this marriage will not be underwater anymore… I’ll get my equity, finally. It seems foolish to walk away when the stock is priced so low. Hang onto it. Wait for it to appreciate. It has to. It has to. It won’t, of course, but imagine what you would feel like if you had bought a bunch of stock and then your broker told you to sell it all as soon as the value of every share fell to less than half what you paid. It would seem like the stock was worthless, but it represents all of the money that you invested, so you would be likely to try to hold onto it. This is the abusive relationship. They nearly always start out really positive, so giving up on that advertisement for the future seems shortsighted and foolish, rather than the right thing to do.

Bargaining Chips

These secret stabby knives round out the SKTAE because they — and their flip sides — are the means through which the abuser maintains control. By creating a landscape in which nothing ever goes right for the target, through sabotage, abuse by proxy, exhausting the target until s/he has no energy to push back, or keeping the target so busy there is no time to think, the abuser creates an entire life in which there are only grey clouds. Nothing but stabby knives. Then, the abuser can swoop in and offer a tiny ray of hope.

For example, if money is one of the secret stabby knives, the abuser may bring home a raise and promise the target something they would love: Now we can finally afford a babysitter for a few hours in the afternoon. You can get some writing done, or run errands on your own. You deserve to take a rest. Suddenly, even though the abuser is the reason why the target is exhausted and at their wit’s end, the abuser is also holding out this golden prize. Something good. The only thing that doesn’t stab, in the whole over-sharpened landscape. A break. I’ll finally get a break. How could an emotionally, spiritually, and physically exhausted person resist this One Good Thing? How could someone who hasn’t eaten in weeks resist a freshly cooked hot meal? Never mind at that point who caused the starvation. The brain has pared itself down to the basics: Get food.

Get love.

It’s the same thing.

So Now What?

Knowing this, what difference does it make? A bit. Sometimes.

If you can identify what your love one’s hidden stabby knives are, you can help them combat those, and thereby also weaken the appeal of the abuser’s faux solutions when they are offered to the target as intermittent rewards to maintain loyalty. This is key.

For example, if the target is afraid about the legal process, openly state that you are available to help them select a lawyer, or just sit with them while they do. Offer use of your computer so their site visits can’t be tracked. Offer a prepaid cash phone for emergencies. Offer babysitting. A place to stay. Dinner every week. Make a blatant and embarrassing declaration: If you leave, I promise you won’t go hungry. I’m here for you. Just say it, and don’t expect them to say anything back, yet.

Most importantly, be something non-stabby in the here and now. There will be plenty of time for the ugliness of reality later. You won’t ever have to say “I told you so” — they will understand when the time is right. For now, it is your job to compete with the faux love bombing that the abuser offers. Love your friend even harder. It is important to say that you don’t have to put yourself out, give actual money, overpromise your time, or harm yourself or overextend yourself at all, but do determine what you can give and offer it freely, whatever it may be. Leave the choice to the target. So much of abuse and the legal process that follows it is about losing agency, over and over in a thousand small and large ways. The final choice to leave abuse should be owned by the target. Otherwise, the pushiness of loving friends and family becomes… just one more stabby knife.

For myself, my biggest stabby knife was money. I was terrified of trying to make the finances work, for a thousand reasons. I was afraid of being forced into dependence. I was terrified of not being able to feed my kids. Car repairs. Apartment deposits. And good god, lawyers.

I had finally looked at the very real possibility that it was time to leave pretty soon, before the holes punched in the wallboard became holes punched in my own self, and the thing that took me from “maybe within the next six months” to “definitely within the next six days” was very simple: an offer of money. No strings attached. I have $x in my savings account, and if it’s ever a difference of that much money that keeps you from leaving, it’s yours. Just say the word.

It was an insanely simple and unthinkably generous offer, and knowing that someone in the world cared about me that much, in my stabby-knife landscape in which I believed that no one cared at all? It made all the difference.

Window

This summer I built a fence around my property. It’s about a half acre with a little house plopped on the middle, in the middle of a neighborhood that is nosy, to put it politely. My lot is one of the most spacious and wooded in the whole neighborhood, and I like the way I feel when I’m outside, especially when it’s not a hundred degrees in the shade. The fence was a weird labor, like a parable; it came at a time when I was working hard to forge good boundaries with a lot of people in my life as well. As I sank the posts, screwed in the cross-pieces, and nailed on the pickets one by one, I reaffirmed my right to have a fence around my own heart and soul as well. Not an impenetrable wall, but a line where the other ends and I begin.

