Miss Tricky Takes Over

Life keeps tripping along at such a furious pace around here that most days I feel like I am barely keeping up with it. Have I really been here for a month already? (Have I really been unemployed for a month already?) I haven’t been calling friends as regularly as I should and I have neglected my internet friends terribly. What am I doing? I suppose you could say that I am trying to adjust to being alive again. Life in Pittsburgh, while exactly what I needed, was solo and quiet; Part time work, full time baby and virtually no activities outside of those things. Just a month ago I would sit around my house and marvel at how slowly time could move. Weekends were endless stretches of nothing and my only connection to the outside world was my computer. I think I got used to it. You don’t realize how much energy it takes just to have another adult around until you’ve been without it for almost two years. Now I look at the clock and wonder how it can possibly be four in the afternoon already, where did my day go? How quickly hours pass when they are filled with conversation and cooking and sharing and love. It’s strange to think about how much time I wasted before I moved, and how much less there is to waste now that I am here.

I am ready to be back at work. I have a few prospects this week so hopefully it won’t take much longer because I am dying to get into the rhythm of Philadelphia. I think I love it here already but I haven’t been immersed yet. I am itching to figure out a bus schedule to work and find my favorite coffee places and wear my own groove into the city. I can’t wait to set my own pace. I love being a guest in Mr. President’s world but I am ready to stake my own claim.

Since it’s the way life seems to work, I imagine that a job will come soon and I will feel like I just want one more week to be around him and home. By my birthday I will be whining about busy schedules and wishing I had the days of sneaking in lunch and a movie on a work day back again. By September when The Spawn starts school and I put him on a bus for the very first time I will be wailing and crying and wanting the slow days in Pittsburgh back; longing for the year when life stood still and time didn’t seem to be banging on the door to grow him up and away from me.  I made the jump back into living and doing and now I have to let it all change again. They are wonderful changes and some days the happiness is almost too much to bear. But nothing begins without other things ending and it’s time to start starting, I guess.

I updated my Facebook status awhile back to say just how much I loved having my single greatest fear depicted on Grey’s Anatomy. It was a flippant remark (as status updates are wont to be) but people asked, and it seems to be more and more relevant lately. What better place than the yawning expanse of the internet is there to share?

More than spiders, more than pooping on the delivery table, more than velociraptors, more than basements- I am terribly afraid of not being truly forgiven. I do not believe that there could be anything worse than having someone you love, whom you believe loves you, throw your dark and dirty past in your face. It happens. A lot. I bet even you have done it. If you had really thought about it you probably wouldn’t have, but in anger or hurt things come flying out of mouths that we probably didn’t even know we believed. And even if we manage not to say it, is it there? In our heads? At the end of my marriage my husband and I fought continuously. We were amazing at it. Never have two people been so willing to battle each other to no end. In the midst of the screaming things that I thought I had forgiven or forgotten or let go would come racing out of the depths where I’d stored them. I could feel nasty words, designed to cut him deeply, slamming against my gritted teeth- like a moth at a light bulb, frenzied to escape. I remember watching my mother’s face and seeing the exact moment that some crime I had committed as child popped into her head. It was irrelevant and she knew it, but out it came.

That moment, the one in which all the work you had put in to change means nothing, is the hardest to get through. That is defeat.

There is reason to believe that I entered and stayed in a marriage I knew to be toxic because I felt I could never really move past the mistakes I had already made with him. The word “addict” haunted me and in my fear I thought the only way to get out from under it was to live a normal and healthy life with the man I had been so lost with. It was a selfish and terrible reason to get married- he had to make good so I could be okay. And when he didn’t I couldn’t accept it. I had linked my whole sense of redemption on whether or not we made it work. Somehow getting better without him seemed to only make my initial mistake stand out so much more. And so I got worse with him.

I have over a year of rebuilding behind me these days. Choices I made, consequences I owned and success that I earned…but I cannot erase that past. It cannot be undone and it only gets uglier the farther I get from it. The people I have around me now -family, friends and lover- love me. I know they do. I know that they think what I have overcome and where I am headed is what matters- but my fear persists. What if somewhere inside, ready to spring up out of anger or hurt, is a doubt? Should there be? I suppose so. Is it mostly my own doubt? Probably. I never went to rehab because I took umbrage with the idea that addiction is permanent. That no matter how long sober you would always be defined by that weakness. Why shouldn’t I be able to stand up someday and say “Hi. My name is Tricky and I used to be an addict. I used to think that abusive relationships were the only kind and that love was when someone knew that you were horrible but found a way to deal with you. I used to think that I wasn’t worth anything more than what someone else wanted from me- but I do not believe that anymore.” It seemed contradictory to me to ask people to change by admitting that they could not change. Still does.

And so THAT is my biggest fear. That to other people I will always be the addict or his wife or the angry daughter or the cheater or the drop out and that someday someone who I love the most will remind me that it’s true.