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.")