Muchness and Light

The fates are vicious, and they're cruel.

I’ve spent most of the last week recovering from a surgical repair to my left Achilles tendon. It had been bothering me all year, but I’d put off seeing ortho about it, thinking it would get better eventually. I was already battling cervical and lumbar spine pain. I was back and forth to Alabama to see and care for Bumblebee while he was undergoing chemo and then surgery and then radiation. I was starting grad school. I was still raising two teenage sons and working a full-time job.

But after a ten-day study abroad in Berlin, I came home limping. The sixty miles I walked during that trip were invigorating in so many ways. They also gave a nasty bone spur in my heel the opportunity to lacerate the tendon. There was no option but to remove it, which happened this past week.

I’ll spend two weeks in a splint, then several weeks in a boot. I have at least four weeks on crutches or a knee scooter. Physical therapy won’t begin for at least four weeks, and I’m told to expect a year for full recovery.

I can’t do most of what I normally do around the house, like laundry or cleaning. I can’t reach some of the cabinets to put away the dishes. Cooking is awkward. Showering is a convoluted chore. The boys have been somewhat helpful. Friends have brought food. Pandy and Cookie came to help get some things situated for us this weekend. Max is old enough to make a run to the grocery store for me. (Delivery isn’t terribly helpful, as I can’t really put a lot of the groceries away.)

Elevating my foot is key to healing during the first few weeks. I have spent days in bed or on the couch, binge watching television. My eyes have been too blurry from the pain meds to try to read.

In the midst of it all, I am still dealing with the emotional aftermath of this fucking breakup.

I am forced to be still in ways I hate. For years, I have walked to clear my head, and the exercise is incredibly helpful at dealing with my anxiety and depression. But physical limitations this year have made me far less active. I’ve lost muscle tone and gained some weight back, and that is going to worsen over the next few months before it gets better.

All of this makes for a perfect storm of self-recrimination and frustration and anger.

I find myself journaling the same things over and over—hurt and anger and confusion at how the hell I ended up in this place again, how anyone could be so consciously and callously hurtful of someone they professed to love. Then I think about the times I have hurt others, and I question at what point I stop paying some karmic price for damage I’ve inflicted.

When will I have worked hard enough and atoned enough that other people stop fucking hurting me as some kind of cosmic penance? Why am I the one left holding the hurt and carrying the blame for anyone else? Why does there seem to be no consequence for their actions, except what I am left to deal with?

I don’t know how to get past what I don’t understand.

Moonshine admonished me not to lie in bed crying over this and not to let it define who I am, to look at the good in my life and not get mired in the bad. “I really believe that everything happens for a reason, but sometimes we can’t/don’t or won’t see the reason. I think the reason for this is that you needed to see how string you can be.”

I don’t want to have to be stronger right now. I don’t want another Nietzschean lesson in my own resiliency. I am fully aware of my tenacity and my capacity. The one thing I wanted was a partner to carry some of that for me, sometimes when I needed it most, so I didn’t have to keep breaking my back to do every fucking thing by myself.

He told me he would do that. I trusted him and believed him and gave him the opportunity to be taken at his word, and he shrugged and dropped it all back at my feet when I was least prepared to pick it back up.

And he told me it was for my own good.

I am viscerally offended by the cowardice. I am hurt in ways I have rarely been—after having been as open and honest and brave as I could be to even engage in that relationship with him. I am now literally trapped inside my own head with no physical outlet for it, and I want to crawl out of my own fucking skin.

But I refuse to compartmentalize it away. I refuse to pretend it didn’t happen or that it doesn’t matter, because to do so it to traumatize myself in the exact ways others have hurt me. It won’t define me, but it will be another marker on my journey, another cautionary tale of another person who made me carry their shame and who dismissed me with little thought in order to justify their cowardice.

Another on top of another on top of another on top of another….

Except this one promised me he wouldn’t do exactly this, just so I would never have to feel this again.

I’m not grieving him. I am mourning the loss of trust and love and faith—and at a time when I need it most. Hope feels dangerous and is not allowed right now. I am lamenting the death of my own passion, again, at the hands of a man who will never face me to apologize for the catastrophe he created.

And I’m doing it all from forced confinement.

The timing is ironic. Maybe it’s the universe’s way of forcing me to slow down and deal with it now. Maybe there’s something coming that will need my attention and focus, so that I need to be free of this bullshit to deal with that.

Maybe it’s just coincidental assholery.

Maybe none of it means a damn thing.

 

 

A million lights are dancing, and you are a shooting star.

As I wrote about a few weeks, I have been seeing someone new. I won’t wax poetic here; it’s simply too early to exalt him to the status of Blog Fodder, in and of himself. I hadn’t necessarily intended to get into a relationship—though maybe it’s still too early to even call it that—while also trying to work on my own stuff, much of which was highlighted and exacerbated by the ending of my relationship with Rango. But the fact is he presented as an opportunity worth exploring while I was beginning the process of self-reintegration.

Whether coincidental or due to some meaning I have assigned (or even thanks to that fickle bitch Fate), there are things about him that remind me strongly of Bounder. He is not another alcoholic, though he may well be overcoming a history as a dismissive-avoidant. He is not Bounder, however, and it is unfair of me to make direct comparisons. They are two different men, with different histories and stories, but there are moments that are striking, to say the least.

Because of this thing with Finn (so named because he is my huckleberry) and because of the end with Rango and because I sometimes pass him driving on the road between our houses, Bounder has been on my mind a lot. A lot a lot. It makes sense that he would be, but it set me off on a path of re-analysis and overthinking (again). I think I’ve dissected that relationship for the millionth time over the last few weeks, still looking for where exactly I went wrong. Because his shit is his shit—I can’t control how he acts or reacts or fails to act—all I can do is try to figure out what I screwed up. He told me numerous times that it wasn’t me, and I generally believe that, but I always dissect to the point of vivisection, flaying myself to a bloody, psychoanalyzed mess.

I do remember getting a text from him, a couple of days after we’d met. He said he was glad we could take things nice and slow. Except we didn’t. We started intensely, quickly, and that’s exactly how it continued. Within two hours of that text, I was making out with him in the parking lot of his office, a quick drive-by on my way home.

And that is where I failed him. Hurricane Sassafras was coming, no matter what he did. I didn’t really hear him and slow down. It wasn’t terribly caring on my part, no matter how unintentional the push was.

Finn also said he wanted to go slowly, I have tried to honor that. I have tried to dial back my impulses to forge full-steam into his world. There is something there worth exploring, and I don’t want to do it all in hindsight.

Which brings me back to Bounder.

Working within the IFS model, I have become very mindful of my feelings. I don’t just mean my emotions. When I feel something—anger, grief, sadness, longing, affection, attraction, love—I take note of where in my body I am processing the emotion. There is usually a physical locus of that energy. Because my strongest emotions are often tied up with what a subpersonality is processing in a given moment, I feel them in different places, which is effectively where each of those subparts resides. Harley and Quinn and Stephie and each of the others sits in a specific spot and pulls on my center from her point of reference. When I feel a subpart whose name I don’t know (who maybe I didn’t even realize existed) pull at my center, the emotional and physical feelings are often coupled with anxiety.

Because there has been so much thought of Bounder over the last few days and weeks, my anxiety has been really high at times. It has often felt like a pull from the right of my stomach. Sometimes it has been so bad that I would get nauseated and irritable, desperate to make the pain stop.

“What is that she’s feeling?” my therapist asked. “She may just want you to acknowledge her feelings. Can you tell what she wants?”

“She wants relief,” I replied. “She is hurt and angry and confused. She doesn’t understand how anyone could have something so precious as that kind of love in their damn hand and just walk away. It makes no sense, and it’s infuriating.”

