I almost forgot to blog about my one year anniversary as a single parent, caught up as I was in the MoTH thing.

I can feel the visceral coolness of that early morning, sitting on the balcony in my ex’s apartment, our ninth wedding anniversary, November 25, 2007.  We smoked a cigarette and he casually told me about the date he had had with the woman who is now his third wife, and how he wanted to keep dating her.  That it was over between us.  I cried, but not as hard as I would have expected, and chain smoked about five cigarettes. Then I brushed my teeth and washed my hands, trying to eradicate traces of tobacco, and lay down next to our still sleeping babe.  Somehow I sank into an exhausted sleep, curled into a fetal ball, as his body breathed into mine.

Perhaps I have blogged about this before - I can’t remember.  But in the end, it came down to my ex’s hands.  I loved those hands of his, large and square and strong.  I looked at them that morning and thought about how those hands would never touch me again, how I would never feel mine in his.  Up until that time, a small promise of reconciliation had glimmered like a gossamer thread between us, and then, that November day, it snapped.

I crawled into a hole for a while, and stopped writing altogether for three months.  

That is when I know I am in trouble - when I stop “using my words,” so to speak.  Without a creative outlet with which to make sense of my life, I start to go crazy.  It’s not pretty.

Not a month after my ex’s revelation on the balcony, I was crippled by back pain so horrendous, I could hardly walk.  A year ago at this time, I was completely disabled from pain, popping serious narcotics in order to just barely make it through the day.  And yet I still managed to put on a second birthday party for Sami.  How I did it, I’ll never know.  A mother does what she has to do.  

In the last two weeks leading up to my surgery, when it got so bad that I could no longer safely care for Sami or myself, debilitated from pain and narcotics, I lined up the caregivers.  I got on the phone and asked for help when I hate asking for help more than anything in the world.  I paid people when I had to, and rounded up friends for trips to the emergency room and urgent care, MRI scanning, and the like.  I did it for Sami.

When I look back, it is no wonder that my back utterly gave out.  When my ex left me for another woman, I lost the tenuous sense of support that I had in him.  For ten years, he had been my rock.  Without his strength upon which to draw, I literally crumpled.  This was not metaphor.  It took James Brady’s neurosurgeon to put my spine right.

This evening, I write from a place of exponentially greater strength.  My spine has held me up for nearly a year now and I live without pain (physical, at least).  I used to say, “my back is broken and my heart is broken.” Now, I can say with utter certainty: my back is healed. My heart is healing.  

In retrospect, it makes sense that I got caught up with MoTH at this precise time of year.  Fall, my favorite season, also has been a terribly painful time for me, as my marriage unraveled in stages over two autumns. That whirlwind fantasy romance was a way for me to stave off the traumatic memories of Novembers past. To hear someone say “I love you,” even if he did not know what he was saying, or to whom he was saying it, served as a temporary healing balm.  It was nice to pretend at love until I believed it to be truth.

A little more than a week ago, I had no compassion for myself for buying into the lie.  I was horrified at myself for getting so caught.  For allowing myself to be so deeply vulnerable, so intensely hurt.  Now, I am able to touch into an authentic sense of, “ah, I see where this all came from.”  I can wince for myself, and embrace the hurting woman who sought to lose herself in another.  If I were my own best friend, I would say: “You learned from it, and now you are stronger and wiser.”  Now you know, on a deeper level, that trying to escape pain leads only to more pain.  Healing comes when you are willing to face the suffering head on and see what wisdom, what potential for awakening, lies within it.  Otherwise you just run and run and run and never get any closer to home.

I am reminded of that beautiful quote by Nisargadatta Maharaj:

“Wisdom tells me I am nothing.  Love tells me I am everything.  Between the two, my life flows.”

Tonight, I embrace the nothingness and love within, reflecting on a year where I was literally and metaphorically rebuilt.  Still quite the work in progress, still puzzling through this wondrous life.