Lost in Translation

When it comes to relationships, how many times do you ask yourself ‘what if?’. How many times do you question each of your wants and intentions? How much do you worry about the finality of it all? When you’re middle-aged and have already been unsuccessful, be it in relationships or marriages, I think it may just be natural to question things. Do we want the same things? Is this really worth my time? Am I in love with the idea of us, or am I really in love with him? I mean, at any age, these are questions that hold water, but at 44, these questions feel like the difference between happily-ever-after and ‘here-i-go-again-on-my-own’.

Let me just say here, because it’s been churning through my mind all day, that if I ever actually write THAT book or become somewhat of a guru somehow or someway, I hope that Brene Brown invites me onto her podcast, because I am absolutely certain that we would also best friends.

Okay, that’s out there. I feel so much better.

But truthfully, here’s the deal. I’m a single mom and have been for almost a decade. Nine years, at this point, but a decade really because it was 2011 when my husband and I separated. And unlike Glennon and countless others, I have not moved on to women. I have (maybe) not found the love of my life, and life is a struggle every single day. BUT, I am a survivor baby. That’s just who I am. And I know this because my dad died when I was 11 and I was a daddy’s girl. I didn’t know my mom until my dad passed. But, by the time my mom did pass just 8 years ago, she had become my EVERYTHING. And then she, like every pet I ever had, walked across that rainbow bridge.

She did it with such Faith and dignity, and love and beauty….and acceptance, that I couldn’t say no. I could only support her plight and love her all the more for her strength, her dignity, and her everlasting resillience.

That’s what we do as lovers. As survivors. As daughters. We love until they leave.

As a unicorn only, I can tell you this. I want to always be this way. I want to love until they leave. I want to always be able to say that I did all that I could do, and want to do everything I could’ve done until I can do no more. And honestly, after two divorces and one HUGE broken heart, I think that for the most part, I can say exactly that.

Would I love to have a happy ending with the love of my life? Absolutely I would.

In truth, I am hard to love. I love big, and oftentimes it’s too much. I’m not clingy. Not dependent. But sometimes I can love so much that people tend to think that I don’t need them when in reality they make me completely complete to the extent that it scares the hell outta me and I retreat right back into the shell out of which I crawled during the excitement and the newness of beginning. Beginnings are that way. They bring out the best of us. And as relationships move on, beginnings fade into doubts and fears and before we know it something else has taken over and the very same communication that brought us beauty and clarification in the actual beginning looses strength and fades into apathy.

Apathy is tricky. It seems and feels easier than actual feeling and communication. But eventually, either within the relationship or long after it’s over, we realize that we missed out. We stopped trying out of fear of rejection. We didn’t want to disappoint, so ironically, we disappoint ourselves AND our person equally.

I’ve been with my person for almost a year (off and on). He is incredible. I can talk to him about anything. He truly doesn’t need anyone outside of God. I struggle with this. He struggles with my independence as well, which is really the same thing, because I am nothing without my relationship with Christ. And still, I wonder.

I don’t know if we are right, if this is right. I have had so many moments of affirmation, but I’ve also had many times of questioning who we are and where we are. All that I can say is that I vow to keep trying until God tells me otherwise.

I think that it’s all we can do as humans. We can accept, and love, and glorify with our whole hearts. We can ask God for signs and for Grace. We can do our parts. But in the long run, the only one who actually SHOULD have say is God himself. He created us. He has known us forever. Literally. His knowledge is way deeper than ours.

So before we resist. Before we throw in the proverbial towel. Before we call it quits with all the decisions we have made, shouldn’t we sit with those decisions and simply breathe? Shouldn’t we first see where HE leads us?

It’s not all about you. Really.

Picture it. Farragut (TN). 1993.

I was 17 and so smart and cool as I pushed open my upstairs window so that I could sneakily smoke my Marlboro Red without stinking up the house. Just three puffs in and there’s a piercing knock at the door. All I can hear is my mom’s muffled mad voice ‘Heather, are you smoking in there????’. There’s almost a cry at the end of her pitch in that sentence. I hear something in that that I haven’t heard since my dad passed 6 years ago. Was that…could it be…vulnerability?

