The moment I let go of it, was the moment I got more than I could handle; the moment I jumped off of it, was the moment I touched down ~ A. Morissette

Here is something no one tells you about divorce: you will be on your hands and knees, forehead to the floor, nearly two years after you and your husband decide to separate, overcome by the enormous riptide of loss it took you both of those years to comprehend.

Here is something else no one tells you: you will feel so vulnerable and so afraid that you will change who you are just to be close to someone...and you will spend the next year filled with confusion and regret and rage at how much you sacrificed for that one sliver of peace.

Once you are alone, you will, at times, question your sanity. You will move through moments of estrangement from your own life, and you will lay face-down in your endlessly streaming tears, well past midnight, desperate for help with your child who won't sleep or listen or give you 5 seconds to think, and still manage to get up when the alarm goes off the next morning to do it all again.

Two years into your "new" life, you will crumple in front of a friend when you tell her it might be time to move on. You will sob on your couch at night, and while your child is in the bath, and when your dreams take you to places you'd rather never revisit.

And you will, without question, arrive at that tender place where you finally realize you are tired of crying, tired of placing cold packs on your eyes so that they're not so swollen in the morning, and tired of putting your hand up whenever someone tries to love you, even though this feels like your only protection at times.

You will talk to your divorced friends and find out that the grief never really goes away, it just changes into something you can live with most of the time. You will hear that there is always a little bit of guilt, always a sensation of failure, especially around the holidays, when it comes to your children. You will adapt, and you will move on, but you will always feel like a little bit less of a good enough mother when you recall the things you couldn't repair.

Waking up on Christmas morning without your child will never get easier. You will spend a lot of time coordinating holiday schedules and trying to read between the lines while focusing on the positive. You will communicate with your ex-spouse better than you did when you were married in order to siphon out the challenges and filter in the love you both share for your child. You will have to forgive and you will have to forget in order to cope. And you will have to extend more faith than you did when you brushed your teeth together every night.

In the early months, you will feel more like strangers than you did before your very first date, and upon seeing your in-laws for the first time after you separate, you will understand that the circle of people with whom you celebrate the miracle of your child's life has just gotten smaller.

You will exhaust yourself holding open doors that simply want to close, and sometimes you'll be the only thing bracing the walls when they want to come tumbling down. You will teach yourself how to fix your shower drain, repair a crack in your windshield, and troubleshoot your computer problems. You will sleep with the windows open during summer's hottest nights because you can't find the time to properly install your swamp coolers.

Good friends will become your saviors, and you will look to them for guidance during your darkest hours. Without a partner, you will have the space and time to let people in who will protect you from the scorching flames of your guilt and regret; and you will learn, eventually, how to ask for help. Forgiving indiscretions will be difficult since you are now your own gatekeeper, but your life will be cleaner and safer in the end.

There will come a point, maybe sooner, maybe later, when life will threaten to topple the delicate balance you have worked so hard to achieve in the aftermath. Knocking on your door will be opportunities you've always dreamed of, but require a loosening of your vice grip on the type of parenting that allows for little else. And it will break your heart to love again because the doors left open by the sheer force of your unrelenting hope will close.

Surprisingly, you will find that the final heartbreak that divides two people is not the last, but the first of many to come. You won't know how much you treasured laughing about your child's antics together until you're suddenly laughing alone. And you won't fully understand the enormity of raising a child by yourself until you're the only adult in the house at night and no one else is coming home.

And yet, what emerges from the unspooling of a family is more than devastation...and just as inexplicable. Grief eventually becomes a setting sun that will always rise again, bringing with it a newness terrifying in its unfamiliarity but necessary in its illumination of everything beautiful and whole and unchanged by your tragedy. You will lose yourself in moments of despair, and tire of chasing your sanity around the labyrinth of your life, but you will learn - because you have to - how to love even the most despicable pieces of yourself so that you can present to your child the person you've always wanted to be.

On difficult days, you will raise the clear, glass sharpness of yourself to the light and find a way to smooth the edges, and you will know that the person you see in the mirror each night has the strength to get through tomorrow because she just survived today. And as simple as it sounds, you will power yourself through impossible moments by powering yourself through all the preceding impossible moments. No matter what, you will put one foot in front of the other because that's the only way forward even when you're lost.

I wish I knew two years ago what this separation would do to my family and what it would ultimately do to me. When the decision was made, I saw divorce through a pinhole, and as the days have gone by and that tiny hole has split, widened, gaped, and finally opened completely to expose the whole of single-parenthood, I finally understand its impact.

For me, divorce meant jumping into a new existence and finding, once submerged, that nothing was any easier...only different and, in some ways, harder that it had been when it seemed impossible. But, eventually, I learned how to swim and, in most cases, protect myself from the sharks that circle every once in a while. And, in finding ways to keep my head above water, I have created an island for my child: safe, dry, and sometimes magical.

My life is no longer contracting but expanding to include new people, ideas, and a kind of serenity I never imagined. Sure the peace sometimes feels like isolation, and the silence in my house sometimes leaves too much room for sadness, and calling my daughter at night rather than tucking her in feels like the worst kind of pain, but this is all part of the life I am blessed to lead. I don't always understand it, I don't always like it, and sometimes I cry for days, but there is always something at the end of the day to hold on to. Always. Even if it's just a glimmer of hope that tomorrow will be a little bit better or a little bit easier than today.

Rainer Maria Rilke said, "Perhaps everything terrible is, in its deepest being, something that needs our love." I can say with absolute certainty that the last two years have brought with them the darkest, most frightful moments I have known in my life thus far. But, they have also brought with them the opportunity to survive. And with that survival comes an appreciation for the forces in me that refuse to be overcome, and sometimes, in brief moments of clarity, a genuine appreciation for the struggles themselves.

~ Katie

This much, at least, I've figured out. I know this much is true. ~ Wally Lamb

This morning, feeling aimless and heavy with thoughts, I pulled my rose-patterned box out from under my bed and started to read, hoping to find an inroad to my writing voice. What I found instead surprised me: a deep and clear understanding that I'm done processing those years, done communing with the girl I once was, done with that chapter of my life. It is time to close the door.

The thing is, I'm not ending the journey out of frustration or exasperation, but out of the calm serenity of closure I've nurtured here. I have honored those years and the people in them and, in doing so, discovered myself standing tall atop the darkness of my twenties. I wasn't sure what I'd find looking back into my troubled and recovering mind, but I'm leaving the process behind knowing that I not only survived anorexia, I learned and changed and grew into someone with a full and challenging and beautiful inner life. I am, quite simply, not a sick young girl anymore.

I contacted a friend while in the midst of making this discovery. I can't write, I said, and explained that I'd gone back to re-read my journals and couldn't connect to or channel the young writer anymore. And then I understood: I feel like I've grown up, I said, it's time to move on.

I realize now I've been combing through those years, really feeling them again, so that I'd eventually reach the day when I could finally lay them to rest. Attracting and embracing change over the last couple of years while shedding the tight, cracking skin of my twenties, and experiencing the vast and frightening overhaul of a new life lived in a new place, has been nothing short of metamorphic. My skin is still raw and fresh.

It is true, though, that in looking back to see the heavy door of my past click shut, I am unsure where to turn. I know that I am well into a new chapter of my life, but it doesn't have roots deep enough to stabilize me during times of extreme doubt. I still awaken to quick moments of haziness and plan my day as if I lived elsewhere. I still fumble through feelings of displacement which seem exciting during bursts of exploration but terrifying and exhausting during stretches of loneliness and despair.

And yet...I've fallen in love with this place and that in and of itself is a soft place to land.

I've learned, in imparting these years of my story, that we all share the same soulful unrest that plagues me at times -- we've all got bundles of life tied to our backs that feel either heavy or weightless depending upon the slope of the ground beneath our feet. We all get tangled up in the minutia of daily life, creating a narrative that makes sense and feels safe in its re-telling, while days tick by and etch their presence onto our hands and memories, reminding us, when we dare look ourselves full in the face, that time is marching on.

Walking Adela to kindergarten the other day and feeling her quick kiss on my cheek and tiny hand slip out of mine as we reached the playground, I realized that there is nothing I can do or change or think or say to fix these moments in time. No amount of intelligent, responsible life-construction or determination will make time stand still. My daughter's childhood is like a beautiful limitless sky, and though I've come to understand that clouds and wind and rain blow through every once in a while marring the blue, I was never so aware of the sun traveling in its own finite arc until now. This one perfect, glorious day won't last forever.

And so, as if braiding my life, I pick up another strand of change and weave it in.

A few weeks ago, on the eve of this wrenching set of discoveries, I found myself blisteringly angry. Sitting alone in my room late one night I told the universe exactly what I thought of it through heaving sobs and shallow breath, hoping to make sense of my confusion. I didn't realize at the time that grief was erupting noisily around me and I was trying to muffle it with fury. Everything was changing right before my very eyes and what I knew to be solid and true was mere shadow in the light: my daughter's youth, my sense of self...

Change is extremely painful, especially change that ruptures within, and I tend to follow a very distinct pattern when a particular journey such as a relationship or job is ending: shock, blame, anger, withdrawal, grief, and, finally, acceptance. Completely unaware of my position within the continuum of change, I have spent some time balancing on each of these stepping stones over the last couple of months, sometimes going backward then forward again. As the days blur hastily by, blame simply feels like blame rather than the bookend of shock or the precursor to anger. Grief just feel like grief, not the resting place of withdrawl nor the tunnel through to acceptance. Real change doesn't happen overnight, but rather through this series of transitions, the next step presenting itself only when it is truly time to move on. Acceptance doesn't come until anger has crashed, foamed and bubbled in silence, and receded with grief.

