The present

In my last post on this blog, written in May of this year, I was talking about waiting for the next phase of my degree, my practicum. I spoke of it as a destination and of the plaintive cry of someone on a journey asking if we were there yet. 

But as it turned out, the practicum was not a destination, but only the beginning of another journey - one that took a sudden turn I wasn't (but should have been) expecting: basically, my practicum supervisor fired me. The sense of failure was very real, and I began to question everything about the last ten years of my life: my recovery from codependency, my personal growth, my relationships with my extended family members, my desire to become a therapist, my self-image as a kind and compassionate person, and my suitability for a helping profession. It was quite wrenching - traumatic - overwhelming.

In addition, the shock of that experience tipped me over the edge emotionally and after the initial days and days of crying, it's like the water that overflowed the dam just froze in place. Nothing penetrated. Nothing affected me. I could not feel sad, or happy, or angry, or worried. Sleep was fitful and gave me no real rest; motivation went out the window. I started to isolate myself from things, lost interest in the things I loved to do (music, word games, etc.) and just buried myself in escapist behaviors: binge-watching shows I had seen so many times I could recite the dialogue, mostly.

So I sought professional help. I asked my doctor about it and he put me on an antidepressant and referred me to a psychologist. I have my first appointment with her next month. And although I didn't want to do it, I forced myself to do certain things for myself: read something inspirational every day, brush my teeth every day, eat regular meals, and find something to do that got me out of the house once in a while. 

Photo by Tirachard Kumtanom from Pexels

And - of late - I have been pondering the idea of staying in the moment, and not thinking about the past or the future. Like yesterday morning. I had eaten my breakfast and was finishing my coffee when I saw a box of Turtles (TM) on the table. I decided that I would like to eat one. Just one. Slowly. And as I bit into it, there was a part of me that said, "Hey. You'll be late for work. This is ridiculous. You're wasting time here. You have to get your makeup on and pack up your stuff to go." And from somewhere inside of me came another voice, one that said, "No. Just enjoy this moment. This is self-care. Taste the taste, really focus on it." And I did. When I was done, that part of me said, "Now, see? THAT is being in the moment. Nothing more simple than that." And I realized that I had rushed through so much of my life trying to get to the destination or the next big thing, and missed out so much on the "in-between" stuff of everyday life: the journey of thousands of moments.

It is a new learning experience for me, this 'savoring the moment' notion. It is this moment right now that I have: the now. Who was it that said, "Yesterday is history; tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift - that is why it is called the present"? 

In that same vein, I received another unexpected present this morning, before we even opened our gifts. Our little family was having breakfast together, talking about a movie we had watched together recently, "The Greatest Showman" (which I highly recommend, by the way!), and we were saying how all the little threads of P.T. Barnum's life, which seemed so random and unrelated to each other, the glad and the sad and the mad, weaved themselves together in his life to show him his purpose and help him fulfill his dream. And that's when it hit me. All of those things in my life - glad, sad, and mad - also had purpose and were being woven together in me in the present. 

That was the gift I had been given, and even though it was not yet complete, I caught a glimpse - a freeze-frame, if you will - of becoming who I am meant to be.  In the moment, in the now, in the present, weaving the past threads together, the dark and the bright and the gray and the colored threads that seem so purposeless by themselves seemed, for one brief moment, to coalesce. 

And in that moment, I felt something. For the first time in weeks, I felt something! An emotion, a state of being, a ... whatever you want to call it. The closest I can come to describing it is by calling it hope. But it was not the wishing-for kind of hope. It was more an assurance that I am where I am supposed to be, even if it is hard. That right now is a gift: the Present. That it is okay to be where I am. And my throat tightened, and my nose stung, and tears welled up and spilled over onto my face. 

And I lifted my face upward and whispered, "Thank You." 

Rigorous Honesty

Would it shock you to know that I, who have been a Christian since age 12 and a committed Christian since age 16, spent most of that time being dishonest?

Of course, it started long before age 12 ... but after I was converted, this was one area where I didn't see the need for change, because I didn't even know I was doing it. 

Don't call it lying

Secrets were a huge part of my upbringing. 

Two rules reigned supreme: 
(1) Don't make Mom angry, and 
(2) Don't ever talk about what happens inside this house. 

I remember a time when I was nine or ten, innocently asking my mother in a store if we could afford this item (I even forget what it was) only to be grabbed by the arm and taken out of earshot forcibly. She got her face twelve inches from mine and hissed, "I don't want these people to know we don't have enough money to buy things!! You be careful what you say in public!!"

Oh. So I'm supposed to not tell the truth. In other words, lying is okay if it protects the family image. But don't call it lying. Cover that part up: it's not lying - it's protecting the ones you love.

Image from
What Career Needs to be Studied to be a Social Worker?

