Muchness and Light

Just close your eyes until you can imagine this place, yeah, our secret place at will.

On the first Friday in January, after my New Year’s Eve had gone awry, I was driving home from work, anticipating a long, lonely weekend. I was a little agitated, my anxiety still unreasonably high, worried about how another weekend alone would go. But Bumblebee called, as he often does in the early evening, asking how I was.

“I’m tired,” I lamented. I hadn’t slept well for several days, and it was starting to take a serious toll on my overall health.

“What will help?” he asked.

“Sleep. Lots and lots of sleep.”

“What if I’m there to sleep with you?” He paused. “I’m giving you three hours’ notice, as you’ve asked. I’m on my way.”

And just like that, he drove on a Friday afternoon from Birmingham to Atlanta to see me. We still missed a midnight countdown and champagne, but we did manage to see Bumblebee in the theater (as we’d planned for months) and to get pho (as we’d planned for two weeks). We managed to escape into our beloved bubble, tucked away from the world and focusing on us (We. Oui.) and recharging our shared battery.

All of my disappointment from the screwed up New Year’s Eve, which had ballooned a growing anxiety into an almost-panic, was assuaged by his showing up. As I’ve discussed so many times before, much of my anxiety both comes from and drives my fear of emotional abandonment. Often in my life, love meant leaving, it meant disappointment, it meant hurt—all of which my internal system interpreted as Stephanie simply wasn’t worth loving.

In October, the logistics of the long-distance relationship had started to take their toll. What I need from a partner is hard to maintain across such distance, especially my need for physical touch and consistent, reliable interaction. Hell, I’ve broken up with more than one local man for not being able to make time to see me, because “to date someone requires actual interpersonal engagement within a certain physical proximity.” I swore off the possibility of long-term relationships—until this started with him.

But looking back to the series I did last year on what I value in myself, in a partner, and in a relationship, there was no question that Bumblebee more than meets those criteria. He is brilliant and kind, humble and funny. He is extraordinarily patient, especially with me, and he is deeply and readily passionate. Even with the distance and the circumstances of our lives, the apprehension of love again after divorce, he acknowledges his fear and chooses to be open and available to me anyway. We maintain regular contact and conversation, although sometimes our schedules make it hard to have more than a few minutes of talk on a given day. He is physically and emotionally the safest partner I’ve ever known. The girls have welcomed him as a part of our family, and vice versa. We are slowly moving forward, together, even if we aren’t sure what exactly that will look like.

The difficulties of the distance were outweighed by the reciprocity and depth of emotion and care that we share, and we decided we could not let this relationship go.

But… long distance relationships are hard. We don’t get impromptu lunches or random Tuesday nights together. When I wake from a difficult dream, or just rouse to the Litany of Bullshit that Might Go Wrong, I don’t get to reach for him in the middle of the night. I don’t get to comfort him with a hug after a long day at work, or to care for him when he’s sick. Even if the physical distance of 180 miles isn’t that difficult to overcome, visitation schedules and divorce logistics and family commitments often interfere. Given the still-budding nature of our relationship, almost none of our mutual friends know we are dating, and our time together rarely includes anyone but us.

The inconsistency is both cause and effect of our current posture, and it can be frustrating. For me, it can drive my anxiety to ridiculous levels. For a girl who hates to feel like she’s trapped in a box, the necessary compartmentalization that comes from a long-distance relationship can be terrifying. Not being an active, open part of his day-to-day life can sometimes leave me feeling like an option. On the worst days, I feel like a dirty little secret, which can trigger years’ worth of trauma around shame. The parts of my internal system get conflicted, imagining different outcomes that almost always end in despair. Some days, I break up with him in my head a dozen times or more, simply out of fear that he might one day leave me.

But… the distance does give us opportunity to practice communication. Unless we can manage a FaceTime call, we are limited to text and voice chat. Without the benefit of non-verbal cues, we have to make a very concerted effort to listen to the other. Misunderstandings do happen, but we tend to address them very quickly. Having lived the damage caused by unspoken resentment in relationships, we are usually quick to politely air our grievances and move on, not allowing small scrapes and bruises to fester.

It’s impossible to foresee every twist and turn our relationship may take—and we have been sideswiped more than once by some pretty ugly unexpectedness. But we are both sensitive to not repeating the same patterns and mistakes that caused other relationships to fail.

“You know,” I said to him over breakfast on Sunday, at the end of a 15-hour visit, “maybe it’s good that we’re not in the same city. If we were, we’d be seeing each other every day and just doing what we do--”

“—settling into a groove.”

I shook my head disdainfully. “You know I’m never going to let that happen, right?”

“Baby,” he replied evenly, holding my gaze, “I’m counting on it.”

 

 

And a place in your heart, dear, makes me feel more real.

Last week, I was walking and listening to music, as I’m prone to do. I’ve been walking again a lot lately, both to try to lose the weight I regained over the last couple of years and to clear my head a bit. The last few weeks have seen a lot of processing about everything going on in therapy. I admit to there being a lot of overthinking, as well.

I was listening to the new Mynabirds record, Be Here Now. Their first two records were especially poignant for me during and after my divorce. I hadn’t had a chance to hear this one, so it seemed a great choice for a three-mile walk on a lovely autumn evening. The record is quite good, and I added several tracks to various playlists, as I’m also prone to do. But something—and I can’t be sure what—in the song “Wild Hearts” set me off. It’s as lyrically fantastic as any other song Laura Burhenn has written, but something sent me spiraling toward epiphany.

