March Arrives

 For the first half of March all was well.

Well, as well as it could be when you are trying to shuffle work, three kids, and directing a big musical, (which the three kids are actually in) and a boyfriend newly home from rehab. 

We made it through the last week of full rehearsal with soooo much to do, and yet, I thought, the show was good.  It worked  I was, almost, proud of myself.  The Producers is a complicated, maybe even, delicate undertaking.  And getting the cast on board with the show is... tough.  On its face, in a plain way, the show is two steps past irreverent.  That is a hard sell for earnest teens and mmmnghdhhhb somethings. Nobody wants to get it wrong.  Especially this musical, because getting it wrong means making everyone angry and looking foolish in the process  

So we opened on a Friday.  The kids came home from school early, telling of weird, uncomfortable classes where the teachers tell them they have no idea what was going on but that they should go home and not expect to go back to school for at least a couple weeks.  But w go to the theatre.  We get ready for opening night.  We (well the cast) perform beautifully.  They get a standing ovation.  We have a get together after the show and talk, praise each other, hope that this COVID thing doesn’t affect us and then go home.

I am happy.  I am satisfied.  Then I get the call.  The show is being closed immediately.  I cry.

Then my daughter gets sick.  And I worry.

Then my boyfriend gets sick.  And I worry.

Then I get sick.  And I worry that everything will fall apart if I am sick... or worse gone.

Then the boyfriend leaves.  On a bender that will last almost two weeks.  And because of COVID I can’t go after him, bring him home as I have many times before.  

As I lay on the sofa, worrying about my sick daughter who’s test is two weeks away, I don’t sleep much.  My own test is farther away.  My boyfriend, wherever he is, his test is two weeks away and whether he will take it or not is anyone’s guess.

Laying in the dark, watching CNN, reading World War Z (I know, I know, maybe a weird choice at this particular time) I realized this was the worst crisis in our history so far.  Collectively as a country.  As a family it was a challenge.  As a mother and a girlfriend, it was a turning point.

He left me.  Just like all other important men in my life have done.  Left me.  But he left me in the worst of times to go drink.  They say “Its not you” but there is no other way to look at it except that he chose to go there to do that, instead of staying here, with me, going through this time, with me.

Yep, that is it.  Worst of times.  Best of times.  

And to go it alone.

He did come back, physically.  But not really wholly.  He left a couple more times before he really left for good and I couldn’t take it anymore.  

Ice Cream Ketsup - Or, The Importance of Truth

 TRUTH

I have been thinking a lot about truth.  And people.  For a long time.

It’s a complicated subject and I come at it from a number of angles.  From being a human being for sure.  From being an actor/director/creator of stories which is a wildly complicated subject.

And I come at it from someone who has always held as a core value the notion of truth, which as a person who did not always tell the truth.

Let me just get out of the way right off the bat here my variances from ‘the truth’.  I have never told any grand lies.  No real smoke and mirrors, or obstructions to some particular end.  No, my biggest untruth of memory is possible a depressed drive one night where I stopped in a bar and tried to pull myself off as a French person.  The lie was big enough to get me served alcohol underage, but I doubt I actually fooled anyone.  Or maybe I did and that is why they served me when I pretended not to understand “May I see your ID”.

In any case, I find truth a fascinating subject.  One that we do not discuss very often.  Too provocative I’m guessing.  But truth is as vital as air, food, water.  It is a necessary component of society and without it leads directly to its breakdown.

We count on each other to tell the truth.  Think about it.  When you buy something at a store, you rely on the person ringing you up to tell you the truth about what it costs.  You rely on people driving on the roads side by side with you to be as you assume - able to drive, understanding of the rules of the road, and capable of managing their vehicle.  We rely on the truth of each other’s competency, of each other’s truth about it.

We assume when people speak to us, telling us about their son while in line at JCPenny who is at MIT and loves these Polo shirts.  We assume when we date that the life story we are told is the truth.  We assume when people apply for a job, their credentials are real, and the person they present us with is the one who will show up at the first day of work.

Where in life can we find a place where the truth fundamentally does not matter?  Where in life can we find peace in the discovery of an untruth?  Our relationships?  How many marriages have broken up because of lies?  How many friendships, familial relationships how many jobs lost because the truth was not strictly adhered to?

