Making Amends

Five years ago when John went to rehab the first time, I wrote a piece for my own emotional release about what it was like to live in a sea of deception. Compared to what I would eventually discover, I knew virtually nothing back then. But the black undercurrents and shadowy half-truths were pulling me down.

I'm revealing this piece now as a means of contrasting the way my life is these days. For all the ugliness of the past few years, my head has reached the surface again and I can breathe.

It's called "Little Cat Feet" with apologies to poet Carl Sandburg, whose three words I borrowed from a famous poem he wrote about fog:

"My husband's rage creeps in on little cat feet.

There is no warning, then suddenly his eyes are cold, green-tinged and defiant. His masked anger slinks into seemingly innocuous conversations, and I prick my ears. I know his claws will come out, and they will draw blood.

He is not the kind of drunk who staggers, slurs his words, or pisses in his pants. I would prefer that, because then I would know what I was dealing with. He is the kind of sneaky drunk with no outward signs, except for the eyes and the anger and the claws. When I finally figure it out, it's too late. I am what's for dinner.

Alcohol turns him into a demon who hides in the shadows, and then pounces. He says the worst things he can think of. It's as though the poison inside him has to come out, so he throws it all up on me, like half-digested, putrid rat stew.

"You are the worst wife in the world. You are the most self-centered person alive. The kids and I all hate you-- we talk about it. You have no friends, do you know that? Nobody likes you. You are the reason I drink-- it's your fault. I can't stand you. You are ruining my life. I will do exactly what I want, and you can't stop me."

When I won't engage him, he follows me around, running up the stairs after me so he can puke up the rat stew.

He humiliates me in public, making thinly-veiled references to my ugliness or stupidity, and flirting with other women right in front of me. When we arrive, his eyes will narrow and become challenging, and he will give me the unmistakable signal that I am supposed to act like I don't know him. He will disappear, and I will see him caressing another woman's bare back in her evening gown, as though he is her lover. He will sit close to another woman in conversation, sometimes caressing her thigh. Other women get charismatic John, the one who could charm the lace-trimmed panties off a lesbian. I get the half-digested rat stew.

The dark sinew of his deception bothers me the most. It makes me feel sick inside. I feel like I am drowning. I would rather hear, 'I just drank an entire fifth of Grey Goose,' then the elaborate stories of how he has been sober for seven months, he is making friends in AA, he convinced over friends not to drink, he goes to AA meetings weekly. I would rather hear, 'I find myself attracted to other women, because I need to feel good about myself again,' then to uncover the text messages, e-mails, red roses sent to another woman on Valentine's Day.

I feel, for all the world, like he has put me out for the trash. My soul and my love have been murdered, and blood-soaked limbs are sticking out of the dumpster for all to see.

My husband's rage creeps in on little cat's feet."

It is a small miracle that John isn't that man anymore. The switch didn't flip the minute he stopped drinking. He was still justifying for far too long-- I am convinced that people can justify any kind of behavior they want in order to live with themselves. That is why history's greatest villains were convinced in their own minds that they were victims.

His booze-soaked, toxic brain took time to recover, and those old patterns of thinking didn't disappear overnight. All the medications he had to take for the liver transplant didn't help. But over time, I am seeing more and more of the old John. All the rage, passive-aggresiveness, blame, manipulation and lying is gone. There is peace in our home now.

Last week he gave me a written amends, something strongly suggested by AA. It isn't just a simple apology, but a careful reflection on what happened and why. In AA, alcoholics are taught that they can't just hide behind a label of alcoholism and expect all will be forgiven. They still have to take full responsibility for their alcoholic behavior, and understand they may never be forgiven. Making amends is as much for their own recovery as it is for the people they hurt.

I had been waiting for a written amends for five years, since John first went to rehab. I got one a few Thanksgivings ago, but he was drunk when he tossed it on the dining room table, and he later caused a huge angry scene. So that amends became something he would have to make another amends for.

I can laugh a little now when I think of it: hours after throwing the amends at me, I saw him frantically pawing through a drawer. "Have you been going through my stuff?" he angrily accused me, his voice rising and his eyes narrowing. "You moved everything, didn't you? You are going to be sorry, because you really wanted the thing I am looking for. You have wanted it for a long time." It suddenly dawned on me what he was talking about. "Do you mean the amends, John? You gave that to me hours ago-- don't you remember?" I wanted to add, dramatically and sarcastically, "It was everything I hoped for and more, my love. It makes up for everything, it explains everything, and now let us ride into the sunset together on your steed as white as snow."

After all my waiting, I had given up most of my expectations. When I was still enmeshed in the insanity of living with an alcoholic, I didn't know where he ended and I began. When someone asked how I was, I began talking about John and all the chaos. I was not used to focusing on myself, because I was too overwhelmed with his problems. I had recurring dreams that I was lying in a hospital bed, hooked up to IV's on both sides. He was a vampire and I was sucked dry.

