Muchness and Light

I don't want to be tied to anyone's strings. I'm carefully trying to steer clear of those things.

I am a passionate person. I tend to throw myself fully into whatever I do, doing it loudly and brashly and intensely—though I am perfectly capable of tempering that passion when needed.

I’m also verbose. If you’ve read Muchness and Light over the last seven years, you know I rarely spin up any idea in less than 1,000 words. Text messages and emails are almost as wordy, even if they’re just to myself.

Even while I’ve been inactive in this forum, I have tended to continue to journal, whether in a Word doc or an email that sits forever in my Draft box or in a note on my phone. Bounder commented once that he was amazed at how much I could get out through a tiny phone keypad. Although initially interested in my writing, and in being the recipient of effusive love letters, Rango eventually told me to stop sending him walls of texts that he’d lost interest in reading.

Over the last few days, I looked back at many of those messages. What I saw was almost two years of trying to convince him to love me. That’s not to say he didn’t feel the affection. I’m certain that he did. But I wanted his actions to match his words, to behave in loving ways toward me (and the boys) as often as he told me he loved me. It wasn’t just that I wanted reciprocity of affection—I needed to feel loved to feel secure in our relationship.

What I also saw in those messages was a slow spiral into severe insecurity. I didn’t regularly and consistently feel love from him, and I questioned the distance he was putting between us. Like so many others I have known and loved, he compartmentalized his feelings into these tiny boxes that he used to build a wall between us. As it got harder and harder to get reassurance from him, sometimes to get response at all, I inferred a great deal to fill in the empty space. Eventually I adopted what I interpreted as his skewed perception of me as my own, and I became unbearably self-critical, lobbing ugly accusations of flaws and unlovability at myself.

Last night, as I was journaling again, I got myself type the words, “He wouldn’t have hurt me, if I hadn’t made him so angry.”

There was no physical abuse, ever. But for me, the systematic elimination of my passion was just as devastating. I reread months and months of my begging him to engage me, of telling him that I couldn’t take much more of his ignorance. I saw him blame me for being too much and causing him to withdraw.

His withdrawing would stop, the distance would shrink, if only I’d give him space and time to allow it to happen. Every time I changed my own behaviors and approaches to match what he led me to believe he wanted, he would move the finish line and leave me just as far away from him as I had been just weeks or days or hours before. Eventually I learned to stop having expectations of him, because expectations are just regrets waiting to happen. Eventually I learned to suppress my own desires and needs—until my passionate nature would erupt in anger at having felt ignored for far too long. My anger would, of course, drive him further away.

“Baby, why you make me wanna hit you?” Queen Frostine commented dryly.

While I have been effectively starved for intimacy, I am also incredibly fearful of it now. Certainly, it hasn’t even been a month since we broke up, and I’m not ready to meet anyone new. I’m still not quite ready to entertain the thought that it might one day happen. The idea of getting over someone by getting under someone else is repulsive to me right now. As I explained to a friend today, the thought of anyone touching me make me physically ill.

But I long for affection. I long to be touched carefully, to feel my own warmth reflected back from the skin of someone who chooses to share in intimate moments with me. I miss being seen, being regarded as an interesting woman. I miss being valued as a woman in any way.

At the same time, I don’t believe I am an interesting woman. If I were, surely Rango would’ve stayed interested. He told me time and again that he wouldn’t have been here if he didn’t want to be. But wouldn’t he have chosen to engage me, if he’d really wanted to? He did other things he wanted to do. So, if he didn’t choose me, there must be something wrong with me. And if there’s one thing wrong, then everything is wrong. If I have no value to him, then I must have no value to anyone else.

I understand the logical fallacy. I get that this thinking is maladaptive and self-defeating, if not self-destructive. If I ever expressed these thoughts to him, he would tell me I was wrong, that none of it was true, but he would never offer reassurance. He might say it’s not true, but he would continue to behave in the same ways that contributed to my having arrived at the conclusion that I am fat, ugly, stupid, worthless, etc. And so my insecurities systematically buried my own passion, compartmentalizing it away so that it was less likely to hurt me.

He told me a few times that he didn’t understand why I needed him, or anyone else, to contribute to my own satisfaction. In his mind, I should be able to be fully independent, especially emotionally. In the end, I believe he saw me as weak because I needed him.

But I believe that love is shared. I believe partners in healthy relationships care for one another. They do the things logistically and emotionally that support the other. They work to create and maintain intimacy that is meaningful to each and to the whole.

I believe love should be greater than the sum of its parts.

I want to believe that there are others who believe the same, who want to live and love passionately for their whole lives, not just for the initial stages of a relationship. I want to believe there are people who care about others more than they care about themselves. And I want to believe there is someone who could both allow me to care about them in such a way and do the same for me in return.

But I don’t. Not really. I want to. I want to still be the woman who had faith in love above all else. I want to still be a believer. I’m just not. Not because I don’t think it’s possible for me to be that woman, but because I have become so accustomed to being shown those beliefs were delusional that I don’t trust them anymore. I can’t. The possibility of hurt is far too great.

Even if I never again allow anyone close enough to hurt me, there is still the damage I have done to myself. There is still my own culpability in having allowed him to hurt me, to have given him the proximity and knowledge-as-weapon to be able to do it.

Maybe in the end it’s not just that I don’t trust others. I don’t trust myself. I adopted those skewed perceptions, and I’m no good to anyone until I can unravel that mess of barbed wire. But I am truly afraid I will weave into some kind of armor to keep others at a distance—including myself.

 

 

Some dance to remember, some dance to forget.

Last week, I had this awkward moment of running into an ex (read: very brief fling) in an unexpected public place. We didn’t speak—just eye contact and awkward silence. The next morning, Facebook Memories reminded me that it was three years ago that day that the fling had happened. The next day (and for the next two) Facebook reminded me that it was a major milestone anniversary with a different ex, tossing pictures of Vodka-soaked memories at me like Molotov cocktails. Somewhere in the midst of that, yet another ex made his presence known.

The Parade of Ghosts has begun.

This time of year marks the beginning of a couple of months of incredibly difficult anniversaries, from multiple relationships. Some days are reminders of more than one relationship—sometimes more than two—and the memories are not always kind. Yes, it is reminders of the hurt from other people, but it is also riddled with reminders of the choices I made and their lasting impact.

But I’m also riddled with reminders of who I was, of the transformation that occurred over the course of two years. I am plagued by pictures of myself from those times, and then I see myself now.

And I weep.

I know. In the last three years, I finalized my divorced, worked three part-time jobs (and then no part-time job) while going to school full time, while finishing one degree and continuing to finish another, while now working full-time and schooling part-time, while winning a huge award, while establishing a new relationship, and while raising two sons with very little help from their absentee father.

And it turned out my body was revolting but I didn’t know it, hence the extreme fatigue and hormonal issues and weight gain. Followed by an injury that has kept me out of the gym since October and that culminated in surgery last week.

Reasons not excuses.

In my heart, I feel like a fucking fraud.