This, of course, is wholly indicative of my fear of emotional abandonment. While that’s rooted deeply in my childhood, the feelings of hurt and betrayal and confusion are never more profound than when I think of Bounder. While I’m still angry at Rango for how he handled the boys during our break-up, I have dealt with my feelings toward him, kept what I needed to keep and shed the rest. Same for DH and Rex and others whose names and memories don’t really matter or impact me all that much anymore.

I explained to my therapist that the feelings are seated in this very specific location, that they can be overwhelming at times. And when I am most overwhelmed by something, I tend to dive into it head first, hoping to reach the bottom quickly and resurface cleansed.

But that never seems to happen with him, and I am forever in a loop of self-flagellation.

“Well,” she said, “first of all, she needs to know that you are simply witnessing the trauma again, a memory of it; it’s not actually happening again. You’re not being traumatized again.”

Okay. Just a ghost. Not real. Not happening now.

“And,” she continued, “she doesn’t have to feel that anymore. You don’t have to feel that anymore. That’s a lot of burden to have been carrying around for so long. She can let it go. You can let it go. Let the elements have it—they can take it—they can take a lot more than that. But she doesn’t have to feel that anymore.”

Wait—WHAT?!?

Even I could tell that my facial expression shifted in that moment. I was stunned, utterly baffled by the idea that it was okay not to keep feeling those emotions over and over, effectively retraumatizing myself every time. I have dealt with it repeatedly, and there is no healthy in dragging the futility of it all around, night after night.

And it makes sense. I had stopped feeling similar things for others long ago, in a healthy timeframe and in healthy ways. Why is he so special that I should continue to carry that burden?

In part, I think, it’s because he wouldn’t. Part of what happens during the emotional abandonment is that I’m left to feel whatever with no support, and I’m the only one feeling it. Maybe the other person is feeling something, but it never seems to be anywhere close to what I’m feeling, especially when the other person is a dismissive-avoidant who is so well-versed in compartmentalizing emotions away to protect themselves.

I have often railed against feeling like I was carrying it for both of us, because that was sometimes the only way to prove that the thing had ever happened, with no acknowledgement of grief coming from the other person. I am sure Bounder felt it in the darkest of times, but I know that he never faced me to tell me he was sorry for hurting me. His not acknowledging me and the hurt he created, his ignoring of me when he damn well knew it was the worst possible way to hurt me, made me feel worthless, especially to him. But that flew in the face of his telling me he loved me, of his moments of showing me deep, incredible love, and I could never reconcile the conflict of extremes no matter how much I psychologized him and myself.

But to think, to realize, that I don’t have to do that was foundationally shifting. I could feel the anxiety and the tension to the right of my stomach abate immediately. There was a deep sense of relief. She’s there, and she’s a little antsy about what she’s supposed to do now. If her job was to hold all that baggage, what is she going to do now that still allows her to be of use to the Self?

I had a dream once while Bounder and I were dating, one of those lucid nap dreams. I was standing outside a tall, wide, stone tower, trying to figure out how to get inside. I could hear a knocking from the inside, and I needed to let whomever was in there out. As I looked more, I realized the tower was his face, the details of his mouth and eyes and brows built from each brick. I climbed some scaffolding and began to chip away at this one high, white stone. It was the speck of light in his left eye.

Months later, he told me that I’d been like this force knocking on his walls, over and over and over, until he eventually poked his head out enough to see what was in the light.

I let light back into his darkness, and somehow that wasn’t worth staying for. And it’s not that I wasn’t worth it; it’s that he didn’t see himself as worth me. So convinced that he would hurt me in the end, he made it happen, pushing me unaware into the dark pool so that I felt like I would drown before I could resurface.

But in the same way I did it for him, I must do it for myself. I get to be the disco ball for myself, to reflect light and shine it brilliantly into my own dark corners. Disorienting and distracting at first, yes, but eventually it becomes a beautiful swirl worthy of dancing.

It is odd, a little unsettling, to think of life without the possibility of him. I gave up the possibility of him as a romantic partner long ago. Our life goals are different, and he would never be able to consistently meet my needs. But he was always this driving force of emotion and thought, even when we weren’t together, sometimes in contact and sometimes not. Music, in particular, became a daunting prospect for me, because everything could remind me of him.

And that’s her job now, that’s what she is supposed to do, to dance. She is lightened of her load. And she gets to pick the music she wants to dance to. She’s not trapped by the years-long playlists of Bounder songs. She doesn’t have to be afraid of hearing one of them in the grocery store and bursting into tears. She doesn’t have to listen for him in every new song. She can move freely again, not weighed down by his burden or mine. She can find the path that she lost, can move toward light and laughter and love, because she deserves that.

This wasn’t her fault.

And if we pass him on the road again? I don’t know. I could feel something; I could not. I may well never see him again. I’m not going to dwell on what might happen. Now I have different roads to explore and a different Stephanie to discover.

And there is dancing to be done.

 

 

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Let's have a disco ball, and let's be happy.

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You can be the outcast, or you can be the backlash of somebody's lack of love... or you can start speaking up.

NOTE: This post includes discussion of some pretty difficult subject matter, presented in an emotionally honest way. It may not be appropriate for all reading audiences.

At the heart of my myriad insecurities is a deep-seated fear of emotional abandonment. I am afraid that the people who profess to love me will stop caring, will decide that I am not worth their love and affection, and will dismiss me and my own emotions outright.

Physical abandonment is daunting enough, but it always seems to be symptomatic of a deeper emotional distance. DH left after our 19-year marriage crumbled, but that came only after he’d emotionally checked out of our relationship for years. I’d struggled to get Rango to engage in any emotionally significant way for more than a year before he told me he just wasn’t showing up for Max’s football game or my birthday. And when Bounder was most overwhelmed by the intensity of our relationship, he stood me up and distanced himself—at least until he decided he missed me too much to stay away—only to do it again and again.  

But the fear comes, plainly, from my childhood and adolescence.

I’ve written extensively about the sexual abuse I suffered as a child. There are at least six years during which I can remember being told, “Don’t tell anyone. You’ll be the one to get in trouble.” Years later, when I did finally tell—in the aftermath of a date rape at 16—I was left to deal with the physical and emotional impact on my own. Both the molestation and the rape were acknowledged very calmly for a few days, but there was no significant follow-up. I wasn’t sent to a counselor or therapist. I was sent, by myself, for my first pelvic exam to make sure I didn’t contract an STD.

My fear and my shame were dismissed, were boxed away so that someone else could handle what happened to me. My emotions were treated as if they were secondary and unimportant—or at least it seemed that way to me. With the exception of one close friend who literally held my hand through the process of telling, I never once felt that I was supported or cared for in those days and weeks.

I was scared and sick and confused and alone. When I most needed to be loved, the person who should have loved me most left me alone in my horror, pretending then and for most of the years since that none of it happened.

So what I learned from an early age, and relearned over and over and over, was that when someone loves you, then they leave you when your emotions are too much for them.

They leave you when you are too much for them.

Because they can’t handle what they’re feeling in response to what you’re feeling, it’s easier to pretend the feelings don’t matter or that there are no feelings at all. So while love is supposed to be this caring, beautiful, wonderful thing, for me it’s also tainted by hurt, twisted up with rejection and carelessness and neglect.

None of this is new. None of this is revelation.

What is new for me is the realization that the subpersonalities are afraid that I will emotionally abandon them. They are terrified that I will decide that they aren’t worth the trouble, that the help they try to provide is too much of a hassle for me to bother to listen to them. They are afraid of being ignored and dismissed. They are afraid that I will shut them all down, in turn becoming exactly what I fear most.

And my choices, my culpability, in all of my relationship failures make my trustworthiness questionable. My complicity in DH’s ignorance of me, which I would go on to rebel against in the most damaging of ways possible. My constantly shifting boundaries, allowing Rango to pull further and further away while I accepted the blame for his distance. And my tortured love for Bounder, whose kiss could make time stand still and the seas turn to sand—who I will still seek out when I feel utterly lost and alone, even though I know he will almost certainly let me down. The multitude of others, who said I mattered but then walked away with barely a glance over their shoulders.