Today my cousin fixed the window that my ex-husband punched out of the back of the house in an amphetamine rage, four years ago. It didn’t end up being that expensive, but there was always something that seemed to be more important than fixing it. Dad boarded it up a few months after it got shattered, and it stayed that way until this past weekend when the torrential rain started to leak in, bringing with it a few frogs — “sticky friends,” as I call them with the kids, to take the edge off the weirdness of sharing our home with a few green amphibians.

The house was calm and bright when I got home, the new glass simple and clear. When Dad first boarded up the window, in my weird trauma and grief I felt it was safer that way, and wished I could board up every window in the house. Now it seems right to put up glass instead, and let the light in, keep the rain out. An open heart inside of a fenced yard. Warm and bright, but protected as well.

Learning to build fences and open the windows at the same time.  Friends, it’s brand new.

Casual/ty

I went shopping with the kids this past weekend, hunting around for Christmas things. We were trying to find a little store I had heard of, in a little shopping center in town. It was raining. We found stairs, gripped the rails and each others’ hands, and made our way up.

Slippery when wet, the stairs said.

At the top it was weirdly quiet. Ghostly. Hollow. Everything was boarded up, paper on the windows. But the businesses were all businesses I knew by name, that I knew were still open. Then we walked around the corner and I saw it. The pile of carnations and mylar balloons half empty of helium. A damp box of tissues. I realized I was right outside the yoga studio where there was a shooting a few weeks ago. I had thought it was in a different shopping center, but it wasn’t; it was here.

I realized I live in a time and place where I can stumble upon the scene of a shooting accidentally, without even knowing I’m near it, until I almost step on a pile of carnations. Like a grave in an unexpected place. I had felt a weird chillness in the slippery staircase on the way up, but I have weird feelings all the time. Sometimes they mean something and sometimes I don’t know. We walked back down and I realized this would have to be the staircase the shooter took to get up to the studio, moments before he ended two strangers’ lives and shattered many others. As ordinary as anything. Metal steps, rubber treads.

“Be careful going down!” said my daughter. “You could slip and fall and hit your head! And then you’d be dead.” She giggled at the rhyme.

It’s right there, all the time.

 

Hook and Eye

You fit into me
like a hook into an eye

a fish hook
an open eye

–Margaret Atwood

I’ve been thinking a lot over the past few months about something that has fascinated me for years: the ways that bad relationships have hooked me and called out to me. On the surface it doesn’t make sense. They’re terrible. They are, after all, called “bad relationships.” So, what is so compelling?

Some answers and advice are facile. “Just believe you are worth more! Take a bubble bath and learn to say no!” Mmk. But none of that explains the magnetic pull that a handful of truly terrible people have had on me. The truth is, I haven’t wanted to be free from any of them until the interactions became so out of hand that I couldn’t even pretend to be fine anymore. Something was terribly not-right. But I kept going back to it.

I thought of a new way to conceptualize it that makes a lot of sense with my own experience.

To back up to the beginning, (only briefly, don’t worry), I learned early on that my value was in providing service for others. On my own, there wasn’t enough attention to go around, but if I took care of others, there was a little something for me: a thank you, a notice of me as an individual, important, worthy person. In this abuse model of love, the same thing happened over and over: I provided an emotional service that someone else wanted, whether it was as a sounding board or a whipping post or a projection screen, and in return I got attention and a little bit of love bombing. Those were the times when I would be told how wonderful I was, how special, how unique, how set-apart. How different. How even my difficult times were evidence of how special I was, because regular old normal people don’t struggle like this. Don’t worry. It gets better. The message of love was clear: You give me what I want, and I’ll tell you that you’re good.

Then, spit out on the beachhead of real life during my school days, I discovered that these little pacts — these unspoken agreements — did not really exist among other people. I did not know how to start friendships with people when they didn’t need my specific emotional services. “Hi,” I would say, and they would stare at me briefly before waving at their friend across the room and getting up to greet them. I would fantasize of somehow magically having something interesting enough to say so that one time, they would stay and talk. But it was just something I daydreamed about, and it never happened, no matter how I squeezed and squished myself to fit what I thought regular people would want. I barely ever even got close, so I never could connect with them, as much as I tried. And so, I drew to me these same kind of people I had known. The people with empty spaces inside of them that needed my approval and caretaking, and in return they gave me what I needed, in between the jabs meant to keep me from getting too full of myself. My favorite crumbs: they noticed me. They spoke to me, and about me. I was real and corporeal with these people. I had a name and a birthday and a favorite color. I had talents. I existed.

