Later that morning when I walk into the kitchen holding Chase, Craig turns away from the eggs he’s cooking and smiles at us. It’s a sheepish, questioning smile. I walk Chase over to him and Craig puts down his spatula and wraps his arms around us. This hug is our acknowledgment of last night and our agreement not to discuss it again. We will put that box of darkness away and carry on with what we’re good at: family.
* * *
We have two baby girls. We name the first one Patricia, after my mother, and the second one Amanda, after my sister. Tish and Amma. Sisters. We get ourselves a mortgage and a minivan. We find a church. Who could ask for more? Life at home with three kids is rich, bursting at the seams with love, but I am stunned by the amount of work that caring for my children requires. I quit teaching to stay home with them, and their needs are relentless. From dawn to dusk and then through the night I am reacting, responding, juggling, dripping with children. I am running a never-ending relay race, and since I am the only runner, I keep passing the baton back and forth to myself. My exhaustion is total.
Craig and I decide that our best chance of survival is to divide and conquer, so we laugh and cry together less often. Craig does his part by working all day and helping with the kids in the evening. Even so, I feel resentful. When he tells me about his long work lunch, I say, “I had the crusts from the kids’ grilled cheese for lunch, and I ate it standing over the sink.” When he mentions an article he read, I tell him how difficult it is for me to imagine having time to read an article. When he returns from his evening networking event, I ask if networking is the fancy word for drinking beer with other people who happen to have jobs. I’m embarrassed by my bitterness and worried because we are slipping further away from each other and deeper into ourselves. When we were three, we were one world, but now Craig has the outside world and I have the world of our home. We cannot bridge the two.
Every evening Craig walks through the door, smiles hopefully, and says, “How was your day?” This question is like a spotlight pointed directly at the chasm between his experience of a “day” and my experience of a “day.” How was my day? The question lingers in the air while Amma shoves her hand in my mouth, while Chase screams, “Mommy come help me!” from the bathroom, while Tish cries in the corner because I never, ever, ever let her drink the dishwasher detergent. I look down at my spaghetti-stained pajama top, unwashed hair, and gorgeous baby on my hip, and I want to say:
How was my day? It was a lifetime. It was the best of times and the worst of times. I was both lonely and never alone. I was simultaneously bored out of my skull and completely overwhelmed. I was saturated with touch—desperate to get the baby off of me and the second I put her down I yearned to smell her sweet skin again. This day required more than I’m physically and emotionally capable of, while requiring nothing from my brain. I had thoughts today, ideas, real things to say and no one to hear them.
I felt manic all day, alternating between love and fury. At least once an hour I looked at their faces and thought I might not survive the tenderness of my love for them. The next moment I was furious. I felt like a dormant volcano, steady on the outside but ready to explode and spew hot lava at any moment. And then I noticed that Amma’s foot doesn’t fit into her Onesie anymore, and I started to panic at the reminder that this will be over soon, that it’s fleeting—that this hardest time of my life is supposed to be the best time of my life. That this brutal time is also the most beautiful time. Am I enjoying it enough? Am I missing the best time of my life? Am I too tired to be properly in love? That fear and shame felt like adding a heavy, itchy blanket on top of all the hard.
But I’m not complaining, so please don’t try to fix it. I wouldn’t have my day or my life any other way. I’m just saying—it’s a hell of a hard thing to explain—an entire day with lots of babies. It’s far too much and not even close to enough.
But I’m too tired to say any of this. I’m a windup doll that’s run out. So I just say, “Our day was fine.” Then I hand the baby to Craig, pull my dirty hair back into a ponytail, step into some flip-flops, and grab my purse. The kids notice that I’m preparing to leave and they start to cry and wrap their little arms around my leg. I kiss the tops of their heads, whisper, “Mommy will be right back,” and extract myself from their grip.
