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And then what?
January 09, 2007 | Category: In My Life
This blog is a true story.
It's my life.
And now the question I am facing... is there anything left to write?
Yeah, the last 7 years have been like a soap opera.
You know the plot, right? First Luke and Laura break up. Then they get back together.
The bad guy ties her up and she swings over a vat of something nasty. "Oh, Luke!" she cries, her hair rippling down her back. "I've always loved you!"
He shouts her name and struggles to get to her, but in a puff of mist.. she is gone!
Or maybe that was Bo and Hope.
Anyway.
The dips and rises of a life can seem like that sometimes. Like the chapters of a story. Working through time ... to find love, to get pregnant, to stay pregnant, to give birth, to stay married, to stay faithful.
In 2000, the first crisis tied up with a little blue bow. Bear was born after a very high-risk pregnancy. For 7 tense months I had written out my fear and his progress. But on September 6, he was born pink and squirming.
I remember thinking that I was at 'Happily Ever After'.
Yeah, anyone who has ever watched a soap opera knows .... there is no 'Happily Ever After'.
But who could tell me back then? After so many pregnancies, and so many months, there I was. Happily married and a new mother to the most amazing child ever born (just saying).
We'd just bought our first house, a fixer-upper on a quiet street yet so close to the city that we could see the top of the Sears Tower in the morning sun.
We were unpacking. Living in clutter. Hunting the extra toilet paper out of a box titled 'kitchen' and laughing over dinner made in a single saucepan.
Wasn't that the way it was supposed to be?
But just underneath the Rockwellian picture, there was something wrong.
Cue the music from Jaws.
You know how it is. Like a cold coming on. I knew something wasn't right, but I couldn't know how bad it would get.
It got bad.
Dread, anyway.
My baby was pink and perfect. My husband was ashen and oversleeping each morning. Struggling to get through the days.
It wasn't a cold.
I called my old company and asked for my job back. They gave me a new one. In North Carolina. I hired a nanny, and stuffed my swollen boobs in a blouse, and got on a plane every week.
A few weeks later, "Honey," he said on the phone as I paced a garden in Raleigh. "I was just fired."
After that firecracker explosion came the avalanche. All the stuff we'd built up slid down and I watched, horrified, as the next 6 months ruined the bright man I loved.
Until October came, with brilliant orange and red leaves. In a moment of utter exhaustion and agony, I asked him to leave.
Just for a while, I said. Just until we remember how to breath.
He wasn't supposed to agree. He was supposed to suddenly change back and put on a cape and swoop me into his arms and tell me that everything would be all better now.
He left.
You know how it is. People rally. They help out. But behind your back, they don't understand. They say things like what an awful guy he is and how everyone saw it coming.
I didn't see it coming.
And he isn't awful.
He came back 6 weeks later and we had to face facts; what was driving us apart was more than just a little bad patch.
And for the next 3 years, we struggled. We did not go lightly into turning things around. To keep sane, I started another blog. I started writing it all out. Teeth clenched, wit sharpened.
Furious, invigorated, screaming over the soap opera life could be:
And then the smoke alarm went off in the front of the house... My living room was on fire.
Perversely, in the midst of it all, I was getting promoted. Get a larger staff, larger budgets, more responsibility. Projects to install a new server somewhere became projects to replace all servers, everywhere.
It made me all dizzy. The highs and the lows and the ominous organ music.
Some days, I would wake up and still be in love with the man I saw - even if I hated how we far apart we were. Some days, it would seem like there was no hope.
Some days, I would eat too damn much chocolate.
Most days, I thought I would break.
So I went a little crazy myself and got into fights with the people at Dunkin Donuts, and watched my own health declinee - taking my sanity with it.
"Well, OK," I told her. "But you understand that it's no win if my fingers stop hurting but I wet the bed."
And just when I thought it was already as crazy and awful as I could stand, came that day. My son had been suffering with a 104 fever for 7 days and nothing was helping. The hospital could treat the heat but couldn't find a cause.
And I was ready for him to crumble. I was ready to deal with the craziness that normal had become.
But in a stunning turn of events, my husband was steady. He seemed ready - the crisis proved something we hadn't even realized....
We were all right.
You know how it is. You struggle with something for so long that you can't exactly know when it got better. When the cool began to warm. When the pouring rain began to putter down to a drip.
A week later, one lazy afternoon, in a big bed. My husband rested at the center. Our blessedly recovering son asleep in the crook of one arm. Me curled up under the other. "I'm going to quit my job," I said. Like I had threatened so many times before. "I'm going to stay home, and take care of him. While he still needs me to. While I still need to. I'm going to give my notice, I mean it this time."
And he sighed. "I know," he said.
And then it was quiet.
It was almost year ago that I told my management that I was leaving. Started a long, slow, chaotic rebuild of this unpredictable life. It was almost 100 days ago that I decided to stop mourning what had happened, and challenged myself to make more of this time and this chance.
And today, this morning, I woke up to my son climbing into bed next to me. Laying his soft cheek on my shoulder.
I opened the door, and blinked at the sun.
I ground the coffee, and made breakfast.
I checked my mail, and hunted up clean underwear.
I touched my toes, and brushed my teeth.
I had a thumb war with my son.
The thing about Luke and Laura is that they can never just be. I mean, who would watch that?
Would anyone watch if Luke got Laura down from her perlous perch, and took her to live in the suburbs?
The most amount of drama we have these days was when my husband used a flashlight to find a pair of matching socks yesterday morning, because it was still dark and he didn't want to wake me up.
It's not much to read about, I guess.
In fact, it's not much to write about.
It's this fragile, new rhythm in our lives and sometimes I don't understand. It leaves me with calm days and little inspiration for dramatic posts and a kind of dizzy unfamiliar sense of things.
But God. I think it's happiness.
It's happiness.
You know how it is.
You struggle to find things to say, wondering what happened to all the brilliant drama.
And realize...
Life got good. Well, better.
But it makes me wonder... what does it mean when these 100 days is done? What will there be to say?
And I don't have an answer.
I don't know if there is one.
What if video killed the radio star. And there was no 'then what' to the former Corporate Mommy?
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