Category: Self-reflection

The Long Haul

On By drwiebIn marriage, Self-reflectionLeave a comment

Randy had a temper to beat all tempers….except, maybe, mine. He didn’t get really mad very often, but when he did–everyone knew it. He would be grumpy more often than angry. He really preferred to ignore the daily irritations of his life, including the ones I brought to him. It used to drive me crazy, how he could just walk away and ignore me when I wanted to argue. Over the years, I learned how to push the correct buttons to get him to come stomping back and give me what I was looking for. Over even more years, I learned that letting him walk away and ignore the irritation was usually the better choice. Usually. I must say, arguing with him was always interesting.

In the beginning of our married life, it would scare me to death when he got mad. I was never afraid of him; I was afraid he would leave me. I swallowed many of the words I knew would pierce him deeply. I could live with being miserable; I couldn’t live without him. I would try to hold my end of the discussion as calmly as I could, but he could never “discuss.” He would always yell, and usually nose-to-nose. He could turn any argument to his favor, and it would always end with it looking like I was wrong. I was never sure how it happened, because I knew I was right to begin with, but that wasn’t where I ended. I had my own limitations, however, and would never apologize–no matter what. Even though he had come out on top, verbally, I would clam up and utter not another word–for days–until he said he was sorry. He said he was sorry a lot in our first 7-8 years of marriage. Then he quit drinking, and suddenly, I was responsible for half the arguments, dammit, and he was sober enough to remember.

This is not to say I was a meek little wife, by any means. He could out-argue me any day of the week due to my fear of pushing him out the door, but I managed to get my point across in different ways. I learned to wait for the just-right time, slip in some biting words that made my point, and walk away. The resulting silence as he stood there in shock that I would say something so cutting would give me the chance to escape before he could turn the argument around again. Mostly, though, I was persistent and stubborn. I may not have been able to win an argument, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

It was the summer of 1990 that I first learned I could actually live without him. It changed the whole way I argued. We had a rocky marriage at that time, and the rocks won. We were both bloodied and bruised, emotionally, on a regular basis. We had just stopped trying for our second child, as nothing seemed to work. I was a wreck from the disappointment of not conceiving month after month. We were trying to sell a 3-bedroom house out in the country and buy a 2-bedroom back in town, and the realtor was not cooperating. Randy’s drinking was getting worse, and he’d had two accidents that resulted in DUIs. Luckily, Meagan doesn’t remember any of that time. I sometimes wish I didn’t either. We were not nice to each other. He left twice, moving out without telling me where he was staying. The first time, I spent hours on the phone trying to track him down. The second time, I put all my energy and focus into selling our house and getting the next one ready to move into. If I was going to be on my own, it would be on my terms. I spent the summer being a single mother and rarely saw him. My family moved Meagan and I into our new house in August. I didn’t pack anything of Randy’s at the old house. When he showed up to help move (he drank, but he wasn’t stupid), he was angry that I had left all his things where they were at the old house. I just looked at him as I handed him an empty box and said “I don’t know where you intend to live. You can pack and move your own shit wherever you want.” He moved it into our new house, but he didn’t come with it. It was about another month before we decided to try again. By that time, I was no longer afraid of him leaving me. He had left me, and I had survived. I loved him deeply, but I loved my daughter in a completely different way and she had to come first. It was a whole new ballgame.

It was almost two more years before he quit drinking, after the birth of our second daughter.  During these two years, our arguments reached new heights. Now, when he would get nose-to-nose and yell, I would yell right back. I refused to back down. I wouldn’t even bother to discuss anything, I’d just say the words I knew would send him into a frenzy and let the games begin. I was still incredibly angry over his drinking and his abandonment, and the whole world knew it. The more I pushed, the more he pushed back. It was like “Clash of the Titans.”

Then, one day in January of 1992, I decided I was done pushing. I made up my mind to get a lawyer and be done with it. I told no one. It was soon after my decision to wave the white flag that he woke me up in the middle of the night, crying. He said he was so sorry and he was done drinking. He knew it was killing our marriage, and he didn’t want to lose his family. He asked for my support, and understanding, and patience. He knew it wouldn’t be easy, but it was what he wanted to do. I was astounded but wary. How did he know that those words were the only ones that would get me to drop the lawyer he didn’t even know about? How had he finally seen the rope that I was at the end of? I agreed to wait, with reservations. He was right, it was not easy, but it was so worth it. The whole experience of putting past hurts to rest and starting fresh made us that much stronger and closer. In addition, it changed the tone of our arguments. 