None of the other stuff matters, because I got fat again. Because I regained part of the weight I spent three hours a day, for fifteen months, fighting off. When I was a stay-at-home mom who had to rely on a distant and emotionally-inconsistent husband for everything.

So right now, I’m fighting not just the ghosts of my exes and my former life, I’m battling the ghosts of myself, and they are bitches.

They are snarky and blond, with thinner thighs and less sag and a tighter ass. They are unapologetic for their choices, even now when it’s me who has to face their implications. They remind me that they warned me, that I wrote openly about how I couldn’t relinquish control of my food and weight for the rest of my life, how exactly this would happen. (I told you so!)

How maybe if I hadn’t made some of those choices along the way, I wouldn’t be in this emotional predicament.

So for all of my talk then—hell, even this talk now!—who the hell am I to tell myself or anyone else anything??

In so many ways, it feels like I’m back in the summer of 2010, in chronic pain and uncomfortable in my own skin, struggling to keep the house and the kids together and still give Stephanie time to breathe and enjoy the things that make her soul feel not dead. Not even alive. Just not dead.

I have come to accept that things are often outside my control. Really, I’m good with that. This doesn’t even feel unmanageable, just unmanaged.

So I take a deep breath—I don’t have the luxury to get real high—and try to make the mental list of what needs to be done. I tally projects and plans and intentions and expectations in an ongoing psychic To Do list, and then I am overwhelmed by it all and I just want to crawl in my bed and go to sleep.

But I can’t. There’s too damn much to do.

And even if I could sleep, my goddamn ghosts are there, just waiting.

It’s like my own production of No Exit starring Stephanie as Garcin, Inez, and Estelle simultaneously.

Existential crisis, indeed.

Today, I have no swarthy internet wisdom. I have no words of encouragement or really anything else. I can’t find the out, not yet. I know I will eventually scratch my way through the dark, along the dank wall, and claw my way out if that’s what it takes. But there’s no door opening today.

Those most I’m getting today is dirty fingernails.

 

Baby, you cry too much. I'm tired of the sound. You're such a baby.

After a couple of days—weeks, months, I don’t know—of intense “discussion” (as my grandparents would say), Rango has finally said what so many before him have: I’m too much.

I suppose I should clarify that. Initially, it was that it’s not me, per se, who is too much, just my emotions. My overt expression of exactly what I’m feeling at any given time, especially when it’s not in line with how he would feel or express something, or how he thinks best suits me to feel or express it.

And when my expression manifests in ways he doesn’t like or understand, it makes him uncomfortable.

There is absolutely no expectation on his part that I behave in a set, specific way. He just doesn’t understand why I am often so stressed, why I hang on to issues and analyze them into unrecognizable minutiae, and why I am so prone to outbursts of tears when I’m overwhelmed by emotion.

For more than two years, I have done my best to find some full-time/part-time balance of student and employee, plus being a full-time mom. In all but one of the two-dozen classes I’ve taken in that time, I’ve worked for and gotten an A. (Algebra is still the bane of my existence.) My first real job in 15 years is for a prestigious state agency, and it challenges me and engages me constantly. My ex-husband has been out of state for most of that two years, barely in contact with our children and leaving me to care for them while cleaning up his emotional mess—all while berating me bitterly and randomly, usually about money.

I try to explain that I am still trying to learn to stand on my own two feet, and Rango counters that I don’t have to do it all on my own, that I have him.

Without question, he has been a huge support since we started dating. He has been the constant male figure in the boys’ lives, and he has been incredibly supportive of my schooling and work and time with GOAL. He understands fully when I need to take a little time to myself or with the Castration Committee, like I did last weekend.

He doesn’t understand why I berate myself about having gained some of this weight back, about not having time to work out even if I were cleared for weights after a lingering wrist injury from October. Another apparent blown disc is reminding me every day of how far down that slope I have slipped. Seeing pictures from four and five years ago compared to pictures from now is devastating to my ego. My head knows I was living in misery when the skinny girl pictures were taken, and that’s utterly dichotomous to the pictures of me with the Governor or addressing the Georgia Senate.

I should be easy on myself for holding all of this together as well as I have, and I should be nothing but proud of the accomplishments I’ve made. But somewhere in my fucked up head, I am often embarrassed to be me, to see how far I fell down a hole I never wanted to think of again, and to feel the snap! of one tenuous thread and to know how that can bring the whole damn thing crashing down around me.

Even now, while I’m writing, I’m crying. There is just so much that needs to come out.

I’m writing while he and the boys are asleep. I’ll wake them soon to go about our busy day of haircuts and errands and homework and cleaning and cooking and hopefully going out tonight to see a friend’s husband’s band because I was too damn drained last night to do it. I also know I am choosing this time to write because I don’t want him to see me cry. I don’t want him to tell me again that it’s too much.

I also know I choose this forum, because he doesn’t read what I write. Like so many before, he’s not a reader. If I send him something specific, he will read it, but he doesn’t seek out that side of me. Truthfully, that’s part of the reason I haven’t written much in the last year or more. If I couldn’t get the approval of the only person whose approval mattered to me, then why devote the energy there? There was already enough to deflect my attention away; it wasn’t efficient or productive to waste the time and effort.

Except it never was a waste, was it? DH hated that I wrote, and that I wrote away from and about him. Like Absolem and Bounder after, he would tell me I was a good writer, that I should do it, but that I shouldn’t write about things and in ways that made him uncomfortable. I should steer clear of truths that made him feel bad.

It was too much.

Fuck. That.

I feel what I feel. I pull it out and examine it and play with it. I may spin it all around like a Rubik’s cube and put it back in, or I may hang it on a shingle for the world to examine for itself.

But it is mine, and I have my reasons, and absolutely no one ever gets to tell me otherwise. Not if they want to stay.

I struggle, and maybe I’m struggling more and differently than when Rango and I met, over drinks on a holiday weekend when my kids were having rare visitation with their father. But there is a lot more at stake now—logistically and legally and emotionally—and I will never again be content to let anyone else be my sole support. It’s not that I’m unwilling to let anyone else be supportive; I simply will not put myself in any precarious position where I am unable to support myself.

I appreciate that he sees me as beautiful no matter what, that the size of my ass doesn’t tip the scales out of my favor. But if it is the weight of my tears that are too much, I can’t help that. All I can hope is that, in the end, both weigh less than Osiris’ feather.

 

 

 

Maybe I think too much but something's wrong.

Hi.

It's been a while.

This has happened before, where I've been quiet for a while—for far longer than I'd like or intended. This time, though, I haven't been quiet so much as I've just been biting my tongue.

It's been almost six months since I sat down to write for me. Oh, I've been writing, just not for myself. I've written for school—I'm now a senior pursuing a B.A. in Liberal Studies with a minor in Women and Gender Studies. I've written for work—I'm now a full-fledged, employed paralegal for a prestigious state agency. I've written various speeches for speaking engagements around the state—I have three more months to go as GOAL winner.

All of those have kept me very, very busy and feeling very rewarded. I work myself into a tizzy sometimes from the stress. I am striving to be the best possible student and employee and ambassador and mother and partner. It's naturally a lot of pressure, and absolutely no one is harder on me than I am on myself.