Like Elliot separating from ET, I had to learn to detach and emotionally distance myself from John, in order to retain any semblance of sanity. I had to learn to release my expectations of what love and a family were supposed to be like. It was actually a healthier way of loving someone who didn't love himself. I had to learn that fear is the opposite of love, and that all my fears for him were not helping either of us.

So when he finally gave me the written amends I had been waiting for all those years, it was a little anticlimactic. I wasn't full of anxious anticipation, expecting one confessional letter to heal many years of grievous wounds. I had been healing little by little, all along.

"I want you to know how hurt I am over what I did," he wrote. "The shame I feel is unbearable. I can't believe I did things to hurt the nicest, most sincere and loving person I have ever met." He said he will making a living amends to me for the rest of his life, and that he knows he is the luckiest man on earth that his family stuck by him.

"I love you with all my heart and I will be honest and forthright and try to live my remaining days with integrity, honesty and love," he wrote.

A long time ago, those words would have moved me to tears and filled me with unrealistic hope. The little cat's feet of my husband's creeping rage is gone, but I am not the same woman I was. I am many things at once: damaged, traumatized, skeptical. I can still feel every throbbing scar on my heart. But I am also healthier, wiser and stronger in many ways.

Today, this woman accepts a long-awaited amends gratefully but cautiously and says inwardly, "We shall see. We shall see."

Insta-Jerk

My forte was focusing on the funny side, even when life was difficult, enormously annoying or sad. Laughing at myself made everything bearable. I honestly didn't think there was anything I couldn't make into a joke. I would tell stories about things that happened to me, and people would laugh until they cried, all the while shaking their heads and secretly being very glad they weren't me.

Then an avalanche hit me and sorely tested my approach to life. For two years, I couldn't find much to laugh about, and that is when most people realized they actually didn't want to hang out with me anymore.

In fits and starts, I am beginning to focus on the funny again. And one of the biggest sources of amusement for me is the world of drunks. Fearlessly flying right into the face of demons is very healing for me at the moment.

John and I routinely spend Saturday nights at AA speaker meetings now, where I am the perfect audience member. I become as immersed in the re-telling of their lives as I do in a good movie: I laugh, I cry, it becomes a part of me. Afterwards, I am usually the one who makes a fool of myself trying to talk to the speaker, with tears copiously streaming out of my eyes as they back slowly away from me. "Oh my GOD," I wail, "You lost custody of your daughter? But that is so UNFAIR! How do you stand it? How can you go on?"

Mostly though, the speakers are hilarious. I have come to realize that most recovering alcoholics could make a career out of stand-up comedy. Last Saturday night, in an attempt to re-cap the true stories of his drinking days, a former boozer made a list of the Top 20 ways to tell you are an alcoholic. Because we are old, we could only remember a few of them:

1. You piss on the head of the captain of the football team.

2. You trade your girlfriend for booze.

3. You are given a choice between sex and alcohol, and you choose alcohol.

4. You find yourself performing a field sobriety test in a church parking lot after side-swiping a deacon's car one Sunday morning while attempting to retrieve your car from the place you parked it the night before. The whole congregation is watching.

5. Your home gets 10 miles to the gallon.

6. You wake up in an easy chair in the house of a complete stranger, and you hear the guy's six-year-old son ask, "Daddy, who is that man?"

John was a different kind of alcoholic than most. He never staggered, vomited, slurred his words, or missed a day of work because of drinking. Instead, his personality changed. He turned almost instantly into a jerk, like one of those miniature plastic toys that become life-sized when immersed in water. He was the Insta-Jerk: just add alcohol.

But most people had no idea he was drunk. He was highly functioning, just like his alcoholic father before him, almost right up to the day he quite suddenly lost his liver. Seldom do John and I ever hear a story from an alcoholic that echoes our experience, which just proves there are all kinds of drunks.

After the AA speaker's meeting, John and I added a few more to that Top 20 list from our own experience. It is still in progress, so it's currently only a Top 10, but here goes:

7. You leave your wife at a neighborhood party and walk home, but halfway there you decide to take a nap on the hood of a stranger's parked car.

8. You call your early-rising 7-year-old daughter from work to ask her to please hide empty booze bottles from Mommy.

9. You discover you can climb on a toilet, find a six-inch space between the ceiling and the top of a cabinet, lay down a towel to muffle the sound of a bottle, and hastily take "maintenance" swigs of vodka all day long with no one the wiser.

10. When your wife cleans up the garage and finds hundreds of wine corks in a hidden corner, you deny drinking in secret and explain earnestly you had been saving them up for many years in order to make a wreath. Yes, a wreath-- because you are actually a male version of Martha Stewart.

Now that the liver transplant is behind us and John's brain is recovering more every day, we can even laugh about those times pre-transplant when his brain swelled from the ammonia in his system. He may have been near death, but now they have become funny memories on par with the time he stole his parent's car as a teenager or our 4-year-old son solemnly announced that his philosophy of life was "Milk." Maybe it's sick, but this is our reality now. We just have to go with it.