Suddenly, I had to let go of all my anger and resentments towards the Randy-who-drank. That Randy was gone. I could not hold him responsible for my past hurts, not if I wanted to move forward. Since forward was definitely where I wanted to go, I buried all those feelings. It was not the best of ideas, but it worked for me at the time. Our arguments decreased drastically. We talked more. I learned how to drop hints instead of the bombshells I knew would set him off. I learned to let the little irritations slide because I realized that in the grand scheme of things, they really were little.  I learned to pick my battles. Best of all, I learned that no matter what the argument was about or how heated we got or how long it lasted, Randy and I were in it for the long haul. We could argue almost comfortably, knowing that this, too, would pass, and we would continue on our path together. We could truly let our thoughts be heard, knowing the other may not like hearing them, but would listen, and maybe reflect later, and things would get better each time. We could argue passionately, because we loved each other passionately, and that balanced everything. We found ourselves talking more than arguing, discussing more than arguing, laughing more than arguing. But still, when we argued–boy, could we heat up the air. He still apologized first. I was still stubborn and he always liked getting to the “making up” part as quickly as possible.

I still have trouble looking at pictures or videos from when he drank; it brings back the anger at the Randy-who-drank. I would rather deal with those memories all my life to get to the Randy-who-didn’t-drink. That Randy was truly special. He was the love of my life and always would be. He still had a temper, I still had a temper, and we still knew the buttons to push. We just didn’t feel the need to push them as much anymore. It was so much more fun to not argue.

I’ve heard people talk about Randy’s temper with friends, with family, with work. I would hear people remark, “He’s a great guy, but you really don’t want to make him mad.” He could annihilate a person with just words within seconds. What they didn’t realize was this: Randy could get truly angry only over things he truly loved. Randy could get that angry with those he loved because he loved them. He always wanted what was best for them, and it would incense him that we didn’t always see what he knew was best. He could get furious with me or, occasionally, his children, because he truly and passionately loved us. He could get angry with his friends, because he truly loved his friends. He could get angry at work, because he truly loved the company he worked for and people with whom he worked.

In the end, no matter how angry he might get, he was always standing right there with us. He tried very hard to never let anyone down before he stopped drinking, and he succeeded beautifully once he became sober. With his family, with his friends, with his company, he proved daily he was in it for the long haul.

Boy, Were You Wrong

On By drwiebIn Being a mom, Self-reflectionLeave a comment

All through their childhood, there were days when you would hide in the bathroom or the bedroom and try to imagine the day when they were grown, out of the house, and no longer causing your ulcer to flare. When there would be just a moment of peace that didn’t end with a wail or a crash or a scream or a slam or a “MO-OOOOOM!”

You cannot imagine your life without them. You know they’ve only been here for a finite time, but it’s so hard to remember what life was like with just you and your spouse, when it was two against the world, and the future seemed so possible. 99.9% of the time, you thank god for the chance to know these beautiful children and you try your hardest to make sure they know how much they are loved. You realize that while you would gladly die to protect your spouse or your parents, you would gladly kill to protect your children—without a thought or a blink.

You can’t count the hours of sleep you’ve lost, or the meals you’ve missed, or the tears you’ve shed, or the words you’ve shouted, or clothes you’ve discarded because they no longer fit post-partum. You don’t know how you still have any teeth when you know how hard you’ve had to grit them to keep the angriest words inside, whether they’re trying to slip out in fury towards your child or their friend or their teacher or their ex-boyfriend. You really don’t try so hard on that last one, but you do try.

You wonder if you’ll ever actually see the floor in their bedroom again, or be able to fully close their closet doors, or drive anything other than a minivan, or ever not have chicken nuggets in your freezer and fruit roll-ups in your pantry. You’re amazed when you realize you are can throw around terms like pas de deux and bicycle kick and negative space and the infield fly rule, and actually know what you’re saying. You’ve gotten really good at gas chicken and can internally calculate the miles between home and school and soccer and dance and the gas station. You’re happy to know all those elementary and high school math skills are still buried somewhere in your brain, and even happier when you can shake them loose during homework time at the kitchen table. You thank god for Google when those skills appear to be forever lost to college happy hours or pre-partum all-inclusive romantic getaways to Cancun.