Emerging from my own confusion and finding a bit of reflection, I am happy I spent this past year sifting and sorting through the contents of my rose-patterned box. I am proud that I surrendered to those wretched and shameful memories for a time, understanding their nuances and how they affect my life. Honestly, I am astonished to discover that the wayward soul I once was still has the strength to power me through challenging times. And, I am relieved to discover that I don't have to cast out the lost little girl who starved herself in order to shed her shame...I'm privileged to love and live with both.

This year, as I navigated through one kind of grief, I said goodbye to a friend whose life was cut far too short. In one of our last conversations, she shared with me some of the challenges she saw before her and how she planned to deal with them. After her death, I reeled for weeks trying to understand how a woman and mother whose work seemed so unfinished could be gone. It seemed an ugly injustice to lose someone with plans and hope...until I accepted that our lives are present and vital while we're here and that death doesn't diminish the importance of the love and lessons we leave behind. My friend will not live through the challenges and blessings she foresaw, but that doesn't mean I should stop looking ahead.

I know in leaving this subject behind for now that I have mountains and oceans of work left to do. If I'm lucky, I'll still be climbing and sailing throughout all the days of my life. I have lists and lists of unfinished business and unanswered questions tucked away in my mind, ready for the next phase of exploration. The brilliance of being alive is getting an infinite number of chances to crack open life's little riddles while the sun still travels through the sky.

Georgia O'Keefe once wrote to a friend, "I see my little world as something that I am in - something that I play in. It is inevitable to me. But I never get over being surprised that it means something to anyone else."

Thank you for making it safe to share this tender piece of my story with you.

~ Katie

Quote from Georgia O'Keefe by Roxana Robinson, 1989, p. 454

Now I know a refuge never grows from a chin in a hand and a thoughtful pose, gotta tend the earth if you want a rose. ~ E. Saliers

Some of the most difficult journal entries for me to re-read are those I wrote to Rich from the hospital. Over the past year, I seem to have made peace with my starvation diaries, my desperate, aching poems, and my doctor's clinical notes, but looking back into that place in my heart, where light was cracking through for the first time in years...those words are the most difficult to take in.

And to see where we've gone from there makes it nearly impossible to pull those pages out, sit patiently with them, and listen to my innocent voice. Somehow, keeping those feelings hidden, well out of the spotlight, makes it easier to stay objective when telling my story. I can't skim the surface of my emotions when the weight of my disappointment and heartbreak still has the power to drag me under. Even now, with all of the relinquishing I've done of my shame and inner torment, vestiges of pain and regret cut through.

During my last hospitalization, I wrote a 30-page letter to Rich detailing my every meal and indignity. I sat at my tray, in corners, on the visiting couch, in my room, next to other patients, alone, in full view of the nurse's station, in the middle of the night, after meal time, first thing in the morning, and wrote line after line on clean white paper in blue pen, black pen, scribbling frantically, pausing, angry, tired.

I told him everything; even, at times, nothing at all. "What would I say if I could say the words that I feel?" Sometimes, he talked right back to me in my own words. "I know, I hear you telling me not to be so hard on myself." Sometimes, I was caught in the loop of my fears. "For the millionth time, I'm worried about my heart. My breath. The rest of my body."

I described my surroundings: "It is so windy outside. There are no clouds in the sky except for the fog peeking up over the most distant hills. It seems, from the inside here, that the world is so silent it might actually sound like the air-duct in my room rather than like traffic and talking and rattling leaves. I'm in a world unto itself. Here, there are noises and drama and conflict and joy and relief. Here, people feel things and think thoughts that elude them in their daily lives. They may see hope where they haven't been able to before. Or, they may see more pain than they previously imagined existed. We run the gamut here."

I shared my feelings for him. "You heal me. You soothe me. Your very presence makes my heart lighter...I used to tell you not to worry, I'm fine, you're just being silly but now...I feel like we're in this process together..." And this is where I stop.

In retrospect, these pages are as much a love letter to my anorexia as they were to Rich. On them, I processed the gradual ending of a relationship that held me so snug and so safe for so long while I slowly and reluctantly welcomed something -- someone -- else into my life. Suddenly, bathed in this new light, the quiet stillness of starvation felt stifling and musty, curling around my throat in angry demand, a relic of the suffering I didn't want to feel anymore. I was tired. My constant and reliable companion, sweet as it seemed in my solitude, left no room for hope or change or faith. And so the transition began from one life to another, a complete overhaul that ultimately led to motherhood.

I have a picture of myself from those months between my last hospitalization and the start of my pregnancy. I'm sitting outside Rich's apartment, in a garden, with a spade in one hand and a packet of seeds in the other. Six seed pots and a bag of potting soil sit in front of me and I'm smiling up into Rich's camera. Two photos later, I'm tapping the seeds into place with careful concentration. It was a moment of pause in my life, when the rough swell of my treatment leveled off, leaving a smoother surface and a gentler pace. I had to go back to work, I had to re-assimilate -- there was nothing normal about medically-supervised eating -- but the hollow sound of anorexia was fading from my ears.

I folded into Rich, pulling his life over mine like a temporary blanket. I found so much security in his concern, allowing for a re-awakening of dreams I'd forcibly denied for years. I let the future stretch before me again, an unknowable blankness, and constructed in words and actions the kind of life I wanted to lead. I told Rich I never wanted to get married again -- I'd made that mistake too young, twice already, astonishingly. I wanted to explore all of my options, embrace the freedom of my youth, and try different lives on for size. As time went on, I began earning my own trust and gaining a sense that maybe...just maybe...forgiveness for my disastrous chain of mistakes lay within.

And from this very, very tender, very nascent, embryonic state, came our child.

As soon as I discovered I was to be a mom, I was ready to be a mom, and I believe Rich experienced the same thing as a father. But, I don't believe we were ready to be parents together. The paths of communication we'd just begun to blaze needed to be paved over and solidified prematurely. There was no time to turn around and wonder if we'd gone the right way. Together, we shared few tools, building a precious little nest just the right size for our daughter which we circled in separate orbits, never once landing and making it home.

Now that we live apart and have for some time, I see more clearly the trajectory of our differences. We don't parallel one another even in the tiniest moments of parenting. We now tread respectfully around each other, casting individual nets beneath our daughter so that whichever way she falls she'll be caught. It isn't our unity that gives her safety, it's the attention we pay to the gaps our distant lives create. She isn't a fixed star in our universe anymore, she's the living, breathing ocean between our shores. And though it breaks my heart that we couldn't hold this life together for her sake, I'm sure we could not have done it for ours either.

It is not without stepping over deep wells of grief pooling in my mind that I move on now. My joy has a galvanized edge to it, sharp and shiny. My life is not the vast plain of newness I gave to Rich, instead it is a complicated, dense biosphere of traditions and rituals that continuously evolve to suit two young women living alone in a cute, blue house on a hill. With the disparate elements of our lives so tightly wound and interwoven, leaving no room for distinction between our needs and wants, what is there to introduce but the sun and the moon and the stars? What can be hidden when life is played out on the skin, when mistakes are as obvious as spilled milk, and love is as achingly real as it gets?

Every morning, even this far removed, I must grab my shovel and dig myself out of my dreams, arresting the uneasiness and unfamiliarity that continue to plague me in those early moments. And week after week, as I flip wildly between my two lives -- she's home, she's away, she's home, she's away -- I still search for the common threads between them, desperate to knit something whole. Yet month after month, despite these little battles, I forcefully send my roots down even deeper, letting this life branch further and further from its closed, quiet core. And I remember, when the storm clouds roll in and the hillside darkens, that the only way out is through.

This summer, when Adela moved to Rich's house and my balancing act collapsed under its own weight, I was reminded how clear the windows into my life are, and how expectation and reality never really intersect, causing disappointment to web between the two. And as I watched the arc of my story boomerang around me, never once touching the ground, always just out of my reach, I realized that there is very little I wish to defend anymore. My life is mine and I'm doing the best that I can. Embarrassment and shame still live in my bones, but they're softening and, when I most need them to, graciously step out of the way. I am starting to see the benefit of grabbing my past in a great big bear hug, and squeezing.

Adela said to me recently, "Mom, you don't have to do it perfectly for it to be perfect," and I think she might've been right. I've stumbled over myself a few times thus far, and will again in all the days to come, making mistakes that are more apparent than others and finding those the most difficult to overcome. But if Adela is correct, and true and blissful perfection is built upon one imperfection after another, then I have succeeded...perhaps well enough for her to be proud of me someday.

And now, in allowing myself to glance into the uncomfortable past and read the real emotions I put down on real paper a lifetime ago, I find myself more willing to listen to what my heart is saying now. I am still devastated that the earnest and innocent journey Rich and I began has left us here, apart, raising our daughter, but I am encouraged to discover that hope and possibility flourish in my life again.

And if I've learned one thing, it's that having faith in love, even when it isn't right, is never wrong.

~ Katie

Title quote from Hammer and a Nail by Emily Saliers (Indigo Girls)

If there ever comes a day when we can't be together keep me in your heart, I'll stay there forever. ~ Winnie the Pooh

I became pregnant with my daughter six months after my last hospitalization for anorexia; six months after the nurse kneeled down and told me she could see my fighting spirit just below the surface; six months after I took what was left of my life, cradled it close, and moved on.

Six months was not enough time to transition my mind and my heart and my body from living with death to producing life. I lived in fear of losing the baby, and the fear was acute and constant. In the beginning, her body was tiny inside of my tiny body but still I felt the enormity of the physical responsibility at hand. I had a miracle to perform, and I wasn't sure my blood, bones, liver, and heart were up to the task.

I was petrified.

