Entanglement

When I was a senior in high school, a mean girl*  made a brownie look like a pile of shit   and put it in my locker. She and a snickering group of girls then waited and watched.  I went to a small Christian high school. Our senior class only had 24 students, the whole school, grades 8-12, had probably less than 300 total. The school was round—dubbed the Vernadome—with classrooms all around the outside, surrounding an indoor basketball court and a stage.  It’s like someone started to build a typical high school, started with the gym and then gave up, slapped on some rooms, put a dome over it and called it a day.  It was as weird as you’re picturing.  Anyway, shit brownie.  All the lockers were inside, on either side of the basketball court, the entirety of the school filing into the space between classes, so that when I opened my locker…well, you get it.  The girls laughed and laughed as I took in the “shit” neatly placed atop the contents of ...

Self care has never been my forte. Even when I was the most fit I’ve ever been, I was still drinking a bottle of wine and smoking half a pack of cigarettes every night for dinner. I sure did look good though.  I look at myself now and wish I could go back to 35 year old me and slap some sense into her. I wish I had taken better care of myself. All of myself—the mental, emotional and spiritual as well as the physical. Especially the physical. Everything hurts now.  I don’t know what I expected, growing older. But I didn’t expect to still be struggling with my weight or my mental health. Small, ordinary things that most people do on autopilot, like showering for instance, is such a fucking Herculean task for me. I spend half the day psyching myself up for it, and it’s not like I don’t want to be clean, it’s just…hard now.  Lots of things are harder now: sleeping, eating, laundry, cleaning, cooking, caring…existing, some days. Gratitude is the lifeline that I cling to becaus...

When I was eight months pregnant with our first child, my then husband did something so horrifying, it shattered every illusion I held about him, confirming with utter clarity who he really was. I was devastated. We had two cats at the time and they began howling at one another from the next room. My drunken husband went charging in. There was a commotion. When he came back he said, “I broke Imsa’s leg trying to separate them.” Imsa was my cat, a solid white, gentle, ethereal beauty I’d had since she was a kitten.  My mind conjured a vision of a crying child, an intolerant drunk jerking or shaking her in anger and the dire consequences left in his wake. I knew in that moment, with every motherly instinct that I possessed, he could never be allowed to be alone with my child. My heart raced, nausea roiled in my gut and I wept. Wept for the daughter in my womb and for the sweetest cat in the world who didn’t deserve to be in pain. As a victim of domestic violence from a previous relat...

Imagine it’s your sole mission after a tragic accident, caused by you and your own stupidity, to stop paying child support and have your ex wife served court documents to that end, from your hospital bed.  Imagine being such a self-centered, selfish prick that you don’t bother having a civilized discussion with her about next moves, or maybe reducing support for a time. No. You just go for the jugular, the kill shot, the blindside, knowing she has zero chance of taking care of the kids without your financial support that was mandated by the divorce decree you signed just a year prior.  One year. That’s all I got after twelve years of marriage, of being a stay at home mom, of staying by his side through all of his lies, gaslighting and narcissistic behavior. This man went from the Captain’s seat flying commercial airplanes, to stocking shelves at the local Chevy dealership. His boss wouldn’t even let him drive the service vehicle to deliver parts. I went to work driving a schoo...

I had a drinking problem for years. It was always five o’clock somewhere and I craved the feeling of a good buzz. I drank to socialize. I drank to fuck. I drank to escape. I drank to stay skinny. I drank to be able to stand my own presence. I drank to embrace oblivion.  I slipped the bounds of my reality too many times, innumerable times, and made new ones that I can’t even remember.  Being with someone who was equally fond of the drink was like needing oxygen to breathe, but it’s also like looking in a broken mirror—you still recognize your reflection in all the cracks and broken pieces, but instead of getting a new mirror, you just stop looking at yourself.  I’ve had thirteen years now, of sober clarity, to remember and to reflect. To sit alone in silence, to face my worst demons, darkest fears, deepest pain, biggest insecurities and all my defects of character. To own my mistakes and feel remorse and regret and an ocean of fathomless sadness. To find my true self and t...

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. 

I was not born with Type A personality disorder—YES, I said what I said. It’s in your DNA that y’all don’t know how to be still. Zero chill unless life forces you to via illness or injury. Sorry not sorry, my daughter is an A (albeit a sensitive A), she’s like a shark, always moving, ready to attack the next bullet point on her too long to-do list. Busy, busy, busy.  Let me be clear, she does not get this from me. I’m not even a Type B. I’m more of a Type L—lazy, always have been. I can sit in the same spot for hours writing, reading or binging a good K-Drama on Netflix. I’m all about a nap, especially on a dreary day. Sit me outside on a mild, sunny day and I might be mistaken for a turtle on a log, don’t bother me or I’ll snap at you.  Despite this defect of character, I know when to get going and be productive, and watch out when I do because I will get as much shit done as possible as long as the motivation is motivating. Then I will go back to my book and continue being a...

My peri-menopausal years are a blur of madness and rage. I didn’t even know what peri-menopause was back then. I chalked up my radical mood swings to going cold turkey on cigarettes and booze. Being trapped in a situationship with a sociopath certainly didn’t help matters.  The melancholia that followed that uncoupling was beyond any previous descent into depression that I’d ever experienced, worse than the postpartum depression that pushed me to suicidal ideation while trying to care for two under two in my early 30’s. Zoloft, therapy and copious amounts of alcohol numbed me enough to ignore my then husband’s extracurricular sex life and subsequent trip to prison for trying to fly a commercial airplane while intoxicated. It made national news—viral before the term was ever coined.  I raw dogged menopause and eight years post-menopause I am not on a single prescription medication. No HRT, no patches and no GLP-1, just me, for better or worse. And that’s something I’m really pr...

Been trying to get back to the thing that gives me breath and purpose and hope—writing. I’ve spent too much time on socials, running a fairly successful business, but it is draining the life blood from me and stealing precious brain cells that used to nourish and feed my creative flow.  Writing is survival for me, my most sacred creative need. Never artificial AI slop. Never. Just me, my soul laid bare for your eyes only, darling. I’m deep cleaning the cobwebs from the darkest recesses of my mind—from the abyss as Kafka so eloquently put it—in order to have a testament of my existence, my most…delicious lived experiences both good, and bad.  Follow along, won’t you, if only to find out if you’ve made the cut.    TTFN #writerlife #storyofmylife  #writingistherapy