And yet.  And yet.

How rich would we be were we to each be presented a dollar for every slight untruth we heard.  “Oh all lawyers are crooks”.  “Both parties are the same”.  “All men cheat”.  “Climate change is just a theory”.  We humans have long been susceptible to drama and hyperbole.  We love it, we eat it up - its where comedy and drama and storytelling come from after all.  We entertain each other with exaggeration.  

But it has always been a slippery slope.  Ever has ignorance met exaggeration to a bad end.  But we have relied on a separation of drama and reality - such a separation like that between church and state.  Let’s not let the reality of life, the facts, get in the way of our more ethereal and spiritual nature.  Let’s not let science and practicality dampen imagination.  We need both.

But we need them to be separate and distinct.  And these days the experience is more of blurred lines with some diving right into the middle of the squiggly center.  A smorgasbord of truth and fiction all on the same tray for us to figure out which is healthful and which will give you indigestion.  

Hail choice, of course.  But lets have some more separation between truth and fiction with an agenda.  Or we might all eventually find we are raising a spoon of strawberry only to be swallowing ice cream ketsup.  

March 2020

 After being stung by a swarm of bees in February... oh, right.  That part.  

I was getting into new good habits.  Taking the puppy for a walk in the morning, taking the other two for a walk at my lunch.  I was loving working from home.  Everything was going pretty well with the boyfriend after he got home from rehab...

Anyway, I was walking my little dog, and my old dog at my lunch.  We’d rounded the corner and begun the walk back home when I saw a guy in a golf cart get out, wave around his head, then get back in and drive past us, staring at us the entire way.  And I thought to myself, “Huh, I wonder if he was waving away a bee”, and then kept walking.

Moments later I heard a buzz, then felt one buzz my head.  A few moments later, more buzzed, and then one hit and man.  I’d never been stung by a bee before.  So, having the experience in your 50’s by a swarm of them, well...  Me and the dogs getting pummeled by stinging bees, in my hair, under my shirt, under my glasses, started to run.  We ran up to a door, which was not ours, and Mickey was getting stung - he’d been shaved earlier in the week - so I let the leashes go, yelled “run” to the dogs and called out to the girls who were inside the house.

When the ambulance got there, moments after I’d been able to tap out a misspelled email to my supervisor that I wouldn’t be returning to my desk the rest of the day, they put me right into the back of the ambulance and asked me a bunch of questions while I tried to joke and make them laugh (they don’t by the way).  Then the one with the computer and the questions looked up nd said “you are allergic to bees looks like”, which, by the way, is the best way to find out, in the back of an ambulance heading to the ER

There, the nurse who was tending to me told me he was giving me a shot of adrenaline because my inflammation, after shots of Benadryl and a breathing treatment, a steroid shot (which hurt like hell, by the way) was still not going down.  If I was not allergic to bees, said he, I would feel jittery for a few hours.  If, however, I was allergic it would probably knock me out.  I don’t remember him walking out of the room.

March to come. 

February 2020

For the first time in over a year I was working full time again.  It was great.  I was super busy, between directing a musical and working full time, trying to take care of a house and as many as four kids. But it was good busy, happy busy.  

Then the relapse.  It was what I feared when I told the boyfriend I wasn’t ready for him to come home from rehab.  I knew I wasn’t ready.  I was pretty sure he wasn’t.  Before I found out I was right things were pretty good.  I managed my stress as well as I always had - that stress about never really being sure you’re going to get everything done on time.  I was getting back into the swing of our family life, the game nights, trips, cooking for everyone.  It was the family life I had always imagined was possible but never quite had.  I had almost created the peaceful, loving, safe home I’d been trying to create for so long.  Well, we had it, for a time.

And then the relapse.  He didn’t come home and I couldn’t get him on the phone.  The tears didn’t come right away but I knew what was happening.  If he’d been sober he would have answered.  I knew where he’d been all day, at the hospital at his program, so it wasn’t too difficult to find him.

When my son got home that night he asked where he was.  He’d dealt with the drinking before and was resigned to it.  Had even asked, when I was deciding to let the boyfriend back home, “What about if he drinks again?” My son had said, “Well that’s just who he is, we will deal with it”.  I wondered aloud if we should go get him and my son was game.