And so I began to grieve almost instantly, even as I felt myself crack wide open with heartbreaking love for this speck of a soul that had somehow entangled itself with my own. Loss was imminent, so I felt, even moreso after the positive triple screen results and the subsequent genetic and termination counseling. To get through my days, I held my pregnancy loosely even as I clung to it for dear life.

My friends and family celebrated cautiously, seeing, no doubt, my reluctance to embrace this incoming, transformative force. I let her new little life come in and pass through and out as I moved from love to fear to loss to grief and then back to love.

To cope with the possibility of loss, I wrote letters to my unborn child, certain that what emerged from my heart would be known and felt and understood by her. I strung my fears from page to page like lighted bulbs on a string, illuminating every so often the deepest, darkest recesses of my soul where only the fear of losing a child can live. I handed my love and loss to this baby even as we grew and grew and grew together.

As I lay in bed during those full and heavy months toward the end, watching her roll and twist and stretch beneath my skin, I loved her with fierce endurance, bittersweet in those frequent reminders that while she lived within me, she was ultimately not mine to keep.

I wrote to her:

"I'm afraid I'm not strong enough to do this for you. I'm afraid I'm going to hurt you. I'm afraid my body isn't good enough, strong enough to take care of you. And losing you would be my punishment, THE punishment, for my anorexia.

I love you more than I've ever loved anyone before. Already, you are in my soul. And I would do, will do if this is to be the case, anything for you.

I want you to come into our lives. I want you to share your childhood with us, your life with us. I want to see you and know you. But...that feels selfish...I want what is best for you.

I love you.

I know you are not mine. I know you are a child of the universe, of God. I know that your life is your own, your path - the path you are meant to take - is your own.

I know that I am just meant to carry you, and to care for you with love if you are destined to be here with us.

Much love,
Mom"

The month before I gave birth, when attachment had overgrown resistance, I devised a contract with myself so that I'd have something to hold on to in the end if not my baby:

"November 12, 2004

I am 8 1/2 months pregnant. If anything should happen to this baby I will change my life in order to help those in need. This baby has given me back my life so I will give my life to those in need, not simply use it to better myself."

I signed my name.

In the final weeks of pregnancy, at a grocery store in Oakland near our apartment, I saw a stuffed baby toy. Up to that point, I hadn't made any preparatory purchases for the baby, fearing I wouldn't be bringing her home from the hospital. But, I reached over, grabbed the toy, paid for it, and brought it home. Though most of the baby toys have come and gone, I still see my fleeting faith in that one little bear.

Looking back with 5 years of motherhood now under my belt, I see the terror I lived in. I read the letters and know that I had one foot planted firmly in hope and the other in total surrender. Though I was carrying a baby, I could not erase from my mind the years of messages that my body was dying, that I was dying, that my heart might give out at any moment, perhaps unexpectedly while I slept. Before my baby was on her way, those messages helped me gain the perspective and strength I needed to claw my way out of a desperate situation. But once the pregnancy test came back positive, those messages, and that knowledge, filled me with a dread so opaque and so dense it immobilized me at times.

Today, my love for my daughter tethers me to the earth. When the tidal wave of life's constant disruption crashes down upon me and drags me out to sea, I fight my way back to shore because I know she's waiting there for me. I never knew myself -- or the power of my own love and strength -- before I became her mother. And if anything causes me to rise to a level higher than even I can imagine, it is her love for me.

During these summer months when weeks pass by without her, my world tips over. I dream endlessly at night and wake in total panic, wondering where she is. When I remind myself that she isn't here, fresh sadness seeps in. She is a happy girl wherever she is, and her life with her dad is full and rich with love and affection, but the resounding emptiness of my house when she's gone is sometimes more than I can bear. And as I drive back and forth through the orchards and rice fields, ferrying her from one life to another, I beat back my raw devastation at how often we have to say goodbye to each other.

I would have imagined that by this point, with our separate lives well-established, Rich and I would spin smoothly as satellites around this planet we've created. But, there is no settling into this strange and difficult life; there is only a painful and reluctant acceptance that even time isn't going to deliver an easy solution. Decisions are rock solid...and then they melt...while the clock ticks and the days pass and the months grow into years.

The thing about love and loss and separation and grief is that they don't soften into well-worn, familiar possessions over time, they are as fresh and new as the sun peering golden eyes over the horizon each morning. They stretch and snap and pull and tug and recoil when touched, and they sprout and blossom and reseed with each passing season. Every day they are young, impressionable sensations that expand and contract in relation to everything else. One love fades into loss into love into loss into love.

I miss my daughter with an instinctive desperation during these months. Her absence leaves a void in my life that requires constant management and attention. I find things to do, places to go, people to see -- peace, fun, adventure -- and life seems to regulate. Then she comes home and I see so vividly the distinction between motherhood and life on my own. Clicking between these different roles has gotten easier, less abrupt, less jarring, but nothing has brought the two closer together. The only sustainable ablution to this constant polarity is a fine and practiced filtering of every emotion through one intact, receptive heart.

After delivering my daughter to her dad recently, I drove home awash in the bitter grief that drowns me still, and wondered what kind of mother permits this bumpy journey for her child. It's not what I wanted for any of us, certainly not for her, yet these are the lives we lead, these are the lives we preserve. They're not pretty, they're not fancy, and sometimes they hurt us like hell, but for the time being -- which is all we have -- they're ours.

And so, with a heart still funneling that enigmatic mix of love and loss from one chamber to the next, keeping my spirit alive, I carry on. We all carry on. And that, I'm coming to understand, is the painful bliss of simply being alive.

~ Katie

What greater thing is there for human souls than to feel that they are joined for life- to be with each other in silent unspeakable memories ~G. Eliot

My brother was 17 when he ran away from home. I was 23 at the time, well into my eating disorder, and already estranged from my parents. Yet, I spiraled into panic with the rest of my family and photocopied missing person posters, reviewed tidal charts with the police to determine where his body might wash up, and slept in my childhood bedroom with my 15 year-old sister. My parents and sisters did other unimaginable tasks like decipher a cryptic postcard my brother sent from the road which led to the discovery of his abandoned car in Santa Cruz.

We banded together the five of us, found ways to cope, managed the influx of visitors day and night and the emotion of candlelight vigils held in our living room, and reminded each other to breathe. And when my brother came walking home a week later, all the worse for wear having traveled overnight by bus from Los Angeles, we grabbed each other in a great big hug, relieved to be six again. Over the days that followed, a subtle softening occurred between parents and children while the curtains of our inner workings parted ever so slightly, exposing everyday challenges that had always hummed along, barely a vibration, before shattering the windows around us.

Families aren't the slightest bit transparent; they are impossible to see into until something of this magnitude happens and friends bear witness to mothers and fathers and children falling to their knees in anguish or in grace. For my family, my brother's disappearance and surprise return brought about a gentle buffer of amnesty, if only for that brief season of terror and relief, and rather than peer at one another through the familiar thicket of history and pride and disappointment, we saw each other as breakable, mortal human beings made of bones, blood, fear, and love. And when that chapter ended and we returned in earnest to our routines and preconceptions and estrangements, we carried equally within us a token of that hard-won innocence as the curtains slowly fell back into place, shielding us once more from the eyes of the world.

In Wild Geese, Mary Oliver writes:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you about mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

In my hospital writings, I chronicled my family's visits and documented my pain at being so nakedly exposed. Without the security of my job, my relationships, and my house, I was a terribly frightened, fragile young woman living at the mercy of well-meaning but nonetheless unfamiliar medical staff. Not a family, indeed. Years of wall-building and self-protection were no match for the shame of wearing hospital clothing and weeping in the corner during meal time. The girl my family had always known was nowhere to be seen, yet I remained to accept her visitors.

At the time, it seemed to me that everything I had built and worked for was gone. When I was discharged from the hospital for the last time I didn't even have a home to return to. But, I was determined to make it on my own, and so I did.

Re-building genuine ties with my family took much longer than re-establishing a home for myself as my treatment eventually ended and real life began again. Even during my pregnancy I maintained my distance, calling to share the news that I was having a girl, but keeping my private fears and questions to myself. It wasn't until I was in labor, and experiencing the sheer uproarious pain of childbirth, that I finally called out for my mom.

It astonishes me how gradually the seams of a relationship pull apart, stitch by broken stitch, yet how quickly they can be mended. The arrival of my daughter brought about more than just a resurgence of my own vitality, it opened doors that had been sealed shut for years. Just as my brother's casual stroll back into our lives fused the shattered pieces of our hearts, so did the appearance of one small baby girl, reminding us with her newness that anything is possible.

I think about what Mary Oliver writes: "You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting." To me, this instruction falls in direct opposition to what I've always believed to be my duty to my family and the world. There is a right way forward, often aligned with the path of least resistance, and it is to be followed without question. Black is on one side, white is on the other, and together they meet in sharp contrast, forming a long straight line down the middle. Room for error is nothing more than a vacuum of time and space.

I haven't lived in a straight line, nor has anyone I've ever met, yet I spend much of my time crawling through the desert, repenting.

Letting the "soft animal" of my body "love what it loves" is another inconceivable concept. It is always with great shame that I explore my thoughts and feelings, nervously reaching into the shadows of my mind and heart, afraid I'll find darkness where light is supposed to be. Though no one can see it from the outside, I writhe in discomfort and despair when I unearth genuine feelings of love and concern for others. Attachment feels like a nightmare until the soft lullaby of trust comes drifting through and I reawaken.

Every once in a while the jaws of my earliest confusion clamp shut and I'm suddenly locked in mid-step. Perhaps my heart has opened itself too fully to another, or my mind has traveled too far into unknown territory. No matter the consequences, the journey often ends in regret, and so I have adapted to hiding away, lonely as this is. Just today I found myself burrowing into my dark, quiet place -- that tiny little corner where, even if someone peers in through the windows, I cannot be seen.