As I’ve said before, the goal of the Internal Family Systems model of therapy is to reintegrate the subpersonalities that are formed as the result of traumatic events. No matter how dysfunctional their behavior may (or may not!) be, my subparts are trying their best to protect me from hurt and further damage. Some have very simple roles, while others are complex and nuanced in their approach to what they see as their role. They are such an integral part of me that I don’t always notice when one subpersonality is controlling in a situation. (Just think about any time you’ve ever gone off and yelled at someone, had a full-blown tantrum, maybe not even realizing how out of control you are until the moment passes and you’re able to reflect on it rationally. You were always you. You always knew you were you. You were just… not really yourself in that moment.) This part of my journey ends when each subpart is reconnected fully with my Self, which is able to make healthy choices without the need to call on the managers or the firefighters to protect the exiles, perpetually trapped by a moment of trauma.

As I was walking and listening, I had the realization that there is another subpersonality I hadn’t noticed before. In my mind, she looks like a child, though she isn’t. I tried to reach out to her and let her tell me about herself, having an internal dialogue with this deep part of myself. I realized the others had crafted her, had created her from their own bits and pieces. She knows everything each of the other subpersonalities knows, though they don’t each know everything she knows. She acts as sentry for Cissie, a strong last line of defense of the exile, able to protect her (and thus me) with the full knowledge of every other manager and firefighter subpart.

Every time a subpart experienced any kind of extreme emotion, it was transferred onto Pearl. Layer upon layer of hurt and damage, of ecstasy and deep love, grief and agony, irrepressible joy and unflagging hope—all built up slowly to create their own scapegoat, much in the way I created them.

And if I created them and they created her….

Yeah.

Pearl is, essentially, my muchness.

She is the figurative embodiment of everything I’ve lived for the last seven years. She is the angry rebellion against being shoved into a box and denied reciprocal affection. She is the wild abandon that led to not-always-healthy choices. She is the late-night drives with the windows down and the same song blaring for thirty miles. She is the trail of glitter left in my wake. She is the frustration at loving someone so much and not being able to be any more entwined with them.

She is the shame that comes from needing so badly to be loved. She is the uncontrollable, make-me-shake-with-the-sick-of-it-all fear of being emotionally abandoned. She is the overwhelming sorrow from not being able to think of one more thing, the just-the-right thing, to prove that I was worth their love.

Pearl takes those hits, because even the others aren’t always capable of doing it. So they—I—created her, coating both good and bad carefully on an amorphous form disguised as innocence. At the center of it all is the exact hurt and shame that they all fight like hell to protect Cissie from.

Even in the depths of my fucked-up psyche, I tried to make something beautiful from something ugly.

Queen Frostine and I talked at length about it all, as we are prone to do. She was surprised to realize how much of what I do is tied up with self-protection.

“All these things I think about when I think of you, I always just thought of them as personality traits. Now I’m seeing that they’re defense mechanisms, and that is so fucking weird to see.”

And it’s not just the unhealthier traits, like redrawing personal boundaries to accommodate men who refuse to do the same for me. It’s also the gregarious and seemingly-healthy ones, like my openness and willingness to put all of me out there no matter what others think.

Pearl came about as a last line of defense. She’s the general behind my own enemy lines, telling everyone else what to do. And she mimics my voice so well that I let her be in charge.

But she’s not the one who’s supposed to be in charge—I am. I’m the one who gets to make the decisions about what’s best for me, for us. I can have an internal dialogue with these persona, assigned by me as a way to catalog and contain my emotions, to make sense of it all.

The irony is that in dividing myself into these intricate parts, I have compartmentalized my own emotions, segmenting them and locking them away until I’m ready to deal with them—the very thing I hate most when others do it to me. To be ignored, to be dismissed, to be relegated to the dark and dusty recesses of someone’s heart until such time as I am convenient is enraging to me.

But I’m doing it to myself.

It’s time to let them out of their boxes, to remove the walls of compartment and allow them to wander free, talking to each other and to me. It’s time to let them out into the light and the fresh air, to experience my life fully and mindfully, able to see more than the limited view from the bottom of a box.

 

 

 

My tongue gets tied when I try to speak. My insides shake, and there's no relief.

Yesterday, I reached out to the Hive Mind that is Facebook, and I asked about the logistics of post-divorce dating. Having been separated and divorced for five years, I’ve had some experience with it. Three years with Rango, the months that turned into whatever with Bounder… plus the dozens of others I entangled myself with to varying degrees.

But having unexpectedly met someone threw me for a loop. I am often hypersensitive to others, and I’m constantly on high alert for warning signs of disappointment (read: abandonment). I am persistently in a state of overthinking everything. Everything.

Ah, the joys of anxious attachment!

I wanted to know about the logistics of dating. I didn’t actually date in my teens and twenties. I married DH at 21. Though I’d been in a four-year relationship prior to him, it was abusive and tumultuous. Dating again five years ago was weird, for sure, and Rango was intended to be the last one.

Best laid plans, man.

So now having unexpectedly met someone, I have been struggling to determine if my feelings of anxiety and agitation are warranted, i.e., did he really pull back, or are those flutters and weird pangs in my chest just my own insecurities in a panic?

With rare exceptions, all of my romantic partnerships during the last five years started intense and immediate. We exchanged lots of messages, dates’ worth of information disclosed over the course of a couple of days via text and chat. Phone conversations were rarer, but it’s hard to talk when you’re both working and managing kids and lives.

Dating after divorce is hard. For everyone, there is the complication of past hurt, of trying to honor your own internal struggles and pain without getting caught in the same loops again. Those best laid plans were decimated, and it’s daunting to consider opening yourself to the possibility of hurt again. The demands of adulthood make finding time to connect even harder. And when one or both of you have kids, the scheduling difficulties and emotional concerns expand exponentially.