You’re overwhelmed with how much they rely on you until they hit third grade, then realize they’ve started pulling away sometime in the last year when you weren’t paying careful attention. You’re seeing evidence of the person they are becoming, not just your child, but a real, whole, independent person of their own. By the time they’re in high school, you’re starting to worry that you may actually get your wish for that quiet house. You find yourself having to grit your teeth more and more, because even though you have an abundance of advice to give, there is no one willing to listen, and you remember how you, yourself, preferred learning by doing. You thought it would get easier as they got older and less dependent and less time-consuming. You thought you were looking forward to the time they didn’t need you maybe quite so much.

Boy, were you wrong.

You start to realize that, while you will always be a mother, your time for being a parent is quickly coming to a close. All that time you spent pushing and prodding and teaching and explaining how to be responsible for your own actions is coming back to bite you. This is also about the time you start apologizing to your own mother daily, in your head and in your heart. Some of her pointed comments now make sense, the “I could’ve told you that” and the “but what do I know” and the “if you would’ve listened to me.” You remember thinking she just didn’t get it, and you now realize she got it all too well. You want to go back and ask her now, but you also want her to think of you as a competent adult. It will be years before you understand that she has always thought of you as that adult; she just wanted the chance to help you as your changing roles develop with age. It is when she is gone and just a memory that you wish with all your heart you could ask her some questions, maybe about a million, and wish you could curl up next to her and let her be your parent one more time.

Because once your children leave home for the first time, your role has changed. You can keep the label of ‘mother,’ but you have to set down the ‘parent’ one. If you’re lucky, you may be able to eventually replace it with the label of ‘friend.’  But first, they need to figure out how to be as independent as they think they are. They fall, and get up, and fall again, and get up again, and you sit to the side feeling every one of their hurts, wishing they would let you be a parent just one more time. Usually not, but you have to remember that you’re still their mother. So you’re there when they finally decide they need their mom, even just long enough to get back on their feet. Upright once again, they use those feet to keep walking further away. You try to remember they are not walking away from you, but to their own future. Your head may get it; your heart still remembers when they were your future. 

The years have slowly moved you from the center of their universe to the outside orbit of their life, and you didn’t quite fully get that your independence from their needs equated with their independence from yours.  You really do understand that this is the way it’s supposed to be; they have to be prepared to live without you in the same house so they can be prepared to live without you in the same world. You want them to carry on. You want them to be happy. You want them to have everything they need.

You just didn’t realize it would hurt so much. You thought childbirth was painful.

Boy, were you wrong.

Reflection of a Decade

On By drwiebIn Being a widow, Self-reflectionLeave a comment

On June 26, it was twelve years since I last saw Randy breathing. I’ve come a long way in my life since that day, although Grief does its best to dismantle everything I’ve done. It doesn’t get better or easier; it will never be better or easier that Randy is gone. It just becomes the New Normal. The pain has become a dull ache that sits in the corner of my heart and waits for the right moment to strike. I know I should expect it; I know it still happens at the odd moment. The mistake is forgetting it’s there. The forgetting just makes its reappearance all the more jarring, and no less painful.

Imagine being attached to a retractable leash, but free to roam anywhere you want, as far as you want, in any direction you want. The leash is invisible, and you can’t really see what it’s tethered to, so you tend to forget about it. You go about your daily life, being happy, or sad, or bored, or exhilarated, or expectant, or any number of ways that mean you’re alive. Except, at odd, unexpected times, that invisible leash snaps you off your feet and in the space of a heartbeat, you are a thousand miles away, curled in a fetal position from the intensity of your memories, wondering what the hell that was all about. After you’ve gotten your breath again, you dust yourself off, check for injuries, realize it’s just your heart that hurts, and continue on. Cautiously, you go back to making this new life, gaining courage and confidence the more space you put between you and the whatever-the-hell-THAT-was and…WHAM! There goes that damn leash again, snapping you right off your feet. It is unpredictable, it is fast, and it hurts.

I have learned quite a bit about myself in the years Randy has been gone, and about judging the people in my life. I have found out just how truly human we all are, no matter how hard we try to rise above that. We handle pain in so many different ways, and we should never assume someone’s pain is less just because they don’t wear it on their faces like a neon sign. Judging someone else’s journey is not only useless, it is monstrously egotistical, and while we are all harboring varying degrees of monstrous egos (because we are all human), we also each have our own invisible leash.

I remember when I was among the “newly widowed,” how I would look to those further out in the grief journey, needing to be sure I could survive this. I wanted assurances that I would be able to weather the absolute agony that my life had become, that there was a reason to keep breathing. Now that I am further out in the whole process, I avoid giving any advice to the newly widowed. I have no assurances to give, because I haven’t survived it yet. I am still surviving it, each and every day. I have no idea when it’s supposed to get easier or, god forbid, better, because it has only become different.