I tend to work at a frenetic pace that is exhausting. I am exacting and demanding of myself, sometimes pushing myself to a breaking point. One tiny slip-up, one slight mistake, and it feels like everything comes crashing down around me. For the last few months, Rango has found me more than once in a sobbing, fetal pile in the middle of the bed.

I've often thought out loud that I needed to take the time to come and write. Almost every day, I draft some blog post in my head but never quite get around to getting it onto the screen. There's always something to get in the way—school, work, errands, chores, kids, life.

In reality, it is me that has been getting in my own way.

With so much happening, with so very many demands on my time and energy, I've let some things slide. I finally had to recognize that the house won't be as clean as I would like. Sometimes popcorn and apples make a perfectly acceptable dinner.

There has also been less time to work out. There's been less energy to devote to working out. In taking care of the boys and the house and our world, there's been less effort to take care of me.

With that has come weight.

By no means have I regained all of the lost weight, but it has been slowly creeping up. Queen Frostine has told me for months that I needed to cut myself some slack.

"Look at everything you have going on," she admonished. "Don't be so hard on yourself."

"You're beautiful," Rango tells me every day. "You're not fat."

Before the divorce, before I went back to college and work, I had time to devote to it. I could walk for an hour or two every day before I hit the gym. I could carefully plan and prep meals for a week at a time. And I knew damn well that the weight wouldn't stay gone just because I wished it; I knew I would have to work at it for the rest of my life.

But I didn't, did I?

Tonight, I was trying on ill-fitting clothes, lamenting my spreading thighs. Rango found me crying in the bedroom, again. He told me, again, that I'm beautiful and not fat. He reminded me that I am so much more than my physicality.

In my head, I know he's right. In my head, I know that my worth—whether to other people or to myself—should not come from the size of my ass. But it is hard to make my heart believe that when I'm struggling with clothes that are ill-fitting because I haven't been doing what I should.

And there is shame. There is self-loathing and self-recrimination. Not so much because I'm not a size 8 but because I let this happen, again. Because I built so much of my story and my identity around the self-transformation that came about because of and during the weight loss, and now it feels hypocritical to let that have ever been a part of my story.

Looking for hangers in the closet, I saw a dress hanging and thought, "That's from when I was pretty."

And it doesn't seem fair that I have to choose between being pretty and being smart. It doesn't seem right that anyone, including myself, would put such pressure on me to be a great student and be a great paralegal and be a great ambassador and be a great mom and be a (sometimes) great partner and be as physically perfect as I can muster, given my inherent limitations.

I get it. No one but me is putting that pressure on me.

But that is how I validate my own existence. I strive to exceed expectations, even when it means exceeding every possible and anticipated expectation before I have any clue what they are. Because if I am not perfect, then I am a failure.

Yes, of course, I know how utterly ridiculous this self-imposed craziness is. In so many ways, I am my own albatross.

And so, I have avoided writing for months, sidestepping my fears and evading myself.

But there is catharsis in writing for me. This is the space in which I am most likely to be truly, sometimes brutally, honest with myself. This is how I have worked my head out when my life has felt like it was unraveling. This is where I have found the stones to lay my own path.

So I'm writing again. I'm crying again. But I'm writing.

This is not a passive-aggressive request for encouragement. This is not my wanting someone else to tell me how special I am.

This is Stephanie edging her way back to where she needs to be. This is me finding my voice again, because it is mine and it is valuable.

So I will try to do better, to be more consistent and to be more open, to make the time to take care of myself in the ways that are healthiest and most vital for me.

I've never been fearless. I've been headstrong and dogged but absolutely never fearless in my determination. But they are my fears, and I am determined to face them again.

It's time to reclaim my muchness.

 

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Ain't these tears in my eyes telling you.

Let's have a disco ball, and let's be happy.

Let's have a disco ball, and let's be happy.

For weeks I've been thinking that I need to write a blog post.  I knew it had been far too long, but I was shocked this morning when I realized it had been six weeks since I'd last posted here. 

For the most part, I have been silent because I've been busy.  The boys are constantly on the go, and it seems half my waking hours are spent transporting them from school to an appointment to a team practice to an event... assuming I'm not in class or doing homework or working.  Emotionally I've been pretty even-keeled, which is in-part attributable to Rango, who brings far more romance and comedy to my life than drama.  Sometimes I freak out about the stress of it all, but he and the Castration Committee are always available sounding boards when I need to vent. 

Last week I sat in on a series of paralegal continuing education sessions.  While I don't need the CLE credits yet, I knew there would be useful information and excellent networking at the all-day event. 

The day was filled with talk of entity management and legal investigation of security breaches and e-filing processes.  The last speaker of the day, though, made me come home and cry.  (Yay, networking.)

Mr. Worthington is a senior human resources manager at a law firm.  He manages paralegals and sometimes teaches through a local paralegal education program.  He spoke about appraising your value in your job.  Value, he said, is derived from the benefit you provide to your client, whether they may be internal or external.  I'll go further to add that the value is benefit net of cost.  He asked each of us to examine the services we provide with a series of threshold questions:

• What do I do?
• How do I do it?
• Why do I do it?

There is the basic description of your job, then the mechanics of how the job is performed, and finally the beneficial applicability of the services provided by the job you do. 

"If you're doing something and you find yourself thinking, 'No one cares that I'm doing this,' then stop doing it."

I spent years doing shit no one but me cared about.  I am a perfectionist who is prone to overachievement.  No one but me gave a damn that I perfected my bathroom cleaning skills and kept my CDs alphabetized and sub-categorized by genre.  It didn't matter to my family how I folded the towels; they just cared that there were clean towels when they got out of the shower.  All that homemade chicken stock in the freezer will make delicious soups, but were the hours spent making the stock instead of playing video games with the boys of more benefit than the cost? 

How I took care of my family and managed my household was the entirety of my value for a very long time.  Three years ago, I wrote about how I was a financial liability to my family, given the fact that I didn't work outside the home.  According to the LIFE Foundation's Human Value Calculator, I am now worth about $232,490, though that's subject to change now that I'm working one unpaid internship instead of three part-time paying jobs.

Much of the last four years has been about assessing my personal value, both to myself and to other people.  Now that I'm transitioning from stay-at-home mom to full-time student to gainfully- and professionally-employed, I have moved from the red into the black.  Hopefully I will continue to appreciate over time. 

Even three years ago I knew I was worth more than the laundry and the cooking and the dishes.

Given the self-exploration I've written about, Mr. Worthington's words were fodder for thought.  What is my job?  How do I do it?  Why do I do what I do?

The job for my external clients—my family, my professors, my employers—is easy to address.  I take care of their needs with the skillset specific to each job, in a way that it fulfilling to me.  I get personal satisfaction from taking care of my sons and Rango, from apply my critical thinking and writing skills to an excellent case brief or legal document.   