Besides, I was the one who was making out with that guy the night of the rape. I was the one whose tiny body reacted with sexual arousal when touched inappropriately. While that is a totally normal physiological response, the behavior that wasn’t normal became utterly normalized. I knew things at an age when I should’ve been happily playing with my baby dolls and getting hugs goodnight instead of confusion and lies to deflect someone else’s blame.

They won’t love me anymore if I don’t do this thing that feels weird and wrong, being done to me by someone who says they love me.

Hurt was normalized. Secrets and shame were normalized. Pretending like nothing happened, like it didn’t matter, was normalized.

So if I have culpability or complicity in those hurts, who the hell am I to be trusted? How can my internal family trust me to make healthy loving decisions for them when I can’t even seem to make them for myself? How can I be trusted to do the right thing for any of us?

The difference in me and those who’ve hurt me is that I don’t want to be distanced from my emotions or anyone else’s. I don’t want to be ignored or dismissed, and so I try like hell not to do the same to anyone else. To disregard those parts of myself, to act as if my own emotions just don’t exist or matter, inflicts unbearable hurt. Shutting down, being numb again, silencing those inner voices entirely is the last thing I ever want to do.

I have to show myself the love and care that I expect from anyone else.

Integration can only come about if I trust the parts not to hurt me and vice versa. I have to honor what each feels, acknowledge each emotion I am ultimately feeling, and accept that the emotion itself is not the trauma. The traumatic events are over and done; the feelings are ghosts whose chains rattle me in a million directions at once sometimes, making me shaky on my feet. Making me insecure.

I may be moving forward, but I’m not leaving them behind. These parts of me, trapped at different ages and stages of development—disintegrated—deserve the chance to mature. They deserve the opportunity to grown into the woman they would’ve become had shit not gone horribly wrong.

I deserve the same.

Part of that maturation is coming to terms with the fact that it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t allow those other people to hurt me. I didn’t encourage them to devalue me and to dehumanize me. I didn’t ask to be sexually assaulted. I didn’t ask for them not to love and care for me.

It wasn’t my fault.

IT WASN’T MY FAULT.

I am worth love, and I am worth care and concern. There is nothing about me that is so inherently ugly or unlovable to have warranted horrid, difficult abuse. I was a sweet, smart, precocious little girl with Moonpie eyes and one dimple. I should never have been a sexualized object. I didn’t deserve to be molested. I didn’t deserve to be raped. I didn’t deserve to be smacked around and degraded by an angry boyfriend. I didn't deserve to be used and abused and discarded.

I never deserved being the target of someone else’s self-loathing and guilt.

I was worth more than dismissal and ignorance because I didn’t meet someone else’s expectations or conform to their fucked-up, dysfunctional norms. I am worth more than an eyeroll-and-sigh in toleration.

All of those bits inside me have fought to protect me from hurt, from allowing anything in that might cause more damage, But the fracturing of my personality into smaller parts left vulnerable cracks. Rather than fill the spaces with gold, like Japanese kintsugi, I often used whatever I could find: leftover packing tape ripped from an old dusty box… someone else’s half-chewed gum… desperate hope coated in blood and sticky mess.

But I was never going to be able to close my own rifts with someone else’s effluvia.

It’s up to me to find the healing from deep inside me, to let those internal persona who so badly want and need to help do just that. If the end goal is a whole Stephanie, the parts that make her up have to have a role in filling those gaps.

So I’m letting them talk, and I’m listening. I’m hearing what each of them says they need, and I’m doing my best to honor those wishes. I’m giving each an opportunity to share their respective visions of wholeness and then choosing what works best for all of us. For me.

It is a process to pick up the broken pieces and put them back together. It took years for the breaks to happen, for the dust to settle enough for clean-up to begin. But it has.

And it’s up to me to do that work.

It’s up to me to show myself the love and care that I need, and that starts with sweeping away everyone else’s pain and destruction and refusing to force my bits to fit with theirs.

It’s up to me to trust that I can do this.  

 

 

Though you drown in good intentions, you will never quench the fire. You'll give in to your desire, when the stranger comes along.

Break-ups can be foundationally shattering. The end of a long-term relationship can be shocking to the core. There is the grief that comes from severing a deep, meaningful connection, of lamenting what has been lost, but there is also a sudden shift in daily routines that now feel hollow and future plans that will never come to fruition.

The day after Rango came to get his stuff from the house, I struggled just to maintain. I woke early, fed the cats, and cried for a while before falling back asleep. At noon, I realized I needed to get up and do my normal Sunday chores. The boys would be home from their dad’s that evening, and they would be expecting clean laundry and food for the week.

Walking through the grocery store, I felt raw. I felt like everyone who passed me in the aisles could see the sadness dripping from my every pore. I was certain that my hard-fought composure would come undone if anyone spoke kindly or smiled at me.

It’s not just that the sadness is a part of the grieving process. The sadness fulfills a purpose.

When I realized the futility of the relationship, I started looking for a new therapist. Therapy had been incredibly helpful through the demise of my marriage to DH. I was fortunate to have found an incredible therapeutic partner to help guide me through a couple of years of divorce and dating and loss. But my insecurities undoubtedly played a role in the tensions and break-up with Rango, and I knew I never want to feel those things again. I never again want to feel so easily broken by another person, especially when my head knows it shouldn’t be possible.

As I did some research online, I came across the Internal Family Systems therapeutic model developed by Richard C. Schwartz in the 1980s. It seemed to be especially effective in treating anxious attachers and rejection sensitivity. The idea is that we are each a Self, which is the true, whole, spiritual center of us. But we also have these discrete subpersonalities with their own intentions and needs and quirks and purpose. Each part has a specific viewpoint, developed from its interpretations of life experiences. Each has its own memories and interprets them according to its unique perspective:

• Managers handle the way we interact with the external world. They try to protect us from hurt, whether from others or from our own memories.
• Exiles are the parts that feel the worst emotions—pain, hurt, shame, fear—usually resulting from childhood trauma. Managers and Firefighters try to exile these parts to prevent their emotions from coming to the surface.
• Firefighters show up when Exiles break free and demand attention. They try to distract us from the pain, often encouraging unhealthy behaviors as coping mechanisms.

The goal of IFS is to allow the Self to access and connect to each subpart, healing them one by one. Thus, the Self leads the other parts in harmony and health. We become a whole, heathy person, rather than an amalgam of these smaller bits that exhaust themselves fighting to maintain a losing battle.

I have long believed that we each are made up of various persona, and we take them out and show ourselves when everyone has gone….

In an online interview reposted through the band’s Facebook page, Alex Wheeler said the title, Persona Non Grata, referred to all of the unacceptable and unwelcomed parts of everyone—the lurid, the shadowy, the hidden, the broken.

“Each of us has a persona, all the time,” he said. “I’m one persona with the band, someone a little different with my fans, someone else entirely with my wife and daughter. Sometimes that persona is ‘good’ and sometimes it’s ‘bad’. I spent a lot of time exploring the bad sides of normal, everyday people, you know? Not serial killers or rapists or anything. I wanted to look at the things regular people like to hide from the people they know and, most especially, from themselves.”

                                                                                                                                Persona Non Grata (2012)

I have, at times, named some of my subpersonalities, though I wasn’t thinking of them within the context of IFS.

