Entanglement

I stayed. I stayed despite the rampant rumors floating around about your sexual preferences.  I stayed. I stayed and was complicit many times, in making sure your breath didn’t smell like alcohol when the bottle to throttle rule had been bent and broken.  I stayed. I stayed when you didn’t come home, but instead got drunk with your friend and totaled a brand new sports car when I was home pregnant with our child.  I stayed. I stayed after I found lipstick on your uniform and on your underwear and you tried to gaslight me about it.  I stayed. I stayed when our newborn was barely five weeks old and you admitted having an affair. You boasted to my mom and dad that I would never leave you. And I didn’t.  I stayed.  I stayed while you and your mom fat shamed me instead of supporting me during the worst depression of my life.  I stayed. I stayed after, on vacation, you called me an ugly, fat, clueless, rock star want-to-be in front of our children.  I s...

Someone who I admire greatly said:  “I told you about the darkness not because I wanted your pity, but because I needed it to exist somewhere outside of me.”  My soul claimed those words and embraced them like a lover.  Writing gave me, gives me, a place to put my own darknesses. It doesn’t matter to me if anyone ever reads me. This I do for me. For my sanity.  Maybe someday, someone will claim my words and hold them close because they, too, have cracked themselves open to evict the demons that reside inside.  It is a brave thing to leash the thing you’ve sat in silence with for so long. Years and years of sadness, trauma, fear and heartache, layer after layer, I had to peel my own darkness off like a second skin. I mourned, I grieved through the pain. And I wrote.   I’m still picking at the pieces that remain.

My ex-husband and I mutually decided before getting married that because we were both unsupervised hellions growing up, I would quit my job as a flight attendant to be a stay at home mom whenever we had kids. It was a non negotiable as far as I was concerned, I wanted to raise my kids—ME, not a grandparent, not a daycare, babysitter, or to my initial disappointment, their own father because even as our first daughter was born, his drinking behavior was still that of an immature, irresponsible frat house boy. He was not a man.  Still isn’t.  I asked him once, when was he going to grow up and start acting like a responsible adult and he said this, verbatim, I’ll never forget it—MY grown up responsibility is to go out and make the money. And I think our marriage only lasted as long as it did because his job as a pilot meant he was gone a lot. I don’t think I could have survived him being home every single day. He might not have survived it, he gave me homicidal rage in those earl...

I will never understand how people, even family—especially family—will think the worst of you based solely off of another’s word, like it’s infallible gospel. That word, that LIE left unchecked, festered over time. Silence from all sides created a reeking, infected wound and while trying to heal it, they poured salt into it, prolonging the suffering.  Actions will always speak louder than words. Always. So, while the world might see a successful, church going, doting, family centric, charismatic person—I see you. Your god sees you. I know enough about you by your actions, by how you treated me and my children, and my heart has forced you out over the years like a splinter.  We are strangers, all of us.  But I will be telling my story, unabridged, so there will be no misunderstanding about what happened to me and what led to the decisions I had to make for my survival—to do what was best at the time for my two young daughters, when not one person offered us a helping hand....

In my author bio, I say that I’m an expert in failed relationships and how to pick the wrong guy, which I still maintain, is true. I included this little factoid because my first published work detailed a three year relationship in my early 20’s where I was the victim of domestic violence. TLDR—read the book.  I thought I would be giving more attention to my failed relationships, to help women recognize the red flags associated with toxic unions. Truth is, I couldn’t be bothered. Not until I healed the emotional scars left in the wake of two failed marriages and a situationship that had me trapped in a living hell for years.  My road to healing included a LOT of writing, some of my best work, still archived. One manuscript I’ve been staring at for almost ten years. I don’t know if it will ever see the light of day. It’s a mere twenty pages and only 2631 words. It’s my own personal, brutal truth—my worst nightmares cast into light and pulling it out of me felt like an exorcism....

There’s no clock in my bedroom and I no longer sleep with a iPhone phone beside my head. Every morning I judge the time of day by the sliver of light filtering in through the closed curtains. It’s very…days of yore, a bit romantic and mysterious and I’m so here for it. What is life without whimsy.  Actually, I can tell time by the dog. She rouses from her sleepy slumber around six every morning. First thing she does is gently roll over for belly rubs. I dare say it’s her favorite time of day, but only because it’s MY favorite time of day. It is the only time of day, in fact, that the belly is presented and that makes it very special, indeed.  The love of this dog is going to absolutely obliterate my heart someday. How tragic and amazing is that? To love and be loved so completely. No human I’ve ever met has been capable of such a thing. I think that’s by design, otherwise, how would we ever fathom the utter perfection of a doggie.