But for me, the internal client, these are harder questions to answer.  My job is to hone myself into the best possible version of me that I can be.  I do that by applying my natural skills and talents—analysis, resourcefulness, creativity—to everything that I do, whether it be caring for my family or writing an essay that only I will ever read.  I do this, because I am not content to be stagnant, because I am driven to explore and experiment and test myself.  I am determined to shine my own light into every darkened nook and cranny of my soul, to shatter every warped looking glass, and to shape those pieces into the unique mosaic that can only be Stephanie. 

And that is my job, to create something beautiful from something ugly, to use it to reflect light back into the darkness for those who need it, not to be the spotlight but to use the spotlight to be brilliant and kinetic, even if it is me who needs the light to dance by. 

I am a disco ball unto myself.

The past couple of weeks have also included prepping for an interview for a Student of the Year award.  I had to appear this week before the judging committee, to tell them my story in three minutes.  While practicing with my advisors prior to the interview, I teared up again.

"It seems almost... dirty," I croaked.  "It feels unnatural and uncomfortable to toot my own horn, to tell people all the ways in which I am good.  I'm supposed to be quiet and modest, not boastful."

"That is a woman thing," one of my female professors replied.  "That's also a Southern thing.  You're taught to smile and nod and be quiet in the corner."

"We know how to put the lipstick on the pig," I said. 

Screw that.  The pig is a pig; it's going to wallow in the mud, no matter what I do.  The pig is not my client.  No one cares if I make the pig look pretty. 

But me?  Stephanie? 

I nailed my interview.  Even if I don't move forward in the judging process, I've won a lot over the last few weeks.  I've decided it's time for a raise. 

So now I have to touch up my lipstick.  It's time to go dancing.    

 

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I'm not here for your entertainment.

You'll not see nothing like the mighty Quinn.

I'm not here for your entertainment.

A couple of weeks ago, in the midst of my four-day, constantly-tearful breakdown of what established initial patterns in my relationships, I read Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—And Keep—Love by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller.  La Bruja had recommended this book weeks ago, and I finally got around to reading it. 

Holy shit.

When she first recommended it, I did a little quick research online and came to the conclusion that I have an anxious attachment style.  "Anxious people are often preoccupied with their relationships and tend to worry about their partner's ability to love them back."  I realized I mostly have dated and been in relationships with avoidants.  "Avoidant people equate intimacy with a loss of independence and constantly try to minimize closeness."

According to Levine and Heller, people with secure attachments—those who "feel comfortable with intimacy and are usually warm and loving"—make up about 50% of the population.  Anxious ones like me make up 20%, while avoidants make up 25%.  The remaining 5% of the population is made up of anxious-avoidants, and I can certainly include a couple of my exes in that narrow margin. 

But when it comes to dating as an adult, the majority of secure people are in healthy relationships.  They're the ones you know who are still happily married after twenty years.  They're the ones I look to and wish I'd ever had a relationship like that. 

Secure men are generally not on the open market. 

There's a disproportionate number of avoidants in the dating pool.  This is part of the reason I am far more likely to encounter a Fragile Cat when I'm on the prowl myself. 

Anxious people are also more likely to be attracted to avoidants, as if something unconscious in us feels like we've found a missing piece of our puzzle.  Avoidants are usually reflective of a powerful, dysfunctional attachment in our earlier life, often from childhood.  Initially everything may seem really great, but then something happens and the avoidant backs away, which causes the anxious to move closer to close the gap, which causes the avoidant to back away even further.  Both partners are having their fucked-up emotional attachment needs met, but it's a pathological dance of getting close and backing away. 

In reading Attached, I was surprised (and thankful!) to learn I wasn't quite as screwed up as I'd thought.  Yes, I am anxious, though not nearly so off-the-chain as I could be.  (I'm less of an outlier than I normally am.)  Levine and Heller argue that there is a biological, evolutionary purpose and need for attachment.  Just as happens with parents and children, bonds are formed in the brain when we partner.  Synapses and neurotransmitters and a bunch of brain shit that I only understand as a layman come together to imprint that person on our brain as a matter of survival.  As inherently social creatures, especially ones who have sexual reproduction, we need other people. 

When an avoidant backs away from me, it activates that attachment system, and I've learned mostly unconsciously to do things and work in ways that will get a response from my partner, to deactivate that system.  (I'm talking phone calls and texts, not boiling bunnies, though I'd imagine this is exactly where and how stalking begins.)  When I don't get the response I need, it amps up my anxiety, so I step closer again and again until I'm either soothed or I get so worked up that love feels like a huge waste of my life.

Because of these patterns established throughout my life, emotional security is something I need in a different way than secure people.  That doesn't make it better or worse than anyone else—unless you're the avoidant on the polar opposite side of the need.  The avoidant's need for independence, their oft-refused acceptance of needing another person, is a defense mechanism and a way to fulfil their own established patterns. 

The avoidants' defensive self-perception that they are strong and independent is confirmed, as is the belief that others want to pull them into more closeness than they are comfortable with.  The anxious types find that their perception of wanting more intimacy than their partner can provide is confirmed, as is their anticipation of ultimately being let down by significant others.  So, in a way, each style is drawn to reenact a familiar script over and over again. 

My secure friends, and certainly my avoidant ones, have a very hard time understanding this.  They don't get why I can't always just suck it up and go on and get over someone, even when they've hurt me time and again.  But when that attachment system is activated and spinning out of emotional control, contact with that person can immediately soothe all of my anxieties, much in the same way an upset baby is soothed by the presence of its missing mother. 

Many individuals find it hard to follow through on their wish to break up, even after they've tried more than once to do it.  Anxious people may take a very long time to get over a bad attachment, and they don't get to decide how long it will take.  Only when every single cell in their body is completely convinced that there is no chance their partner will change or that they will ever reunite will they be able to deactivate and let go.

One of the things Levine and Heller stress is that emotional dependency is not bad.  It is, in fact, a natural part of a healthy relationship to make your partner's needs more important than your own and vice versa.  It's okay and normal and good to elevate someone else's needs above your own when you are healthily in love. 

But I have this history of addicted men.  Alcohol, drugs, sex—I've seen and dated and slept with them all.  I've written before about how I am historically and enabler.  So what about codependence?  Isn't becoming so enmeshed in another person that your boundaries are blurred just dysfunctional?  Doesn't dependency on a partner make you lacking or broken or just fucked-up in some way?

Not necessarily.  

Need and addiction are not the same thing.  Codependency exists, and it is especially relevant in the realm of addiction.  The addict uses their substance as a tool to maintain emotional distance.  They drink or get high or sleep with other people as a way to cope with their own damage, and that often means they are actively inserting something between themselves and their partners.  There are other biological factors that come into play with addiction, as well.  The times I have refused to leave because my partner needed me to take care of them—whether to pick up their drunkenly-abandoned car or make excuses to their boss or friends about why they weren't showing up or to clean up whatever mess they created while they were fucked up—that's where the dysfunction of codependence can actually be applicable. 

Just because you need someone, that doesn't mean that you are addicted to them.

