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)
