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Calamity Jennye




Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Otherwise, you'd cry your eyes out...

This weekend was great. The kind of great where you start to think things are really turning around!

I got to go shopping on Friday for 12 hours. Any of you who actually know me, know that that is a dream come true. My best friend, Alyssa and I got to head down to the cities, kid free on Thursday night and then had all day Friday to shop. We also had a great chance to sleep in, and where were we at 7am Friday morning? In the living room, looking at each other, saying, seriously??
So, we had a great breakfast and were waiting outside Nordstrom Rack as they rolled the gate up. It was a great day. A great day made even better the only way you can, by including the purchase of a new bra that actually puts those puppies where they belong.
The whole weekend was really so great in a just normal life kind of way, great with the little things, that I started to feel like life was on the upswing. It was a culmination of the whole last week. There have been a lot of ups and downs. But overall it’s all up.

And that of course, is always when a challenging day comes along. One of the landlords from the house my husband and I rented was in our office today. Before she even made it out of the waiting room she was already having a conversation with someone about the state of the house after he left (he lived there alone, with just his name on the lease, for 6 months). I couldn’t hear the details of what they were saying, then or when the conversation continued later between three of them.
All I could feel was the panic moving through my body. It wasn’t just that I felt so horrible about the way he treated their house, it was mostly that I couldn’t believe that was my husband. My mind was racing, feeling so horrible about myself, wondering how I could have been the person who sticks around for that? What must people think of me? People must think I’m as crazy as him if I could stick around as many years as I did.
I’m well aware these are not wholly rational thoughts. Like I said I could feel the panic moving through my body, and it felt horrible. At the end of her visit the landlord sat at my desk to checkout, as I choked back my tears, trying to convince myself I was fine, she mentioned that if I ever need it she would be happy to come testify in court about the ways in which the house they saw after he moved out was not suitable for a child.

Later, I was able to get a rundown on the conversation and of course the conversation was not what I imagined it to be. In fact, this woman who had met my husband a total of two times, maybe. Just based on the contents of his house after he moved out, was able to tell my co-workers things they had only ever heard from me (things very few people have heard, and even fewer believed). As my friend repeated the things she had said this amazing light dawned for me. It was like the night I talked with the two therapists. I had another, “maybe I’m not crazy” moment.
Maybe I didn’t imagine these things that made my marriage an uphill battle for so many years. And to hear this woman talk in detail about the state of the house, my friend said, “can you imagine you held that much together for that many years?”  “Yes, I can imagine it, because it felt like it for so many years, felt like an uphill battle, almost every day, for so many years”. Like I was just barely holding on, and I never quite knew when it would just slip through my fingers.

Maybe I laugh so hard at the image of those damn chickens running around the basement because I feared for so long that I would lose that battle, things would slip, and before I knew it there would be chickens in my basement. I can laugh because I escaped with just months to spare.
   
I have to laugh…because we all know the alternative!

1 comment:

  1. I'm sorry...did you say "chickens running around the basement"? ME

    ReplyDelete