I walk outside, climb into our van, shut myself inside, and breathe deeply. I drive to Target and wander the housewares aisles. I see a woman there with two toddlers in her cart and I want to walk over and say, Excuse me. Is this the best and worst time of your life? Are you scared of your anger and your love? Do you have trouble talking to your husband? Do you feel heard, seen, known by anyone? Are you getting lost in there, too? But I can’t say any of that, because we have all agreed to stick closely to the script. There are only a few things we are allowed to say to each other, so I choose one of them. I smile and say, “Your babies are beautiful.” She smiles back and I notice exhaustion and longing in her eyes, but I tell myself I’m projecting. I turn away and keep filling my cart with things I don’t need that I’ll return later. Bulimic shopping, my dad calls it. As my cart gets fuller and fuller, I tell myself, You are a mother and a wife and you are sober and those are your only responsibilities on earth. You have everything you’ve ever wanted. Be grateful. The truth is that I am grateful, but I’m also confused. We have done what we were supposed to do. We have become a family. But becoming a family has not made me unlonely.
* * *
Craig and I are good parents, but we are not good friends or lovers to each other. I wonder if this is because I chose the wrong man and Craig chose the wrong woman—or maybe because we didn’t choose each other at all. I wonder if Craig believed I was the right thing instead of the right one. I wonder if we’ll divorce after the kids leave for college, since we’ll have nothing left to talk about. I wonder if we should just keep having kids, so we won’t lose our glue. I wonder what it would be like to be married to a poet, to stay up late into the night discussing ideas and art, love and war, with enough passion and traction between us to fight loudly and make up tenderly. I wonder if my friends have with their husbands whatever it is we’re missing. I wonder if everyone has what we are missing. Mostly, I try to stop these wonderings as soon as they begin. Wondering about true love and good sex feels like touching a hot stove. Considering these impossibilities burns and hurts, so I recoil quickly. There is no point in wondering what if or what else because I will never leave Craig. He’s a good man, a devoted father, a gentle husband. I need to be grateful. I’ll stay lonely for the rest of my life if it means my children have a family. I can’t have it all. What we have is good enough. I stop reading love stories, and this helps me stop wondering.
7
ONE DAY I PASS by my computer with Amma in my arms and notice that some of my Facebook friends are participating in something called “25 Things.” They’re posting lists of interesting facts about themselves and I think, Maybe I could make a list, too. I consider that this might be a way to reach people outside my home, to complete a sentence, to tell the truth, to prove to myself and others that I still exist. Yes, I decide. I do want to make my own list. I put Amma down for a nap, sit at the computer, and start typing:
#1. I’m a recovering bulimic and alcoholic, but I still find myself missing bingeing and booze in the same twisted way a woman can miss someone who repeatedly beats her and leaves her for dead.
I sit and stare at the words I’ve written: stark, bold, and unapologetic. I feel thrilled. Yes. There I am. Right there. That’s not lost Glennon or found Mrs. Melton. That’s not my representative. That’s the real me. I want to learn more about me, so I keep writing. My fingers are flying now, pounding against the keyboard like they’ve been waiting a lifetime to be freed. They type juicy, dangerous, desperate sentences about marriage and motherhood and sex and life—it all pours out fast and furious, like the real me is gasping for air, like she’s trying to get it all out at once in case she’s never allowed to surface again. As I f
inish and stare at my writing, I feel more like I’m looking into a mirror than I have ever felt looking into an actual mirror. There I am, the inside me, on the outside. As I read and reread my list, trying to get to know me, I hear crying from upstairs. Amma is awake from her nap and she needs me. She’ll have to wait because I’m finally awake, too, and I need me first. I’m desperate for other people to see this version of me, so I post the list to my Facebook wall and then climb the stairs to Amma’s room.
An hour later I return to my computer. I look at the screen and scramble to make sense of what I’m seeing. My list has been shared publicly by friends and I have an in-box full of messages. I look at my wall and it’s covered with notes from acquaintances and strangers. I feel sick, overly exposed, regretful. I’ve said too much and I want to take it all back. I shut the computer and walk away. Later that night I make a cup of hot tea, sit in front of the computer, and start opening messages.