With love it got uglier. At 21, 22 the loneliness felt lonelier. And so I answered the first bid for my attention from the first horrible person I came across. And now, today, I can see clearly what it was that he gave me. By inviting me to participate in the garbage relationship dynamic we had, he gave me something to give him, and in so doing gave me something to be approved and noticed for, and then usually followed through. He needed someone to “understand” him in the way young, naive girls understand assholes. Someone to explain his bad behavior to himself and others. Someone to overlook his moments of scathing rudeness. To laugh at his half-funny jokes. He needed someone to do that in order to function within society, to smooth over his rough edges enough for him to blend in with the other humans. With a lifetime of practice in providing this kind of “help,” I was ready. And in return I got gratitude and hours of interesting, intensely engaged conversation.  A “special place in his heart.” For someone whose prom date only asked her because two better girls said no first, this kind of one-on-one attention was literally irresistible. I could not have turned away from it if I had tried.

And this is it. This is the dynamic that I’m squaring off with now, with fifteen years and two additional unhealthy relationships under my belt since that time. I discover that if I’m being invited by someone into that private, needy space, to provide them with something that they claim Only I Can Give, then they are someone I need to stay away from. Whether it be money, listening, encouragement, my stellar skills in making calls and appointments, understanding, love, dinner, a tax write-off, an available womb, monetary support during mental breakdown, a legitimate appearance for them to use as a cloak, or just a soft place to land in between bouts of addiction, whatever my special role is to play, I’m able to see now that it’s not really the warm home it feels like. It’s a cage.

When I ended my last relationship only a few days into this year, I decided I would take all of 2018 to be purposefully single. That even in the unlikely event someone were to ask me out, I would say no. The year is on the wane now, a quick slide to Halloween, Thanksgiving, and the holidays, and I feel like I’m just getting started with what I need to figure out. My year might turn into three, or five, and I might be happier with it the longer it stretches.

And so now I’m back where I started: five years old at the picnic tables at lunch, saying hi to people who don’t say hi back, wishing I had something that any of these normal, happy people needed.

I miss companionship sometimes, and I still miss my warm, safe little roles that I played with my wrong people, while they hammered the tap into my side and turned the spigot, slowly draining me, praising me just until the barrel was empty. My lizard-brain misses that warm cocoon of desperate mutual need, because that is the only place I have ever found the kind of focused interaction I want and like so much. To my young self, that place was “love,” and I couldn’t get enough. Now, I don’t feel comfortable there anymore, but I’m out of place nearly everywhere else, as well.

What love really is, I have no idea. But at least now I can say that I know what it is not.

Back to Life: The Soul

There’s a point in any daily, real-life tragedy when the aftermath gives way to a steady, slow sameness every day. And it can be an awful, wrenching thing, in part because it’s terrible to be spat out on the shore after such a terrible shipwreck, and in part because you know, on some level, that what you’re facing is really nothing new. That millions of humans before you have faced such a thing:

a death

a job loss

the end of a relationship

And yet there is a point where you know that you must do something completely singular. You must pick yourself up and keep going, in a way that only you can do. And you want to do so with some grace, at least, and whatever dignity you have left.

But how?

I faced this question a few years ago, after the meteoric end of a ten-year marriage, and in the haze of waking up on my pallet on the floor (I had a bed, but I couldn’t stand sleeping in it, because it reminded me of him, and I couldn’t afford to buy a new one) day after day, I realized I had to get myself together. If not for me, then for the children I was trying really hard not to scar in between crying jags.

But it’s not a sad story about me. I’m fine these days. Life has a way of giving you the time and space to get well, when you finally let it. This is a story about what you can do if you’re curled up in fetal position like I was, and what things might actually work to get you standing right side up.

I have some ideas, and I invite you to try them on, and see if they fit. If they don’t, toss them in the bin for the thrift store and keep moving forward. If they do, I’m glad.

These are some things to do after something particularly terrible, like the end of a spectacularly bad relationship that started out quite good, recently enough that you still remember what it was like, but long enough ago that you know the good bits are really quite gone.

This is something like Phase 1, getting the ground back underneath your feet when Literally Everything Sucks.

1. Get an inner sanctum. For me this was Job One. I needed somewhere I felt safe. My father came over and replaced all the locks in the house, and I taped paper inside the bottom half of my kitchen window (the only window without blinds) so that I knew no one would see me while I washed the dishes. Sure, I felt like I was about two steps away from constructing a string map and muttering to myself for half the night, but it made me feel better, so I didn’t stop myself. Anything that made me feel safe was allowed: Large, bulky clothes that went to my wrists and to the floor, never answering the phone, and never leaving my car on the lower level of a parking garage.

My inner sanctum ended up being my room, with the old dining table inside of it, draped in a sheet like a child’s fort. There, I wrote in my journal, and cried, and sometimes just hid when I got home from work. I felt crazy but I let myself do it, and then I grew out of needing it.