• Cissie is the sweet, blond girl who never seemed to be pleasing to her parents, no matter how hard she tried. She never felt like she was enough. She was also molested for years, and she spent a lot of her time agitated and afraid. She is an Exile.
• Quinn is the rebellious teen who learned to trade sex and secrets for affection, often in an attempt to protect Cissie. She has her own anger and hurt, but she will bear it all to protect that little girl. She is a Firefighter.
• Stephie is a loud ball of angry. She will erupt and tantrum and demand her way when she feels she is being ignored. She is potentially a special subpersonality called a Tormentor. (She secretly wears that like a badge of honor.)
• Sassafras Bombalurina O’Malley is the one who reminds me to be shiny and sparkly and to tell the world to go fuck itself if it doesn’t like it. She is an eccentric, outrageous Manager who knows how to call on the Firefighters to back her up.
• Wonder Woman is the Amazonian princess who does it all, because she has to. She handles the day-to-day business of life, and she is remarkable. She is strong and capable, smart and intuitive, and she can predict everyone else’s needs and desires before they can. She is a Manager.
• Stephanie Quinn Jackson is the writer who sees it all, who arranges it and espouses the shared perspective of the others, who bears witness to it all and gives them a voice when it seems that no one else will listen. She is a Manager.

There are others, nameless but all with some variation of my face. Each has its own role and purpose in getting Stephanie through her life. Not to be confused with Dissociative Identity Disorder, I am not claiming to have multiple, distinct personalities. These are simply facets of my personality, and each strives in its own way to help me be secure and healthy and safe—even when its influence result in dysfunction.

The sadness is tied up with the hurt, and it’s not just from this break-up. This is hurt that hasn’t healed in 40 years. This is sadness that helps me to keep others at bay, or to curl up in bed and sleep when I should be doing productive things, so that I don’t have to feel the hurt. So I don’t have to delve back into every haunting memory and question again why I was both too little and too much. Why I wasn’t worth careful, healthy love.

None of these parts can or should ever be exorcised. Each is valuable and necessary, both as its own part and as a part of the larger whole. But the hurt can be healed enough so that it doesn’t make more hurt, create more sadness, because somewhere in there is joy and beauty. Somewhere in there is a sad and lost little girl who desperately wants to be loved.

I have to find her and help her.

We have to find her together.

 

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Muchness and Light - But if you'd known how that would sound to me, you would've taken it back and boxed it up and buried it in the ground.

Ain't these tears in my eyes telling you.

Let's have a disco ball, and let's be happy.

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But if you'd known how that would sound to me, you would've taken it back and boxed it up and buried it in the ground.

Talking to Queen Frostine one morning late last week (as I do almost every week day, on my way to work), I relayed a conversation I’d had with Fluffernutter the day before. I told her how I hadn’t cried about the break-up with Rango since the first days. I was feeling more centered and more at peace with everything, if sad and resigned at times.

“You’re handling this break-up so much better,” she agreed. “I’m really proud of you.”

I told Pandy that, again, I felt like I was reliving events of five years prior, ending my relationship. The similarities were eerie at times. Certainly, I am prone to attract avoidant attachers, usually dismissives, and Rango was no exception. But there hadn’t been the self-recrimination and second-guessing that I’d experienced before. I had avoided the prolonged bouts of melancholy that followed in the wake of Bounder. I chalked it up to having done much of my work in those five years, coming to terms with myself. I’d also had a year or more to live preemptively through the grief of losing Rango.

But he came on Saturday to get his belongings. I’d packed everything neatly, wrapping his glasses in paper and putting a figurine we’d gotten him for Christmas back in its Styrofoam sarcophagus. Some of the boxes were labeled, and I’d stacked them neatly in the carport, away from the edge where the rains of Hurricane Irma might blow onto them.

I heard his car drive up, and I was okay initially. But when I glanced out the kitchen window, peeking from a distance through a space in the curtains, I saw him. There was the man I loved, from whom I’d been separated physically for nearly a month.

I lost my shit.

I immediately hurried back to the bedroom, far enough away that I wouldn’t have to hear him load his boxes and talk to the friend who’d come with him to help. I messaged the Castration Committee that I was sobbing uncontrollably, that it must be Snoturday.

My girls were sweet and messaged with me constantly throughout the afternoon. They reminded me of all the ways in which they see me as wonderful, as well as all the ways in which they see him as an ass. 

But for a moment, none of that mattered. I wanted nothing more than to fling open the front door and run to him, to feel his arms around me and his breath in my hair. I had the fleeting argument with myself over whether I could do it, trying to convince my anger that its sister, aching, would be relieved if only I could hold him for a moment.

It was the bargaining stage of grief, in the Kubler Ross and Kessler model.

I’d avoided it until that moment, at least since I’d officially called it quits. In practice, I’d been bargaining with him for months, trying to abate my grief at what I saw coming. I’d vacillated between denial and anger and that negotiating, trying desperately to convince him to meet me on some middle ground, to love me and to let me love him back.

The last of a 24-hour-long fight over email ensued, plus a final phone call from him asking about where something was (packed neatly just as I’d said in email). Hearing his voice after hours of crying was a sucker punch to the gut. I shouldn’t have taken the call. Not being able to tell him that I love him made me want to vomit.

Pandy suggested this morning that I find my anger again. I don’t want to be angry. That takes too much energy to maintain. I understand her point, though. If I can feel not so sentimental about him, then it will hurt less.

But it’s going to hurt as long as it hurts. For me to feel nothing after a month, in the aftermath of a three-year relationship, would be unhealthy in its own way. I never wanted this break-up. I wanted to fulfill those promises of the rest our lives. It will take time to find peace in the acceptance of what we lost.

For years, I had a sign in my bedroom that says Forever And Always And No Matter What. I hung it on the wall across from the bed when DH and I were married. He took it down in those last months, but I put it back when he left. It was, and is, an important vow exchanged regularly between me and my sons.

We took it down again last summer to paint the bedroom. Rango never got around the hanging it again. I did it this week, while I was home with the boys during Irma. It’s the first thing I see when I wake in the morning.

But Rango had also  bought a sister sign, in the same style, that said HAPPILY EVER AFTER. He’d intended to hang it with the other one, just for us. It never made it to the wall.

I put it in the pile with his boxes. He left it to the side, and for two more days I will see it sticking out of the trash can until the garbage man comes to take it away.

I kept lots of reminders of him. I kept the blue canary nightlight and the book end he bought me for my first birthday with him. I kept the charms for my bracelet that he bought with the boys. I kept the sound machine he bought me for Mother’s Day, to soothe me with rain sounds when I can’t sleep.

But I could not keep the things that would hurt in the coming weeks and months. I couldn’t keep the metal Rango he also bought me for Mother’s Day. I couldn’t keep the house key he returned yesterday.

Those things are all packed away in a box I bought especially for him. In the back corner of my closet, where I don’t have to see it every day, my life with Rango sits in the dark. If I were to get it out and go through it, I’m sure I’d cry.

But I can do that on my own right now. I don’t need his box.

 

 

 

And as soon as I get out of here, I plan on coming back for nothing.

When DH and I split up, it was devastating for us all. He and I had been together for most of two decades, and even with all the bullshit that precipitated our end, there’s no doubt that it was hardest on our boys. Max and Tricky weathered it all beautifully, for the most part, but their world collapsed in on itself. Their dad exited it for most of four years, whether physically or emotionally. While he and I have battled off and on for much of that time, I can very cautiously state that we have achieved a détente in recent months and have been able to effectively communicate and co-parent. I know it has been good for me and for the boys, and I hope it has been good for DH, as well.

When Rango came into our life, it seemed magical. Not only did he get me, he got my kids. His personal history gave him very specific insight into what my young sons were thinking and feeling. He bonded with them almost as quickly as he bonded with me. We were all happy when we intertwined our households and created an entirely new life for ourselves.

But somewhere, it all went awry. It’s not just in hindsight that I can see the landmarks pointing us toward destruction; I could see them happening in real time and spoke out against them. My aggressively railing against impending damage gave him reason to withdraw, and eventually I found myself with yet another avoidant, who could dismiss me and compartmentalize away until he felt the need or desire to deal with me. When I became an inconvenient reminder of his own damage and shortcomings, I was ignored to the point of feeling as if I didn’t exist for him until he chose to acknowledge me.