On the positive side, I no longer feel like The Only One. I don’t have that Why Me? feeling so much anymore, because there are too many versions of ‘Me’ I’ve met along the way to feel particularly special. I can think about Randy without doubling over in pain, and he’s no longer on that pedestal where I first planted him, on his way to heaven. I can remember his faults right along with his best qualities, knowing they all made the entire package, and I loved him just the way he was. The sharp pain of seeing married people, happy couples, intact families has lessened to a subtle twinge, and the selfish whine of “why not us?” has faded to a wistful sigh. It is what it is.

I did adjust to this new life. There were challenges I really liked, and memories that still give me secret smiles, and possibilities that I seriously want to explore. Somewhere along the line, I found that by pretending to be a positive person, I became more positive. By putting a daily smile on my face as the last act of a morning makeup routine, I started smiling more easily throughout the day, even when the makeup was gone. I returned to enjoying the speed of my thoughts and ideas zooming around inside my head, grabbing one as it flew by, releasing it back to the melee to chase after another. I always enjoyed the organized chaos of my mind, and I lost it there for quite some time. Thinking was not only a chore, it was painful, so I just didn’t do it. I once again enjoyed creating whole worlds in my imagination, and the possibilities of those worlds kept me moving forward. I found myself heading into the future with small steps, and then with longer strides. I am pleased to feel as though I’m actually finding my way through the new normal that is my life.

That is, until a certain memory intrudes at an unpredictable time, and the leash snaps.

Once again, I am back on the ground, bewildered and broken, wondering where the hell I am, and how I got here, and Where is Randy? The grief comes roaring back, consuming everything as it scours me with heat and fire. It takes my breath away, and it takes my thoughts away, and it tries to take my hope away. I have learned to stay curled up, protecting my heart from the fire, and just wait for it to burn itself out. It doesn’t take long these days; it is more of a flashfire than an inferno, but it still leaves scars. It still leaves me shaken and unsure in the immediate aftermath. It leaves me tentative, and I so detest the fact that it has once again taken some of my confidence and reduced it to ashes.

At one time, I was a self-confident, assured, whole person. I was married to a man that pushed me to be my best, who loved me despite my challenging ways, and who taught me to stand up for myself. For the first several years after his death, I felt like I was so much less. I had earned my confidence through life and love with him, by believing in him, and being amazed that he also believed in me. Without him, my confidence lost one of its architects. While I have built it back somewhat through determination and hard work, that damn leash takes its due each time it snaps. I try to believe in myself, but Randy is not here to believe in me, and so there is less mortar holding those bricks together. Grief crumbles another brick here or there, and I am more tentative, and I do not like it.

People would ask me “How are you? No, really, how are you?” The truth was, and still is, this: I am sad; I am happy. I am stuck; I am hopeful. I am bewildered; I am curious. I am tired; I am grateful. I am…me, whoever that has become, whoever that will be. My grief is never completely gone, but I have learned to build around it. It is what it is. I am what I am.

The only thing I know for absolute certainty is this: I really, really, hate that damn leash.

Everything is Relative

On By drwiebIn Self-reflection1 Comment

 

“Everything is relative in this world, where change alone endures.”

― Leon Trotsky

As a widow, one of my least favorite sayings is “you’re so strong.” I’ve heard it a lot since Randy died. It always confused me before it started to anger me. Strong? Because I can’t will myself to stop breathing? (Believe me, I tried—no luck.) Because there’s only so many days I can wear the same clothes before they crawl off to the washer, themselves? Because eventually I have to get out of bed to pee? Because once the fog cleared, I realized that the earth was still turning and my children were still here and that meant I still needed money and food and shelter and my job? I don’t consider that strong. I consider that life. You do what you gotta do.

I read something (on Facebook, surprisingly) about how people try to downplay their own pain, which hampers the grieving and the healing processes. It really spoke to me at that time, because I felt there were people in my family who didn’t quite get what it meant to be a widow and a mother, and expected far too much of me. Since I was raised to do what I should, it was hard to put my own needs in front of their expectations. While I may not have had the energy to live up to those expectations, I simply exchanged that for guilt at not being enough and anger at not being understood. Guilt and anger: what a lovely, isolating, self-destructive combination.