But what turned out to be my normal experience with dating again maybe wasn’t very normal at all. That constant connection felt fantastic, because it satisfied my tendency toward anxious attachment. While this new guy and I did have days of constant chatting and a couple of fantastic dates that first week, the communication dropped back. There are lots of logical reasons (see above), but the loosened connection made me agitated, sending me into days of hyper critical thinking.

Is the lack of constant, effusive attention normal, or is he an avoidant who's about to bail?

The thing about anxious and avoidant attachment styles is that they are inherently insecure--that’s why they’re not part of the secure attachment style. But secure attachment requires attachment to something (really someone). Even if I were secure in my own talents and attributes and accepting of who I am (which I’m plainly not), that doesn’t necessarily mean I could be securely attached to another person--though it would certainly improve the chances. An attachment is only formed in connection to an Other.

For me, this has most often manifested as this pathological dance between anxious Me and avoidant Them. We both want intimacy, and we connect immediately. When the feelings and connections become very intense, they run. Right on cue, I chase, trying desperately to maintain the lack of agitation that comes with being connected.

What I have finally learned is that the lack of agitation does not mean the attachment is secure. An absence of fluttery pangs in my chest does not equate to happily-ever-after. Because of the inherent insecurity on both sides, they are likely to bolt when they feel trapped by the intimacy they commanded. I’ve done the dance a dozen times and know the warnings signs, so I am always on high alert.

My rose-colored glasses can make even the whitest of flags look like they’re signalling the riptide that will drown me.

So did the new guy pull back, or is it normal dating behavior?

I don’t know.

I have polled my friends. I sought roundabout advice from the Hive Mind. No one knows, and I sure as hell don’t. The consensus is that I should wait and see, play it cool and just wait.

But I am impossibly impatient. Because I am not throwing everything at him at once, because I’m not demanding answers from him, I am agitated. At times, it feels as though my heart is about to claw its way out of my chest like a lovesick Xenomorph.

I don't know what to do with the agitation. I'm walking again, which helps. I'm down nearly 20 pounds since Rango and I split. I'm writing, though I recognize that almost no one but me sees these words. They are cathartic for me, however, and that has its own importance.  

But the writing and therapy have shined a glaring light on my insecurities. I know why they came about, how they were formed, just not what to do to make them better. And not doing things how I always have, not demanding that he give me the weight of answers I may not want to hear, is uncomfortable

What worked before isn't working now, because I'm not letting it.

But this is driving me crazy, and there seems to be no peace to be found. The firefighters are at odds with one another, fighting inside me over how best to help me feel calm. All I can do is plod ahead, hour by hour, and do the things I need to do. I know that’s the managers, though, distracting me with to-do lists and minutiae that feels all too important.

I may feel like I’m coming apart from the inside, but at least my toilets will be clean.

 

 

And if love is real, maybe I'm just too bad to remember how good it feels. My heart is still.

One of the things I like about the Internal Family Systems model is that it doesn’t pathologize any of the subpersonalities. Even when their behaviors are seemingly destructive, their dysfunction serves a greater purpose, at least in their minds. Their actions and reactions serve to protect the Exiles, to prevent further harm from coming to the already damaged parts of the psyche.

When I am hurt or sad, and usually in response to infliction of hurt by someone else (and usually a romantic partner), one of my subpersonalities will fling terrible thoughts and words at me.

You’re fat. You’re ugly. You’re gross. You’re stupid. You are unlovable, and no one loves you. You aren’t worthy of love and don’t deserve good things. You are a waste.

Now, logically, I understand those things may not be true. But why the hell would part of me continually tell other parts of me that I’m a waste of human flesh?

For a while, I wasn’t even sure who she was. I thought it might be Stephie, but she’s more likely to inflict her anger on others, not on me. And this one’s voice is no one else’s. It’s not my mother’s or my father’s. It doesn’t belong to any number of exes. It is a strangely-pitched, younger, strange version of my own voice. She knows how to inflect dripping sarcasm, spitting hatefully at me when I’m in the worst of the throes of pain. And just when I can’t take more, she hits with a final sucker punch, spinning me deep into tears and frustration.

She’s Harley.

Yes, it’s an easy moniker. And if she does her job well, she can get Quinn to act out, to seek out comfort in dark places.

And all of this to protect some Exile.

But what’s her purpose? I’m already hurting like hell; what good does it to do to inflict more, albeit different, pain?

Well, my first reaction to hurt and sadness is to close it down, to wall it off where it can’t reach me. Rango complained more than once that I would turn icy when hurt and angry. I can become very mechanical and refuse to feel emotion, let alone express it.

And that’s what she does: Harley forces me to feel something, anything that keeps me from returning to a dissociative state of numbness.

I spent the first ten years of my sons’ lives in that space. Struggling to find value both within myself and reflected from my husband, I shut down. My anxiety after giving birth to Max was so great that I started a low-dose SSR. It stopped the anxiety and kept me in the center, so I stayed on it until I couldn’t bear not feeling anymore. While the wild swings from joy to sorrow were abated, I generally felt nothing. When I got nothing in return, I became frustrated, and Quinn stepped in to give me some semblance of meaning again.

But because I am drawn to emotionally-unavailable men, Harley does what she can to keep me from becoming an avoidant myself. Given the last few years and recent relationship troubles, I get the appeal of shutting everyone and everything out. I get how it can seem beneficial to artificially limit what you’re willing to feel for another person, who well might break your heart. There is safety in walling yourself off from the Great Outdoors.