I could spend days psychoanalyzing him, breaking down his history as I know it and applying that knowledge to his behaviors, inferring meaning into every action and word ever exchanged between us. I could obsessively reread every email and text message and chat message, listen to the couple of voicemails I still have on my phone. But really, what’s the point? It won’t change anything, and it’s unlikely to offer me an insight I don’t already have.

I have spent days packing his belongings. I cleaned out drawers and closets and cabinets, looking for any lingering reminders that might blindside me if found later. Yes, it’s logistical, but it’s also a reclamation of the space. I have moved my knick-knacks and pictures onto the shelves where his things had been. I am slowly taking over the empty dresser and closet space again. I am gleefully eating glutinous yummies and not worrying about dropping crumbs, in case I irritate his wheat allergy.

When I told my dad that I really am okay, that it has been far less upsetting than other break-ups, he replied, “Well, that probably just means it was time.”

I’m not burying the sadness. The first few days were awful, and I cried a lot. But I also cried a lot during the last year, begging and negotiating and demanding resolution that didn’t come in the way in which I’d hoped. In the way in which he’d promised me when we met or during the first year of our relationship.

What I can’t get rid of yet is the anger. I’m not angry that our romantic relationship ended. I do think it’s incredibly unfortunate, given how wonderful the man I fell in love with was. We both changed in three years, and we couldn’t change together. He has his own damage and his own need for protections, and those needs are different than my own. In the end, we couldn’t meet each other’s needs, no matter how mindfully and intentionally I tried.

But he hurt my children. The last time he saw them, we sat around the kitchen table while he told us that he loved us, that we were his family, and that he wanted to be home with his family again. He asked the boys to think about his moving back home and to share those thoughts with him. But before they could respond, he was gone.

He ghosted on them completely. He told them he loved them and chose them and then never saw them again. He effectively unchose them with no explanation or apology. While losing a beloved family member and parental figure is hard under any circumstances, especially for children, this was eerily reminiscent of what happened with their father. Rango’s behavior mirrored what was the most hurtful and damaging experience of their young lives, and he knew better. He knew the exact way in which to inflict the most damage, both on me and on the boys, and did it anyway. He abandoned two boys who adored him, who relied on him, who loved him and just wanted to be loved back. If it wasn’t calculating and malicious, it was thoughtless and careless, cruelly reckless.

When I finally made the logistical break from his avoidant bullshit, Fluffernutter asked me if I could see the possibility of reconciliation in the future, maybe after a few months of no contact and time to settle and rethink everything. At the time, I ruled out the possibility of ever ruling him out completely.

But last week, Tricky asked me, “Will we ever be able to bring Rango back?”

I realized in that moment, as he looked down at his homework, floppy hair hiding his face from scrutiny, that I am no longer open to that possibility. DH is their father, and Max and Tricky love him very much; they will always find a way to maintain that relationship. I pray regularly that DH does the same.

But Rango was an outsider, whom we chose to love. The boys chose him, every time, until he didn’t choose them back. I introduced him into our world, cautiously and with the reservation that all single parents have in such cases. For me to ever allow him access to them again would open the plausibility of additional hurt, and I am unwilling to gamble with their hearts again.

So for now, for the foreseeable future, it will just be me and my young men. I’m not remotely interested in dating again. I’ll say maybe ever, but I understand the statistical likelihood of that actually happening. But if I even contemplate trusting someone enough to let them past my own mounting defenses, my heart and mind slam up those steely walls, unwilling to consider such possibility even cursorily.

I also remind the boys that this wasn’t their fault. His choice was his choice, and nothing they could ever do would warrant the kind of hurt he has inflicted. I remind them that they did nothing wrong, that their love is worth far more than Rango admitted.

And I remind myself of the same.

 

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Let's have a disco ball, and let's be happy.

Huffington Post Article #3

Ain't these tears in my eyes telling you.

Underneath my lucid skin, the cold is lost, forgotten.

During an ongoing conversation with a friend about happiness, I asked him what it is in his life that keeps him from being happy.

“What does this elusive happiness look like? What do you believe will bring that happiness? How will it manifest—will you find it, will it find you, or will you make it? What are you struggling against, that you feel is keeping happy away for more than short bursts? What are you willing to change or eliminate in order to make room for this happiness?”

Of course, this banter comes on the heels of my own burst of unhappy this weekend. I have been frustrated that life isn’t necessarily how I want it to be. Since DH moved out of state two years ago, he has had very little interaction with the boys. Phone calls and email have been sparse, and visitation totaled 28 days in that two-year span. (Though I am happy that he has been making a much more concerted effort to rectify that, as of late. <fingers crossed>)

That has left me with very little time in which to connect with myself on my terms. His absence coincided with my starting college and work, so I have lived in the constant pace of mom and student and employee. Constrained by obligation and time and money, I have had to forego a lot of the time to be “free” I’d previously had when the boys were with their father.

Because the boys were getting older and more self-sufficient, I’d been able to take some time away from them, a few hours for class or work or the occasional (bad) date. Then I met Rango.

“Wow,” he said during our first date, “with so much going on, how do you find time to date?”

“If it’s important to me, I will make time for it,” I replied.

Eventually—especially once GOAL was added to my plate—I started to butt up against real limitations. There are only so many hours in a day in which to accomplish what needs to happen in our life. I had to make serious adjustments.

Of course one of the first things to go was working out. If the exhaustion isn’t enough to drop me in bed by 9:00, household chores or schoolwork keep me busy. Now that I’m at Mercer in a program for working adults, my day starts at 6:00 a.m. and often doesn’t end until class lets out sometime after 10:00 p.m.—plus the drive home and the unwinding before I can even sleep before I get up and do it again. Having the boys for nearly 100% of the year also added substantial additional cost; it turns out teenage boys eat a lot, and their school/social activities are time-consuming and expensive.

This week, again, Facebook popped up with my “memories”—pictures from that day in years past. This time it was from a specific night three years ago with Pandy. I looked at the picture and thought, “I miss my purple hair. And I miss my collarbones.”

Toward the end of my marriage, I rebelled against the domesticity I’d created. I felt trapped and struggled to find meaning or purpose that didn’t stem directly from my role as wife and mother. Never happy in the medium, I swung the pendulum so far in the other direction that it, at times, wreaked havoc on my life.

So while I desperately miss the freedoms that come with fully embracing the Sassafras O’Malley persona, I am also careful to remember the confusion and static and sheer craziness that often came with that liberty. Sassafras has a tendency to be where she probably shouldn’t be.

Right now I’m living the life I need to be living: working full time, taking care of and providing for my children, going to school more than half time in order to finish as quickly as possible, succeeding by everyone’s metrics, including mine. And I have the support of a life partner who helps with as much as he can.

But sometimes, I still feel unhappy.

While doing homework over the weekend, I read a quote by Simone de Beauvoir: “Those who are condemned to stagnation are often pronounced happy on the pretext that happiness consists in being at rest.”

Because I’m not able to do what I want, when I want, I often feel stagnant. I feel trapped by circumstance that’s changing far slower than I would like, given my incredibly impatient nature. Sometimes I feel resentful when that circumstance is to blame for the lack of freedom and the feeling of stagnation. And it doesn’t matter that my head knows better; my gut is screaming that it feels wrong, that it feels too much like my life before, and my heart gets angry.

When I feel those emotions, I have choices in how to react. I can scream and go off my fucking rails, which very people have ever seen. For everything I have experienced with Rango, he has never been witness to a full-fledge Stephie Meltdown. I can choose to hold it all in and just pretend it’s not there, cycling slowly through more resentful. Or I can feel it and acknowledge it and let it go.