My mom’s confidence cracked every bit as much as her voice in that moment. I heard that. More importantly, I felt that. Not as much as she did, but in that moment, I thought I knew everything she was feeling and THAT made me feel like the worst daughter ever. Period.

Of course, I had been smoking and I HAD to open the door because she made me open the door and my mouth – to truth. Lying to my mom had always been an impossibility. She was simply too smart, too scary, and too unpredictable. These, my friends, were truly the best of times and the worst of times, right up until I myself became the mom of a couple of teenage boys.

Now that my oldest is 20 and struggling, and my youngest is 13 and aloof, I understand what my mom meant just following those two puffs, when I hesitantly opened the door and a small cloud of smoke to my mom’s face, all twisted in the thunderstorm where disbelief collides with disappointment and sheer and unceasing guilt and remorse. She had blamed herself in the same way that I am blaming myself now. Was I too hands-off? Have I not motivated or driven them enough? Have I not encouraged them to take initiative and seek true purpose? Maybe I should’ve place more importance on money and success??

I don’t know. I’m no expert. And honestly, I feel like this age is the toughest age when it comes to parenting, and I am failing miserably because I am worried 100% of the time. Did my mom worry this much? My guess is that she did. In truth, at my ripe old age of 44, I still remember 20 like it was yesterday. And that was a damn hard yesterday, my friends, even with a husband and an education and career path. Also, we had no pandemic to challenge all of our plans like my kids have had. Just saying.

The thing I keep coming back to in my thoughts – the one saving grace – is simply these two facts: 1) I never once felt it was my mom’s fault that I smoked and 2) I haven’t turned out so bad.

So while most of us parents may lose lots of sleep wondering what we’ve done right or what we could’ve done better, what we really need to know is simply that we did the best we could with the circumstances we were dealt, and that our kids are healthy, intelligent, and loved. Those are the seeds, the bulbs, the water and the sunlight, but the blooms that blossom? Those are all theirs. Sometimes we need to simply sit back and watch them bloom into their own colors.

Letter to an Ex X

Dear X,

If I had known what I know now, we wouldn’t have gotten married. We wouldn’t have had an amazing child together. I wouldn’t have stopped trusting so openly and without cause. I wouldn’t have been carrying around baggage. I wouldn’t question myself on every single decision. It’s likely that I wouldn’t have sold the family business. I wouldn’t question my mind.

But it happened. You conned me. You fooled me, my mom, my family, and your step-son. When it comes down to it, you felt unworthy. You started using more routinely. Because, I believe you were already using. You decided that you couldn’t do it without superhuman characteristics. So you sold your soul, and your wife, your ‘sons’, your dreams, for something that made you feel so good at the time.

I have a hard time understanding, because I haven’t been there. I won’t even take antibiotics. But I have been addicted to things. I ‘needed’ cigarettes for many years, and diet coke, and sugar. So that makes me just as ‘bad’, even though I manage to hold a job, pay my bills, pay for our child’s holidays, birthdays, school functions, soccer, karate, church functions, and playdates.

I have accepted that you will never be a part of anything financial in our child’s life. That you will forever disappoint him because you cannot test clean. I’ve watched every episode of Intervention. So has my boyfriend. We have talked in great length and depth about how we will never unburden ourselves or Ethan from this massive web of destruction you have casted upon our lives. I have had nightmares about what you are doing to destroy your life, and how that affects our son. He loves you, but he accepts that you are not here. You cannot be there for yourself, let alone him.

You talk as though everything wrong you have ever done is in the past, yet you have zero proof that you are any closer to that next milestone of where you ‘should’ be. You have clued me into how you cheated on your lab tests. How you used until 3 days prior, and then switched to suboxone – the very drug that now, people are getting hooked on. The very drug that could kill someone like me. I didn’t deserve this, but no one that lives through the cleaning up of an addict does. Why should I be immune?

I shouldn’t. That’s the truth. It was God’s plan for me, and God will continue to see me through. Losing our home, my car, your job, your income, your support, is not the worst of it. In truth, the worst of all of this rests in something much deeper.