Make a den. Tape paper to your windows. Wear floor-length dresses and don’t smile at anyone who doesn’t deserve it. Get to where you feel safe, whatever in the world that means to you right now. Don’t be afraid to look crazy. Anyone who judges for what you do you has never really been on shaky ground.

2. Get enough to eat. This is even more important than sleep at the very first, because to be honest you’re just not going to sleep well for a while. This isn’t your fault, it’s just true. So screw the sleep. I hadn’t had a decent meal in weeks, and I started with chicken nuggets. I could eat them quickly, before I lost my appetite, and they took only 90 seconds in the microwave. They were bland and I didn’t have to think about them very hard. Once I started eating these regularly, I was able to add some other food groups back in, too. You have to start somewhere. Get your toe hooked into a foothold. Think of anything that sounds good, and eat it, and have it again as many times as you want. This is not the time to worry about the food pyramid. Just get some calories in.

3. Cut out the toxic people. This is instantly helpful. It feels like it would be terrible to cut off contact with your childhood friend who has started critiquing you like a rusty hinge for not grieving correctly, not being dignified enough as you discover affair after affair after affair, saying too much and weeping too openly as you wait for the results of a test you never should have had to get. But I’m telling you, afterwards it doesn’t. Cut them off, cut them loose, and let them float on down the current and far away from you, out into the ocean of forgetfulness. You’ll find it so cool and peaceful without such people stoking the fires with their bullshit every day.

4. Do something indulgent just because you want to. This one seems like a big pile of steaming shit when you are going through a crisis without enough money at the same time, because all of the articles online suggest a bunch of stupid, faraway stuff like having a pedicure or a massage, or getting rid of all of your married clothes and buying a whole new wardrobe. But you’ll need those shitty, dull suits for going to court, and you only have $32 (or maybe $7.29) to last until payday. You’re going to be okay eventually, and you don’t have to buy much of anything. Consider things like hot baths or showers, as many as you feel like taking. Take three slow, crying showers per day. Soak in the bath, drain the lukewarm water after 20 minutes, and then fill it all back up again. No one can hear your Victorian sobs when the water’s running. I know, I have tested this. You’ll get good at it, too. Drink tea. Tea is pretty cheap. Warm liquids can feel a little bit like a hug, when you can’t get a hug. Drizzle some honey in it if you like honey. It’s better not to drink a lot of alcohol right now. But you can if you want to, because you’re grown.

Keep doing these things every day or as often as you can remember. One day after not too long you might surprise yourself and wake up feeling worthy of something, or your very first thought might not be about The Situation. It’ll come right back afterwards, of course, but if you keep telling yourself that you love yourself, eventually yourself will start to listen.

==

Next I’ll talk about getting your work back on track, tackling gross and terrible bureaucratic processes, and trying not to drive away all of your well-meaning friends and family with your righteous indignation over literally everything.

==

I’d say to keep your head up in the meantime, but maybe it’s time to put your head down on the desk again and cry some more. Tears are so healing. Eventually, they actually stop, when you’ve finally cried enough. Life can really suck, and there’s no point in pretending like it doesn’t. At the least, you’re not alone.

The Last Day

I’ve been alone now for as long as I was alone after I left Jabberwocky, and I think I’ve made a better use of the time this time around. To be fair, I have acted on instinct for both stretches of time. It could be that it just feels like a more productive set of months this time because my instinct is to do things like plant a garden, build a fence, plan a trip, and bake a cake, whereas post-Jabberwocky the instincts all led in one way or another to me curling up in fetal position for as long as possible between bitter, squinting forays out into the sunlit world.

I’ve come a long way since then, and I’ve come a long way even in the past few months since January. I’m doing some work to scrape the last of the goo of abuse from the inside of me, so that pretty soon I’ll be hollowed out, but clean and pink, ready to house something real — even if it’s just my own heart — inside the cavern of my ribcage.

As anyone knows who’s had to do it, digging back in time through a lifetime of petit and grand abuse can feel like several things:

• Prospecting for dark and glinting rocks
• This Is Your Life, but without any prizes
• Debriding a wound, daily
• Scraping burnt biscuits out of a pan the day after
• Taking a chisel to wood
• Taking a hammer to wood
• Taking a flame-thrower to wood

All in all, there are a lot of feelings and thoughts, and they bob around on the surface of the lake of consciousness in the strangest way. I’ve learned to just take whatever is on the top of the lake and process it, without worrying too much about its being out of order, or completely unexpected.