And yet...

Sometimes when I'm hiking out in the clear, blue open, I'll stop for a moment to feel the wind. I'll stand atop a rock or plant myself in the grass, throw my head back, close my eyes, and let my hair and clothes whip around me. In these moments I'm listening. Listening to a voice that can't be heard otherwise. It doesn't speak to me like family, and it doesn't sound like a friend; it doesn't even sound like the narrator who guides me through my day, sometimes pleasantly and sometimes impatiently. Instead it is calm, peaceful, and assured, and comes from the very center of my being.

Even though I can't yet access this deep wisdom as I wander aimlessly through my life, alternately hidden and exposed, I know that it exists. I only have to be still for a moment to hear the quiet voice speaking. And the older I get the more I realize that it is always there, gently nudging and nurturing me along my way, whether I can hear it or not. It gets lost in the rush and color and pace of daily life, often supplanted completely by outside noise, but it is as constant as the thrum of my own heart beat, and just as necessary.

Admittedly, I still try my hardest to live in the absence of my own divine intercedence, resisting the urge to surrender with a kind of poisonous power that astounds me at times. But, what is life if not the opportunity to untangle the thread of who we are from where we've been so that we can sew something entirely new?

I feel blessed to know the love of family and friends, and to have the presence of mind to appreciate myself every once in a while, flaws and all. And I am grateful for the opportunity to raise a child while peripherally exploring the mysterious recesses of my own heart and soul -- learning worlds about life and love and family in the process.

More than anything, though, the most amazing lesson emerging from my tentative dance is the fact that what make this life special are the very things in me that make it possible. This knowledge brings with it a delicate coating of bliss and the lightest dusting of forgiveness, reminding me, when I falter and lose my way, why I'm here.

~ Katie

Wild Geese, Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume 1, 1992.
Title quote: George Eliot

Some people come into our lives and quickly go. Some stay for a while, leave footprints on our hearts, and we are never, ever the same. ~Flavia Weedn

It's easy for me to talk about my illness now. The word "anorexia" rolls off of my tongue with an ease I never would have imagined. Yes I was anorexic, yes I starved myself, yes I endured years of treatment before I began to heal my mind, body, and spirit, and yes I'm still experiencing the joys and challenges of surviving my dark decade.

An illness such as mine seems quantifiable. It appears to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It starts slowly with a loss of control, builds into a beast of its own making, and has to be dismantled piece by piece before the threat is gone. In my case, my symptoms were treated, my thoughts and feelings were rearranged, and my body was eventually restored. And that, it seems, is the end of the story.

So why, I've been asking myself, do I still feel compelled to write about it? What questions have I not answered? What is there left to tell? What I am coming to understand, as memories continue to rise and flatten out before me, is that my illness is merely a lens through which I can view my life as a whole thus far, and gradually begin to understand why I came so close to losing it all.

When I was a child, my grandparents lived on a farm in rural Petaluma. I remember leaving for home one night when I was 8 years old and looking back at their farmhouse glowing against the night sky. As we drove alongside the slotted fence leading down the gravel road, I struggled to see into their windows because I was sure, in the way children are sure of such things, that the people I knew as grandparents were now taking off their masks and turning into strangers. I wanted to catch them in the act because I was convinced that the entire evening had been a charade for the sake of the grandchildren, complete with costumes and facemasks and theater. What truth, I wondered, was being obscured? Soon after, my grandparents separated, and eventually divorced.

I remember laying in bed at night, too, and looking around my room and wondering if everything lost its color in the darkness. To me, my toys and clothes and curtains looked black, white, and gray in the moonlight. As I drifted off to sleep, I imagined that color lived only in the daytime, or perhaps only within light, but never within the objects themselves. In the morning I was always relieved and slightly surprised to find that my room was once again filled with shades of red and blue and pink and green.

It's almost as if I can hold up a looking glass and see the world now exactly as I saw it back then. I was not a naturally trusting child and kept myself in constant reserve, closely examining everything that came into view. When I encountered things I didn't understand, I stepped back and watched until things made sense again. I didn't entirely trust my environment and dealt with change by imagining that what I saw wasn't actually real. I felt that life, real life, was taking place just below the surface of what I could see, only I didn't have the tools to access it. I was on the outside, standing on the very top of my tippy toes with my young fingers curled into the splintered window pane, trying to see through the impossibly fogged glass.

Now, I find myself the mother of a child who bears the same kind of wonderment deep within her own mind. A soulful taking in of the world, bringing unsettled and unanswerable questions that skip out and about when night falls, testing me and teasing me, and leading me back to that very same seat of confusion.

This week, she and I are processing grief and trying to understand how the loss of a mother impacts a young family. Who will care for her children when she is gone? How will their lives change without her? When will we die? How can we be sure that an accident like this won't happen to us?

Cuddling with her at the end of the day, and doing my best to answer her questions honestly, we are merely two little girls trying to make sense of a world that doesn't make sense. Last night, after crying in the dark for a few minutes and snuggling up against me, she asked, "Mom, a long time ago, were things everywhere only gray? Because when I look at pictures, the only color I see is gray." I assured her there has always been color in the world, and that the gray only lives in the pictures, but I knew that her question was much larger than that, and that she was looking for an answer I haven't yet found.

In searching for peace and forgiveness within myself over these past years, I've often wished I could grab hold of the world, dig my fingers deep into its shoulders, look it straight in the eye, and make it understand that the symptoms of an eating disorder, or other such illness, are simply the waves of a vast ocean of confusion and unrest crashing onto the shores of our bodies. Starvation is nothing more than an expression of something otherwise inexpressible in its enormity.

Looking back on my own childhood, and now glimpsing life through the eyes of my daughter, I see how I've always grappled with an unending need to know where the road ahead curves, dips, and climbs. It is no wonder that I tried with all of my might to erase this unsettling hunger from my life during my twenties. As a parent now, trying desperately to protect my daughter from her own set of frights and worries, I see so clearly that this is a need that can never be met. For the same reasons I couldn't comprehend the world as a child, she can't either. The best I can do for her is hug her when she cries, tell her how much I love her, and try to help her understand the practicalities of an unimaginable loss.

I am devastated by the death of my friend, but am learning from her passing that one moment doesn't guarantee the next. Through this haze of grief, I am beginning to understand that I will take my questions with me to my grave, just as we all do when we pass. I don't need to chase them away or stomp them out, I simply need to tuck them into my mind and move on with my life. It is not my burden to seek a definitive understanding of the world; rather, it is my duty to give myself fully to the people around me so that we all have hands to hold when grief comes crashing down, and someone to smile with when a moment of bliss breezes through.

Given my lifelong struggle, I am not sure I will ever be without fear of the unknown or that I won't scramble around at times trying to find something solid to hold on to. I cannot promise myself that the lessons I am learning today will settle into permanence and become part of each step I take forward. But, what I owe to myself and to the precious people who leave us far too soon is a constant, often painful, surrender to what life delivers no matter how ready or secure I feel. There is nothing inside of today that guarantees tomorrow for any of us.

These sweet little moments that make up our days, whether they build upon or chisel away at the mystery of life, have to be enough...because they are all that we have.

~ Katie

I don't want to go up to the mountains, I don't need to go down to the sea, gonna sit right here till we unravel the mystery. ~ Marc Cohn

My anorexia was an attempt to turn everything gray into black and white, to create sharp relief where the edges of my life blurred.

Starvation simplifies everything. It numbs the constant strike of life upon the skin and dims the roar of people, places, and time passing by. Hunger gave me purpose, it made me feel as though I understood myself. I was one with my needs and my needs were all I had.

It is only as life has softened from the constant palpation of uncertainty that I see how desperately I craved a kind of clarity that simply doesn't exist. I wanted everything in its place; neatly folded, stacked, and put away. For years there was no buffer around me, no room for error, no dreaminess, no confusion. There was simply right and wrong...black and white.

I did not stray from my routine. When my car broke down after work one day, I simply called my brother and had him drop me off at the gym. Life never delivered anything more important than my bruising schedule.

One night, after a particularly long stretch of starvation, and after hours of consideration, I bought myself dinner and left it in my room while I stepped out. At the time, I was renting a room from a family, and their dog came in and ate my food. Every last bite. I was devastated. Starving, exhausted, and aggrieved, I called the restaurant and begged them to stay open long enough for me to drive back. The trip took 40 minutes, but I couldn't change my plan. My calculations were set; I had to eat that particular meal.

When I made my lunchtime salads, I counted dried cranberries and shavings of carrots. I could pour exactly 9 nuts into my hand from the bag without even trying. I weighed, I measured. Everything was precise and there was absolutely no room for variance. Anywhere. Three slices of tempeh, two teaspoons of cottage cheese, 4 rice cakes, 5 mile run, 1 hour and twenty minutes on the bike, click, click, click...

Because of this, everything else seemed so clear. It was as if my lifestyle provided the kind of lucidity I needed. I had nothing but my workouts, my job, and the management of my starving body. I didn't shower, I hardly changed my clothes, I never wore make-up, and I paid no attention to my hair. If I was covered up, I was fine.

Easing from a black and white world back into color threaded through with gray has been very difficult. I find myself holding up my hand in the middle of conversations when things feel too heavy to bear. During weekends alone, I close off for days, drive for hours, burrow into my little world where there are no people, no sounds, no chance of misunderstandings or rejection. I settle in for long stretches of just me. That's where I feel safest.

Slowly, this is changing, but the silence of my own life still draws me in.

A friend recently told me about a personal loss. I couldn't wrap my mind around the magnitude of it and realized, for the first time, that pieces of life actually splinter off and can't be reabsorbed back into the body, or into the mind or heart. We lose things. We lose people. We feel despair. Huge crevaces open up inside of us and sometimes there isn't enough to fill them and so a little bit of breeze always slips through. Life isn't a series of stones set neatly aside one another, it's a patchwork of bliss, fear, sadness, peace...blisters, glimmers, holes, tears.