The first time he went into a brain coma, I followed the ambulance to the ER and arrived in time to see a technician dutifully recording his answers to all their questions. "Excuse me," I asked. "Don't you realize he is saying "yes" to EVERYTHING? Watch this."

"John," I said tenderly, "Do you know who I am?"

"Yes," he answered crisply and carefully, with eyes that clearly conveyed nobody was home.

"What is my name?" I asked.

"Tulalip," he said emphatically.

I was an Indian casino.

At that, the staff finally stopped writing down his answers.

The next time it happened, I woke him to take him to a doctor's appointment, but realized within several seconds he did not know who he was. It took me forever to put on his clothes, because he kept taking them off again, batting my hands away when I tried to slide a sweatshirt over his head. I briefly wondered if I would have to take him to the hospital naked. I finally got him sitting down, only to turn my back and find he was wandering off again, a dazed look his eyes. I fed him his crucial liquid medicine, and with a funny face he spit it out like a one-year-old. Yet he was an affable lunatic: every question I asked was answered with an amiable, "SURE!"

At one point, I caught him gently cradling a shell-shaped soap dish from the kids' bathroom, holding it furtively close to his chest like the shell soaps were precious treasure he was on a secret mission to protect. I returned it, and the next thing I knew he was cradling it again. I found those shell-shaped soaps in the far reaches of the house the next day, as though he were laying a Hansel and Gretel trail to retrieve his lost mind.

Getting him into the car to the hospital proved impossible. John could not remember how to sit on the car seat, and instead perched on the running board. I was not strong enough to haul him up, and finally gave up to call his business partner to help me. That was a mistake, because in his frustration the guy kept yelling irritably at me and the dog. I wanted to say, "Do you have any IDEA of what I have already been through this morning, and how surreal it is to take care of a man who stomped on my heart? And you think it is appropriate to YELL at me?" Sadie, easily the most enthusiastic mutt on the face of the earth, would not stop jumping up and licking Dan's face while we were trying to maneuver John into the car. I thought Dan would blow a gasket when Sadie jumped in the backseat of his car, lay down next to John's awkwardly hunched body, and refused to move. "Where are we going today?" her goofy, tongue-lolling face seemed to say. "Dog Park?" In spite of myself, I found my body shaking with laughter, as Dan seethed beside me. It was like an episode of Lucy, gone horribly horribly wrong.

I followed Dan and John to the hospital. Probably to punish me because I had failed at getting John into my car alone, Dan huffily insisted that HE would drive him, and I was clearly not invited to ride along. Banished to my own empty car, midway I suddenly realized I had had the prescense of mind in all the melee to shove John's ID into my pocket, but that I hadn't remembered to give it to Dan when plans changed and he became the driver. I called Dan to warn him he would have to wait for me a second to check John in, and I had to listen to a barrage of abuse from Dan about how unbelievably stupid I was. Sean called, and I tearfully vented on the insane events of the morning. "I am going to call Dan up and tell him not to talk to my Mom that way," Sean said protectively, all blow and bluster.

Nurses told me John would be out of it for a long time because of the astronomically high amounts of ammonia in his bloodstream, so after spending all day in the hospital with someone who didn't even recognize me, I forced myself to get a good night's rest and walk Sadie before heading for the hospital the next day. When I walked in his room, John looked at me with a blank expression and asked slowly, "Who are you?" I hung my head in disappointment. It was going to be another long day.

"Could your name possibly be...Tulalip?" he asked with a gleam in his eye. That's when I knew his brain had returned from its vacation.

The night John got the liver transplant, I drove him to the hospital and stayed up with him all night, waiting in a quiet pre-op room until the surgery. We were forced to wait for hours, and I didn't know whether he would survive the surgery, so finally I pushed aside all my anger about the terrible things he had done to me in his addiction, and crawled next to him on the gurney. I spooned him, thought about the good memories we had shared over the years, and asked quietly," Do you think we should plan your funeral?"

"WHAT?" he bellowed. I was perfectly serious, and it didn't seem to me an odd question to ask on the brink of a very serious operation. I am a bottom-line girl, and I already knew that if John died, his funeral would be tricky business. Attendees would be of decidedly mixed camps: 1. His alcoholic friends 2. People who had no clue of the deep wounds his deception had caused (including his children) 3. My friends, who had lived through all the agony with me and might well be celebrating his demise. How on earth would a single service satisfy them all?

So, pressed together there in the half-light of a cavernous, sterile hospital room at 3 a.m., two people who had already been through hell together talked about a funeral. He wanted Sting's "Amazing Grace." I wanted Johnny Cash's "Burning Ring of Fire." He worried no one would come. I had an answer for that one that made him groan and me collapse into a paroxysm of giggles. After years of walking on eggshells because of the insane disease of alcoholism, it felt so good to release, even if the humor was as black as it gets.

Now, we sit in restaurants and recall what happened in detail, and laugh hard about the absurdity of it all. "Oh my God, when you carried the shell around," I gasp, barely able to breathe. "Tulalip," he blurts out in mirth, his eyes streaming with tears. People around us have no idea that we are reliving the dark comedy of our lives, trying to make sense of it.