What I got from that article was this: everyone’s pain is relative, because everyone’s history is unique. What was my “worst” could pale in comparison to someone else’s “worst.” Conversely, someone else didn’t need to experience my “worst” to have their own version of “worst.” I have my unique moment that is the lowest point and others that represent the high end. It is my relative scale against which I gauge all other moments. It is ok for me to feel pain at my worst moments, even if I can objectively see that others have had moments that may be worse, because this is the bottom of MY scale. And it is ok for others to not quite get my own worst moment, because their scale may not go down that far. It doesn’t make their scale “less than” mine; it just means they have a different scope of experience.

I have always marginalized my own experiences. The bad is never as bad as others act like it is. I have the curious ability to pooh-pooh my own memories. I wouldn’t exactly call it sexual abuse by a neighbor’s son, but if it had happened to one of my kids, I’d be screaming sexual abuse. I definitely call it years of physical abuse from a sibling, but I survived it, so let’s move on. It’s an amusing story now about how I was left at a store when I was 4-5 years young as my parents continued with their Saturday errands and how I remember every second of searching the store and sitting in the window staring at the parking lot for an hour or two before their car raced back into view. I didn’t know it was ADD and just dealt with the “stop daydreaming” admonishments my entire life. I can laugh about being 6 or 7 and watching my dad steal a hubcap from a car in the bowling alley parking lot and then the harrowing ride home at speeds up to 70 mph on winding roads after a Friday night Men’s League (which meant lots of drinking on the Men’s part). I know I was leaning strongly towards alcoholism, myself, in college and have many, many things to regret there, but so do many others, right? That’s just college. And yes, I lived with an alcoholic for 7-8 years and dealt with car accidents and DUIs and screaming matches and separation and at least one incident I will never ever ever talk about, but he became a Recovered Alcoholic and things improved phenomenally for the next 13 years. He was everything I knew I would love about him after that and gave me a life & family I could only dream about before. So he started drinking right before he died, and we’d already had one major argument concerning the drinking, but I never got a chance to find out how that would play out because, well, he died suddenly. And yes, he and my heart died when he was 48 in the span of 3 days from leukemia. I’ve since met many widows/widowers with stories much sadder than mine. My experiences with childbirth may be others’ visions of hell, but they’re all I know about bringing my children into this world, and I wouldn’t begrudge their entrance for anything. My youngest may have spent 4 days in a psychiatric hospital and for years suffered from extreme anxiety and depression and bipolarism, but just look at her now. She’s healthy and happy and working full-time at a job she loves. And the oldest daughter distanced herself for over 10 years, just so I wouldn’t be able to see how her boyfriend/fiance/husband was whittling away her confidence and self-esteem. And I’ve had to watch her go through a divorce, a new romance with someone I really disliked, and then become a widow, herself, after less than a year of that marriage. And I had a ring-side seat as she descended into alcohol and depression and refused to let me be a parent again. And even though I jumped into that ring to battle it out more times than I can count, she has found her way back to life and love and I can breathe again. And yes, I packed up and moved across states to be closer to a family that never seemed to understand me, but I figured it out after 5 years and my mother’s death and moved back to my friends. And ok…it’s been 12 years and I have yet to work up the courage for even a first date in spite of the daily loneliness that permeates my life. I won’t even address the years of pain and “oh, you’re too young for that” related to arthritis and other health ailments, or the laundry list of surgeries to try to correct joint and stomach issues. Everyone’s life is tough. Suck it up and move on.

I don’t want people to think bad about people who I feel may have wronged me, because that’s just my opinion and I’m sure they had good reasons and I’m sure it’s not as bad as I remember and I’m sure I played a large part in what happened to me. Seriously, I am responsible for my own actions, and reactions, and the consequences of both.

I know what my worst moment is, and I can rate all the moments from that point up. It’s amazing how the “best” is not one single moment. “Best” appears to be relative, also, within my own experiences. There are moments that are “best” as a child, and “best” as a sibling, and “best” as a wife, and “best” as a mother of this child and then mother of that child, and “best” as a professional, and “best” as a friend. This scale appears to be an inverted triangle, with many points along the top of the scale whittling down to one single point at the bottom. I’m going to assume that means I have had more happiness than sadness, and so it is harder to pinpoint one single moment of extreme happiness.

I don’t consider myself stronger than the next person. I don’t consider myself weaker than another person. I only know that I have catalogued my worst moments and my best moments. As long as I’m breathing, I’m hoping the upper end of that inverted triangle continues to expand faster than the lower. I’m not strong. I’m just balancing as best I can, just like anyone else. After all, everything is relative, including triangles.