This kind of understanding wouldn't have been imaginable, or acceptable, 10 years ago.

Sometimes, though, I still find myself wanting to hammer these miscellaneous pieces back into place. Shove them down and sand the edges until everything is smooth again. Wipe away the dust, shine up the wood...good as new. But I can't, and so these messy fragments join the orbiting debris that encircles me and I have no choice but to move on.

It's nights like tonight, when the gray swallows me whole, that I wish I had a roadmap. I don't wish for the numbness anymore, or for the sharp delineation that comes at such a high price, but I long for something with a bit of demarcation and topography so that I know how far the road extends if I head west, and if there are any impassable mountains along the way. Is that a shallow valley to the north, or an ocean? How can I be sure?

It's nights like tonight that I remember how much easier life was when my heart simply slept.

Over the past week I've encountered two women with eating disorders. One was young, about the age I was during the height of my illness, and the other was an older woman whose starvation was extremely advanced and long-term. Unfortunately, anorexia can persist for a lifetime. In my treatment group, I met women who'd struggled for over twenty years with the disease, vacillating between a life of freedom and uncertainty and a life of safety and control. This is a nearly impossible struggle to overcome, and one that has very little to do with food.

And yet, it is possible to move past this struggle. But how? When I see those lost and closed faces I wonder why I'm here and not there anymore. What was the piece, or pieces, that saved me? Was it my doctors who had the same conversation with me day after day, month after month, year after year, never once losing their focus or patience? Was it the nurses in the hospital who talked to me about faith and confidence and persistence and forgiveness? Was it Rich who went grocery shopping with me every day? Was it my daughter who came along in spite of it all? Was it my distant yet penetrating love for my family and friends? Was it something inside of me...?

I wish I could capture those magical and elusive circumstances, bottle them up, and hand them to the women who struggle. They'd reject my help outright, I know, but I never fail to wonder what's going to make the difference for them, if anything. I wonder what's missing for these women. Why does starvation gain a toehold and hang on for dear life?

The truth is, I know what's missing. I know the question that starvation answers. I know the silence that anorexia speaks.

It is interesting to look back on my twenties and find that my desires and passions often traveled no further than the pages of my journal. My feelings, fresh and unspoken, were somehow too shameful to share and so I tucked them away and kept them hidden. The moment my heart left its safe little corner, I grabbed it, scolded it, and wrestled it back into place. I afforded very little leeway to what felt potentially damaging and hurtful, but what, in retrospect, looks like little more than love.

In my most nervous, uncertain times I am silent, shut down, afraid that one loose word will send me hurtling into the wild river thrashing its way through the canyon. And so I stay quiet, watchful, distant. But I'm learning that as I let people in, and let my heart do some of the talking, the frighteningly powerful river below thins to a gentle stream and I'm not so afraid anymore.

Maybe there is no going back, but there has to be more than standing still. There are words left to be spoken, and I'm finding the courage to speak them.

~ Katie

You may not see it when it's sticking to your skin, but we're better off for all that we let in. ~ Emily Saliers

I wasn't one of those little girls who dreams of her perfect wedding day. It was almost as if I had no illusions; a big white wedding wasn't in my future. So it's strange to me that I got married so young.

When I was 19, a good friend married her boyfriend. He was stationed at Pendleton while she and I went to school in San Diego. They moved to an apartment in Oceanside and although she finished her degree, we hardly saw her after her wedding.

A co-worker friend came over to my apartment one night during my sophomore year and told me that she and her long-time boyfriend were married for two weeks before they called it quits. A year later she met the boy she'd marry for real.

Another co-worker friend was already married with three kids. She was in her mid-twenties and supervised the college girls.

There was something about marriage that I craved. It seemed so safe, like nothing could hurt me. I don't remember imagining for even a moment while making plans to marry the first boy that we'd spend the rest of our lives together. It was as though my imagination didn't stretch that far into the future, though now I know it wasn't about the rest of our lives but about reversing a downward spiral.

Before I met the boy, I was deeply unhappy at school. I'd had a relationship during my first year that sent me into self-imposed hiding. This kid wasn't violent, but he had a dark streak that frightened me. My knees would buckle and my heart would pound in fear when I saw him on campus. Something about our dynamic knocked me too far off course, and I wondered who I was to enter into something so wrong. I stopped seeing friends and hid at home. I was always scared of running into him at a party so I never went anywhere. It was hard to explain my fear and avoidance at the time which probably had more to do with my own sense of vulnerability than with him. He didn't seem so bad...so why was I terrified?

I don't even remember falling in love with the first boy I married. In fact, I don't think I ever did. It was like a puzzle I was piecing together, trying to make myself whole again, and he was part of the picture.

During our courtship I shaved my head, pierced my nose, and got tattoos. I'd left for college as a sweet-looking girl who managed, in just two years, to strip herself of any trace of femininity. When I walked into women's restrooms I literally heard gasps.

And so, at 21, marriage intersected with a loss of self that was already well underway. When I look back, I see a girl who'd already begun to dismantle herself before starvation even entered the picture. I'd cut off my hair, stopped wearing make-up, covered my body with used rags, and set my expression in a "don't talk to me" way.

I wonder now how it was possible for the boy to even like me then. My tender fragile self was covered over by angry self destruction. I was proud and embarrassed by the fact that I didn't look like anyone else, except for the handful of kids who'd entered college either already lost or found in their own unique way.

Looking back, the depression is clear. My self hatred is apparent. I'd already gotten rid of everything that made me feel desirable, and had cut off all access points to myself. I can see now how this may have frightened my family. I transformed into someone they didn't recognize in so short a time and I didn't want help or advice or love or concern...but really, I was dying for it.

And so that morning, when I woke up to find that I was married, I'd already started down the path that would lead me straight into the heart of my illness. It would take years from that morning before the hardened shell I wore finally softened and people could reach inside of me again.

So much of what I feel now comes from that severe retreat from friendships and civility, almost moreso than from the havoc my eating disorder wreaked. Honestly, sometimes I look in the mirror and am shocked at how normal I appear. I always wonder in those moments...what am I expecting to see?

How I wish now that my twenties hadn't been so destructive! I still carry pain for that person who dropped out of everything and crawled along the margins on her hands and knees. I wish I'd had the calm serenity in my mind to carry me through the rough patches a bit more unscathed. Instead, I wore my pain like a new set of skin.

A few years into recovery, I threw away all of the clothes I'd worn during my illness because I couldn't stand to see evidence of that girl any more. The green pants, the gray sweats, the tattered blue sweatshirt with the "D" embroidered in yellow thread. I used to wear those clothes to work. In fact, I'd wear them to the gym in the morning and they'd dry out a bit while I stood on the BART train platform on my way to Berkeley. It disgusts and embarrasses me now how I used to get on the commuter train in the morning absolutely drenched with sweat while other professionals headed to San Francisco in their suits.

It's those moments, those flashes of memory, that make my skin crawl now. Feeling like an absolute alien for so long can still make me uncomfortable when I enter a room. In some ways, I've left that old awkwardness behind by reminding myself that nothing about me now is going to catch that kind of attention. I'm not displaying that horrific internal unrest anymore, not only because it isn't there but because I have the ability to smile at people on the street if I want to. I spent years unable to look anyone in the eye for fear of what I saw looking back at me.

Maybe this sounds overly dramatic. How could a cute young girl transform herself into a monster who skimmed the periphery of society hoping not to get noticed? But, that's just what I did.

Anorexia treatment didn't just expose the fact that I had severely disordered eating and exercising habits, it also illuminated the fact that the body and face I'd always known had changed, too, unbeknownst to me. The bursts of clarity I've mentioned weren't just an acknowledgement of my inability to eat a raisin, they encompassed the realization that I'd become a shadow of my former self. The first chinks I'd knocked out of my exterior had been intentional, but this had gone far beyond my control and now even I didn't recognize myself.

And so, my dark decade wasn't just about eating or exercise, it was about a total loss of everything that made me who I was. It was almost as if I took a knife, at 21 years old, and slowly carved myself down to the bone, removing every bit of my spirit and my humor and my dreams in the process.

I'm grateful, at 33, to have a head full of dreams once again and a spirit that perseveres even when the world outside feels damp and spongey and cold. As the circumstances of my life continue to change I am astonished sometimes at my ability to bend with the wind instead of break. Sure, I get whipped around in the worst storms that blow through, but I'm still standing when they're gone.

So much of my strength now comes from the people I've chosen as friends. Without them, I wouldn't have a place for my troubles, my joy, my fears, my confusion. I live alone with my daughter and though we have the most wonderfully sweet, and sometimes challenging, existence, I am buoyed by the people who give me hugs and ask with sincerity, "How are you today, Katie?"

I spend a lot of time by myself when my daughter is with her dad. Sometimes I close off for entire weekends, making tentative plans that never materialize. Sometimes all I need to know is that there are people out there in the world who care about me, and then all is right within.

Over the last couple of months, I've watched myself grow tentatively into new friendships, opening up and learning how and when to trust. And though I sometimes still wear the badge of shame that exclaims I'm made up of broken bricks, I know that these people see and appreciate what I've built. And those who know I'm in the process of putting all of these errant pieces of myself into a manageable place so that my past is with me but does lead me, share their journeys with me, too.

It's pretty incredible to look around and find that everyone else is making their way through life just as I am. Despite how we look on the outside, we're all just a bunch of people with flashlights in our hands, making our way through the darkness one step at a time. And when we come upon kindred spirits, we reach out and link arms for a while and travel together.