And trying desperately to heal.

A Healing Journey

For the past two years, I've been trying to heal from the shock of betrayal. At first, my preferred method of healing was to lie in bed and sob loudly, to the alarm of the family dog. When I couldn't sleep, I relentlessly called people from the East Coast in the wee hours of the morning, to hash over the details yet again. Thank God for the patience of old friends on a different time zone.

My next step was to visit some of those friends, many of whom I hadn't seen in two decades or more. I think I was trying to return to my roots, to a time when I was extremely happy. I wanted to try to piece together my life, to figure out what had gone wrong. "Wasn't I happy?" I wanted to ask them. "It wasn't an illusion, was it? Did I see to be happy?'

Those visits were a revelation. When we are in exquisite pain, we always think we are the only ones. At a 35th high school reunion, I discovered an entire room full of pain. "My husband was a sociopath," an old friend told me. "He went to prison for armed robbery. I had to move back in with my mother, raise my kids alone, and go back to school so I could support myself." This was not a bitter woman. She laughed in the face of adversity, and had not one iota of resentment etched on her own beautiful face. She made it seem easy. I wondered what was wrong with me, that I felt the betrayal to my bones and could not seem to move past it. It made me feel sick, like a cancer that had attached itself to my body and was slowly eating away every vital part of me.

My best friend in the 8th grade looked like she was still 19. The years had not left a trace on her face. Yet she told me that when her son was three months old, her husband announced," I've decided I don't want to have a family anymore." She re-grouped and married again years later, only to eventually discover that her second husband was an alcoholic. Steeped in sadness, she is divorcing again. In the meantime, her father decided at 59 that he was in love with a woman only one year older than his 22-year-old daughter. Devastated, her mother became an alcoholic. She went 17 years without speaking to the man who betrayed her, and only now is beginning to communicate with him again.

On and on it went. To me, it felt like the pain my friends had endured could fill the entire universe. Their bravery astounded me. It also cowed me. How could my experience compare with an amazing friend who discovered that her husband was a pedophile, while also coping with a son who was profoundly handicapped? She struggled every day with how to financially make ends meet, and how to manage alone with a son who was sometimes violent. Her troubles made mine pale. How dare I feel sorry for myself, when there were women everywhere handling problems far worse than mine? Thank God for women, who seem genetically engineered to balance the weight of the world on their slight shoulders. One day, I am convinced, women will rule the world.

Yesterday my journey led me to a Seattle "energy healer" and intuitive who had helped transform a friend's broken life so thoroughly that I just had to see if I could start attracting good things to my own life. My troubles have made me much more spiritual, and ignited a seeking spirit. My daughter's brain aneurysm was the final straw-- that's when I began to feel that God was "piling on."

Beth uses, among other tools, a powerful thousand-year-old natural healing system called Reiki. It is even being used in some forward-thinking hospitals now to treat cancer patients. Scientists have proven that all living things possess a bio-magnetic energy field created by electrical currents from our cells, so it's not as far-fetched as it seems to use energy to heal. Beth went much further with it, accessing her own inner "knowing" and intuition to offer advice while holding her hands inches above my stretched-out body. If I have this right, basically she was "reading" my universal life force and interpreting what she felt from my energy centers. Because I believe I have been suffering from post-traumatic stress from all that has happened, I decided to just go with the flow and not over-think the process. I felt open to anything that would help me relax, see things differently, and ultimately heal.

The entire session, I felt a sense of peace I had not felt in a long time. I almost felt that I was in a dream, or hypnotized, or on a different level of consciousness. Afterward, I felt happy and free from the debilitating anxiety and stress that had drained me. I felt certain that everything would be OK in the end, no matter what.

At first, Beth kept washing her hands over and over as I lay on the massage table, because she said the energy I had used to nurture and take care of everyone else over the years was showing up as toxins I needed to shed. "Yucky," she announced. She could actually feel it on her skin. Now, she said, it was time for me to take care of myself, to fully unfold into the person I was meant to be. When I told her that I was most concerned about my son, she said I needed to release the worry I had for him, and realize that he was doing very hard work on his own life journey right now, and that I was not helping him by being so fearful. "He is a very powerful light worker," she told me, and I felt warm tears of relief coursing down my cheeks, even though I had no clue what a lightworker was. She told me I had been afraid to cut the cords of fear between the two of us, because I felt it was all that bound us and without those cords, I would lose him. She said he feels so guilty for the way he has treated me at times, and that he loves me very much, but that it has become his habit to dump all his angst on me.