But I’m also a firm believer that love matters. It matters when we feel deep, caring emotion for another person, no matter the context. I don’t mean infatuation or attraction or simple affection. I mean the kind of love in which we are willing to sacrifice to help them reach their next goal. The kind of love that is so simple and pure that it expects to be cared for in return, simply because that is its nature.

It is unimaginable to me to walk away from that. It makes no sense to me that the people who’ve said they loved me could then walk away, could turn their backs on the thing they need most, which I just happen to be willing to give in droves. It’s nonsensical to have what you want most, what is good and healthy and true, right in front of you and to drop it carelessly on the ground on your way out the door.

So, the hurt for me comes from both the act of abandonment, whether physical or emotional, and the injustice of the leaving. And emotional abandonment is a very large part of the hurt for me. Hiding deep inside is a little girl who felt abandoned. Every time she felt it was safe to come out, trust someone enough to hold their outstretched hand and hope for love, she was let down again, over and over. She continually learned that she wasn’t worth loving, because people who love you stay and support you and care for you. They sacrifice for you, and no one sacrificed for her. She was, at times, a sacrificial lamb of sorts.

So, when the same wounds are reopened, Harley steps in to keep me from shutting down entirely. She steels me for an onslaught of disappointment and confusion. If I can already feel badly about myself, the abandonment makes sense. If they leave, it is because I am unlovable, so it shouldn’t be so hurtful or saddening. Even if what I feel is disgustful pain, that’s still better than feeling nothing at all.

While I know the things she says to me aren’t always true, there is, of course a nugget of truth to everything she says. I regained weight. I became complacent about my health. I can see myself aging both in photographs and in the mirror. I am emotionally difficult, hence my return to therapy. And even when those faults seem natural and overblown in my mind, there are long stretches of time in which I’m unable to find more good than bad, unable to value myself as more than my faults.

Pandy and I had a wonderful Saturday recently. I took her to see my beloved Afghan Whigs for the first time. Even though I’d just seen them in Atlanta a few weeks before, I traveled to Birmingham for what turned out to be the best Whigs show I’ve ever seen.

 

• 
• 
• 

A few days later, she messaged me and asked me to look at the photographs she had taken of me that night. She asked me to see what she sees, what she was trying to capture, “joy, or strength, or tenacity reflected in you.”

You are exquisitely beautiful. I know you seldom feel the woman I see, but that doesn’t mean you are any less the one I see. Sometimes friends see us more clearly than we see ourselves. Those are the times we need to redirect our focus, and look with kinder eyes; look at yourself for a moment as I do. See yourself in my photographs of you, and imagine what I was trying to capture. I see beauty. I see sass. I see strength. I see might. In short I see a very real version of Wonder Woman. She is a woman I love, admire, and appreciate. She is you.

I looked at her photographs. I can see what it is that she sees, why those moments capture those qualities of the woman in the photographs. What I don’t see, is myself. I don’t connect to those women in those pictures. I don’t feel attached to or protective of them. I don’t feel that their beauty and strength and sass is my own. Because if I feel those things about myself, it will open the door to hurt. It will allow for the possibility of disappointment.

But no matter what I do, no matter how far I get from my own center, Pandy is there. She is with me through thick and thin, through skinny and fat, through aging and heartache and wonder. I love her, and she loves me. I know this. I feel it every day, even if I don’t talk to her. Even when I’ve been at my worst, she stayed and supported me and loved me anyway, even if it meant telling me truths I didn’t want to hear.

Sometimes Harley argues with Pandy. Sometimes she rolls her eyes and just lets her talk. But every so often, she stays still and lets me feel the love that comes from this woman who has no desire to ever abandon me.

Somehow, that is progress.

 

 

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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When your mama heard the way that you'd been talkin', I tried to tell you that all she'd wanna do is cry.

So it has been a rough couple of months. Honestly, I don’t even know the last time I checked in, the last time I wrote something that wasn’t schoolwork or workwork or some ranting, raving text or email that I hoped would perfectly and pointedly enunciate whatever the hell has been trying to claw its way out of me. Heart, brain, mind, soul… all a big confusing blob of Idon’tevenknowwhat right now.

Radiation was a downer, but I got through it. All of this activity with my thyroid has sent my hormones into overdrive. Concerns about my health have sent my head spinning, and three days in isolation, binge watching Game of Thrones, sure as heck didn’t help.

But I have, at times, been a raging bitch. It’s not that I am imagining things to get upset about; it has just been far too easy for me to explode about anything and then find myself curled into a sobbing ball of inconsolable self-recrimination.

In the middle of a tense discussion about it a couple of weeks ago, Rango told me that he doesn’t understand why I am so drawn to chaos.

“It’s like you need the tension.”

He doesn’t get it. He says he prefers to be in the middle, at even keel and as balanced as possible.

“I don’t trust extremes,” he continued. “I don’t like euphoria any more than I like chaos.”

But me? I thrive in chaos. Euphoria is my drug.

“I need the tension to know I’m alive,” I replied. “It’s the only way I know I’m not numb, and I don’t ever want to be numb to my life again.”

I challenged that I abhor the happy medium he espouses.  But he has a point: I am drawn to extremes.

Lately, though, there seem to have only been extremes of bad, of anger and disappointment and outrage, over the slightest things. I can blow a gasket if the towels aren’t folded right or if the boys didn’t clean the table.

Last night, I was adamant that I’ll be kicking Max out of the house when he’s 22, because he can’t hold down a job or finish school or take care of himself—all because the kitchen was a torn apart by a ravenous, irresponsible, 15-year-old boy.

For the last week, I’ve been hearing other people say things, often random things that aren’t directed at me, that seem like messages the cosmos intends for me to hear. There was a gathering of the Castration Committee at my house over the weekend, and all three of the present girls said something very specific about themselves that I also needed to take to heart.