As much as I doubt and question and worry and regret, I'm happy with my life. I don't struggle nearly as much as I used to. I'm kinder to my body and my heart and my mind now, and I'm finding little bits of sparkling pride within me that are bright enough shine through. I notice the seasons and I watch the sky. I take deep breaths and look up through the trees. And when my daughter is away I ride my bike through the hazy glow of sunset and feel just about as complete as I can.

The calm serenity that I desperately craved for all those years is slowly but surely becoming a faithful companion of mine. And looking ahead into the vast unknown of my life, nothing gives me more peace.

Life never stops giving us chances.

~ Katie

Title quote: All that we let in, Emily Saliers, 2004

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination. ~ Mary Oliver

For the most part, I've always considered my compulsion to write a curse, something I could never escape. Growing up, the need was an intricate web I fought my way through: a dense, sticky net of feeling and color and sound that stretched itself out in a flagrant, uncomfortable display. Writing wasn't something that sat easily within me, and it regularly forced its way out.

Early on, writing poetry helped me make sense of myself and the world. In grade school, I scribbled rhymes in my awkward, unformed handwriting on scraps of paper. Somewhere under my bed, in one of my memory boxes, is the first poem I ever wrote -- a tiny time capsule of my earliest dreams and humor. The subject matter: boys.

In junior high my writing took a dark, forested turn and I lost touch with the depth of my expression. In high school, I was finally old enough to carry the weight of my words and kept a notebook with me at all times.

While in college, I published a poem and wrote another piece that was incorporated into the medical anthropology curriculum. During lecture breaks, I leaned against cool concrete buildings and wrote line after line of silly, angsty musings. I sent long, languorous letters to friends afar and squeezed poetry from every inch of myself. Writing was a listless yet appropriately cerebral pastime in those days. I was a lost and wandering poet.

During the following years when my illness left me with no energy or inclination to make conversation and my mind compressed into a heavy, dead mass, the compulsion to write remained alive. The infrastructure of my poetry buckled, however, leaving verbs touching verbs touching adjectives with little or no punctuation. Messy phrases, chaotic juxtapositions, crass, weathered, profane words all intertwined with recountings of my bizarre diet: "carrot juice for dinner tonight and sixteen million brown rice cakes and sushi and peanut butter and a peach."

I can't make sense of it now: "a galloping leap of self into the space created by distance, laying down its highway in passing."

Sometimes, though, I see an attempt to make real the very, very unreal: "today it is the whipping of moods, brain-frothing switches inverting all parts (her eyes, minds, hands) once semi-solid, footing the breakage, damning serenity, but all in jest."

Some of it is sad: "The mirror doesn't reflect me anymore. I look to it for guidance, to let me know when I've gone too far. But often, it will only tell me I have not gone far enough."

And some graphic: "My insides are coming out of hiding."

But something in me changed during the final months of my treatment and I stopped writing all together. The flow of words that never ceased suddenly dried up and I was left with no inroad, no sense of evolution, no hold on space.

It was a relief to be released, frankly; no one could get to me, nor I to myself. My life cast no more ugliness. There was no drifting line in the water, no glinting lure, no net waiting by the side of the boat, only still waters lapping a calm shore, obscuring what lurked below.

Something about the recovery process silenced me, made me hate and distrust myself and reject what already seemed like a curse. I threw away my lined notebooks and writings from adolescence on. Pages of words typed in fading ink, crudely marked with my edits and notations, went into the trash. I held onto a few journals, but only because the books were of such fine quality I couldn't throw them away. I kept the rubber-banded stack of papers from the hospital in case one day I needed a road map back to the place I'd already forgotten.

Every once in a while, though, that strike of lightening would flash on the horizon and I’d look into the distance and wonder: Is it time to start again? No, I'd quickly decide. It was easy, for a while, to lose myself in the rush and pull of daily life and ignore the familiar and growing pressure...that voice...my voice...

Last summer, however, after my world tipped upside down and everything spilled and splattered out, I sat in front of my computer for a long, long time and called for the storm. Though it brought deep pain, I let the coursing rawness move through me once again until I arrived at a single poem -- one with just enough weight to snap the lock on my emotions. It ripped me wide open.

The Gardener

with his hands
he turns over her earth,
a barter to upend convention -
plaiting seed rows,
guiding roots
downward until
her land has no choice but to
flower and sprout.

his love affair with
her soil
is clean,
rapturous -
unspooling questions in me about
my own hands,
their work,
and the seasons bringing change;
how the space between two people cannot be
harvested,
held,
understood.

and my own heart breaks
knowing
that the seeds of this life, lovingly tended,
bear seeds of their own in time that will
one day
take to the wind.

watching the reach and tangle of his devotion,
I wonder if there is wisdom
in cultivating dreams
this way,
amassing the treasures of a farmer -
fruit heavy on the vine,
bitter to sweet to rot,
single moments in perfect
fleeting suspension.

but at dusk,
after the day has claimed its newness and yields again,
I realize that
no answers grow here -

only gifts for which
we could not have known
to ask.

In the months after writing this poem I allowed the need back in, sometimes hesitantly and sometimes with punishing regret. There is nothing painless about tacking oneself to the wall for casual observation, and I often resent this ridiculous desire to drag my feelings into the light. After all, I try to make good use of my time and this seems like the worst kind of waste.

And with this vulnerability comes a rolling sense of loss, too, an unending feeling that whatever solidity I’ve offered the world is now softened and blurred by my writing. What is there of a woman if she ebbs and flows with the tide? Who is she really? I’m confronted over and over by the realization that nothing is as sure and as sturdy as it looks on the outside, certainly not me.

In Dogfish, Mary Oliver writes:

I wanted
the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,
whoever I was, I was
alive
for a little while.

Perhaps Mary Oliver doesn’t feel the same burst of shame I experience every time I push my tender thoughts and feelings out of the nest. Maybe she doesn’t squirm in the presence of her self-knowledge, or shield herself from the blinding glare of her inner beauty, dignity, grace, confusion, and despair as it reflects off of her work. But, perhaps she does.

I am always grateful, after reading bits of published poetry, that writers fight and win this war. After all, without the courage of those who take the time to explain the world and themselves in it, I would know very little.

And so I choose to share.

~ Katie

Quotes: Wild Geese and Dogfish, both by Mary Oliver (Dream Work, 1986)

The best way out is always through. ~ Robert Frost

Why this?
But because
the clouds
are too light
to carry me
away...
(July 23, 2001)

My recovery from anorexia was a dark, ugly time, yet now I experience it as one of the most beautiful, radiant stretches of my life thus far.

It was an opportunity like no other to decide if I wanted to live or die. I teetered at the crossroads for a long time, permeable to the forces around me encouraging one path over another. I listened to the rhythm of my pulse, counted my heartbeats, and measured the likelihood of my survival against a chart that hung on the wall.

I was an angry patient, railing against a diagnosis I didn't believe in, but one that kept me imprisoned. My voice was a drifting whisper in the cacophony of sound. Why did perfect strangers have the right to overrule my decisions, tearing every last bit of my control away? What made these people who didn't live under my skin more powerful than I was?

The doctor who treated me during my first stay in the hospital had an office climbing with plants, giving the room a fresh, wet smell of dirt. I would inhale the damp cool deeply and feel grateful for this reminder of the earth outside. But, I didn't agree with what the doctor had to say and I hated him for his haughtiness.

One afternoon while passing him in the hallway, I voiced a growing panic that I might die if I didn't exercise. Literally. I pleaded for a quick walk on the treadmill. Maybe only 10 minutes? How about 5? Not enough to burn off the toast I'd choked down for breakfast, but enough to ease this suffocation. Please, please, I begged, until I was yelling. I don't remember his words, but I do remember the shake of his head and quick retreat.

At one point during my hospital treatment, a fellow patient said to me, "I've seen thinner." Looking back, I'm sure she was trying to ease my mind, but at the time I journaled: "When I get better I'm going to write a book or develop a lecture so that I can expound on WHAT NOT TO SAY to a person struggling with an eating disorder -- especially if that person is sitting in a fucking hospital trying to come to terms with his/her problem."

Skipping higher
where
heaven awaits,
Fertility
breathing.
(June 7, 2001)

As I've mentioned, having a baby was the only pin that pricked my heart during the worst of my eating disorder. It was the subject my doctor would bring up when I was most deadened. She'd ask: on a scale from 1 - 10, how motivated are you to get better? I'd hover between 6 - 10. Then: on that same scale, how willing are you to get better? 2 or a 3. I knew deep down that I needed to get better, but I was unwilling to do the work...until she mentioned having a baby, and then my numbers aligned.

It amazes me how seamlessly and rapidly I traveled between denial and clarity, and what triggered the trips between the two.

What I'm most proud of, having just read through my hospital writings more thoroughly than ever before, is the fact that I did the hard work. The box I've held onto for all these years is a reminder of everything I thought about when it was hard to think at all. There is so much about my recovery that I wouldn't remember had I thrown away the words that were so meaningless to me at the time but now tell a story that astounds me. There is a reason for knowing this story, and perhaps for telling it.

Late last summer, I stumbled upon this poem:

Honeybee ~

Having traveled miles
with unerring precision,
he alights on mica wings,
to feed upon the hearts
of riotously exclaiming flowers.

There is doubt among those closest to me that I've truly emerged from the other side of anorexia, especially in light of my bare admissions here. Though it seems too simple and perhaps a little careless to say, I wouldn't appreciate the honeybee if I was still stuck inside.

Without a doubt, I fought my recovery tooth and nail; but, ultimately I grew tired and began to let go, piece by piece. It was during the fight and ultimate surrender that I primed myself for the lessons that would surface from the shadowy depths of real living. Had I simply gone through the motions of recovery, keeping my heart and mind disengaged, I would still live by anorexia's rules today. Of this I am 100% certain.