The first is from a stranger. It reads, “I don’t know you but I read your list this morning and I’ve been crying with relief for hours. Your list was my list of secrets. I thought I was the only one.” I open a different message from an old friend: “Glennon. My sister is an alcoholic. None of us knows what to do for her.” And another, and another, and another.
“My marriage is falling apart…”
“I don’t know how to find my way out of this depression…”
“Sometimes I wonder if I’m not cut out for parenting. I get so angry that I want to push them down. I don’t, but I want to. I feel like a monster.”
I marvel at the honesty and pain. Many messages are from people I’ve known for years, but I’m discovering that I never really knew them. We’ve spent our time together talking about everything but what matters. We’ve never brought to each other the heavy things we were meant to help each other carry. We’ve only introduced each other to our representatives, while our real selves tried to live life alone. We thought that was safer. We thought that this way our real selves wouldn’t get hurt. But as I read these messages, it becomes clear that we are all hurting anyway. And we think we are alone. At our cores, we are our tender selves peeking out at a world of shiny representatives, so shame has been layered on top of our pain. We’re suffocating underneath all the layers.
* * *
The following week, my sister brings me a brand-new computer and says, “Write, Glennon. Get up every morning and write like the girl who wrote that list.” I follow directions. Since a mother gets done whatever she’ll lose sleep for, my alarm sounds at four thirty every morning. I stumble out of bed and toward the coffeemaker that Craig has preprogrammed for me. I take my coffee into the walk-in closet—my room of my own—and I open my computer and begin to write. Since it’s dark outside and dark in the closet, I feel safe writing about my darkness. Just for this hour, I invite my real self forward to speak her pain, anger, love, and loss. I never miss this morning appointment with myself, because I can tell something important is happening in my closet. After I write, I feel calmer, healthier, and stronger. Every time I fling an internal demon onto the blank page, that demon turns out to be much less scary than I thought she was. I am becoming less afraid of myself. I wonder if this is because I need to check my shame levels daily, like a diabetic checks her insulin levels. Truth telling becomes my shame checker and my relief. It’s a holy purging of the painful fullness of my secrets. And it’s safe, because I’m purging in the dark, to a screen, so I never have to see anyone’s confused or embarrassed reaction.
After a few months, I feel ready for others to see my writing, so I create a blog. Each morning, as I click the “publish” button and walk away to start the day with my babies, my mind is back at that screen. All day I wonder, Will anyone read? Will anyone understand? Will anyone respond? I am itchy for feedback. I check my blog a hundred times a day and find with delight that people are responding. They’re responding from their homes and cubicles and phones and they’re saying, Me too, me too, me too. We see your dark and it matches ours. You are not alone. Every new “like” and comment is a shot of adrenaline. I feel understood. I feel found. My blog community becomes my sanctuary, my safe world where there is no small talk, no script, only truth. Over time my blog goes viral and the agents start calling and I get a contract to write a book. Suddenly, none of my pain is wasted.
My desperation to know and be known by Craig relents. For the first time, all of my needs are being met—largely by strangers. I decide that this is healthy. It’s not right to expect your every need to be met by one person, after all. I find myself writing about Craig instead of talking to him; it’s safer and neater, and our story is tidier and better this way. We are easier to understand as characters than as real people. I can tell that Craig senses me slipping further away from him and into this new world I’ve created. He wants to come with me. He reads every word I write on the blog, and every comment others leave. He often learns the truth about his wife there first.
One day I write about falling off the wagon, because the night before I’d binged and purged after years of food sobriety. Craig reads it along with the rest of my community and writes to me from work. His e-mail says, “I just read your essay. I’m worried about you. Are you okay? Can we talk about these things?” That night, we sit awkwardly together on the couch and try to talk, but I don’t know how to explain my bulimia or myself to him. There is no way to be as honest in spoken words as I can be in written words. I wonder why it’s so much easier to be honest with strangers than with family. Sitting on that couch with Craig, I don’t know how to be my real self. I feel like I’m still my representative. The real me is back in that essay and I just want to say, If you really want to understand, can you just read it again? Instead I say, “I’m okay, honey. I’m really okay, I promise.” I stand up, signaling to Craig that the conversation is over. I do not need from Craig what I used to need. Through strangers on a screen, I’ve found the intimacy I yearned for. We both have, as I will soon learn.