Yesterday, I was driving to work, in a total funk, listening to my favorite podcast, Death, Sex & Money (with Anna Sale). The latest episode was an interview with author and Buzzfeed senior editor Katie Heaney. Anna had interviewed her a couple of years ago after she published Never Have I Ever, her memoir of then-lifelong singledom. Now dating and now openly gay, Heaney talked about what it was like to let go of much of her apprehension about dating when she realized she really might want to date women instead of men.

No, I didn’t need to get the message that I’m really a lesbian, no matter how often the Castration Committee and I plan to swear off men and just be together forever. There was actually a lot in her story and in her words that jumped through the car speakers toward me. (That happens a lot when I listen to Death, Sex & Money. That’s why it’s my favorite.)

Sale asked Heaney if there’s anything she feels like she needed to be taught in her new relationship, having never been in a relationship herself.

“Not really, no…. Not taught. I think that I… and I am still learning this… I have to learn how to not catastrophize every disagreement or every feeling that comes to me that isn’t a one-hundred-percent joyous one. You know, I always thought that I was above the sort of ‘white knight’ narrative and thinking that a relationship was going to improve my life. I don’t think I thought it was going to improve my life, but I thought that I had struggled so long to find it that once I did it would just be perfect or easy…. I was naïve about what it really means to spend that much time with someone and still be happy but still have days where you’re just like, ‘Ugh, I don’t feel good, I don’t feel good today, this is not my favorite thing that’s going on today,” and I think early on I would get very nervous about that, because I was putting a lot of pressure on both of us.”

Dude.

Is Katie Hearney living in my head?? (I’m sorry if you are, Katie. It’s a cacophonous place.)

Sale did the same thing I did, questioned whether or not “catastrophize” was a real word, or whether Hearney’s mom had coined it in reference to her daughter.

Turns out, it is a real word. It’s an irrational thought that something is much worse than it actually is. According to psychologist John M. Grohol, catastrophizing can take two forms. The first takes a current situation and turns it into catastrophe—a small mistake at work will result in your firing. The second form takes thoughts of future happenings and creates a reality around the anticipated catastrophe.

Guilty as charged, on both counts.

In the very beginning of my break-up with Bounder, when I saw the potential of so much going badly because of something he felt I had blown out of proportion, he called me on it.

“You’re always looking for the worst thing to happen, waiting for it to blow up, because you just know it’s going to. Things aren’t always that bad, Sass.”

Well, he was right and not, of course. So was I.

I am incredibly analytical by nature—I am a good Virgo, after all. And my job requires me to be hyper-analytical, looking not only at what is wrong, but also at what might be wrong, to anticipate a response and a rebuttal and a reply to the rebuttal, all with the end goal of being right. I am very good at my job, but the cacophony in my head is often just the buzz of this computation of possibility and plausibility in a way that is extreme, even for me.

So while I’m analyzing the minutiae of every relationship I have, often to my own detriment, I don’t know if I’ve ever been able to give this one with Rango (or any one) a fair and healthy shot. He noted that I am constantly scrutinizing everything, waiting for it to break down and fall apart.

And with another year of hormonal chaos ahead of me—so says my doctor—I don’t know if either of us has the energy to try to keep up with my thoughts.

My crazy train can be gloriously and devastatingly exhausting. I am always on the go, and the next year will be no exception. There is not time to slow down, between work and school and the kids. But somehow I have to find a way not to expect the worst, even though I have planned for it so carefully.

I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to just stop being me. And I am afraid of taking away the glorious if I abandon the devastation. I am afraid of being numb again.

I don’t have an answer. I have a recommendation for a book, The Mayo Clinic Guide to Stress-Free Living, and I have ordered a copy. I am not one to turn to self-help books, unless someone very special recommends the book. This time is no exception, and it feels like the cosmos wants me to read something.

So for now, I am waiting patiently for Amazon to deliver my copy. I will not expect it to get lost in the mail—I can always go to the book store for another one if that one never shows.

But I will try to take those thoughts when they come and let them be that, just thoughts. They are not action, they are not reality, unless I make them so.

 

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.

 

You were the promise at dawn, and I was the morning after.

My head is a little haunted sometimes.

Because I horde the memories, because I keep an extraordinary amount of minutiae in there, and because I'm an intensely emotional girl, there is a constant swirl of emotion in me. In a given moment, I will drive along a certain street or hear a specific song, and it will dredge up a memory—Oh, I talked to Absolem from that parking lot or That song was playing when Bounder and I <did whatever>--and then I will re-evaluate the entire relationship. It may take hours or it may happen in an instant, but every emotion I ever felt about that person will come in waves of good and bad, roiling over each other and crashing against the shores of my heart in quick succession.

Hurricane Sassafras can be an utter bitch sometimes.

But none of those emotions are happening now. I'm not living the event that led to the original emotion. It's just an echo, a ghost.

"Ghosts can't hurt you," Rango has reminded me a hundred times. "They're powerless."

Theoretically, they have the power I allow them to have, though I don't really know how to make them feel less important. Some have just taken time to fade. There are dozens of faceless, nameless shifting shapes that are little more than a murmur in my periphery.

But then there are the others.

My therapist said to me once that our bodies have a memory of their own, that our memories play out on a deep, cellular level because our bodies were physically present for the events that occurred. As she explained it, this is why anniversaries of powerful and vividly-remembered events can bring on the same emotions that were felt originally.

