I'm Sorry

I have never known emotional pain like this before.

I am about to give myself permission to totally and completely lose it because of how painful being separated from my husband and children is.

The separation hurts my skin. It hurts my eyelashes. It hurts each hair on my arm. It clutches my throat. It makes my neck spasm. It makes my eyes burn because there are tears that need to come out but too many were spilled yesterday. Are my tear ducts empty? How can I not be crying right now?

Four people who were a family are not a family today. There is my husband, always so angry, always so impossible to please, always so impossible to pacify, who is reeling so hard from the absence of family that he asked me to give him a list of things to change so that I’ll come back.

There’s 9 year old Daughter A who is a carbon copy of her father and doesn’t hesitate to scream at her parents. “I know you two are getting a divorce,” she yelled at her dad a few days ago, “just go ahead and say the word!”

There’s 5 year old Daughter M who is a carbon copy of me. She’s already observing, already scanning for danger and already people-pleasing. And if she still can’t avoid trouble despite her best efforts, she resorts to tears.

And then there’s me. The wife who felt completely demeaned when she was screamed or hissed at. The wife who felt like she could provoke yelling just because the look on her face was wrong. The mother who had horrible guilt for letting her daughters see her cower. The mother who lives in a different house now and knows she can’t come home without fear setting in.

I am a wreck, such a wreck that I can’t believe I don’t blow wide apart leaving a gaping hole where my heart was. And sprinkled in are the oddest pieces of comfort and oddest pieces of woe.

Pieces of Comfort
- 2 friends from long, long ago got in touch with me on the same day
- An older coworker abruptly came into my office, read me a passage about shedding or old skin to make room for the new and told me about her 2 painful divorces
- A younger coworker came into my office to ask me why I was on disability, and I decided to be honest with her. I told her that it was due to an eating disorder and anxiety. Then she confided in me that she was having very bad problems with an eating disorder and anxiety, and we both talked about how dysfunctional relationships seemed to be driving the problems in both of us. I felt a sisterly bond that has me crying tears for her but at the same time bowing my head in gratitude for the fact that she chose to come talk to me.
- A maternal coworker gave me a CD of beautiful hymns arranged on the piano, and when I started playing it in my office, the day’s tears finally did come.
- Yet one more coworker told me that there had been abuse in her first marriage and started to detail it. I’m the only one at work she’s ever told.

Pieces of Woe
- I continue to chase after those empty promises
- Codependent thoughts come at me like a serial killer with a butcher knife
- Everything I see reminds me of what life should have been, could have been or everything I see shows me what life is now.

One of the worst parts of today was when a man I work with just looked at me and said, “I’m sorry.” In two little words he pared everything down to the sheer sadness of it all. Yes. I, too, am sorry.

And All His Empty Promises

At my therapy group last night, one of our members was talking about her relationship with a married man. You know the type. He claims he can’t stand his wife but then goes on a vacation with her, he says they aren’t intimate but then she ends up pregnant, he says over and over again that he’s going to leave but doesn’t. My fellow group member knows that she is nothing but the other woman and that her only future with him is as an unpaid paramour. She also feels terrible guilt about how her behavior is damaging the marriage of another woman. And yet she talked last night about how much of a hold the illicit relationship had on her and how negatively it was affecting her life.

“I cannot describe to you how totally unfulfilling that relationship is for me. I know he’s never going to leave his wife, I hate what I’m doing to his wife, but every day I want to get a text or an e-mail from him that makes me believe that he cares about me. So if I haven’t heard from him, I get really anxious and I text or e-mail him. And then there’s just this cycle of anxiety that I go through as I wait to hear from him the next time…”

I had never had the idea before to look at my life to see if anything was unfulfilling. I gave my life a quick glance and didn’t like what I saw: unfulfilling, unfulfilling, unfulfilling. I felt sick and pathetic. How could I not have seen how much time I spent in unfulfilling ways before? And looking at those parts of my life, why was I hesitant to change in some areas?