As she held her hands above different parts of me, Beth told me the deep betrayal I had experienced with my husband was akin to rape. I began sobbing. To me, I said, it felt closer to a murder-- like my soul had been murdered, or my innocence. But she went on to say that she was absolutely amazed the energy radiating from me told her I was not holding on to bitterness. I was not playing the role of victim, but had been able to somehow let the resentment go. She told me I was very strong, that my heart was very strong, and it was a message she gave me over and over during the session. I knew instinctively that what she was saying was true at that very moment, and I knew it was because I had emptied my heart so thoroughly of grief and refused to hold it in, and that the love of my friends and family had buoyed me. Earlier, she had shown me a "Queen of Wands" card from a special deck and told me the card represented me-- a lively, inventive person, a loyal friend and lover, an optimistic person who accepted life's ups and downs and used creative, feminine energy to find solutions. That ability, she implied, would save me.

Beth assured me I was never going to be hurt by a man again, because I was not the same person I was. She told me I had been grievously hurt by both my husband and my son partly because I didn't understand that there should be boundaries around each of us. I had opened my whole heart and let the people I loved all the way in. I had been so vulnerable, and I needed to learn to open my heart without letting people encroach on those boundaries. As she talked, my forehead began aching, and Beth said it was "the third eye" we all have that had begun pounding because I was regretful that I hadn't known what my husband was doing behind my back. But she said I could trust that he would never hurt me again. He was working hard on himself now, she said. He was actually a man of integrity who became vulnerable to evil when he started drinking so heavily, because anytime people become consumed by drug or alcohol addiction, they open themselves up to other entities, she said. In essence, he was possessed for a time by the devil, and it wasn't his true self who did those things. That sounded right to me. Beth told me there were angels all around me trying to give me messages, and that I needed to be open to those messages and trust my intuition.

But she also told me I needed to be grounded, and that worry, disappointment and fear of failure threatened to keep me from the person I was meant to be. "Imagine a cord of light running through your body and leading to the core of the earth, holding you there," she told me. I imagined it with all my might. Then she old me to imagine light pouring down from the heavens, from the center of the galaxy, filling me. I pictured it, imagining that's how the messages would arrive.

I know this all sounds so strange, but it didn't seem weird at all. It seemed exactly right. When I left, I felt full almost to bursting. Beth made me feel that I could handle anything that happened, and that God and his angels would guide me. I did resist inwardly a bit when she told me that everything had happened as it was meant to, and that my mantra should be, "Everything is perfect. Everything happened perfectly." I knew what she meant-- that events forged our family through fire, to make us strong. Maybe in the end, that will turn out to be true.

I will never be able to look at the murder of my soul and my innocence as the perfect plan. But as I continue my journey, I will try to implement a new way of thinking: that I can't continue to re-create the past in the present. I need to speak of appreciation, and be grateful for the good things in my life. I need to learn to hold on to the FEELING of what I desire for myself and my loved ones, and realize that something even greater than I can ever imagine might be on its way.

Wild Woman

I got a peek back at my old self the other day. I miss that woman.

A dear friend was over for lunch, and began regaling mutual friends with stories of me in my past life. She used to go on trips with John's company as a client, so she had a birds-eye-view of what I was like as a corporate wife. My ears perked up, because I never knew what clients thought of me. I never put on airs or tried to be sophisticated, and I had no idea if Honest Diana was good enough for Corporate America.

"My favorite memory is when we were all eating dinner together, and they served a Caesar salad with anchovies," she said. "You suddenly announced, 'Oh my God, there's a vagina in my salad.' You picked it up and dangled it from your fork, and it looked exactly like a vagina. Everybody cracked up."

Both my friend and another woman who frequented those trips said everyone loved me, because I was so authentic and refreshing, and that I furthered John's career just by being myself. I have no idea if that is really true or if they were just blowing smoke up my keister-- I KNOW most corporate wives do a far better job than I ever did. But the conversation made me miss the Carefree, Smart-Ass me. So did a card my best friend and old college roommate just gave me for my birthday. It showed a tall woman on the street dressed in an outlandish outfit, and it bore a favorite Oscar Wilde quote,"Be yourself-- everybody else is taken." Inside, Carole had written, "I bought this card because the girl on the front reminded me of you--daring and bold while others watched in awe. You need to get that feeling back, because it is the real you."

No one would ever call me daring and bold these days, or think I was funny or refreshing or full of chutzpah. I am the turd in the swimming pool these days, the Downer who is a visual reminder that life can change in a heartbeat.

I know this because one of my best friends recently insinuated that I am a tad too needy lately. It's probably true, although I resist that label with everything that is in me, because it's not my nature. In the past, I was always the one who was there for other people. I hate wearing my pain like bad perfume. It is a scent that can clear a room.

I know it because my own father told me the last two times we spoke that I am acting like a victim. I have not told my parents everything that happened, and I have only burdened them with my blinding pain several times over the past two awful years. It hurts, because there is something inside of me that wants my Daddy to say to John, "How dare you? Don't you ever treat my little girl like that again," instead of giving me the clear message I need to buck up. I know my dad probably said it because men are notorious for being unduly frustrated by problems they can't fix. But we all yearn for our parents to be a soft place to land, for them to be more nurturing than we are to ourselves.