Right now, at this time of year, I am in a cycle of dozens of anniversaries. For whatever reason, the period from mid-April to the beginning of August is peppered with anniversaries like a minefield of memories. They run the gamut from wonderful to confusing to downright heartbreaking—and sometimes all three at once.

My therapist also had me work on sitting with my emotions, on allowing them to fall in and around me and just be, without reacting or overreacting to them, naming them and being aware of what they were and where they came from. But with emotions constantly on this rollercoaster down Memory Lane, it's too easy for me to become stuck in place, sitting, paralyzed in my useless fear.

And I do know that the fear is pointless and counterproductive. In my head, I am fully aware that what I'm feeling is wrapping its cold hand around my heart because I let it. I know that the ghosts are vaporous re-imaginings of what I remember, vacillating around my perspective at the moment that I am reminded of them.

But what is it about the others that I can't quite seem to escape them fully?

Absolem was both witness and accomplice to the inner transformations that were the cause of so much outer revolution. There are days I think of something that I should tell him and then remember that we no longer have that relationship, that I can't just message him and tell him to call me when he gets a chance. While I miss that friendship, I do not miss the emotional craziness that sometimes ensued because of it. I don't miss those tears, but I do sometimes change the route I drive just to avoid passing my own ghost.

Bounder was... Bounder. He was the one who broke my heart and wouldn't give me the closure I asked for. There was an ending—and one that took far longer to play out than we were actually a couple—but it didn't come how I felt like it should've, and it never will. Because he lives close by, I sometimes pass him on the street. It's not a ghost with him so much as a poltergeist, make me nauseated and ill from a sucker punch to the gut.

There are still some songs I just. can't. bear. to hear.

And with DH, it seems like there should be more than with the others, but there's not. In fact, it happens far less often than it used to. Yes, I've had almost three years to put that damage behind me. Yes, I still have to deal with his shit in my basement.

But I can also see the very best of him every single day in our boys. I chose to have two children with him for a reason, and Max and Tricky remind me all the time of how that decision was the best one I ever made. Somehow I've been able to unpack and repack all of that emotional baggage and keep only what mattered, and it's very rare that those memories have the power to upend me.

So I've been a bit on edge for the last few days. I told the Castration Committee that I felt like I was about to crawl out of my own damn skin again. Last night, the first good spring storm came, thunder like the laughter of those specters. I sat on my porch swing, feeling the cold spray of torrential rain on the breeze like phantasmal fingers stroking along my neck. I let the emotions come and swing with me until I thought I would choke on my own breath.

What was I feeling? Why was I feeling it?

I couldn't name it. I couldn't exorcise it.

One of Rango's superpowers is to be able to replace those memories with his own, our own. He is a Ghostslayer Extraordinaire.

"What do you need me to do?" he asked.

"Nothing. Just hold me."

Is it that you miss them? One of them?

No.

Is there something you're not getting that you need?

Not at all.

It wasn't that I was missing anyone else. I hate to compare old loves—each relationship was special for its own reason—but Rango is undeniably so much more than any of the others. There is nothing any of them was or has that he doesn't offer to me willingly and completely.

"Sometimes I just... hurt," I whispered to Rango.

It just hurts.

And there it was. Just hurt. Not grief or anger or longing or sorrow or love. Just hurt that hasn't fully healed. It doesn't feel like it did when the wounds were fresh, but it still aches sometimes when I twist just right or move too quickly in an unexpected direction. Sometimes I just bump the old wound.

And somehow, giving that to Rango makes the hurt fade.

He kisses me and makes me better.

Today, the ghosts are mostly quiet. They're just kind of hanging out and busying themselves with other things, playing quietly off in the distance. I can feel their presence, see them out of the corner of my eye, but I'm doing my best to stay out of their line of sight.

Somewhere between them and me is him, Rango, who will stand guard for as long as I need.

I'm not so scared anymore.

 

Will you let me follow you wherever you go? Bring me home.

It's been an incredibly busy six weeks, and I've been sorely out of touch.  Summer break for the boys was surprisingly busy, especially for Max who was gearing up to start high school.  (High school!  My baby is in high school!)  I was working when I could, and I was constantly doing homework or in class—completing the 15-hour class load for the summer session.  It exhausted me, but I managed to pull off a 3.8 GPA for the semester and both boys are still alive. 

In the midst of all of that chaos, there came Rango.  While talking during our first date, I was telling him what my hectic life was like.

"How do you manage time to date?" he asked across a ginger beer.

"I just do it," I replied.  "If it's important to me, I find the time."

That was an issue with so many of the Fragile Cats before.  They would often say they were too busy to be regularly available, but they also had the expectation that I would be happy and welcoming when they wanted to drop a dead mouse on my doorstep.  As most of the Castration Committee will attest, I thrive in chaos; I am generally at my best when I am forced to prioritize and organize and be efficient in my decisiveness.  I could always find time to spend with Bounder or Katniss or Rex or any of them. 

They wouldn't always find the time to spend with me.

As I realized over the year-and-a-half of dating after my separation, I was mostly drawn to avoidants—the asshole Fragile Cats who justified running hot and cold and often made me feel like it was my fault for wanting or expecting them to follow through on their word.  Yes, if you tell me you're going to show up or call, I actually expect you do show up or call.

Somehow they were always surprised when I felt hurt or angry with them for not doing what they'd said they would. 

Eventually I learned it wasn't me at all that had screwed up in these exchanges.  La Bruja told me months ago that I would eventually find an amazing guy who wasn't like that, at which point I would cease to even see the avoidants who were trying to get my attention. 

She was right.  Kind of.

I still see them; I'm me—I can pick them out of a crowd in five seconds flat.  But I don't pay attention to them.  I don't feel drawn to help or empathize or soothe.  Usually I smile and nod politely while mentally running through my to-do list for the upcoming days.  Sometimes I just roll my eyes and walk away. 