One of the things Attached recommends I do is date a lot of people, to go out with several at once.  That way if an avoidant sneaks (bombards his way) into my circle, I am reassured by the fact that I have someone else over here who wants to go out with me.  It's no big deal that this one fucked up, because there's someone else who finds me attractive and wants to spend time with me.  Historically, I am not a multi-dater, but I'll see how it goes. 

So I put myself back on the market. 

Friday night, I had a date with a new guy.  I'll call him S, because I don't want to reveal his name and—as you'll see shortly—he's not worthy of a jellicle name.  We met nearby at a billiards bar.  We had a couple of slow drinks and talked, though we never got around to actually playing pool.  He was cute and smart and funny.  We sat on the patio of the bar talking about sociology and music and dating as adults.  We walked around for a while, still talking and laughing, and ducked into another bar for a last drink.  I even messaged the Castration Committee while I was peeing that it was going really well. 

With about thirty minutes left in my night, that first kiss was looming.  Okay, you'll get a kiss, and it sounds like there's a chance you'll get another date.  I was looking forward to the prospect of seeing him again and getting to know him better. 

Cut to the chase, and he turned into a handsy ass.  Now, I'm no prude.  While I've been mulling imposing a Three Date Rule for sex, I have never been one to live by such social proprieties.  That doesn't mean I've slept with everyone I've been out with, and certainly not always on a first date, but I am comfortable going quickly down that path if I feel the situation is conducive to such intimacy.  Yes, sometimes, it's just a one-nighter.  I had to be home in an hour; this was not going to be one of those nights. 

For the first time in a really long time, I felt like a 16-year-old piece of cheap meat.  I felt stupid and also insulted that I was being offered a quickie in the backseat of his car, parked down a dark side street.  Again, not a scenario I'm unfamiliar with given my history, but I am not that girl anymore.  I'm a grown-ass woman.  I am worth far more than what this man was clumsily and uncomfortably offering me. 

And after writing two weeks ago and talking with my therapist this week, it was like I was watching this from above, from outside my own body.  For a moment, it felt like Stephanie was sitting there with Quinn as this recently-nice man imposed himself on us.  I could feel myself now, knowing this was just insulting, but I could also feel Quinn sitting silent and petulant, wishing he would just take his rough hands and slobbering mouth off of her. 

Something in me clicked and shoved him away quickly.  I got out of the car and said I needed to go.  I walked back to my car, a block away.  I texted Pandy to let her know it had gone awry but that I was okay. 

This is where I will also interject that I called Bounder.

In the now-14 months since we met, dated, broke up, dated again, broke up again, slept together, slept together again, dated others, slept together again, et cetera, we have continued to have this weird connection.  One of us reached out to the other, usually via text, at just that right moment when the other seems to need us.  We still sometimes dream of each other at the same time, as we'll find out a day or two later. 

But in all of that time, with all of the men I've gone out with, Bounder always seems to know.  He has never failed to text me while I'm with someone new, sometimes at the most inappropriate moments that I don't see until after the fact.  He's never failed to reach within than four hours after I've been with a new guy.  Whether he smells my perfume on the wind or has a bug in my phone (no, he doesn't), he just knows.

It is unquestionably the dance of an Anxious and Anxious-Avoidant.

I'd even joked on Friday afternoon that I wasn't blowing off this first date with S just to go sleep with Bounder.  (It wouldn't have been the first time.)

I hadn't even left my house for the date when his text came.

Totally innocent response to something else from days before.  I was leaving for the date when I saw the message.  The man is uncanny, really. 

And I didn't shut down this thing with S because of Bounder.  He really doesn't have the power to cock-block my dates from a distance.  I wasn't caught up in the idea of him that night; I was completely engaged with S until it turned weird.  (Let me stress here that at no time with S did I feel unsafe or in any type of danger.  I was simply very, very uncomfortable.)

My voice shaking and low, I called Bounder to tell him thank you for having never made me feel like I owed him anything.  Honestly, I was thankful it was a late-night voicemail and that I didn't have to talk to him directly.  For all of his faults, for all of the times I have done this fucked-up pathological dance with the man I love more than any other ever but who is such a heartbreakingly-close-but-terrible fit for me, he never made me feel sexually worthless.  In fact, as I was working through some pretty ugly memories and trying to get past some things, he was incredibly, beautifully patient and supportive with me.  He failed me in a lot of ways, but he never, ever made me feel anything but beautiful and wanted for exactly who I was, not because I should or might be something else, not because there was an expectation.  And that, in and of itself, is its own kind of love. 

So I'm still learning how to step differently, how to dance to a different beat.  It's not like reading this book would suddenly make me not maladaptive.  But it did open my head, giving me some insight and tools to work toward the healthy relationship I likely never would've possessed, had I not started this process of intense self-analysis and re-discovery. 

As shaken as I was when I walked away from that uncomfortable moment, I know I am fully engaged in this process.  I'm not watching from afar, checking out emotionally to just let things happen to me.  Healthy or unhealthy choices are my choices, and they aren't dependent on what Cissie or Quinn might want, though their needs are sometimes still my needs.

I drove us all home and to bed.  Alone.

And as La Bruja commented on Facebook as we talked about this date, "The good things that I see from this: 1) material—duh; 2) nothing happened and you're fine; 3) when you meet the right man, and some hot guy starts flirting with you while you're in line at Starbucks, you won't wonder if you missed any fun experiences by not dating more. You'll know you've got a great thing going and that 97% of all the guys who flirt with you would not come close to measuring up."

 

And I don't understand. You deserve so much more than this.

When I was a child and would misbehave, my mother would send me to my room, out of her line of sight, with the words, "I love you, but I don't like you very much right now."

I love you, but I don't like you.

I don't like you.

I love you, but....

I love you, because I have to.

I love you, because I am required to.

The more trouble I was in, the more of my name I would hear.  Just "Stephanie!" was a warning.  "Stephanie Karen!" meant I was treading on some pretty thin ice.  "Stephanie Karen Quinn!" meant there was likely a spanking in my immediate future. 

But when I was a good girl, when I was sweet and obedient and well-behaved, I was Cissie.

To this day, I'm not terribly clear on the origin of the nickname.  I know it was given to me by a close family friend.  It was not diminutive of my given name, nor was it reference to my being a sister; there was no sibling calling me Sissy, as is so common in the South.  (I was raised an only child, and my (step/instant/in-my-heart) brother came to live with my mom and stepdad when I was in college.)

I remember being called Cissie until junior high school, when I demanded that both family and classmates call me only Stephanie.  While it may have been sweet inside the family, it was hard to explain this other name that made no logical sense to anyone else.  Eventually I rebelled against this thing I didn't understand and established myself fully as Stephanie Quinn.  When I went to the alternative magnet high school, no one knew Cissie had ever existed. 

Cissie was blond and blue-eyed.  (Stephanie has green eyes.)  She was smart and shy, though she could flourish as a chatterbox when she was comfortable.  For Cissie, it was important to be what Mama and Daddy and everyone else expected her to be.  If she wasn't, she was punished. 