Knowing myself the way I do, I usually choose the latter, but Rango called me out on my methodologies. He complained that I become cold and distant, obviously struggling with some emotion that I refuse to let escape the icy surface. He’s right. I eventually found that the quickest way out of my own head was to jump in, dropping into it as quickly as possible, and then use that downward momentum to push off the inevitable bottom, letting the pressure release as I rise back to the top in a stream of my own bubbles.

But as long as I feel like there are things missing or that I am bound by circumstance, I will still have moments of discontent. I will still have impetus to feel unhappy at times.

Maybe happy isn’t the goal. My former therapist told me once that happiness is a fleeting emotion and that content is likely the healthier alternative I am most likely to feel content when I am living my life on my own terms, in my own way and at my own pace. But because I have relationships with other people, especially those three men who live in my house, I am morally obligated to take their contentment into consideration as well. What I want is sometimes in conflict with what they need.

So for now, I’m trying to make the best of it. I’m trying to make those small changes I talk about in my GOAL speeches, to pick up the pieces I keep dropping and put them together in the ever-expanding mosaic that makes up my disco ball. For once in my life, I’m thankful to have these big hands that let me hold more than seems possible.

 

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Simone de Beauvoir

Let's have a disco ball, and let's be happy.

Ain't these tears in my eyes telling you.

 

Wonder if I'll ever bury the hatchet inside.

About the time Rango moved into the house with us, I started to realize that I was having a hard time with his past.

Due to the constraints of time and distance and the necessary logistics for the boys, he and I never spent a night in his apartment. He insists that the apartment was never more than a landing pad and that it never felt like home. While I do believe home for him became wherever I was within days of our meeting, part of me still feels like I never got the opportunity to... I don't know... mark that territory...?

It sounds stupid, I know. I feels stupid. Every time some ex comes up, I cringe.

I know part of my insecurity comes from my maladaptive attachment style, which was established in my childhood and then reinforced over and over and over (and over and over and over) in my adult dating life, especially in the two-and-a-half years after DH and I split. I'm a fragile cat, without a doubt, but so is Rango. Generally we are very careful and patient with one another's emotions, lovingly treading across the scarred battlefield of the other's heart.

But really, I have no idea why the hell I am so freaked out when some former relationship of his is mentioned. Because I took the brutally-open-and-honest approach while I was dating, Rango learned probably far more about me in those first days than maybe he wanted, especially my history with the fragile cats.

When you're divorced, or maybe it just happens at this age when you have a good deal of life experience, first date conversation inevitably turns to prior relationships. Were you married? Do you have kids? Why did you break up? First dates are basically an interview, after all—a chance to see if their fuckeduppedness will play well with your fuckeduppedness.

So he knew very quickly that I was living in the same house I'd lived in with my ex-husband. He knew my most painful ex lived just a few miles away and semi-regularly sees me in passing. He knew I'd had a very active dating and social life on the weekends before DH moved out of state and dropped regular contact with the boys.

Hell, I wrote a book about some of it.

In the semi-autobiographical Persona Non Grata, Tierney talks about how she has a hard time hearing about her husband, Sam's, relationship with his long-ago ex-girlfriend:

"I worried for years that you had loved her more than you loved me," I admitted one night.  I couldn't look at him when I said it.  I kept my gaze trained on the darkness in the woods behind our house.

"Why?  Why would you even think that?  Didn't I tell you every day that I loved you?  Couldn't you just believe that?"

"I believed you.  I still do.  But, Sam, you were so broken when you guys split.  I kept waiting for you to come home and tell me that she'd called, that she wanted you back.  I used to dream about it all the time."

I really didn't know that DH loved me more than he'd loved her until the day Max was born, more than seven years into our marriage.

And I know that love should never feel like a competition, but my head is sometimes a mess, and I sometimes feel like I am constantly at battle with the ghosts of the past. I am forever struggling to overcome my screwed up perceptions of how I think other people see me. Often this drives me to be bigger and better and faster and more. I feel like there is so much inherently wrong with me and about me, and that if I can perfect as many small things as possible then the huge amount of bad is still outweighed by lots of little good.

No one is harder on me than I am on myself.

I few weeks ago, I told Rango, "I won't feel secure until I've been with you longer than you've been with [your ex-wife]."

"But you already have."

I looked at him, puzzled. "You do remember that you were married for five years, don't you?"

"Yeah, but our relationship was over long before we even got married," he replied. "Emotionally, we were together for a week-and-a-half."

A few days later, we took our first trip together. Without the boys, we went to Texas for his sister's wedding, which also gave me the opportunity to meet and spend time with his family. We had a lovely couple of days in San Antonio, walking around Riverwalk and later dancing at the wedding, followed by a day in Houston.

 

Wedding Selfie #Sassafras #Rango #JenAndAli

A photo posted by Stephanie Quinn Jackson (@stephqj) on May 2, 2015 at 5:22pm PDT

DH and I had flown into San Antonio once, gone immediately to buy a car, and then drove straight home to Alabama. We passed through a section of Houston on the way. My 2012 trip to Austin by myself was my only real trip to Texas.

Rango spent his teen years in Texas, especially in and around Houston. He lived in various places before moving to Atlanta (to be with [his ex-wife]), but he still thinks of Texas as home. (Well, maybe until he met me.)

Although I'd never been to San Antonio, I set part of Persona Non Grata there. Tierney's life blows up (the climax without a climax) at the Marriott Riverwalk. I spent some time researching and wrote about what I'd never actually seen:

    I walked out from the hotel and turned onto the wide walkways along the river.  I knew there was a coffee shop nearby.  I ordered a frittata and took my coffee to a small table.  I ate slowly, trying to abate the nagging headache.

    I was tired but didn't want to hole up in my hotel room.  I spent a couple of hours exploring San Antonio.  I walked over little bridges and through lushly landscaped mini-parks.  I was impressed by the mix of modern and traditional, of historical and new. 

    I found a shady spot outside a coffee shop, sitting under a bright yellow umbrella.  It was still early, but the River Walk was bustling already with people ready for the new day.  I sketched the profile of a young woman sitting on a park bench, reading a book.  The face of the sleeping baby, parked in his stroller at his parents' table next to mine. 

 

Tierney is hanging out at the Riverwalk in San Antonio. #personanongrata #junkture

A photo posted by Stephanie Quinn Jackson (@stephqj) on May 2, 2015 at 11:21am PDT

Rango and I stayed at another Marriott a few blocks away. On Saturday morning, he happily walked with me to find the spot I'd written. We had lunch at a Mexican restaurant that was included in an earlier draft of PNG. (It was eventually cut and re-written because the scene was lifeless.) And while he knew this was a fictionalized account, that I'd never been to these places, he also knew we were living a moment from the fictionalized account of the events that triggered the metamorphosis that led, in part, to my divorce.

Never did he complain. Never did he express a jealous thought. Not once did he have to choke back an angry lump and leave the room to catch his breath and regain control.

But driving to Houston the next day, picked up by his best friend, some comment was made about an ex they shared. (Who am I to judge someone for dating their best friend's ex?) Sitting in the back seat of the car, I bristled at the mention, knowing full well that she was long, long before me, that the relationship was short-lived and didn't work for a reason, that he loves me more.

Days later, as we were talking about traveling again soon—something DH and I never did together—I told him I would never go to Sweden with him, because he went there to see a now-ex.

"But it's a beautiful country," he argued. "You would love to see it."

I'm sure I would, but I was never willing to go to New Orleans with DH (in theory, because we didn't travel together or take vacations) because India had lived there in her childhood and later gone on vacation there with DH.

I've talked before about how I am a hoarder of memories. Because I remember virtually everything, I hold onto a lot of shit on my big, broken brain. Combine that with my intense sentimentality, and my head is an emotional minefield that I can barely traverse—how the hell is anyone else supposed to get through?

