So Here We Are, On the Other Side

The roller coaster ride that I am on is creaky, scary, thrilling and pee-my-pants funny all at once. The sum total makes me feel a little bit nauseated and isn’t helping the sleeping problem I have at all. I thought that the big thing, the serious bit, was getting through the Week-of-a-Year-Agos and the Eldest of the Fries moving out. And those were big. I’ve spent this week hiding from my own blog because the picture of -Ray and Ruby breaks my heart into tiny slivers of glass over and over again.

What I thought would be a week of looking back one year has become a month of looking back twelve years, twenty years, way way back. It’s the looking twelve years back that is eating my lunch and at the same time filling me with wonder.

As mentioned, the Former Friend popped up. And I was so proud of myself when I looked at that email and realized I wasn’t hurt anymore, I wasn’t angry anymore, but I had been those things and I needed and was able to say that to her: You hurt me. I loved you, and you bit me, hard. And she was able to say that she was sorry, there was no excuse, it was wrong.

So we’re catching up. A lot of time has passed, and part of catching up is drifting back to examining those awful years when I first married sgt. gennimcmahon and moved away from my kids and plunged deep into the black hole of sadness and self-hatred that consumed me for three years. And I feel really good about the fact that I can say, “I went through some really bad times” and know that they are over, even if I can feel their little fingers brushing my hair as I pass through those woods again.

Then, someone else I hadn’t heard from in those same twelve years contacted me. This one has more back story, and is far more complicated. Like anyone, I had a first true love. Like anyone who was as damaged as I was, it wasn’t a simple or straightforward relationship. It lasted four years, it left scars, and he spent ten more years regretting the end, and expecting no other happiness in his life, which is terribly sad. But that changed and he married a woman who is, in my opinion, the most fabulous creature ever. Sgt. gennimcmahon and I attended their wedding as a date when we first met (because that’s how I roll). Then we lost touch. The fabulous woman felt very threatened by me. I was busy having the bad times. I knew that they had moved back here about two years ago, but never once ran into him.

And the reason I thought of or wanted to run into him was that, for the eight and half years since my father died, I have wanted to tell this First Love about my father’s passing. I’ve had dreams about it regularly. He knew my dad and my dad liked him because he was a lovable sort of screw up and my dad had a serious soft spot for guys who couldn’t get their shit together. (This guy, he did get his shit together and he’s got a good job and the fabulous wife and an assortment of cars and dogs and such but no children, the lucky bastard). 

The exponential weirdness is that the Eldest of the Fries, he was born on  this First Love’s birthday, which was the day that the First Love decided to break the twelve years of no contact and email me.   I said, “Hey, happy birthday” and we exchanged emails, then met for coffee the next day.

This planned meeting was promptly discussed with sgt gennimcmahon because I ain’t no lying hoor, thanks, and he was okay with it. Two things of importance to me happened at coffee. One was that I suddenly felt hugely happy to married to sgt gennimcmahon. I didn’t think, “Oh, thank god I didn’t get stuck with this guy” I felt, “I am so happy to be who I am today and where I am today and I’m really lucky.” And I felt that same happiness for the First Love, although that may be a happiness that I have created for him and it may have some fiction in it, but it warms the little cockles of my heart.

The second thing happened when the First Love spoke of working with my dad after I had left, and my dad saying to him, “She’s completely insane.” When I got home, that felt to me like yet another person playing the “gennimcmahon is completely horrible and the most evil person ever amen” game that my family excelled at. I shot off this email to the First Love about how many people had been willing and anxious to help drive me to insane, hand me off to the crazy train conductor and book a long passage for me to desperate and needy. I was angry with him for possibly colluding with my father by agreeing to that statement. I was angry for things that happened to me immediately after our relationship ended that shouldn’t have happened to me and that, back then, no one believed had happened, or if they believed it felt that I had it coming and deserved it. I felt all that pain and defensiveness and a need to describe just how bad things were for me during those years. I went back nearly twenty years. I felt it all again, and it made me wobble a bit in my current, very different life. It made me wonder if, indeed, I have completely escaped the fate that seemed planned for me.

I have. But I can’t forget what it took to get here. Here is good, mostly, and here is better than I’d ever thought it would be. The past has come knocking because I am in the process of giving its ability to control me last rites. I am leaving it behind. I am not the bad person, the insane person, the broken, damaged person I was cast to be. I am so much more than that, I have grown tremendously, I am much, much closer to whole.

But that doesn’t mean that looking back isn’t sad. That it doesn’t remind me that life is never free of pain, even if the only reminder is a scar. It’s there. But it’s part of what got me here, so I have to honor it even as I wish to never think of it. My therapist has recently assigned me to welcome being uncomfortable, and because I’m an uptight, first born, anal retentive, type-A personality I’ve managed to excel at being miserably uncomfortable. But I’m learning. Life is changing, I’m ready for what’s next, and I’m learning to be okay with what it took to get here.

I say that even if, at this moment, sgt gennimcmahon is barely speaking to me and a big fight over the Naked Teenage Daughter’s most recent escapade prevented me from declaring and acting on the Big Love I was feeling for him in the aftermath of coffee with the First Love. Even that is way, way better than where I might have ended up in life. Even that is better than being dead, or absent, or lost. I’m glad I’m here, right now, at this moment. But damn, I’m uncomfortable.