Such psychological labels are confusing, because when it comes right down to it, I AM a victim. Would he say that to someone who had been raped or nearly murdered? Because I have learned there is more than one way to rape or murder someone. You can rape someone's psyche. You can murder her soul.

Believe me, I get the general idea. It is annoying to be around someone who acts like a victim. We all love people who endure horrific pain and keep it all inside. It's so much easier for the rest of us, and it doesn't solve anything to wallow in self-pity anyway. It is far healthier to be a survivor, and that is how I think of myself. I do not want The Tragedy to be my life's story. Eventually I will stand tall and handle this with grit, style and resilience. I will reach out and help other people through their own version of Hell, and I will know whereof I speak.

But this is the way I see it: I loved John with my entire being. I handed him my heart with the innocence and pure enthusiasm of a puppy. All I ever wanted was to have an intact, healthy family, and because I cared the most, in the end I was left with the least power. For 30 years I thought I was living the dream, and when the duplicity was finally revealed it took my breath away. It will take as long as it takes to get over it and start breathing again.

In the meantime, I look forward to meeting that bold, plucky, wild woman in the mirror again one day. I can't wait to hear what she has to say.

Birthday musings

Fifty-three years ago today I was born. My mother was 24, the same age my son is now. She already had a one-year-old, and would give birth to five more. On this day, I am filled to the brim with love and worry intertwined for my own children, the same way I know my mother has always been for us. The love and worry are like two strands from the same skein of yarn, and I wonder if a child has ever been knitted without that twin strand.

I was an amiable baby. My mother put me in a playpen to get things done-- she was always starting big projects she seldom finished-- leading my Southern grandma to wryly drawl," Honey, if that child didn't cry once in a while, she would never get picked up."

My daughter and I were alike as toddlers. We were both the type of children who could find a bobby pin on the floor, wrap it with toilet paper, call it a baby doll and croon to it for hours. Maybe it's because we were both second children, but we didn't need to be constantly entertained. We could do that just fine for ourselves, and it made us grow into independent souls.

I know my mother had the same heart-felt dreams for me as I do now for my own children, and that she made the same kind of mistakes. She was just a regular person who did the best she could, the same way I did. We are all just picking our way through this life, thinking we are doing the right thing but looking back with clarity and seeing that sometimes we didn't.

As a mother, I want my children to remember the sterling moments: that I played freeze-tag with them even when I was bone-tired and just wanted to sit zombie-like on the couch, that I read to them cuddling in bed every night until they were teenagers and begged me to stop, that we sat down to a home-cooked meal almost every night and never ate in front of the TV, that I quit my job at a newspaper because I couldn't bear to leave them anymore.

I want my daughter to remember that when she didn't want to get out of bed in the morning for school, I'd lie next to her in bed and rub her back and run my fingers through her hair and tell her all the things I wished we could do that day: make mud-pies, finger-paint, play dress-up all day long. I want her to remember that it was enough just to imagine all that, and then she could go to school all day with a song in her heart.

I want my son to remember that when we were biking home in the pouring rain when he was four and he started to cry, all I had to say was, "Sean, it's an ADVENTURE," and he brightened right up. Forever after, whenever anything bad happened, he would remind me, "Mom, it's an ADVENTURE!" and the bad times just became good stories to tell later.

I want them both to remember our house was always the Kool-Aid house, the house the kids flocked to from the time they were little until well in their teens. We didn't really serve Kool-Aid, but I was the mom who didn't mind the mess of Play-Doh, paints and homemade forts. I was the mom who joined right in with the games, because it made me re-live my own childhood, and I didn't want to miss a second of my kids' growing-up.

Even when we were on an outing, as soon as neighbor kids saw our car turn into the driveway, they would come running like lemmings. Once, I was alone in the house napping and opened my eyes to see the close-up faces of the little children next door peering at me. Another time, I was surprised coming out of the shower, dripping wet and naked, by a six-year-old neighbor.

But I also know that my children remember the wrong things, just like I did. They seem to recall all the times when I lost my temper and screamed like a banshee ("It was YOU!" is a well-worn private joke in our house), rather than the times when I had the patience of a saint. They liked to compare me to other mothers, such as the time when my small daughter instructed me, "You know, Mommy, when Miss Beth makes cookies, she puts sugar, flour and milk in a big bowl instead of just getting a tube out of the refrigerator." There is no one who can tap into a mother's insecurities like her child.

For some ridiculous reason, one of the abiding memories of my own childhood is when a passel of us were folding laundry on the front porch, and my mother wrinkled her nose and inquired, "Who just passed gas?" Another is when she chased me around the kitchen with a broom for a teenaged misdeed. I am sure she wishes I would have preserved better memories.

I do recall my mother always told me I was the kind of person who had the talent to do anything I set my mind to. She always bragged about me to her friends, as she did about all her other children.

I know that when she suspected I was marrying the wrong man, she spent a lot of sleepless nights. Your children are your children, no matter how old they are, and it's true that as the child grows, so do the size of the troubles.

