From there to here

October 11, 2004 | Category:

I want to thank everyone for your kind emails about my Blogging for Books entry. I published it on a weekend, when I figured traffic would be slow, and was blown away by the kind responses. I've tried to write a thank you for each one; but this is my deep bow public thanks. I am so terribly touched and grateful.

I've read most of those other entries and frankly, some of those bloggers should, and probably will, be Top 10 authors. I recommend them.

The overwhelming question that has been asked is "However did you ever get from there to here”?

It was a slow climb. For years, I kept getting into relationships where I had to "test" my partner, to make sure he would hold fast - even if I was pummeling him with little rabbit punches in anguished fury. It took me years to learn how to argue, how to share, how to give up control of the relationship but not responsibility.

I made many mistakes. It took a counselor's help but the cycles grew looser and healthier. I had to fight perception, the ones that kept me pegged. "Oh, she's broke again" they would complain. "Oh, they're breaking up. You know how she is with relationships."

In May, 2000 I kind of had that "epiphany" moment. CD's company had flown both of us out to California so CD could manage an IT migration. They put us up at a gorgeous hotel, and I was on a brief lull from bedrest in my second trimester expecting Bear.

We took our new digital camera to Santa Monica one afternoon, and I realized as we walked barefooted down the beach: Hey, I'm happily married, solvent and debt-free with a down payment for a house in the bank... we have a counselor teaching us good relationship skills, good friends, love, good careers, and we have a baby on the way.

More than a dozen years since that fateful court date, and ... I was here. Giggly and pink-cheeked and happy, I told CD that we were walking in a dream come true.

"That's funny," he said, kissing me soundly. "I thought we were walking in California."

And I had some additional realizations in that tangerine sunset:

1) They don't send down an actual angelic choir of angels when there's an epiphany. More like a flock of seagulls dive bombing your rental car.

2) Drama, crises, orgasmic joy - these things happen in everyone's life. It's OK to have a juicy existence and to live out loud - as long as it is from a center of confidence and faith, and there is a state of grace within.

3) Digital cameras don't like sand.

4) Reenacting that scene from "From Here to Eternity" won't have the same zing if wearing maternity panties.

5) The secret to my future happiness was in nothing that was said back then, it was in Linda's example: Kindness. Just that. Kindness.

6) And wherever "here" is, it will never be so far from "there". Both places are indelibly a part of me. It keeps my perspective grounded.

So, who would have guessed that doting mommy living with her tall husband in Pleasantville - the lady who manages programs larger and more expensive than governments of many small nations - would have, long ago, spent a tortured week bottoming out in a Red Roof Inn?

Yeah. So. The good news is that I became this person from those experiences. The bad news is, with those experiences I'll never be President.

As. If.

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