Uncommon Curiosity

The morning’s still quiet here.  The cats are just waking up, and so the chorus of panic over when their next meal will come hasn’t started yet.  The kids and my husband are asleep, and the sky is blue-grey with little yellow streaks of sun just peaking through.  I’m still trying to get over bronchitis – I prefer to treat my illnesses by talking about lying down to rest, rather than doing it, because moms really don’t get that many opportunities to stop, and I have trouble convincing myself to waste them in stillness.  Usually refusing to get sick works beautifully for me – viruses get tired of trying to live inside a whirling dervish and depart for people who’ll more thoroughly enjoy their disease.  But this time I’ve met my match – my shoulders ache from coughing and my throat tastes and feels like the bottom of a swamp.  “Where Are You Going” by Dave Matthews is playing on repeat in my head, an anthem for the past year for me, both a comfort and a challenge.

Life has never been simple – carpet weasel #1, my daughter, has a whole host of diagnoses that attempt to medically describe a beautiful, bright girl whose intellect is 3-4 years ahead of her age, but whose emotions lag 3-4 years behind, with a quirky IQ which shows her to be extremely advanced, but held back by a processing speed that ranks well below the 25th percentile.  She’s outspoken, unintentionally rude in social settings, deeply loving, frequently frustrated, tormented by violent feelings she can’t control – she’s been a teenager since the day she was born.  At 9, she’s seen more therapists, psychiatrists, doctors and personality tests than most people see in their whole lives.  The rest of us have carved out a life around her outbursts and difficulties, and it’s certainly taken its toll, although it’s also brought us together in many ways, and taught us to appreciate small moments of grace.

But then this year happened, and my view of the world turned on its side.  When a life comes tumbling down it’s so easy to see the flaws that were invisible while you were living it.  I was too trusting, too unsure of myself, too willing to believe everyone, anyone else.  Did I know there were problems?  That’s a hard one – I sensed something was wrong, I knew how I was feeling, but I had long-since learned to believe my reactions were wrong, the product of a broken mind.  I really did believe I was the one who was wrong, and I can remember knowing that was true, even as I can see how inconceivable that is now.  I was bullied and I took it, as I had all my life, and I regret it terribly – all of it.  And there’s the rub, the terrible question – would I undo it all?  Go back and erase history?  The easy answer is no, of course not, but I have my doubts.  I adore my children, but they’ve been through so much, and we, as a family, face climbing Everest to make ourselves whole again…it’s a seductive fantasy, going back decades to change the course of my life and wiping the slate clean, and if I didn’t admit to it, well…I’d be a fraud and a liar.

And so there are psychiatrists for them, the weasels and my husband, and eventually for me, too, although what happened in May has erased every last bit of trust I’ve ever had in people, and it’ll be a long time until I gain it back enough to speak the truth out loud again.  My friends who take pills to ease the highs and lows of life have been encouraging me to give it a try, but I’m a suspicious old teetotaler – I didn’t take drugs in college, and I’m certainly not going to take them now to fix unpleasant, but justified and reasonable, reactions to very real events.  In my mind, those little pills are intended for people whose reactions are out of proportion to the events (real or imagined) that trigger them…but perhaps that’s just the last refuge of a troubled mind.

For now I have to trust myself, because everyone around me is at odds.  The family wants it all tv-show better, in time to go get chips and soda during the commercial break.  The doctors tell me the kids need a stable environment, and my friends all want me to kick him to the curb.  The reality isn’t black and white, or even shades of grey.  There are a million considerations in my head, a game theory table in 3-D where all the entries shimmer like fairy lights as probabilities shift and outcomes change.  I’m thinking, and thinking, and thinking of my children – financial stability, moving, the future, the past, school, doctors, friends, family, love, trust, redemption, education – it’s all about them 23 hours a day – even in my dreams I’m tormented by questions of what to do, what to do.

But in the mornings, when they’re sleeping, and their dreams are still sugar plums and Star Wars, I think of myself.  The love I’ve lost, the terrible feeling of emptiness for a passion I don’t feel anymore.  There’s anger and betrayal, and a longing for a better life where I’m not fighting my partner for what’s right every day.  There’s guilt – terrible, gut-crushing guilt – for wanting to abandon my husband now, and for not doing it sooner.  (I’m just so well-trained at guilt, I can feel it no matter what I choose to do.)  I’ve never lost my gift for self-loathing, and it creeps up on me when the day is still too slow to distract myself.  “Why didn’t I see it sooner?  How could I have been so weak?  Why couldn’t I defend myself?  Why did I hide it?  Why couldn’t I hide it longer?  Why didn’t I do a thousand things differently because, clearly, it was all my fault.”  My brain berates me over a million things that I couldn’t have changed even if I had had the will and the strength to change them, because, for myself, I have no mercy, and that’s ultimately what I need to face – not the abuse by others, but the abuse I inflict, every day, on myself.  No pill will quiet the voice inside – I have to find a way to forgive myself the way I am slowly learning to forgive everyone else.

And accept that the world has already changed.  I’ve worked so hard, for so long, to keep the pretty postcard picture of our family from falling apart, I’m having trouble stopping.  I still catch myself trying to cover up, even as the bag is empty and those cats are long gone.  But it does get easier, and I am getting stronger.  The doubt is slowly being replaced by resolve.  It shows in my eyes most days – the weariness of someone’s who’s had to live harder than she was ready to, who’s seen the ugly underneath – but there are brief flashes of joy:  teaching, playing games with my kids, blowing a kiss through the web cam to Kyle, digging in the dirt.

A friend of mine said something profound to me last summer, after I told her everything over a multi-hour lunch.  I said to her, “I don’t know if I can break up with him,” and she replied, “whether you break up or not, the relationship you had together is already over.”  Of course, she was right – I need to figure out how to forgive myself and let the past rest.  I have to stop trying to change what’s happened so I’ll stand a chance at working out what to do now.