Given my own hectic life, it's surprising that I even bothered to try one more time.  I was determined that July 2nd would be my last date for a very, very long time.  I'd intended that to be the case if and when it turned out that he was another avoidant asshole.  Never did I expect the guy to actually be Rango. 

Because he mattered to me, I had to make the decision very quickly to incorporate Rango into my life.  He was willing to accept me and my crazy, plus my two sons and the logistical issues that divorced parenting brings.

Somehow, because I matter to him, he finds the way and the time to make me and the boys a priority.  When a recent family illness brought an unexpected road trip to Alabama, he didn't hesitate to offer to go with us.  He hasn't shied away from meeting my family or friends.

More importantly, when I woke in the middle of the night crying a few weeks ago, he didn't shy away from me.  The logistics of my life were taking a physical and emotional strain, and I woke at 4 a.m. to a barrage of hot, angry sobs.  He was awake elsewhere in the house, trying not to wake me with his own sick and sleeplessness. 

I laid there for a moment in the dark, paralyzed with fear and hurt.  All the nights I woke alone like that came crushing back, and I couldn't breathe.  Then I remembered that I had begged the Universe for someone who could help shoulder that weight for me.  I had prayed for someone to be there in the middle of the night when I was crying.

I padded down the hall to where he was in the kitchen.  He looked at me, saw the glint of streaming tears in the dim light, and dropped everything just to hold me and listen while I sobbed against his chest.  Eventually he put me back to bed and stayed right there with me until I fell back asleep. 

Impossibly, he was still there the next morning.

Rango doesn't shy away from my heart any more than I do.  I warned potential suitors that I was a lot to handle, and they always said they were okay with that.  He is the only one who has consistently and unabashedly embraced the intense chaos that swirls in and around me. 

He loves me not in spite of but because of that intensity.

Queen Frostine commented the other day that I had not once called her crying or lamenting some stupid thing Rango had said or done—totally unlike any of my other relationships.

"He grounds you," she noted.  "He keeps you centered."

I quickly pointed out that I do the same for him.  Even though it's a tenuous balancing act some days, it's easy to be with him, to love him.  We are open and honest in our communication.  We are true to ourselves and to each other.  He is the same way with me that I am with him... that I was with the others who couldn't manage to get their furry heads out of their own asses long enough to realize that it didn't have to be so damn hard all the time. 

Interestingly, he doesn't make me feel like I want to puke.  Yes, there is the excitement and the giddy and the uprush of love.  There are no underlying warnings, no red flags flapping above choppy waters that bring the seasickness. 

Invariably, I am me.  Stephanie is prone to moodiness and difficulty.  She attracts sea monsters, curiously dancing with both Scylla and Charybdis, struggling sometimes to stay afloat in a hopscotch board of eddies. 

Hurricane Sassafras is always swirling, in danger of whirling me under my own upsurge.  My biggest fear is that I accidentally pull Rango into that riptide.

But this one has his own undercurrents, his own battles and strengths that pull against mine.  Somehow we manage to moor each other into the safety of our own harbor, like Puerto Rango is the capital of Glamazon Island.  (In my head, it kind of looks like the lagoon on Gilligan's Island.)

It's natural and easy.  We just fit in ways that we've never felt together with someone else.  Even with all of the awareness of the past and cognizance of the present, it feels effortless to love each other in the ways we each need to be loved. 

Rango and Sassafras live contentedly in the eye of the storm, looking up at brilliant skies in the midst of so much buffeting wind.  And if it means a lifetime of my cracking coconuts for dinner and his building radios from the hollowed shells, so be it.  At least there will be piña coladas and music.

 

 

 

And I'm so dizzy, don't know what hit me, but I'll be alright.

Last October, I was recovering from thyroid surgery and pining away for a man who couldn't love me like I needed.  Pandy came to stay with me for a couple of days, to help get my head out of my ass and keep me happily entertained.  With yet another recent snipe from Bounder, we talked at length (ad nauseum) about what my heart wanted and needed. 

Watching movies in the midst of some giggly crazy that always seems to rule our world, Pandy named the next Big Cat to impact me: Rango.

Rango would come from the west.  He would rescue the princess when she freaked out and couldn't do it herself.  He would be afraid but refuse to walk out on his own story. 

Rango would also be big; my ideal was 6'4, 240 pounds, blue eyes, dark hair but balding and shaved, western-European descent.  He would be smart and a little geeky, funny and compassionate, respectful and gentle.  He would be intense and look at me like I'm precious.  He would laugh as loudly as I do and totally get my batshit. 

He would not be an alcoholic, and he would not be afraid to love me.  He would not hesitate. 

Every date I had and relationship I started, Pandy and I would debrief and debate whether or not that one might be Rango.

When she and I went to the beach in April, she continued pressing me in her Practical Magic way to name what I wanted, based on what I'd already had. 

I kept dating.

On May 30^th, I received a message on one of the dating sites I'd been trying for ages.  The guy was a decent match, very cute, 6'5, and he was asking me about my writing.  The conversation went back and forth for a couple of messages, and then I dropped it and forgot about it. 

School, kids, work, my grandmother's death.  And, as has happened so often in the last year, there was the inevitable back-and-forth with Bounder.    I had a couple of dates, but nothing that was quite what I was looking for.  I finally (yes, finally!) got Bounder out of my heart.  Queen Frostine and Peanut and their kids came to visit for a few days.  With so much hectic happening, I decided to screw dating and just focus on school and the kids. 

But then last week I received another message from this guy.