I know that I am miles from the girl who earned straight A's in high school and who was dubbed "Best Personality" in her senior class. I know that in making the choices I thought were right for me I confused and ultimately disappointed my family. I wish anorexia had never become the solution that it was for so many years. I wish I could go back, grab the time lost, and shove it into my pocket for safe keeping.

But...I can't.

What I love most about Honeybee is the word mica. It means thin, tough, often transparent, and usually elastic, which I'd like to think is a result of miles and miles of travel. Then, not only does the honeybee alight, it feeds, and not just on what it needs to survive, but on the hearts of riotously exclaiming flowers.

I believe that we admire in others what we most admire in ourselves, and that as I travel the sometimes strange and winding passages ahead I'll seek out fellow honeybees.

For I know that along our winged and luminous journey together, unerringly precise or not, we'll find the sweetest nectar.

~ Katie

If my ship sails from sight, it doesn't mean my journey ends, it simply means the river bends. ~ John Enoch Powell

When Rich and I separated at the end of 2008 I felt relief. When we battled over custody last year I felt fear. When the settlement agreement arrived last month I felt grief. When the divorce papers arrived last week, dated and filed, my heart finally broke.

I didn't see this coming.

Our life together as full-time co-habitating parents ended in December of 2007. A year later we were maintaining separate residences. The following year we were coordinating holiday schedules so that we could spend Christmas with our daughter. What sort of power did this little piece of paper have over me?

Last week I spun in agony, wearing tiny crystalline shards of pain on my sleeve like sequins. I cried at the office, I cried in my car. I was unable to articulate the impact of this latest milestone and closed myself off. For the new man in my life, this was unnerving and left him examining our still "under construction" relationship. Over a period of days I went from managing it all to dissolving at every turn.

And, for the first time since that late August afternoon when Rich lay crying on our bedroom floor while I flitted nervously between him and our daughter in the next room, my healthy mind and body rebelled.

Food became the enemy once again.

Luckily, I have 4 years of behavioral therapy under my belt. My anorexia doctors taught me how to beat the demon by opening my mouth and putting food inside. What I didn't have time to learn once my baby came along and I was thrust back into the working world, was how to make peace with taking those bites when the going gets tough.

The good news is that my recovery is so well established eating is a non-issue. Sure, my ability to share a meal with friends may disappear at times, but there is always eating taking place sometime, somewhere. What I haven't experienced in a long, long time is the relentless pounding of my inner critic who, thankfully, has been silent all of these years.

With the slightest bit of distance, I can see so clearly when and how the cycle begins. After the settlement agreement arrived I wasn't pleased with how I looked in my clothes, my appetite decreased, and I spent less time getting ready in the morning. By last week I was ashamed of my body, too shy to eat in front of most people, and had cut my clothing options down by half.

Anorexia starts with a spark and spreads like wildfire. It is a tenacious thief who steals good sense and reason. Once nutrition falls away everything else follows, which is why no matter how harsh and unforgiving the landscape of my mind becomes I will always eat. No matter what.

This recent storm, short as it was, raged invisibly within the confines of my mind. Perhaps the evil little dictator wore herself out too quickly; perhaps she wasn't getting the response she sought. The truth is, these tiny corrective steps I'm taking day after day are leading me in the right direction.

I'm in the driver's seat now.

But, where do I stow this grief so that I can return to my life? Maybe it isn't something I can bury and forget as I've tried to do with so much of my past pain. This ache lives under my skin. It's the reason I'm here. It's the answer I give to my daughter. It's the choice I've made and the path I'm on. It's my every breath.

Rich and I searched for peace together and apart this week. We passed our feelings back and forth and hoped, I'm sure, for some sort of closure. There isn't any. We share a small, impressionable child who needs these lines to remain open for her own health and survival. What passes through them now is goodwill, frustration, tension, hope and...still, this hurt. To give her the life and love we want her to have we must stay permeable.

In 1999, during the year of my first marriage, I considered creating a compilation of all of the things I wanted my eventual daughter to know. It is sweet to look back on my earnest yet troubled 21 year old self and imagine how knowledgeable I thought myself to be. But as young as I was, I wanted to capture and preserve something precious before it was gone -- an innocence I could see fading right before my eyes.

As I do with many dreams I nurtured at the start of my illness, I wonder what would have happened had my mind not slipped away. Would those writings have changed the course of my life as these are doing now?

Instead, I've unknowingly accumulated pages and pages of writing I'm not proud of. Notebooks full of questions and cries for help; margins packed with wild and desperate scribbles. Sentiments I hope never to share with my daughter in life or after my death. I don't know the girl who wrote them and I don't want her to either.

And yet...

On May 30, 2001, in the midst of anorexia's steep climb, I wrote:

The contents
of my story
done then
to bring about
another story.
I
am
waiting
for
her...

In these last few weeks I've plumbed far too deeply into my psyche. I've gone places that don't need to be revisited when there is peace to be found in the sun and the sky and in simply watching the trees blossom and the grass blanket the hills. If nothing else, there is so much richness in each moment with a child that no other journey need be made.

But there is a hazy, undeniable noise building within me as Rich and I pass into our epilogue. It's almost as if our river has ceded another that is forcing its way through the roughage unbound. There is a new truth to my life now and, rather than hide behind its accompanying shame and regret, I am letting it in.

This chapter is over, but the story won't be complete without it.

When I was a little girl, a doctor told my mother I was fortunate: my perpetual stomach aches were a clear signal from my body that things were not okay. Years later, my body would broadcast this same message to the world, teaching me in the process how to listen when it speaks.

These days, I may not hear anything at first, or I may ignore my body's inconvenient little lectures, but eventually the message comes in loudly and clearly. And while I may not be the first to jump when the alarm sounds, I always respond.

Over this week, as I've tried to heed my body's cry and find my sane and lovely voice again, I've realized that I have a whole life ahead of me to craft a story for my daughter. It won't stem from my innocence and it won't center in my regret. In many ways, it has only just begun.

I've often heard the phrase, "life begins at __," applied to varying decades of life. Frankly, I'm starting to think that life begins when you let it.

Dearest life, I'm pleased to inform you that nothing stands in your way.

~ Katie

The sum of human suffering is a purely mental accretion, the contemplation of which is futile because no one ever suffered it. ~ C.S. Lewis

This past Friday morning, I signed my settlement papers. Though it's been a long time coming, fresh grief knocked me over and I mourned all week in the dark stormy weather, waiting for the sun to come out.

My sadness stemmed not from this decision we've made, but from the journeys we'll have to take back to this place to explain. Our relationship isn't something we can leave behind; it's our daughter's story. From now forward, we are equal yet distant shepherds of her childhood and acknowledging where and how we once stood together won't always be easy for us or for her.

But there is more here, and that's why grief has me by the throat. The other layer, a heavy cloak that drapes me inescapably, is the fact that this isn't my second divorce...it's my third. And sorting through the shame and exhaustion of a life lived in so many iterations in so short a time is my work now.

I have to look back to move forward:

As I have shared, three weeks before graduating from college, nearly a year into my first marriage, I took a trip home. Walking 16 miles a day to and from campus, running for hours at night, eating Saltines and drinking water for dinner -- I'd intentionally lost touch with myself. I'd stopped cooking, bought a stairmaster, and faded out of the friendships I'd made in college. I lived in an apartment with my husband, spent time with my in-laws, and tried to relate to my life. I didn't know who I was. During that trip home I decided to leave it all behind after graduation. This marriage, never really a marriage but a brief and damaging experiment, was over.

Two weeks later, I returned home with my degree, a life torn apart, and my first dose of asphyxiating shame. I wasn't able to slide back into the family slot I'd left 4 years earlier for it had grown closed when I got married and would not reopen. Too many words spoken, too many promises broken, no more trust. Turns out this wasn't home either but a temporary and tolerant shelter.

During those first weeks back, I drove all of my belongings further northward -- wedding gifts still shiny and new, untouched wedding albums, favorite books, photos of my first years on campus -- and sealed them away in a closet at my dad's house where they stayed for ten years. Just last summer, after I'd barely righted my house again, my dad brought my boxes back and stacked them in my kitchen where they haunted me until I tore them open. I sifted through the sands of a life I thought had already washed away, and disposed of nearly everything.

After I left San Diego, the boy and I did the paperwork necessary to end what we'd barely even started. I went to the post office and the county offices a couple of times and then I was done. We were done.

One autumn night, three months after moving back, I was admitted to the hospital. There, my heart rate and blood pressure were checked for the first time since my illness began and I was forced to eat a cookie and drink Ensure. While the other patients slept, I scribbled in the margins of my book.

My grandfather was slowing succumbing to Alzheimer's disease during this same period and lived in a treatment facility a few hours north. On the inside front cover of my book I wrote, "Papa is out there in a place like this. His room, particularly by his bed, probably smells like urine, too...He is lost in the jungles of his own head just like I am; but our maladies have different names." I went on, "The walls here are the same color as the walls of my dormitory during my freshman year of college: mint green. The two places seem eerily similar in my mind tonight. Vacant, unfeeling rooms for misplaced persons to sleep. My dorm room, though, was encased within a University. Here, I am surrounded by Hospital. Saying this causes my mind to stir and skitter." Later, "One thing is for sure, when I am older and looking back on this moment I will feel pain, albeit distant and answered."

When I was released, I packed a few clothes and went to live with my dad. Every day for weeks, while he was at work, I went to a bookstore and read chapters of Vinegar Hill. Then, he'd come home, I'd shrug off dinner, and sleep in the room I once shared with my sister on the weekends. I was 21 years old and had, in one short year, built a life I couldn't lead.

