During fights with my husband, I imagine him gone forever. During happy times with my husband, I imagine him gone forever. I apply this technique to my dying dog—enjoying every single second I have with him—good and bad—knowing one day soon he will disappear.
But now I’m here. I have choices. I can trick my face into the past, I can trick my body into the future. But what do I do with my psyche where a fortyish single lady lives?
There’s a nightmare version, too. I am an addict plummeting to newer depths—looking for home in a bottle, a pill, a baggie. I have become what you think of when you think of a rock bottom bum who you feel sorry for. I am sitting on the curb flyin’ a sign with matted hair, missing teeth, dirty jeans dangling from my skeleton.
We've been married for only 5 years, and everything has changed. My husband is the lucky guy that ended up with a broken wife. A 39 year old, over weight, infertile women who doubts her body and even her own purpose at times. At what point does he give up and leave for a 26 year old who could easily give him a child?
Yesterday, in our last asana, there was a more urgent cry and the woman on the mat next to me leapt out of warrior, lifted from her core, her soft belly carried in a shirt that matched the sudden pink of her cheeks. She leapt soundlessly, lightly, toward the sound of her child. She knew.
I am here because of love. It is my source; it both sustains and weakens me. In the end, it will be the force that puts you back together in some different configuration. It is only pain now, but there will be room for other things.
The dangerous thing about these campaigns is not just that they are entirely insufficient to produce the change we desperately need in our culture, but, again, that people believe they will. The belief that by contributing (i.e. reposting the hashtag or sharing your story), you’re actually doing something to change things is strong and wide.
How he’d been allowed on a plane, I could not fathom. In his current state Max is emaciated. The clothes covering his bones hang on him as if he were a five-year-old trying on his dad’s suit. His skin glows with a yellowish-green tinge. Red pits and swollen sores dot his face, yet somehow, they do not make him any less beautiful.
Her father and I are divorcing and she has two other men in her life. It's not something I give much thought to, but it is different I suppose. She will never have a stepmother, though it is very likely she will have two stepfathers. My bond with my daughter is as unshakable as any other mother-daughter relationship, but it's possible she needs me even more because of where the chips have fallen.
Shortly after Thanksgiving that year, I received the letter that he didn’t want to attend Christmas with us this year because he didn’t approve of my niece’s boyfriend, a teenager he had met at Thanksgiving. My mind, already tired from discerning his god-awful writing, tried to remember her boyfriend.
So here I am on another sunny Saturday morning in paradise, upset that I’m missing the Women’s March and feeling like a time-released, cluster bomb went off inside my body. I hate to compete with egotistical, dictatorial types, but it seems that I actually have the biggest button, and it’s triggered by my overactive brain.