Cissie - Age 3 or 4

But sometimes, no matter what Cissie did, she was just not enough.  She was tall but uninterested in basketball or sports of any kind.  She was smart but sometimes didn't want to do the tedious, necessary classwork.  Sometimes she tried to do it her own way, to challenge and entertain herself, but she would be chastised for doing it wrong, for not doing it how others wanted or expected it to be done. 

Cissie was also scared a lot.  Daddy had a sharp temper and would yell loudly at the least provocation.  Sometimes he would rear his hand back in anger, and sometimes it made contact.  Mama would nod and "Uh-huh" while Cissie talked, but she didn't always seem to hear those little girl words, especially if they weren't the words Mama wanted to hear.  And sometimes Mama would lash out in momentary anger and pop her little arm with the hard plastic hairbrush.  The oval red spot on the back of her arm might sting for hours, but it never felt as harsh as the pressing lump in her throat, the one she refused to talk or cry over. 

Cissie learned to spend time on her own, to entertain herself with imaginary friends and wishes for things that just never seemed to come true.  Cissie learned to bite the inside of her cheeks in just the right way that both kept her quiet and betrayed none of the anger she was harboring inside her little sweetheart mouth.  She had repetitious nightmares of witches and of vampires who lived in the back of her closet.

Cissie was also the little girl who was molested by a man who said he loved her, by a man who told her that if she didn't go along with it or if she spoke about it that she would be in trouble. 

It's no wonder that I didn't want to be Cissie. 

Stephanie - Age 14

 

But lately that little girl has been trying to tell me something. 

After another Fragile Cat skittered away, I was in a text conversation with Bounder (which is a whole different blog post's worth of fuckedupedness):

I'm tired of the hurt, you know? I'm tired of hiding in plain sight.  I don't want to be afraid of the shadows, scared of what seems to be there but isn't.  I feel again like my heart if wasting away.  I can't take another one who stays for days or weeks, with all of his fine words and implications.  I'm better with the balance, and I can't put these lessons into play without another person on the other side of that equation.  I want that safe place.  It's what I miss most, and I'm afraid.

And for all of my crazy, for all of my batshit and intensity, I'm a really good girl.  A guy could do a hell of a lot worse than me.

Very true statement dear...

I feel like being me will never be good enough.  I can either be myself or be what someone else expects.

And that little girl in me started to cry. 

It didn't matter what I did sometimes.  It didn't seem to matter that I was smart or clever or funny, loving or imaginative or curious, as long as I was doing what was expected of me.  As soon as I defied expectations, "I love you, but...."

There is no caveat for love.

There should be no conditions on love.  No one should ever have to negotiate the basics of their personality or their soul to feel that they are loved.  If a man tells me now that he loves me but he wishes I were quieter, less impulsive, less brash, more submissive, daintier, more deferential, I shouldn't accept those things.  I wouldn't accept those things, except I have accepted those things because it is what I learned as a child. 

Be different for me to love you, because what you are now is too much, is not enough, is wrong, and I cannot care for this defiant creature that you are.

All Cissie wanted was to be told that she was good enough, that it didn't matter that she wasn't perfect, that she defied Mama and Daddy's ideals in ways that still made her special and beautiful and acceptable and likable and lovable.  She wanted to know that she was good enough, that she didn't have to keep fighting and trying, that it was okay to be less than perfect.  And she wanted to know that she was good enough, that they would be proud of her for who she was, not for the accomplishments and the grades and the good choices she made that were really never choices at all. 

So for that little girl, to that little girl, I say, "Cissie, it's okay.  You are a good girl.  You were always a good girl.  It's wonderful that you weren't perfect, and it's good that you made mistakes.  You watched and learned, and you helped get me to here and now.  I'm sorry you didn't feel safe and protected and loved like you should've.  You deserved that, not just because you were a little girl but because you brilliantly, spectacularly special, and you were you."

Tonight, I will let her cry all she wants, to let out what is hurting her heart still, and I will tell her as often as she needs to hear it that she was worthy of all of that love, even when she wasn't always shown that. 

Going forward, I will do my best to honor that, to remind her and remind myself that Stephanie is resilient and sensitive because of the bullets Cissie took, that I learned to rebel because of the deference she endured and the secrets she kept, that I deserve healthy love now just as much as she did then. 

We are both worth it. 

 

You shout it out, but I can't hear a word you say.

When I started writing Muchness and Light in late 2010, DH was not happy.  I'd been toying with an old writing project, which later morphed into Persona Non Grata, and I'd been thinking for days about starting a blog.  I wanted a different outlet to hone skill and craft.  I was also in the beginnings of what would become this huge shift in how I saw myself and my place in my world. 

Initially, he was hurt and irritated that I hadn't consulted him about it.  It wasn't that I wanted to write, he argued, but that he could've helped me choose the blogging platform and the technology that would be best for my project.  I hadn't needed his help, though.  I was perfectly capable of researching these things and deciding what would work best for me. 

For a while, I didn't readily share my writing with him.  He would grumble when I did a new piece, seemingly irritated both at what I had to say and that I was saying it at all.  Yes, it diverted time and attention away from him and the children and whatever else I'd normally been doing for two hours on any given morning.  To delay the laundry or the dishes, to allow myself a little time to get inside my own head and see how it worked, was certainly giving my psyche a chance to flex muscles it hadn't used in about ten years. 

I was thinking for myself again.  I was doing for myself again.  I was still handling everything logistically in our world, but I was changing.

DH was not happy.

In hindsight, our marital problems were really amping up.  Of course I knew there were issues—that was part of the reason I was so unhappy.  It was very difficult to mend or even maintain our relationship, especially given the enormous change I was experiencing. 

Through all of the volatility, I wrote. 

As our marriage spiraled out of control, we would fight in the guise of trying to repair our damage.  Night after night of emotionally and verbally violent arguments, a constant battering of each other, trying our best to both attack each other and defend our positions.  Sometimes I would just sit and take it, letting him yell at me as punishment for the choices I'd made that had flown in the face of our marriage.  Sometimes I would yell back, vehemently reminding him of all the ways he had failed me and us, as well.  Sometimes when he was especially brutal, I would do my best to disengage and walk away until we were both calmer and more reasonable. 

DH never liked it when I disengaged.  It infuriated him that I would step out of his line of fire and walk away.  That was often when his words would become knives thrown straight at my heart. 

Late one night, when it was apparent that he'd worn me down to the point of just taking it, I realized there was no reasoning with him.  I was tired of being told I was wrong and said something about going inside to write for a while.

"Your writing is a joke!" he laughed derisively.  "No one gives a fuck about what you have to say!  Your blog is just your fucking diary about shit no one but you and your friends care about it.  You should shut the fuck up while you still have a shred of dignity!"

Make no mistake that it stung like hell.  After twenty years together, he knew how to cut me to the core.  I questioned my writing, my motivations, my talent, and my voice.  Since that incident over two years ago, I have heard those words in my head every single time I have been unsure of this path. 