This next chapter is the most painful.

At 26, I got married again, to a boy who'd been a dear friend since high school. His thorough familiarity with, and acceptance of, my illness and first marriage made me feel understood and loved. I would be okay here, I thought. Maybe even safe.

Whereas the first time I had the mental acuity to register regret, my mind was now too numb to think. I don't even remember the first couple of weeks after the courthouse ceremony. In fact, I don't remember anything up to the drive we took that February night, just two months into our marriage, on the eve of my next hospitalization.

Eventually, I became too sick to work and crawled through the house we'd bought together. I ran wildly between bouts of total collapse, trying to escape the silence of my starving mind and quiet the intuitive stirring of my heart.

Rich was gradually launching his own intervention during this time and, not long after, my memories turn to noise: the doctors, Rich, this second boy who was losing hope and then throwing it away, my family, the patients in the hospital. The madness, the madness, the madness. The crying and the food. The despair and the demands. The nurse who argued that my shame, now compounded a second time, wasn't worth my life.

After my last hospitalization, when alliances changed, I pleaded to have my job back, found a tiny studio apartment in my favorite town, gathered a few things out of the first house I'd ever owned, and started again.

It seemed frivolous to mourn the little things when so much was at stake, but I missed the antiques I'd collected and the furniture I'd so carefully selected for the house. This second attempt at settling down had been a fully realized home. But, an irreversible change had taken place within those walls and I couldn't go back. In the house, I went from sick to dying and I couldn't stay.

With Rich, the intervention turned into its own attachment, and we built something different. A very complicated relationship grew out of the heightened chaos of my illness and, ultimately, a treasure we share made it nearly impossible for us to walk away when it was clear our journey together was over: our daughter. This child whose beginning was an indelible triumph, and whose tiny spirit was so determined to get here that she rebuilt her mother's body in the process.

In so many ways, I feel I've made a mockery of my life thus far. I've embarrassed myself and my family with so many false starts. With all the nets I've cast into the sky, I'm ashamed that I haven't pulled down a single star. But, and I think Rich would agree, together we found something that forever altered our separate skies for the better.

If forgiveness toward myself washes over me occasionally, it is often born of bitter frustration. I am angry with myself, yet I am tired of carrying this. I've slipped in and out of families, bought trust on credit and returned it, taken names and given them back. I don't allow many people to get close because I can't reconcile myself with, or explain, the speed and tumult of these changes. I can't admit how often I've tried and failed, and how I feel at times that I don't deserve another chance.

Here we are now, ten long and tangled years later. Years that were liquid in their pain but now live solidly in my mind. A big weighty mass that chases me in my dreams and wakes me to this latest grief.

But, the moments in my life that are beautiful now are of such heartbreaking volume they dim the insolent roar. Watching my daughter learn and laugh and play, and feeling myself grow toward the sun again...this is the music I hear.

Still, as I navigate new waters, I wonder: what do I have to give but a decade of mangled time? I am ashamed that one day I'll have to tell my daughter how many times I've fallen and how many people I've hurt along the way. And how the path I chose to move through those years nearly killed me.

But, what is the alternative?

Langston Hughes wrote:

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore-- And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over-- like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

I guess I don't want to find out what happens to a dream, or to a life, deferred.

I am 33 years old and I've been married 3 times. Why I searched for myself inside those relationships is another story entirely, but it is fair to say that as soon as I stopped looking, I began to find what I need.

During my final hospitalization, when the nurse knelt down next to me in the hallway, I told her I wouldn't be admitting the same mistake twice. My second marriage would not end in divorce; I could not bear the shame. She asked if my life was worth making the changes necessary for my survival, and I said no. Luckily, I was in a hospital surrounded by eating disorder specialists and I didn't have a choice.

When Rich and I neared the end of our road I asked myself the same question. This time, my answer was yes. I had the clarity and maturity to understand that I still need to make the changes the nurse had been referring to all those years ago. It is time to move through this and get better. It is time to do the hard work.

I'm finding that the true miracle of life is the soul's tireless ability to get up and keep moving forward, even when every sign points in reverse. I don't know what's ahead, and part of me is ashamed to wonder and to hope and to dream. But, perhaps this body that I've tortured and this mind that I've rejected time and time again, are much stronger than the will that has beaten them down.

One of these days, I will find a way to be proud of myself so that when my daughter falls and makes mistakes of her own, she'll stand up and be proud of herself, too. Yes, I'm embarrassed, and yes I'm ashamed. And, yes I'm a bit tired, and yes my faith is shaken. But, sitting here at my computer, with the sun finally coming up, my hope feels familiar and welcome.

Looking back, I do feel the distant pain my young self prophesied in the margins of my book. But, I don't have all the answers yet.

Early in my hospital journaling, I asked,"Will I meet people in the future and refer back to this time in my life?" I guess time has answered that question, but why I refer back I'm not entirely sure. Perhaps I need a few more years to figure that out.

In the meantime, I've got a life to lead.

~ Katie

(1) Annie Dillard on C.S. Lewis in "For the Time Being"
(2) Langston Hughes, "Dream Deferred"

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

On January 27th, 2008, I moved to Chico. It has now been two years since I could travel in any direction and know exactly where I was; two years since the ocean fog lived inside my bones and traffic ate up my time; two years since I woke up each day to a husband and child…two years since “normal.”

Now, not only is everything new, it's becoming newer every moment, and I don’t recognize one day from the next. I say to my life: Hello, have we met before? We have? Oh, pardon me, I didn't recognize you! Sometimes, I’m still surprised that the sun streams into my bedroom from the right.

New job, new community, new friends, new industry…and now someone new in my life…

These days, I find myself wishing I could hit the pause button and familiarize myself with my surroundings before proceeding. But, life doesn't work that way. It plows ahead whether I'm running alongside it or doubled over ten paces back, winded and drained.

Last year, as the shape of my life shifted and my sense of security ebbed and flowed like the tide, I was equal parts strength and fragility. My power surged while my knees buckled. The constant expansion and contraction of my world was necessary but exhausting, leaving me eye-to-eye with my kitchen floor more than once. I don’t know what I would have done without my pink bathrobe, my pillar people, and the command center in my head demanding I put one foot in front of the other.

I am not the same mother I was before we packed up and left the Bay Area. There, I did what I thought should be done; here, I do what needs to be done. When I want something, I don't reach out, I reach in. My house is a glittery, pink nest of blissfully chaotic order, and life is just plain different.

My daughter doesn’t sleep in her bed anymore, but in a “blanket bed” on her floor. And morning doesn’t come without her snuggling in next to me. We didn’t decorate our Christmas tree with ornaments but with projects from preschool, and a four foot witch wearing sparkly red antlers stood in our living room until just last week. Candles and art supplies clutter every room, and a grinning paper Eskimo lives above the recycle bin in the kitchen. A mechanical pumpkin and holiday wreath decorate our porch year-round, and we have collections of acorns, large and small, in plastic baggies all over the house.

This is our life.

We are finding our own rhythm, the two of us, establishing new traditions and routines. We cuddle, we bicker, we share lip gloss, we tie our scarves the same way. We need to watch “Martha Speaks” in the morning to feel we’ve started the day out right, and we need to read together at bedtime to feel the day is finally done.

Her universe is expanding to take in these changes. She asks questions I can’t believe are in her mind, and I answer them from my heart. She inquired, a year into our new life, why mommy and daddy don’t live together anymore. By then, I could give her an answer.

Today, I am more in love with my life than I've ever been, but the tough times are a little bit tougher. Some days I’m desperate to share the load, even things out, smooth the wrinkles, soothe the tears, share the laughter. But in the absence of someone else, I’ve stored these moments inside of myself. Written them down. Laughed with friends. Lived my life out loud.

In order to do all of this, to make these disparate ends meet and keep our sails turned toward the wind, I’ve had to find a new kind of peace within myself. Sharing these chapters of my life in writing has allowed me to move more easily within my memories, and see more clearly the distinction between then and now.

And yet, I’ve hit the wall I knew was there all along. On one side live the pieces of myself I can hold up to the light; on the other live the shadows I don’t acknowledge. I’ve wondered: can I share with my new friends all the things I wish my old friends didn't know?

I can’t just yet.

But, I’ve realized in documenting this part of the story, and in releasing some of my nastiest demons, that shame thrives only in dark and hidden places. If what makes me ugly when I look in the mirror continues to fester unseen, the shame will remain.

Still, everything in its own time.

I am looking at a photo of myself and a good friend, both of us 19 years old, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder at the Oakland Airport. He's holding a shoe, I'm holding a magazine, and we’re leaning in toward each other. I hadn't yet made the myriad of mistakes that would drive us apart, and he still adored me. Two years later he pulled me aside at my wedding to tell me I looked beautiful. Five years after that I called him from a pay phone in the hospital only to hear him refuse to visit. His heart was broken and mine was breaking again. That is one of the last times we spoke.

One of these days I’ll have to forgive myself. With enough distance and time I'll find empathy for the young woman who didn’t think twice about smiling straight into the camera before ruthlessly barreling into her life too fast, too soon. Perhaps I’ll see that same fire in my daughter’s eyes one day and will accept and love it then.

I've always thought I'd build right over those years, simply tear them down and start again. But, now I'm not so sure. Rather than erase the evidence, I'll think I’ll pour this next foundation just a little to the left so that I can still observe my first attempts at constructing a life. And, when my new home has withstood the test of time and weathered life's storms, I'll glance out at the work of my younger hands and cherish it for what it was.

Two years into this new journey, I’m finally ready to put down roots. I’m learning to let go of what might have been, and celebrate what is.

It’s good to be home.

~ Katie

(with inspiration from Emily Dickinson: "We turn not older with years, but newer every day.")