Our child has learned that he can only depend upon one of us. Now, he is happy to lean on anyone else. This creates the gang-mentality that I will likely have to always combat. I always dreamed of having the family I didn’t have. That will likley never happen because of the environment your addiction has created within our lives. But as a Christian, I am supposed to forgive you, accept you, and turn the other cheek. And this is the worst part. I hate myself for not being able to do any of that.

You have ruined my life. You have ruined our child’s life. Instead of starting from the bottom and working our way up, I am forced to start in the trenches. Our son is 8. Your addiction, you say, began when I was 5 months pregnant. You are repeating what you knew. I am a workaholic, repeating what she knew.

You had a horrible childhood. Your parents both had serious issues, and were heavily medicated. They spent most of your childhood unemployed because of it. Guess who gets lost in the shuffle?

I refuse to disappoint our child. He deserves a family who shows him love, who teaches him how to love unconditionally. I may not be able to reconcile what you have done, but I can work to improve the future of our child. And while I may have spent the bulk of my life believing that I don’t deserve more, I believe that I absolutely do.

So my plea to you is this – please work on you. With everything you are, and everything you ever wanted, work on you. Make strides in that direction. Go to meetings. Make valuable friendships, based on trust and clean living. Pray. Listen to what God has to offer. Earn a living. Be a grown-up. Show our child what it’s like to be a man.

We will take your recovery seriously when you do the same. When you’re finished with the lies, the manipulation, and the fiction. Our son wants his dad back. You told him the truth. Now live the promise. I refuse to assist in the lying, in the promises, in the fairytale. The work is yours to do. Whether you do it or not, our child will feel loved, with or without you. It’s your call. I cannot do it for you, and I cannot help you anymore.

If anyone out there is contemplating destroying their lives, consider this. When you were a child, you had those lucid, beautiful moments. You will continue to experience those, but not if you are leaning on substances. Those are lies. BE YOU. Naked. Truthful. Genuine. And vulnerable. Beauty is found in solace and serenity. Not in substance.

Inevitable Bubbles

There are lots of inevitables in life that we all have just, well, come to expect. Like the fact that Curious George will absolutely always and without fail get into some sort of trouble when the man-in-the-yellow-hat leaves him alone. Remember watching Southpark? Yeah, Kenny always died. The same as how every episode of the Waltons ended with ‘Goodnight John Boy’, and the same as the Cookie Monster always ate too many cookies. (By the way, I’m fairly certain that I WAS Cookie Monster in a far off life, not so far away). When we blow soapy water through a ring, we all have come to expect those magical fleeting bubbles that never go out of style, and for which we never really get to old to enjoy.

Predictability can be awesome. Predictability can be as warm and snuggly as the baby blanket with satin lining that some of us used to carry around until we were old enough to become aware of germs, at which point we finally stopped sucking the satin.

What? That was just me?

Anyway, predictability can be great, BUT predictability can also be a great big ginormous dinosaur of a thorn right in our sides. Like when an ex-husband has been struggling with an addiction for the last 8 years, and you know that no matter how much he loves his son, he’s probably not going to stay clean long enough to teach his son the sort of stability and security that he needs. And I’ve come to learn that no matter how many times Ethan’s dad tries, I’m still going to always end up being the ONLY responsible and dependable parent my youngest will know. His dad hasn’t had a job in three years, and has told more stories than are in the Bible over the last 8 years of his addiction. I can’t even listen anymore. And the older Ethan gets, the more difficult it becomes for me to keep all of this a secret.

But I will because I love my child. The longer I can protect him from the ugly parts of life, the better.

So, while today was like hundreds of other days, with the ‘dad’ not calling or picking him up as planned, and with Ethan having multiple meltdowns leading to me having multiple meltdowns, it could always be worse. Much worse.

And those are my thoughts, as I watch Ethan and his best pal Jackson relishing in the simplicity of bubbles, those inevitable, beautiful, dependable, timeless wonders. Like childhood, they are fleeting, but worthy of pause and gratitude. Goodnight John Boy.;) Namaste.