I could tell myself that what I had to say mattered.  Sure, it matters to me.  It matters to my friends.  I have collected a small but loyal readership of people I've never met and never hear from, but I see the web traffic and get occasional messages from random people telling me that something I wrote touched them. 

I still questioned it all the time. 

Recently I started writing guest posts for DivorcedMoms.com.  Given what I know about being both divorced and being a mom, it seemed like a natural extension of what I do here.  Plus it would be an additional outlet to tackle some issues and say some things I might not want to constantly float on Muchness and Light.  (This is not a divorce blog, after all.)

I submitted my second piece, "8 Things Every Divorced Woman Should Do NOW!" a couple of weeks ago, as part of a suggested assignment on their contributor site.  I was thrilled when they not only ran the piece but also featured it that week in their newsletter and on their splash page.  I saw the link to the article tweeted and retweeted by the editors. 

Someone else was interested in what I had to say. 

Two days ago, I received an email from one of the DivorcedMoms.com editors. 

Hi Stephanie,

We are thrilled to tell you that your article is featured on mariashriver.com 

http://mariashriver.com/blog/2014/03/8-things-every-woman-should-do-for-herself-stephqj/

It a great article and we are so happy to see it profiled.  We love your writing, keep the posts coming:)

What?!?

And there it was.  Maria Shriver's site had picked up my article and reposted it.  There was a link back to DivorcedMoms and to my writer profile there.  She (or her social media person) had tweeted the link, which was retweeted repeatedly by strangers.  It was on her Facebook page, with comments from women I'd never known saying how much they enjoyed it, how it mattered to them. 

After the obligatory squealing and dancing and texting and calls to almost everyone I knew, I forwarded the email to my therapist. 

Someone else wanted to hear what I had to say. DH was wrong. I shouldn't have shut up and been quiet.

And I started to cry.  As I've admitted before, I sometimes cry when I write.  I'll hit some place of emotional truth, and the tears flow cathartically as the tension is released.  (Hell, I'm crying as I write this now.)

It wasn't so much confirmation that DH was wrong; it was verification that I wasn't.  My voice mattered to someone else, to someone other than me, and it had value even if only for a moment. 

I was right to write again.  I was right to question my life, then and now, and to work through my issues in the public forum I'd chosen all by myself.  I was right to believe that my words held strength and worth and truth outside my own busy, complicated head. 

I don't know what path I'd be on had I not chosen this one.  In the end it doesn't matter, because this is where I am.  It may not be right for anyone else.  It may not have been right for DH.  But it is exactly where I am supposed to be.

 

My two cents is worth ten grand.

Childhood molestation.  Parental divorce.  Teenage date rape.  Abusive boyfriend.  Suicide attempts.  Morbid obesity and body image issues.  Marriage gone horrible awry.  Series of unhealthy romantic relationships with unavailable men. 

That's the quick and dirty laundry list of the bullshit that led me to now.  But that is not me.

Like so many other people, I fulfill a statistic.  According to the National Center for Victims of Crime, 9.2% of victimized children are sexually assaulted.  1 in 5 girls are victims of sexual abuse.  3 of 4 children who are sexually assaulted are victimized by someone they know well.  63% of women who suffer abuse by a family member also report rape or attempted rape after the age of 14. 

50% of children in America live through the divorce of their parents.  Adults whose parents were divorced are 50% more likely to divorce themselves. 

10% of high-schoolers are physically abused by their dating partner.  50% of youth who are victims of both physical and sexual assault attempt suicide.

15% of Americans are obese.  6.6% are morbidly obese. 

40% of people have maladaptive attachments in adult relationships, driven by the events of their past—with the seeds of dysfunction often beginning in early childhood. 

I am not special.

I talk very openly in public and in private about all of these things.  I didn't for a very long time.  There was certainly a sense of shame about all of it.  When I came to the understanding that keeping these things in secret only perpetuated that cycle of shame that never should've been mine, I began to attack these issues head-on and put them into a healthy perspective.  They've been analyzed and discussed and dealt with, at least until some other issue arises that is a direct or indirect result of what happened.

Muchness and Light was started, in part, as an outlet for dealing with the transformations that came from that self-scrutiny.  Hell, I wrote a book about a lot of it. 

But if you meet me in person, I will never offer you my hand and say, "Hi, I'm Stephanie.  I'm a victim."

I don't live like that.  I don't think like that.  Stephanie is not defined by her past, but she sure as hell is shaped by those events. 

Sometimes there's a reason to make parallels to something that happened with some new event in my life.  Usually it's because there's a problem.  Often the root of my problems surround how I crave and strive for intimacy and love from another person.  I do have times when I feel unloved and worthless, and that's when the self-analysis can become brutal.

I've written a few times about my sense of worth, both to myself and to the people I love.  Regardless of how it seems sometimes, I am acutely aware of my inherent value as a mother and a woman and a soul.  I get tripped up in my value to other people, especially when something has gone wrong. 

In my mind, as a combination of both head and heart, I have been worth very little to a lot of people in my life.  Other people's perceptions and mistakes and miscommunications shouldn't be a barometer of my value, but they often are.  And I know I'm not alone in this.

Even people who are in healthy, secure, romantic relationships see themselves in relation to their partner.  There's a natural loop of positive feedback—through words and touch and action, consideration and thought and care—that show you how your partner values you.  If they are attentive and thoughtful in their approach and recognition of you, if they are engaged with you, the neurotransmitters and hormones responsible for the physical emotion of love are released again and again.  You feel closer to, and more secure with, this other person, making you more willing to reciprocate in kind.  Then their body is responding similarly, and it's a wonderful cycle of love. 

You are important to each other and are showing the other their worth to you by supporting and cherishing and caring for them. 

But when words and actions don't match, or don't exist at all, it devalues the relationship.  Eventually it begins to undermine the self-worth of one or both partners.  If he loves me, he will care for me.  If he doesn't care for me, I am unimportant to him.  I am unimportant to the person I love, who is supposed to love me most in the world.  If that is all this special person thinks of me, I must not be worth very much to him. I must not be worth very much at all.  I am worthless.

One bad relationship shouldn't be able to damage your self-perceptions, but rarely is it one bad relationship.  There's is almost always a series of events—of romantic, erotic, platonic, and familial relationships—that build upon one another, piling on the sense of lessthanness. 

Look at it like an economy.  At birth, you're worth $1,000,000, just because you exist.  Your parents and family care for you and raise you and help you grow.  Eventually you're worth $2,000,000, and you set out into the world, socializing and developing your own interpersonal relationships outside of your family.  Your first boyfriend or girlfriend is pretty good; they add $250,000 to your value.  Your next one breaks your heart, and you lose $750,000.  Now you're at $1,500,000 when you meet your future spouse.  They add $500,000.  Your marriage adds $1,000,000.  Lost friendships deduct $300,000 each.  Kids add $5,000,000 each but have constant volatile flux for the first twenty years, so your value is in constant shift. 

When you find that you have trauma after trauma, especially when they've happened at the hands of the people who are supposed to love you most in the world, it eventually begins to feel like no one has ever or could ever help bring you back into positive territory.  No matter how hard you work to build your own value--$100,000 for graduating high school, $250,000 for college, $1,000,000 for the PhD, and $500,000 for the first great job—you're still constantly trying to overcome this deficit that's been in place and growing for as long as you can remember. 

