Learning

First Disclaimer:  The people in this story are real.  The names used are real.  The events are as accurate as possible from the perspective told.  Recalling this story is like playing a decades-long game of telephone, where one child whispers a story into the ear of another and that child repeats the story to another child down the line.  Only in this game of telephone, a child may wait many years or decades to pass the story along.  During this time, the original story heard from the previous child has become foggy and the subsequent child may not remember it accurately.  Or the child has grown older and the original story has taken on a different meaning or significance than when originally heard.

As we await the Supreme Court’s likely reversal of Roe v. Wade, I am reading “The Girls Who Went Away” by Ann Fessler.  It is a heart-wrenching book about the “Baby Scoop Era” when millions of unwed women were forced to give up their babies for adoption during the years 1945 to 1973.  Without access to birth control or abortion, these women were kicked out of school and shunned from their communities, often labeled neurotic and psychologically deficient.  They were sent off to institutions until the babies reached full term at which time the women’s arms and legs were tied down while they gave birth.  Once the baby was born, many women were not allowed to hold their baby or even to see their baby.  After a short medical recovery, the mother would be coerced into signing the required adoption documents, if they ever signed documents at all.  The women were told to never speak of the events for fear of rendering them social outcasts for the rest of their lives.  Shamed first for having sex and shamed again for giving up their baby.  Meanwhile, the fathers continued on with their lives, assured that a single indiscretion should not derail their academic and professional aspirations.

The young boys in my elementary school had already been socialized to evaluate the female form and deem it worthy or unworthy. They decided my body was unacceptable. Starting with the onset of puberty, boys taunted me daily with assaults of “Fatso!” and “Chubby!,” entertained when they discovered my tears flowed easily and encouraged to masochistically taunt more viciously.

It’s a beautiful Saturday morning and I’m on the way to enjoy the beach.  I’m in my Volvo hatchback with the windows down sitting at an intersection in Escondido, California waiting for the light to turn green.  The sun is shining, there’s a gentle sea breeze from the west, the birds are chirping.  All of a sudden, an obnoxious horde of what appears to be a hundred motorcycles pops over the horizon.  Just as my light turns green, two riders stop inches from my front bumper.  One of them flashes a menacing smile and gives me a “thumbs up” seeming to ask me if I’m OK with waiting for them to pass.  I most certainly am not “OK” with this!  Who do these clowns think they are?  As I try to gesture my disapproval, the two riders rev their loud V-Twin engines, clearly indicating that they really don’t care whether I approve or not.  They’re going to shut down this road and ride through as a single group whether I like it or not.  Rather than push the issue, I sit and wait for the horde to pass, thundering pipes, exhaust fumes, tattoos, patches, and leather.

Since meeting Jenny over a year ago, we’ve had too many conversations to count about what makes life better. More truthful. More honest. More open. More giving. More fulfilling. A common thread in our conversations are the many inhibitors in life that can get in the way of finding life fulfillment. One of the most important keys to life fulfillment is to be the best human being that you can be. While that sounds so easy in a sense, life has a way of throwing an astonishing array of roadblocks and distractions in the way of accomplishing that. For Jenny and I, inhibitors have included abusive relationships and codependency. For myself, an inhibitor has been alcoholism.

Eric is the love of my life. True to the fairy tale depictions of such things, I knew soon after meeting him that I had met my soul mate. In every way, Eric is everything I had always imagined my ideal partner to be. He is naturally kind, innately compassionate, astonishingly intelligent, genuinely thoughtful, uniquely funny, adventurous AND stable (very rarely do those last two attributes go together in the same human being!). On paper he was everything I was hoping for, and even more miraculously, in the most mysterious and intangible way, it just felt right. And he drank. Most nights, Eric drank.

I am an addict. More adverse than my addictions to social media, coffee and chocolate, is my perverse and pervasive addiction to vigilance; my addiction to fear. As early as I can remember, I have felt an insatiable drive to ward off danger. As a little girl, it was the danger of losing those I love to unexpected accidents or to voluntary abandonment. When my mother was a few minutes late coming home from work, I quickly imagined she had been struck by a car or even worse that she did not love me enough to come home. I laid awake at night envisioning the horrors of an imminent nuclear holocaust. Each shadowy bend of the large oak tree outside my bedroom window on windy nights meant it would blow loose and thrust into our apartment, crushing us all. I checked, and checked again, before bed that the deadbolt and chain on our apartment door were locked as I was certain an intruder had plans to burst in and murder my mother, father, our cranky yet beloved cat Joe and me.