What I realized is that I am more than willing to give Rango the chance to replace some of those memories. Sometimes, he does it and doesn't even know it. Maybe we're having an incredibly wonderful moment and a song comes on that would have previously tied me up in knots, a reminder of a past moment. While there are still songs I just can't bear to hear anymore, there are a few that are now associated with Rango. Maybe it's a trip to a place I've been before or only dreamt about with someone else.

His heart replaced theirs in that memory space.

His cautions that there are formative memories that cannot be replaced. Of course. No matter what he or I do, there's no possible way to replace everything, and I wouldn't want either of us to do that. What happened before is what has led us to here, to the place where our paths converged. It's all about the journey and not the destination.

Yes, I know that I am letting my own insecurities and fears get in my way. I loathe that I think and feel this way. I am repulsed by the dark, tangled emotions that swirl around inside me, ensnaring my thoughts and hijacking what should be a calm, normal moment.

The only way I know to fight the dark is with light. When I don't feel like my own, internal light is strong enough to illuminate the path, I turn into the disco ball, spinning and reflecting a broken, scattered mosaic of brilliance that can be as annoyingly blinding as it is charming in its kinetic chaos.

Through it all, Rango says he is more than happy to be in my shadow, to let me spin in the spotlight while he supports me. I want him to be where he is happy and comfortable. I don't want to ever lose him to the darkness that I refuse to face and enter.

But I really have no idea how to counter the jealousy. I don't know how to not feel like it's a competition, even though it's one I know I'd have won months ago. I don't have a clue how not to snarl back at any of his memories that I'm afraid are snarling at me.

 

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Let's have a disco ball, and let's be happy.

You'll not see nothing like the mighty Quinn.

As I was turning 14, I made the decision to leave behind my schoolmates and the few friends I'd managed to make, opting to go to the smaller, alternative magnet high school.  I'd always been an outsider—the strange, poor girl who transferred into the upper-middle-class school where she could be guaranteed the gifted education her test scores demanded. 

In elementary school, I never had classmates who came to sleep over at my house.  My parents and I lived in a trailer two doors from my paternal grandparents, seven miles from the edges of the other school's district.  Occasionally I would be invited to a birthday party or sleepover at a classmate's house, but it always felt strange, like I was included because someone's mother made it that way. 

Junior high was better but only just a little.  I had a few close friends, and my happiest memories of that time almost all involve being at someone else's house.  My friend, Kelly, and her parents never failed to include me in their life, week after week of Saturday sleepovers and Sunday church and family dinners.  Kelly's home was warm and inviting, especially as I was surviving my own parents' divorce. 

I was abandoning the young girl persona of Cissie, but who was I becoming?  Adolescence is a terribly unsettling time, the shift from child to adult.  Confusion and disorientation are rampant, and I was especially susceptible to that.  The gifted high school, RLC, seemed like an opportunity to break entirely from Cissie and the painful memories of growing up different.  The school had its own unique history of being a safe haven for outcasts, a defiant eye-sore of a building in a suburban slum, and the students and teachers were unlike anything I'd experienced growing up in the White Flight safety of mid-80s Bluff Park, Alabama. 

RLC was the place that I became not just Stephanie, but Stephanie Quinn.

 

Quinn - Age 15 or 16

 

 

For a while in the 1980s, monogramed sweaters were all the rage.  I can remember desperately wanting a crewneck one in turquoise, my SKQ initials elaborately adorning the wool blend. 

"They don't do a Q," my mother explained.

I scanned the Sears catalog, looking at the choices of color and style, wistful for the tightly-woven threads that sheened the flourishing embellishment of "Diane Elizabeth Jones" or "Roger Adam Smith".  Q and X and Z just weren't options, so I never had a monogrammed anything. 

By the time I graduated high school in 1990, I had been the only Q-named student ever to attend RLC. 

I was not like other girls.

Looking back, I realize that my habit and joy of finding jellicle names started in my own childhood but certainly continued in my teens.  Budgie and Tomato Butt know who they are, and Tomato Butt began to call me "The Mighty Quinn". 

Who was Quinn?  She was different, even by the strange standards of the socially awkward, creative group she lived and thrived in.  She was tall and big and loud and awkward.  She was a slacker who found it easier to not do something that was hard, because dropping from the lower branches meant a faster, softer landing than crashing from the top of the tree. 

Where Cissie had tried her best to be a good girl, Quinn plainly said, "Fuck that!" and began to demand that life be on her terms.  If anyone expected anything of her, she would go out of her way to do the opposite.  She was openly defiant and disagreeable and rebellious.  She was sneaky and manipulative and mostly learned how not to get caught. 

Because Cissie hadn't gotten the attention and care that she so craved even when she was a good girl, Quinn learned that a gut-wrenching, lung-wailing tantrum could bring about attention.  Bad attention was better than no attention, so she worked with what came easy to her. 

Early in my freshman year, I met a guy at school.  He was a senior.  He never had a jellicle name, though I'll call him Jack for ease of use.  Jack and I were friends immediately.  We spent long hours on the telephone almost every night, talking about everything and nothing.  He would play his guitar in the background while we talked or watched TV or while I did my homework.  When I would argue with my mom, he would talk me down.  When DH and I broke up in that stupid high school way, Jack spent weeks and months letting me talk through it all.  Sometimes I would hear about the girl he'd gone out with over the weekend. 

We hung out some at school, though far less than seems likely given the nature of our relationship.  We kind of made out once, on the third floor hall during our shared free period.  There was no kiss, but my French teacher stopped to talk to us while we snuggled against the painted cinderblock wall near the stairs.  She had no idea that my baggy sweatshirt was hiding his hands on my boobs. 

And Jack and I never failed to tell each other that we loved each other.  I can remember the first time we did, on the telephone while he was at his house and I was at Karolina's.  It was just sort of said after a strange, rough night at the mall, and we continued that tradition for the length of our relationship. 

Jack was also the first person I ever told about my molestation.  He was the first safe place I'd ever known, and then he graduated and went to college.  I have the strange memory of Jack calling me from college moments after my molester tried to grope me for the last time.  I cried, hysterical and broken, explaining that I'd just told the man never to touch me again or I would kill him.  Jack listened patiently and soothed me through it.

When he first left, I missed him but was okay.  We would keep in touch through letters and then the occasional phone call.  (Long distance was expensive in those days.)  Eventually—and some of this is totally skewed by hindsight—I didn't fully understand that I missed him and why I missed him.  I became petulant and argumentative.  There was a nasty exchange of harsh, sometimes vitriolic letters, and then our friendship was dead. 

Eventually I started dating Damien.  The two of them had actually known each other in high school but hadn't had contact in several years.  Damien was loud and gregarious and pushy and funny and strangely charming.  He would call me, while he was dating another friend of mine, and talk for hours, about everything and nothing.  He would play his guitar in the background while we talked and watched TV or while I did my homework. 

Jack warned me not to get involved with Damien, months after our own relationship had passed the point of disintegration.  I specifically chose to date Damien because Jack had told me not to.

Damien goes on to be a tempestuous, on-again/off-again four years of utter Hell.  He was verbally and emotionally and physically abusive.  He was the catalyst for a couple of half-hearted suicide attempts.  He was the intentional, malicious cause of some serious self-harm.   

DH returns to my life.  Twenty years later, I'm cycling through a series of bad relationships with unavailable men.  I'm intently examining my history, unearthing any clue as the what and how and why things went wrong, so that I can at least have the potential to move forward in a healthy, fulfilling relationship. 

This morning, it hit me: I am continually recreating this relationship with Jack. 

Quinn smacked me upside the skull with a derisive, "Duh!"

Hell, Damien and Bounder were even physically built like Jack, and Absolem's hands always reminded me of Jack's.  Interestingly, DH and Jack knew each other, as well, and there was never any love lost between the two of them.

