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