I drove the car with the boyfriend alternating between sleeping and awake and pissed.  I said nothing to him the entire way home.  

The next morning he was apologetic.  He felt awful.  He was grateful we came to get him.

He relapsed once more before the month was over, on Valentine’s Day no less.  He had two cards, hastily scribbled.  One that seemed like it was for me, one that didn’t seem like something he’d get me at all.  My spidey sense tickled.  I did nothing.  What to do in any case, ask directly and you get a direct denial.  Beat around the bush and you get cleverly worded excuses.  The fact is, I hate to admit, I didn’t want to know.  I wanted my family back.

I spent the second half of the month stressed out.  When my doctor suggested I start on Paxil I didn’t argue, I just said yes.

January 2020

We called 2019, “The Year That Shit Got Real”.  That was because when my boyfriend and I met we worked at jobs in a tumultuous company run by a man we suspect was a narcissist and megalomaniac.  The guy man never met a conversation he didn’t overtake.  There was never a good idea that eventually become his own.  And he was constantly threatening to fire someone, and did, fire many people in my nearly four years with the company.

We made it through that experience, dating under the radar (our boss was against us being together) and in secret from our respective children.  Both of us wanted to be careful not to introduce our children to a relationship with either of us or the other children, that didn’t work out.  So, we were careful.  Very careful.  We took it slow introducing his son to my two kids and getting all five of us together.  Once we finally all got together it clicked and worked much of the time.  Our children became more than friends, they became siblings.  

We made it through months of this bliss until July 4th.  There was a pool party.  Then a drive home in separate cars.  Then the viewing of fireworks from my backyard.  And the sudden and gut wrenching realization that he was drunk.

Between the pool party and getting to my backyard he drank enough to become extremely intoxicated.  

Now, one would think when hearing his explanation (after the fireworks were through of course, nothing interrupts my fireworks!) you would think I would have cut it off right there and kicked him out.  But being a co-dependent I doubled down on his pronouncement that he was an alcoholic and invited him to live with us.  So Al Anon am I, that I was convinced I could “handle” it I could control the situation enough that everything would be alright.

My boyfriend spent most of 2019 in rehab.  Two different rehabs.  It was tough getting him in and tough being apart all that time.  But I managed to keep things as normal as I could for the kids, keep our little blended family together and positive.  

At the end of 2019 the rehab was ready to send him home but I was not ready for him to be home.  He had come home for a weekend in October and I suspected he had been drinking.  But he denied it.  By December I knew he was intermittently drinking. Yes, in rehab.  We even broke up on the phone for about 10 minutes while he was drunk one night.  It was the year that shit got real.  But true to my co-dependent self, I begged him not to give up on us and the family that was waiting for him.  I should have probably.  And after that night, driving home from the FedEx store I missed going to because they closed while I was arguing with him on the phone for two hours, I vowed that if he ever broke up with me again, I’d let him.  Maybe shit really did get real for me in 2019.

January 2020 rolls into place and my boyfriend arrives home from rehab.  I am at first nervous, but as things go well we quickly fall into a wonderful routine of family, work, games, ping pong in the garage.  He relapses once.  My son and I go collect him.  I put it aside, try not to worry.  Work and recreation carry on.  He buys a fish tank.  His son is with us often.  It’s beautiful and I am happy and hopeful.  He does well, goes to meetings, even starts eating better.  Gets a sponsor.  

It’s all gonna be OK.  

Love

Love can be hard. How do you explain this to teenagers?

Maybe the more prescient question is, should you tell this to teenagers. It might seem like you can save them from pain by telling them the realities of love. But maybe that’s not how life works. Who, but the most savvy, ever learned from someone else’s mistakes?  Good lord I know I didn’t. My mother was married three times. I wasn’t going to get married til I was 30.  I got married for the third time when I was 30. See how that worked out for me?

I tried to learn from my mother’s mistakes but truth is I ended up more like my mother, and going through more of the same experiences as I would ever like to admit.

And usually those mistakes had something to do with love.

How

How did I get to the point where I feel as if I understand everyone but am not connected to anyone?

How do parents keep friends?

How do you stay connected to your kids?

I honestly don’t feel like I can really talk to anyone. I hope this is not a permanent state of affairs.