These past few days I’ve been water-ballooned by good memories. But not the kind of good memories you want to have. Instead, it has been these encapsulated, perfectly formed narrative balloons filled with the best times I had with Jabberwocky. Now, these are several years old, probably five years old at the youngest, but they are overlain with intensity that comes with having small children, not quite enough money, and enough idealism to choke a horse carry me through several hard winters.

And this is the thing about loving and then not-loving a narcissist. The person you love was a real person, or real to you at least, but that person disappears. The actual person of Jabberwocky is still here, on earth, in the flesh, but the man I met and married is as gone to the ages as Confucius or Cain. And I’m remembering him now, that man as he was, the one I loved and wanted. And because I never get to talk about that man, because I have to dislike the current Jabberwocky so strongly to keep my balance, I want to talk about him to no one in particular.

To tell them about the way he would talk me through the neurotic fits I’d have, trying to decide whether to go to graduate school, and for what. To tell them the way he would give careful gifts at every holiday, happily pay for most of our things while I finished school. The way he insisted on driving every mile of every trip, so I wouldn’t have to worry about it, and could man the radio and the map. (It was long enough ago that we still used maps.)

I want to tell someone about the way he came home from work early to meet me when i called to tell him I was pregnant. At the door, tears in his eyes, holding me in a tight embrace. Both of us slightly scared but even more happy than we were scared. The quiet arm he would throw over my shoulder at the slightest indication I needed a hug. The jaunty angle of his golf club resting on his shoulder when he’d take me out through a full eighteen holes, showing me the place he liked best for thinking.

That ephemeral man is the closest thing I’ve ever had to the kind of life I thought I’d lead, the life I trained for until the day I met him. If he hadn’t disappeared into a haze of rage, amphetamines, workaholism, and other things even more impolite to mention, I imagine we might be settling into a slightly bigger house about now, maybe with three or four kids instead of our two. He might be fussing a little about thickening at the waist as we walk hand-in-hand toward forty, waking up early again to do sit-ups in the garage, taking his coffee black, and kissing my forehead when he came in from work. Walking the dog every Saturday and sneaking a cigarette while he was out, both of us relaxing into being happy.

The narcissist’s ruse is so believable that you see it more clearly than you can see real flesh and blood, and the end of the imaginary love is so jarring because it’s unexpected, and because there is no physical evidence of the disappearance of the love to begin with. His face is still there, his arms and legs, his voice. His legal name, and the scratched up license with the out-of-date picture is still tucked into that same soft leather wallet. But the man who inhabits all of that becomes a spitting, screeching Tasmanian devil, and the only way to win is not to play, to forfeit, to abdicate, to run away without saying goodbye. The goodbye might be the worst loss: not even getting to see him off before he turned into grey smoke, screeching like Rumpelstiltskin when I finally guessed his name.

If I could have one more day with the first man, the man I thought was real at the time, I’d spend it simply, and outdoors. At the spring he loved so much, maybe, listening to his stories of a childhood spent right there. A good meal, a movie. I’d hold back from the dream-talk we’d have in the evenings about what we would build and where we would go next for the weekend. What I would write, what music he would be working on. Instead I’d just breathe through the hours as they slipped on, the scent of some kind of lovely, tender barbecued meat wafting through the yard, and I’d tell him thank you for the good things he did. For the endurance he taught me that I used to get away from him. For the job interview skills I still use to make my way in the world. For keeping the oil changed. For the washer I still use to clean my clothes.

I’ve paid for all these things by now, of course, if you add up the lawyer’s fees and the sadness and the second and third guessing of all of my choices, but how lovely to look that man I loved in the eyes one last time before they went blank and glassy. To hear him say he loved me one more time in the “good voice” before it turned dark and hateful and dripping with tar. To watch for the moment when he split from himself and walked away, years before I managed to actually get gone. To leave at that moment with everything intact.

With a full heart.

It’s weird this time around, being really single, on purpose for the first time in my life, knowing that these kinds of odd hybrid memories might be my only experience of that kind of family-building love in this life. I might be just-Mom for another few years until the darling birds fly the coop, and then I’ll be just-me again. It wouldn’t be bad, really. I am already a better mom on my own than I was even a few months ago. The kids and I relish each other’s company, and the warm feeling of being a real family is creeping back in slowly, knitting us together as we sprawl around the computer room or the living room, reading and chatting near each other, making plans for the next day, and telling jokes that make us laugh and spit our drinks, alarm the dog, and laugh even harder. Whatever happened to Jabberwocky when he vanished into thin air, these kids are real and lovely, and I have to admit in my less-grumbling days that even if they’re the last family I get to have, it will still be more than enough.