This message was repeated over and over, combined with fear-mongering to keep me in line. When I let it slip to a teacher at age 15 that I'd been abused, he got a social worker involved. They sat in our kitchen and confronted my mother with me present about the situation. She asked for a moment alone with me and took me in the other room. "You know what's going to happen here don't you? They're going to come in and separate you and your brother from us and put you in foster care, somebody might even end up in jail, and none of us will ever be able to look anyone in this town in the eye again. Do you really want to be responsible for that?"  

My eyes grew wide. She continued, "I want you to go back out there and tell those people you made the whole thing up. It's the only way out of what you did." 

What I did? 

I reluctantly did as she told me, feeling betrayed and wounded to the core, and deep inside I learned once more that the truth would always need to be sacrificed to make loved ones look good. Even if it was wrong.

So, when as a young mother I figured out that my husband had been an alcoholic for several years, I was understandably upset, but soon naturally bought into the cycle of lies that repeated more and more often to get him out of tight spots, so he didn't look bad, and so his (and possibly my?) reputation didn't suffer. "He must have had something that disagreed with him." "He won't be in to work today, he's not feeling well, probably some 24-hour thing." "He's been feeling a little weepy lately. I'm sure it will pass."

Things started to unravel in February 2006, when he ended up fighting for his life after drinking windshield washer fluid. The doctors treated it like a suicide attempt and he let them (and me) think that rather than admit the depth of his addiction. (Not until much later did I learn that he just wanted another drink and couldn't afford to go to the liquor store.) Thanks to the love of friends, I managed to make it through that ordeal. In the process, though, I was forced to tell the children that their father was an alcoholic and that he'd been one for their entire lives. 

They didn't take it well. They blamed ME.

The beginning of rigorous honesty

When the house of cards fell apart in April 2007, and he ended up in Detox for a week, that's when he had to admit to himself that he was an alcoholic and that maybe he needed some help. We started attending a 12-step group in May 2007, where we learned about a whole new way of living which demands "rigorous honesty." In the practical sense, that meant that if members "fell off the wagon" they would be honest enough to admit it to the group, and start off all over again from square one. Instead of the condemnation they expected, they received nothing but acceptance and encouragement to keep on keeping on, to take one day at a time and move forward. 

It took nearly two years of attending meetings, relapsing and ending up in the hospital on occasion for him to get the full extent of the Program - and it took me nearly as long as it took him. All the while, I tried to protect him, afraid of the negative repercussions on our reputations, on our ministries, on our children. They were already feeling the effects of a father-absent home even with him here. And, I had sucked them into the same web of deceit I'd been weaving; this time though, it backfired and they kept his drinking from me so that I wouldn't "freak out." 

I was supremely unhappy by that point; I considered leaving him to save myself the anguish of seeing him in blackouts and drunken stupors. Secretly, I felt that it was my fault that he was drinking, that if I was only a better wife, a better housekeeper and a better mother, he'd not feel the need to drink. I didn't understand the true nature of addiction. And I truly believed that were I to admit all these feelings to people in the church, even to my friends, that nobody would understand and that I would be judged, criticized and condemned. 

When he lost his driver's license in December 2008, something snapped inside of me. I saw this long, six-month period ahead of me in the dead of winter, and me being the only driver in the house, as the straw that broke the camel's back. I was scared. I needed help. So, I called a family counselor who understood addictions, and I talked to him. We set up regular sessions, and he began to walk me through the Twelve Steps, a blueprint for relationship with God, with self, and eventually with others.

That's when Rigorous Honesty started to make more sense to me. It wasn't just about telling the anonymous people in a group about my failings, and compartmentalizing that portion of my life without it affecting anything else. It was about being honest with ME. It was about being honest with God. And THEN it was about being honest with other people. 

Over the course of the next year, my life did a complete one-eighty. The outside looked pretty much the same - but I was a different person as I reached my 1-year anniversary of "recovery" from the need to control, intimidate, and manipulate people and circumstances. I was also recovering from being a doormat - learning to set boundaries, to let people bear responsibility for their own actions instead of blaming myself for them. I was learning that it is perfectly okay - indeed, even preferable and very freeing - to live a lifestyle which demands rigorous honesty.

Best of all, when I was about 2 months into my own healing process, my husband began his own journey of freedom from alcohol, independent of me and without my help. His first Christmas sober (2009) was the capstone for him; he celebrated nine months sober that day, and realized that his hourly cravings to drink were a thing of the past, and that he was even beginning to feel content without booze. In April 2010, he and I agreed to do a ten-minute Youtube video for a production for our church: a video about the miracles we each had experienced in the area of our addictions: his to alcohol and mine to control-freaking and doormat-itis, and we found such freedom in that. We also discovered which people among our circle of friends hung around with us because of us, and which ones were only attracted to our reputations.

About six weeks ago, my husband celebrated three and a half years of sobriety. 

Reminders like this necklace, hand-made by a new friend of mine, make sense now. Looking back over the last four years, with all those dark days and tough slogging of those first few months followed by a gradual emergence into light and truth ... and yes, happiness, I marvel at the contrast. I can't get over how drastically our lives have changed in such a short amount of time. 

And I wouldn't trade that for anything.