On this day I worry about the tiny aneurysm that is lodged in the head of my beautiful girl. I worry that my son is in an unhealthy relationship that will damage his already fragile psyche beyond repair. My worries were birthed with my children. Like my mother before me, all I can do is couple those worries with love, cover them with prayers that outnumber the stars, and hope that it all doesn't come unraveled.

The Italian Kitchen

Grieving is messy. In the kitchen of life, grieving creates counters over-flowing with crusty pots and baked-on grease. Spaghetti sauce has somehow spread in a massive stain on the ceiling, and spilled flour is everywhere. Every cupboard is yawning open, every drawer is burgeoning with junk. It looks like a grenade has exploded, because it has. I have discovered that I am the Italian Cook of grieving.

But in all my intense, messy mourning of a life suddenly gone topsy-turvy, I have noticed that strict rules of society still apply. Dimly, through the haze of my depression, I have worked out the following:

1. It is not O.K. to grieve for too long. A friend once told me that society in general gives you about a week to grieve for a dog, and a year to cry over a lost child. I have obviously already exceeded the limit for my particular problem, which is not easily explained and is not even on the official Richter scale of things to cry about.

2. If you are going to have a crisis, it is necessary that you make it one people can readily relate to. Only celebrities are allowed the luxury of Super Weird Problems-- everyone else has to stick to normal issues. Special exceptions are made for people married to celebrities. If your name is not legally attached to Cher, Tiger Woods, Charlie Sheen, or almost any politician, you must stick to garden-variety problems. Otherwise, you can expect only a brief period of attention while people assemble the facts for gossip-spreading purposes only. Attention is not the same as sympathy, and you must be aware of this.

3. You are only allocated one problem at a time. I learned this the hard way when I discovered my daughter had a brain aneurysm at the same time my marriage was imploding because of alcoholism and my husband had just had a liver transplant. A friend called my daughter a hypochondriac in the middle of a crowded store, and shouted at me. The clear implication was that I was taking up too much of people's valuable time over a second incident. (If the truth be told, I actually had several more problems at the time, which I realize now was completely unacceptable. It's also possible that I was mistaken, and it was only because there were two MEDICAL issues at a time that I was being reprimanded.) Because I am a rule-follower, I quickly apologized for exceeding my allocation of sympathy. I did not realize there is a finite amount of sympathy to go around, and one cannot be greedy.

4. If you are going to cry on your friends' shoulders, then at least have the decency to do what they are POSITIVE they would do in your situation. They HAVE walked in your shoes, they would NOT be the idiot you are being, they certainly would have seen the crisis coming long before you did. If you are obstinate enough to make your own decisions, then you will just have to lie in the bed you made without any help from them.

5. Do not expect that people you helped in the past will help you now. You silly person you! Prepare to be stunned at the people who will cut you off the minute they find out you have the exact same problem. They do not want to be reminded of it, or be lumped in with you now that their problems are behind them. You are really stupid not to understand this.

6. Do not expect to be invited to the same events you were invited to in the past. Haven't you heard the expression, "There is no crying in baseball?" Well, that same rule applies to almost every other occasion. People want to be happy. Do you think they want to listen to you sniffle while they are trying to have fun? Do you think they want to see your sad face while they are partying it up? It's a downer, man! Come on, show some common sense.

There are many other rules I haven't figured out quite yet, which just shows my complete idiocy when it comes to grieving and social intercourse. Luckily, I have also been surrounded by people who dared to break the rules.

I have been invited to family gatherings by dear friends who knew I was lonely and broken-hearted, even though I didn't belong there. Friends who are excellent hikers or yoga enthusiasts urged me to tag along on numerous occasions, even though it meant they didn't get the work-out they needed that day. I woke people up in the middle of the night because I had time zones wrong, and they didn't yell at me. People dropped everything to talk to me, pray with me and dry my tears, even though I had exceeded my limit of sympathy a thousand times over. And last Christmas, a group of friends asked my daughter to pick up tons of thoughtful little gifts they had gathered for me, because they were worried I would find no presents at all under the tree.

Some of the best "givers" during this time were people who had been through the toughest of times themselves. They had logged hours in their own Italian Kitchen of grief. They had dirtied countless pots with the pain of cancer, the death of a child, the murder of a relative, loved ones' addictions, divorce, and a spouse's betrayal.

Grieving is messy, but so is friendship. I am so grateful for the people in my life who broke the rules in order to give me grace when I was too needy. I fervently hope that through my own meandering journey of grief, I have gathered enough strength and wisdom to lift others up and break the rules, too.

Where's the Beef?

Last night I quickly threw together a dinner I had already prepped when I took the same one to Sean the other day. I seared the flank steak, put it aside, tossed fresh veggies in the same pan, poured in a beef sauce I had waiting in a baggie, and added a few handfuls of fresh edamame at the end.

We ate outside facing the lake on a clear night with a slice of moon. Halfway through the meal, John ventured tentatively, "You know, I think something's missing. A spice, maybe?" I could tell he was afraid of pissing me off, because I have a firm rule that nobody complains about dinner if they haven't made it.