* * *
I start to feel more tired than usual. Every morning my body feels pinned to the bed, like a butterfly in a glass box. My joints ache, my legs swell, and my hair starts falling out in clumps. I am constantly freezing. Two different doctors suggest that my illness is in my mind. I look at my swollen, bruised, skeletal legs and wonder, Is my mind attacking my body? Is my body attacking my mind? Is something from the outside attacking all of me? I don’t know. A third doctor runs blood tests and finds evidence of chronic Lyme disease. I’m pumped full of so many antibiotics for so long that I’m in danger of becoming immune. I get sicker and sicker and we no longer know if I’m ill from the disease or from the treatment.
We buy a small sauna and put it next to our bed. My entire world becomes the two feet between my bed and the sauna. Some days I am so weak that Craig has to help me roll over. Aside from that, we rarely touch each other. My body is in perpetual pain and my mind is in a constant fog. I struggle to complete a spoken or written sentence. I often can’t remember who or where I am.
One night I’m in bed, staring at the ceiling. I feel so heavy, like I’m sinking through the bed—down, down, and away. I lose consciousness. When I come to, I find the phone under the covers and try to lift it to my ear. It feels like a ten-pound weight. I dial my sister, and when she answers, I say, “I think I’m going to die soon. I’m so scared. What’s going to happen to my family?” My sister is crying and I want to comfort her but I’ve already said all the words I can manage. I drop the phone. I hear my kids playing downstairs, and for the millionth time I lament the fact that I have lost the ability to care for them, to even be with them, maybe forever. I fade away and then come back. This happens to me several times a day and it is nothing like falling asleep and waking up—it is like dying and coming back to life. As I open my eyes, I see through a layer of fog that Craig is asleep beside me. I feel between this world and somewhere else. I want to tell Craig to take me to the hospital, but I can’t move my hand to wake him up an
d I can’t find the energy to form the words. I am trapped inside myself. In my mind I scream to him, Take me to the hospital. Take me to doctors and experts and people who know how to help me! He doesn’t move, doesn’t open his eyes, and I’m furious that he can’t hear my silent scream. Now I’m fading away—no longer in my home but on my bed in the mental hospital, staring at the ceiling and telling Mary Margaret about canaries. I’m saying, We’re not crazy, Mary Margaret. But we’re in danger. If they don’t listen to the first signal, the canary dies. And now she’s fading and I’m back in bed with Craig. I look at him and then scan our bedroom with my eyes. I wonder, What is my body telling me? What’s the poison in here? How do I get us out of this mine?
My friend Gena comes to visit and I am gray and small and wrapped in blankets. She is afraid for me. She and Craig plan a trip for our family to her condo in Naples, Florida. As soon as I step off the plane, the sun warms my face, the humidity hits my joints, and I feel relieved. After a few days, my knees stop aching and I stop finding clumps of my hair on my pillow. I find myself able to go on short walks and make my children sandwiches for lunch. On our last night in Naples, Craig touches my leg and I do not yelp in pain. He looks at me and says, “We should move here.”
“Yes,” I say. “We should.” This feels right. We need to get away from everything except each other. We need time, space, sun, and palm trees.
Craig calls his boss the next day and says, “I’m moving to Naples to save my wife’s life.” His boss says, “Go.”
I’m afraid because a health crisis is a hard time to move. I remind myself that since crisis means “to sift,” a crisis is the perfect time to let the extra fall away so only the important will remain. We start to sift. We say good-bye to our kids’ schools, our committees, our neighbors, and our church. We donate most of our things. Our responsibilities fall away like sand and by the time we arrive in Florida, we are left with just the children and each other. We promise ourselves that we will focus on rest, togetherness, and healing.
Love Warrior Page 9