My favorite part of Catholic baptisms is when the priest asks the witnesses, “Do you reject Satan…and all his empty promises?” and we say that we reject him. When I was examining my life recently, that was all I could think of, that my unfulfilling behavior was driven by Satan’s empty promises.

Empty promises. I have trouble thinking of anything more terrible than reaching eternity, only to realize that I had led my life guided by the evil one, the master of lies. What if I could see the horrific, demonic driving force behind all of my bad decisions? Would I still make them? No. But I can’t see the full terror of the evil one. As much as I want to treat Jesus as my king, I chase after the empty promises.

I want to be saved by Jesus Christ. Part of me wishes that I were a Southern Baptist so that I would know that I was saved already, but the other part of me realizes that I would ruthlessly question whether I was truly saved or not. As a Catholic, I am supposed to become contrite for chasing the empty promises, confess my sins and repent. Right now I’m still struggling to attain true contrition, and I ask for Mary’s help with this nearly every day.

Empty promises. Has life really come down to this? Ever since I found my personal relationship with God in 1995, I thought I had been pursuing Christ’s promises. Mary’s promises. The promises of saints and popes. The promises of prominent Christians in my life. The promises of God my Father.

I can’t handle the thought of being a slave to the beautiful weaver of deception. I prayed a rosary yesterday, and as unworthy as I feel, I will pray another one today. The rosary is my lifeline, and I feel like I am a lost soul. Jesus, Mary, I’m reaching out to you. You can’t let the evil one have me. Give me contrition where I have no contrition. Help me to make a full confession. Help me to change. I cry out to you from the core of my being, where there is no peace of Christ, only turmoil.

M. Nole's Dream List

At the end of my therapy group this week, one member advised a member struggling with codependency to write a Dream List if she's tempted to e-mail or text the toxic man with whom she's involved.

I decided to write out my own list, and I thought it would be hard to come up with a neat and tidy list of even 10 dreams. I started writing, and within 3 minutes, I had gone past the number 30. I will be adding to this, but here is the beginning of M. Nole's offical Dream list.

1. Score well on the LSAT and be accepted into law school
2. Become a very good, ethical lawyer who helps people
3. Write a nonfiction Christian book
4. Get off of all pain medicine and be completely into AA again
5. Be active in Al-Anon again
6. Write a Christian novel
7. Have a popular spiritual blog
8. Devote myself to special Catholic prayers and especially to the Virgin Mary
9. Evolve into a saint
10. Make a pilgrimage to Lourdes or Rome
11. Be someone who does kind, spontaneous things for others
12. Make a charitable gift to honor someone special every month
13. Write a fiction novel
14. Create Catholic folk art
15. Learn to make rosaries
16. Join a good Protestant Bible study class
17. Go to Daily Mass
18. Have true contrition for all of my sins
19. Have my daughters when they become adults) feel like I was the best mother in the world
20. Be involved in a ministry (presently working for a ministry does not count)
21. Belong to a book club
22. Subscribe to an audio book service and listen to new books every month
23. Become a Facebook addict and play with my BFFs
24. Open a Christian art store in Midtown
25. Become a positive thinker
26. Become a humanitarian
27. Give generously to my church
28. Use my gift for spiritual writing to change lives, or even better, to save a life or a soul
29. Expand my for-profit resume business
30. Expand my resume ministry (free resumes to single parents and low-income clients)
31. Be on the board of a charity
32. Make enough money for my children to go to college wherever they can be accepted
33. Look like a million bucks well into my 40s and 50s
34. Lead others to the Catholic Church or to a belief in Jesus Christ
35. Infuse hope into other people with my ability to write fearlessly about my emotional and spiritual struggles
36. Resume my service work of intercessory prayer and pray for someone else's needs every single day
37. Realize when I'm 65 years old that I have lived a full, full life
38. Have every one of my friends to feel that I am the most faithful, supportive friend they have - because it's true
39. Make enough money to get manicures
40. Live in a small but adorable house
41. Take more creative writing classes
42. Write a screenplay for a movie about John Calipari