"Yeah, this dish is really bland," I said, bitterly disparaging the magazine I tore the recipe from.

A few minutes later John began clearing up, and informed me he had put the extra beef in the fridge and that it might even make a second meal for tomorrow. Normally I only half-listen to him, because frankly he tends to mumble a lot, but this time my ears perked up.

"Extra beef?" I asked. "There was no extra beef at all-- I gave too much to Sean, so I barely had enough."

It was then I realized that the "something missing" in the meal was the beef. I had made a beef stir fry without the main ingredient. And neither of us could manage to identify that missing item throughout the entire meal.

We have been a couple of dummies lately.

The morning I took the dinners to Sean, I stopped at Starbucks for my chai tea fix. I got into a rousing conversation with the well-dressed woman next to me about men. I told her I was taking dinners to a son who had not felt it necessary to communicate with me more than once since he had moved, and that I thought he could probably go a year without noticing we hadn't talked. We chatted about the differing communication styles of girls and boys, and then moved on to the mystery about why men rule the world. She was a female CEO, and she noted that phenomenon was going to change soon, because more girls are going to college, they are getting their acts together faster after graduation, and the trend is toward more female CEO's.

She was so intelligent and engaging that the conversation really energized me. We gabbed so much that the Starbucks barista assumed we were together. I was in a hurry to get on the road, though, so I paid for my banana and drink and walked out the door. It was only as I was getting in my car and taking a sip from my cup that I realized I had grabbed her coffee and not my chai. It was a particularly stupid mistake, becauseI should have gone to the pick-up counter to wait for my chai. Everyone was gracious about it, but my cheeks were burning.

"Why am I so stupid?" was the refrain in my head.

That same week, John made me feel better about myself when he did something stupid of his own. Our boat wouldn't start one day, so we had to jump the battery off the boat lift. The next day, it wouldn't start again, but this time the jump didn't work. We waited a few days for the mobile marine repairman to come. But when he did, I spent more time chatting to him in the kitchen than it took to fix the boat.

As he and John re-emerged from the boat just a few seconds later, I asked, "Wow, how did you fix it so fast? What turned out to be wrong?"

John sheepishly hung his head. "Um... the boat wasn't in neutral," he confessed.

In analyzing all this, I have to conclude that it feels so good to feel healthy enough to tell embarrassing stories again, instead of playing The Tragic Figure. I have always enjoyed laughing at myself. I hated the fact that people didn't feel comfortable enough anymore to tell me the normal dross of their lives, and that The Horror was my only topic of conversation. I felt so excluded from the ebb and flow of life, so freakish. I was no longer a person anyone could relate to. My problems were too strange and unusual.

I used to be the woman known for her idiotic stories: the time I locked myself out of the house naked and had to hop to the front door in broad daylight wrapped in a sleeping bag from the garage. The time I only realized that I had bypassed the check-out counter in the grocery store when I was piling un-bagged items into the back of my car. The sunny afternoon I was hosting a pool party for John's office when the sales manager's wife asked in hushed tones, "Um... is that white string supposed to be hanging from your bathing suit?" Or the memorable morning when I went for a swim after my jog, and whipped off my shirt in full view of everyone at the pool before I realized I had forgotten to put a bathing suit underneath.

Now I know how Bill Clinton felt. He will never get rid of the stench of having sex with "That Woman," and it overshadows anything else he ever did or will do in his life.

I refuse to let The Horror define me. I refuse to let it be our family's legacy.

Maybe that, among other things, is why I stayed. I want to give John a chance to rebuild his character, so our house has a new foundation. I want to be part of the restoration and the redemption, so the last 30 years won't be in vain.

Yes, I still feel sick inside at everything that has happened, but hope still blooms in me.

I am holding out for the "new normal," when we can again laugh about silly, inconsequential things. I am hoping the restoration has already begun.

Introduction

I used to think I had a normal life. Now I know that if you think someone is normal, you don't know them well enough yet.

I'm writing this because I need to process all that has happened to me in the past two years. I used to be a writer, so that is how I make sense of things. I was going to call this blog "Ignoring the Obvious," because I can't write about what I now call The Horror-- it would hurt my children too much. I will have to be satisfied with writing about how I'm feeling, and all the other things in my life. Maybe eventually I will find peace even in the partial purging of my soul.

I can say that for a year I was separated from my husband of 26 years partly because his addiction to alcohol was ruining our lives. He finally stopped drinking when he developed acute liver failure, and he had a liver transplant in March. Amazingly, we are back together again, but it's a different kind of marriage. I always say I feel like a teacup that has been dropped on the ground-- I've been glued back together, but every messy, glue-globbed crack and chip is clearly visible. I feel so broken. Life is moving along again, but I know I will never be the same. I will never be that innocent again.

For at least 6 years, family problems have been the laser-like focus of my life. I need to find Diana again. This blog is a step toward doing that.