"So I've been matched with you in two different places.  Knowing that you're not into developing dialog through chat, how would you feel about meeting me for a drink sometime this week or weekend?"

Oh, hell! I thought.  I totally blew this guy off for no reason.  And I love to write-chat.  Seriously?  How rude of me!

I agreed to meet for a drink that night, but I also knew that if it didn't go well, I would be done with dating for a while again.  He told me he'd be the tall guy in the Superman baseball cap and that he'd be hard to miss.  I replied that I was an Amazon with a Wonder Woman tattoo; there was no way I would miss him.

Of course he was late.  I was a few minutes earl.  I was sitting at a pub table when I messaged the Castration Committee at 8:37.

"My 8:30 drink date is late.  You know how I feel about this."

"He better have one hell of an excuse!" Pandy commented. 

"There is no excuse!  Release the Cuisinart!" added Moonshine.

Queen Frostine is always so direct in her assessments: "Nope.  Next!"

But then came a text from him: "I'll meet you inside, assuming I made it to the right place.  It's warm out here!"

I was trying to respond to let him know I was already at a table, when I heard a server greet a customer.  I stood and turned to meet him at the door when I saw him round the corner. 

I caught my breath and watched him do a double-take. 

He had been sitting in the 90-degree heat, waiting for me because he was right on time.  Three hours later, I'd agreed to go out with him on Saturday night.  And Friday night.  By 5:30 the next afternoon—after all-day messaging with him—I'm texted Pandy:

He's Rango.

And he is.  Undoubtedly. 

He got to me by 10:45 Friday morning.  We didn't separate until very late Sunday night. 

He's from Texas, though he has lived all over.  He is 6'5, 235#, shaved head, gorgeous blue-gray eyes that flicker like a storm approaching over the ocean.  He kissed me in the park under Independence Day fireworks.  He bought two new Doctor Who shirts while he was with me at the mall, including one that is just like Max's favorite shirt.  He totally encouraged my need to Instagram the absurdities in my world.  We laughed until we couldn't breathe, and we talked for three straight days.

And while I don't like comparing men and relationships, how did he stack up against the Pandy-induced wish list?

He helped me cook dinner, and he cooked crepes for me for breakfast on Sunday.  I watched him clean up spilled cat food from the kitchen floor.  I lost my wallet on Saturday, and he drove me on Sunday to pick up the boys in South Carolina and paid for the gas and food and fireworks for the kids, because I couldn't.  He met my sons and my ex-husband at the same time. 

He saw me immediately, clearly.  He has lived amazing adventures and wants more, but nothing is so adventurous to him as the possibility of me. 

Rango listens to me intently, like my voice and words keep him alive.  He is holding nothing back.  Every emotion, deep and true, is mine to see and touch.  It was he, in fact, who looked me in the eye—not a text or a phone call—to tell me for the first time that he loves me.  To my face, with no hesitation. 

And from the very first, he bested the kiss that I thought would likely never be topped.

He brought me flowers and a CD when he came for me.  He held my hand and breath-sang to me—a country song that, for so many reasons, would have otherwise made me want to stick my fingers in my ears. 

Rango is enormous.  He has worked to overcome his own weight and health issues and understands mine intimately.  His hands and feet are bigger than mine, and I touched his feet with mine the first day, which the Castration Committee knows is a big damn deal for me.  He is loud and gregarious, patient and indulging.  He picked me up and spun me around and kissed me like no one ever has before.

More importantly, he is present and available and willing.  He holds my hand and rubs my cheek constantly.  He texts me in the pre-dawn hours while I am still sleeping to tell me he loves me.  He sends me links and pictures for things he thinks I will find interesting, and he sends similar tidbits for the boys, who both said he is awesome.  He plays my favorite game of sharing poignant songs, back and forth, trying to explain our heads and hearts through music.  He is taking me to meet his friends this weekend.  He talked to Pandy on the phone and is planning to go with me to see her in a couple of weeks. 

He looks at me like no one ever has, and he tells me I am precious to him.  I can see and feel my worth to him in every single interaction, in every touch and kiss and look and word. 

I had all but lost hope that I would ever find what I staunchly believed had to be out there.  I knew in my head that the law of averages said it was likely to happen, but my heart just couldn't connect and was losing faith.  I questioned over and over what I had done so wrong in my life that I didn't deserve to have the good I knew was looking for me just as hard as I was looking for it.  It felt like my heart was dying. 

And in walked Superman.

I am overwhelmed, and I am relieved, and I am grateful.  Yes, to know that I was right and to get something really good when I needed it, but also because it's him.  It's this man, who is so wonderful. 

I see his specialness.  I see those unique qualities that set him apart from other men, hiding behind the dork glasses and the badge on his chest.  His strength is amazing, but his heart is just as strong. 

While it might have been too much for other women, I'm an Amazon princess.  I have my own enormous strength, my own muchness that has been too much.  I have my own, invisible transportation and don't need him to fly me around, unless I've misplaced my driver's license. 

More importantly, we see the humanity in each other, the imperfections and the frailty and the damage that led us to one another.  We know we only have so much time, and we have each wasted enough having to rebuild from one destruction or another. 

Had I gone out with him in early June, before letting go of Bounder, it never would've worked.  I would've thought he was too nice.  I wouldn't have thought I deserved something this good.  I wasn't ready to accept a blessing.

But I asked for him.  I dared the universe to send me something very specific, and just when I thought it couldn't possibly happen, I got what I needed when I needed it most. 

THAT is the magic I was looking for.

 

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Blind faith, heartache, mind games, mistakes, my sweet fireball, my sweet rigmarole, I want it all.