Time and again, I am drawn to creative, smart, funny, unordinary, passionate men.  Men who love music (including a couple of musicians).  Men who can talk to me for hours and meet my need of quality conversation.  Men who don't always have a lot to do with me away from that venue.  Men who hide me and sometimes deny me and the impact I have on their hearts. 

I have never once had an initial exchange of I-love-yous face to face.  I've never had the experience of seeing the look on a man's face when he tells me that for the first time, of being able to look him in the eye when I say it as well.  It has always come over the phone.  Once, it was even in a text. 

For months, I have been angry as hell that, to the best of my knowledge, Bounder never told another living soul that he loved me.  Absolem certainly didn't.  Neither did Katniss. 

And so even Quinn became a secret.  She learned to trade men's secrets and deepest, darkest truths for their affection.  For their love.  For sex.  As long as it was quiet. 

The Mighty Quinn, who has the power to make the crazy better, to return the frazzled to restful normal.  Who knows better how to deal with cold and dark than Quinn the Eskimo?

During the final bench trial for my divorce, the judge asked if I wanted to keep my married name or go back to my maiden.  I knew from experience that it's much easier with schools and friends and the like, when a mother's last name matches her young children's.  I'd also fully established my writing persona as Stephanie Quinn Jackson. 

But I have gravitated over the last few months toward images of Qs.  Initially I saw them as magnifying glasses, as a tool for closer examination.  Then I began to associate them with questions, with my own inner searching.  Lately they've felt more like a reclamation of who I was before DH. 

Today, I see all of that as valid.  I also see her, the 17-year-old girl who wants to make sure I hear what she has to say, who wants to make sure her valiance wasn't in vain.  She wants to make sure I know Jack.

So, Quinn, you crazy nut, I hear you.  I love you, and I thank you for poking me hard enough to make me finally notice the puzzle piece that's been upside-down and sideways for 25 years.  Now take your self-satisfied smirk and go take a nap.  You deserve it. 

 

And I don't understand. You deserve so much more than this.

When I was a child and would misbehave, my mother would send me to my room, out of her line of sight, with the words, "I love you, but I don't like you very much right now."

I love you, but I don't like you.

I don't like you.

I love you, but....

I love you, because I have to.

I love you, because I am required to.

The more trouble I was in, the more of my name I would hear.  Just "Stephanie!" was a warning.  "Stephanie Karen!" meant I was treading on some pretty thin ice.  "Stephanie Karen Quinn!" meant there was likely a spanking in my immediate future. 

But when I was a good girl, when I was sweet and obedient and well-behaved, I was Cissie.

To this day, I'm not terribly clear on the origin of the nickname.  I know it was given to me by a close family friend.  It was not diminutive of my given name, nor was it reference to my being a sister; there was no sibling calling me Sissy, as is so common in the South.  (I was raised an only child, and my (step/instant/in-my-heart) brother came to live with my mom and stepdad when I was in college.)

I remember being called Cissie until junior high school, when I demanded that both family and classmates call me only Stephanie.  While it may have been sweet inside the family, it was hard to explain this other name that made no logical sense to anyone else.  Eventually I rebelled against this thing I didn't understand and established myself fully as Stephanie Quinn.  When I went to the alternative magnet high school, no one knew Cissie had ever existed. 

Cissie was blond and blue-eyed.  (Stephanie has green eyes.)  She was smart and shy, though she could flourish as a chatterbox when she was comfortable.  For Cissie, it was important to be what Mama and Daddy and everyone else expected her to be.  If she wasn't, she was punished. 

Cissie - Age 3 or 4

But sometimes, no matter what Cissie did, she was just not enough.  She was tall but uninterested in basketball or sports of any kind.  She was smart but sometimes didn't want to do the tedious, necessary classwork.  Sometimes she tried to do it her own way, to challenge and entertain herself, but she would be chastised for doing it wrong, for not doing it how others wanted or expected it to be done. 

Cissie was also scared a lot.  Daddy had a sharp temper and would yell loudly at the least provocation.  Sometimes he would rear his hand back in anger, and sometimes it made contact.  Mama would nod and "Uh-huh" while Cissie talked, but she didn't always seem to hear those little girl words, especially if they weren't the words Mama wanted to hear.  And sometimes Mama would lash out in momentary anger and pop her little arm with the hard plastic hairbrush.  The oval red spot on the back of her arm might sting for hours, but it never felt as harsh as the pressing lump in her throat, the one she refused to talk or cry over. 

Cissie learned to spend time on her own, to entertain herself with imaginary friends and wishes for things that just never seemed to come true.  Cissie learned to bite the inside of her cheeks in just the right way that both kept her quiet and betrayed none of the anger she was harboring inside her little sweetheart mouth.  She had repetitious nightmares of witches and of vampires who lived in the back of her closet.

Cissie was also the little girl who was molested by a man who said he loved her, by a man who told her that if she didn't go along with it or if she spoke about it that she would be in trouble. 

It's no wonder that I didn't want to be Cissie. 

Stephanie - Age 14

 

But lately that little girl has been trying to tell me something. 

After another Fragile Cat skittered away, I was in a text conversation with Bounder (which is a whole different blog post's worth of fuckedupedness):

I'm tired of the hurt, you know? I'm tired of hiding in plain sight.  I don't want to be afraid of the shadows, scared of what seems to be there but isn't.  I feel again like my heart if wasting away.  I can't take another one who stays for days or weeks, with all of his fine words and implications.  I'm better with the balance, and I can't put these lessons into play without another person on the other side of that equation.  I want that safe place.  It's what I miss most, and I'm afraid.

And for all of my crazy, for all of my batshit and intensity, I'm a really good girl.  A guy could do a hell of a lot worse than me.

Very true statement dear...

I feel like being me will never be good enough.  I can either be myself or be what someone else expects.

And that little girl in me started to cry. 

It didn't matter what I did sometimes.  It didn't seem to matter that I was smart or clever or funny, loving or imaginative or curious, as long as I was doing what was expected of me.  As soon as I defied expectations, "I love you, but...."

There is no caveat for love.

There should be no conditions on love.  No one should ever have to negotiate the basics of their personality or their soul to feel that they are loved.  If a man tells me now that he loves me but he wishes I were quieter, less impulsive, less brash, more submissive, daintier, more deferential, I shouldn't accept those things.  I wouldn't accept those things, except I have accepted those things because it is what I learned as a child. 

Be different for me to love you, because what you are now is too much, is not enough, is wrong, and I cannot care for this defiant creature that you are.

All Cissie wanted was to be told that she was good enough, that it didn't matter that she wasn't perfect, that she defied Mama and Daddy's ideals in ways that still made her special and beautiful and acceptable and likable and lovable.  She wanted to know that she was good enough, that she didn't have to keep fighting and trying, that it was okay to be less than perfect.  And she wanted to know that she was good enough, that they would be proud of her for who she was, not for the accomplishments and the grades and the good choices she made that were really never choices at all. 

So for that little girl, to that little girl, I say, "Cissie, it's okay.  You are a good girl.  You were always a good girl.  It's wonderful that you weren't perfect, and it's good that you made mistakes.  You watched and learned, and you helped get me to here and now.  I'm sorry you didn't feel safe and protected and loved like you should've.  You deserved that, not just because you were a little girl but because you brilliantly, spectacularly special, and you were you."

Tonight, I will let her cry all she wants, to let out what is hurting her heart still, and I will tell her as often as she needs to hear it that she was worthy of all of that love, even when she wasn't always shown that. 

Going forward, I will do my best to honor that, to remind her and remind myself that Stephanie is resilient and sensitive because of the bullets Cissie took, that I learned to rebel because of the deference she endured and the secrets she kept, that I deserve healthy love now just as much as she did then. 

We are both worth it.