What I want and will say I need (That's an entirely different discussion I'll get into later.) most is for just one person to step up and show me that I matter to them.  That I matter at all.  Because I was let down so many times, I don't believe in my heart that anyone is capable of loving me.  There are people capable of doing it, in general; I know many of them.  But of all of the people who have come through my life over its course thus far, it is with rare exception that anyone has ever shown up for me consistently and shown me that I am worth a damn to them. 

Even if I am worth $1,000,000 on paper, it means nothing unless someone is willing to barter for it.  It doesn't grow unless it's invested.  And if it's just used and depleted over time, it will eventually drop to $0.  Even the Hope Diamond is estimated to be worth $350,000,000, but it's just a shiny rock in a box until someone actually pays for it.

I recognize that it's not necessarily about me.  I am attracted to emotional unavailability, because it is what I have always known.  In my own maladaptation, in my own inherent brokenness, I search for people who are just as broken in their own, extreme way that is the polar opposite of my own damage.  Even if and when I learn new tools for handling that and making healthier choices, I will still be jaded by my past.  I can't forget that these things happened, and they will always be a constant, flashing caution signal as I move forward along my path.

If I build my house on a hill, I can build it with a level foundation.  I'm still building it on a hill.  There's a strong possibility that, given enough time, the foundation will shift and settle, needing to be jacked back up and supported from time to time.  I could always raze the damn hill, but that would require cost and energy to devastate miles of visible landscape to try to forget there ever was a hill in the first place. 

My hill is a slippery slope, but I fought my way to the top to plant my rainbow freak flag in the summit.  From here, there's a pretty damn amazing view.  But it's also sometimes lonely, and I'm tired of looking down and seeing all the people who shrugged and walked away from the clamber, who found themselves unworthy of escalation and therefore made me feel unworthy of their effort. 

So, yeah, sometimes I sit my ass down and cry, howling my lamentations into the wind.  Far too often it has seemed like a siren's call, bringing a reticent hero crashing into the rocks below; for rescue or marooned companionship, I don't know.  But maybe, just maybe, that song will be worth something to someone, someday.  And maybe someone else will be willing to fight their way to my summit and join me in surveying everything we've left behind. 

 

I stand up, and I'm searching for the better part of me.

During the process of divorce, especially at the beginning, life becomes almost exclusively about your children.  Obviously for people who don't have kids or who have adult children, it's a different story, but I don't know what that's like.  Living through both my parents' divorce when I was 11, as well as the last couple of years, I only have intimate knowledge of what it's like from my perspective.

Like so many couples, DH and I had brutal, nasty arguments before the separation.  We tried our best to keep them away from the boys, though I know we weren't always successful.  While we did our best to keep the energy off of them, there's no way they didn't feel the tension.  Sometimes it boiled over and disrupted their lives, occasionally waking them or turning into a heated exchange in the middle of dinner. 

The night we told them that we were separating was the worst of my life.  In that moment, I remembered very clearly being the child huddled on the couch between my parents.  They were both sadly stoic, trying to explain clearly and concisely that they were divorcing, that our lives would change, but that we were still a family who would get through this together.  Watching the boys cry the night we told them, I knew exactly how their hearts were breaking and all of the questions they'd both ask me and keep quietly and painfully to themselves. 

At first, all of my energy went into keeping them calm and safe.  With very good reason, I was even more attentive and patient with them.  I tried to make every waking moment as quality as I could muster, while also giving them space to be able to breathe and think on their own or together, away from Mom. 

Eventually I had to start living my own, private life.  I had to begin to see what being a single mom and woman was like.  A big part of that, of course, has been dating. 

My parents were very good at this.  I was about the same age as Max, so four years older than Tricky, when my parents separated.  When they each started dating, they were careful to keep those new people away from me.  I can only remember meeting two men my mom went out with, one of whom is my stepdad of more than twenty-five years.  I met a few more women with my dad, though he has always said some were nothing more than friends.  He dated one woman for several years, and she actually lived with us for a good portion of their relationship.  Both he and I are still friends with her, even though they've been broken up far, far longer than they were together. 

When I started dating Bounder and saw the potential of something more important, having him meet the boys eventually became necessary.  It wasn't that I needed them to welcome their new daddy into their life; no one will ever replace their father, whom they love very, very much.  But if he and I were going to have a relationship, we would need to spend quality, physical time together.  And, no, I don't just mean sex.  (He never, ever spent the night at my house while the boys were home.) 

Dating and being in love would have to consist of more than constant texts and emails.  Regular phone calls couldn't replace regular hugs and kisses.  While quality time and conversation are of tantamount importance to me, I am bi-lingual (in The 5 Love Languages sense) for physical touch.  The small intimacies of handholding and kisses on the cheek are just as important to me as the loving whispers and soft laughs in my ear.  I need boisterous laughter, both in and out of the bedroom. 

Of all the men I've met and gone out with since I separated from DH, the boys have only met Bounder.  Initially, it was a ten-minute, "nice to meet you" moment one afternoon.  Eventually they were okay with his coming to visit me after they went to bed, then they were comfortable with dinners together and a movie after.  We would occasionally take them out and do something with them, together.  When he and I broke up, they were sad for me but also a little sad that they wouldn't get to see him.  I handled it well (at least in front of them).  They know that I still have occasional contact with him and ask me about him from time to time. 

It's hard enough to bring someone new into my life, but my life includes two boys.  They have to be a part of anything substantial.  Not only are they the most important people in my life, I am their primary caregiver.  They spend the majority of their time in my care.  With some potential changes on the horizon, I am likely to be responsible for them even more of the time.  If I try to wait to see someone I'm dating until a night when I don't have them, it could be weeks that we have to wait. 

Relationships can't function healthily like that. 

While it was best to make the boys the main focus initially, it does no one any good for them to be the only priority.  We live in such a child-centric time, but they have to learn that they really aren't the epicenter of anyone's world but their own.  They are of an age to begin to realize there's more to life than just them. 

Stephanie is more than Mommy.

Going back to school, working small jobs while I'm doing it, makes our life very busy.  I can no longer devote all of my time and energy to their schedules.  Our family calendar is sometimes a color-coded nightmare of homework and school events and appointments.

But taking the time to be me, content and comfortable in who I am and my abilities, makes me a better woman.  Being a complete woman, who is able to both express and receive love from more than just my children, makes me a better mother. 

And it's good for them to see that Mom can go on and have a happy, healthy, productive life.  They won't always been in the house with me, no matter how often they declare that they'll always live with me.  They will eventually move on to college and relationships and the lives that they build for themselves.  I will be here (figuratively or literally, I don't know yet), living and building my own future. 

When I am happy and healthy, living my life while incorporating them into it, I show them by example.  My goal is to raise healthy young men who can handle their own shit.  My hope is that they find partners who can do the same, in part because that is what their mother modeled for them.