KaRyn: The Outburst (or life in a snow cave with addicts)

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addiction recovery, children, codependent, communication, family, healing, Justin, KaRyn, LDS, marriage, one day at a time, parenting, self awareness, sledding, snow

We love it when The kids come stay with us… They bring more meaning to everything we do. Today we got to spend the whole day with K2 all by herself. That’s a full day of “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On” videos and jokes, goofy made up songs, girlie chapter book snuggling and sewing bean bag hand warmers for littlest pet shop animals. I am in pseudo-mom heaven. I always wanted a daughter that I could make magic for the way my mom always made magic for me. Every stitch we sew together, every chapter we finish… These are the building blocks of “the life I was meant to have” and I’m so grateful that Justin gifted me these kids. I need you to know that when I tell you what I did today that made Justin angry because I did it out of love.  Even though it looks like meddling (and it was).

He was headed out the door to smoke a cigarette and he came into the kitchen where K2 and I were sewing and said, “I’ll be back.” No big deal, right?  Well, K2 started to act funny.  She grabbed her dad’s coat and tried to wrestle it off his body and said, “Just stay here! You don’t need to go anywhere.”  Justin lied and said, “I’m just going to get some (insert type of candy here).”  She grabbed his gloves and said, “We don’t need any candy! Don’t go anywhere.” Justin got kind of bugged and told her he was leaving.

As I watched this whole scene play out, I felt like I was reading the cliff notes to K2’s heart and brain probably because I have been in her shoes so very many times.  She was scared.  She knew he wasn’t REALLY going to buy (insert candy name here) and she was worried that he was going to “the shed”.  These kids, they’re so far from emotionally and intellectually stupid and because they now know the truth about Justin’s drug use in the past, they’ve got a vocabulary in their brains to explain the past disappearances and exit strategies.  It’s human nature to be triggered by similar looking experiences.  And I was tired of watching Justin try to hide his cigarettes from the kids.  After all we’ve been through.  After everything that we’ve done to come clean.  Enough.

So I inserted myself where I probably shouldn’t have. I said, “Justin, K2 knows you aren’t just going to buy (insert candy name here).  She knows you’re going to smoke a cigarette.  You should just be straight with her.”  I said it in front of K2 and this embarrassed both of them.  For that I am sorry.  Justin was livid and mouthed a few angry words and sent me some searing faces across the room.  And for a minute I felt bad about it too, but not bad enough to stop meddling… He went to the door and i nudged K2 and said, “Hey, go tell your dad you still love him.” and she got up and ran to hug him before he left and I heard him saying something like this to her in the most loving and careful tones:

I’m not going to do drugs.  I’m going to smoke a cigarette.  You know that I’m not perfect and I still have some things to work through.  I don’t want to smoke cigarettes and I don’t want you kids to think that smoking cigarettes is ok, but for right now, it’s something that I’m working on.  I also don’t want you to worry or to think that you have to take care of me.  I promise I will be honest with you and won’t do drugs and you just take care of yourself ok? I love you so much.

She cried a little and when she came back to the kitchen to finish her sewing project, you could tell she was relieved.  I think about the amount of reassurance I need sometimes and can imagine that it’s NOTHING compared to the reassurance these little people need.  Later that day, we went sledding – we whizzed over hilltops and narrowly avoided death by snow or collision.  At one point, my sled sent me reeling and I ended up prostrate on the ground with the sun blinding me as it glared off the snow.  I lay there for too long, willing the cold to make its way through layers of carefully chosen fabric as the flecks of winter burned at my brow and cheeks.  I had a vision of myself at K2’s age in the snowy Pennsylvania winters of childhood.  I used to spend hours building snow caves that I would make just big enough to crawl in face first but not big enough to hold my whole body – I remembered the quiet in that cave that protected my face and ears and arms from the wind and the strange sensation of being half in and half out.  Eventually, the snow would burn its way through my lower half cuing me to head inside where I would wait for the pins and needles to signal a return to life.

This is now.  Half in, half out.  Protected and exposed.  safe and vulnerable.  Confident and terrified.  This is the healing process.  Some days I’m in the cave and the mistakes I make turn into beautiful moments for all of us.  Other days, I’m dangling out the door and no matter what I do or say, I’m creating freezerburn on everything that matters.

But really, isn’t that what it’s like for all of us anyway?  Nothing particularly unique about any of this if I’m honest.

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KaRyn: The Mothering Part III – MotherWife

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addiction recovery, al-anon, codependency, family, Getting the Love You Want, happiness, healing, hope, LDS culture, life process, love, marriage, motherhood, recovery, rehab, relationships, treatment, wife

So I’m definitely not into the sister wife thing, but I think I have always wanted to be a mother wife.  Yes, I just made that up but it’s the best way to describe what I do and have done:  I wanted to show a man that I love him so much that I can help him be his best self especially when he’s really not being his best self …And, here’s the great news!   I will sacrifice whatever I must (because that’s what mother’s do?) to MAKE it happen for YOU. And be real with me here, ladies…I’m not alone in this, am I?  I mean, how many sitcoms have propelled mediocre actors into B-list celebrity status with their searing portrayal of the nagging, sharp-tongued motherwife to her infantile, incapable husbandchild?  It’s kind of a thing in most cultures, whether they be national or familial or religious.

And I do adore a good cultural norm…so here we are.  “Mothering” is the buzz word in the Mormon church culture for women of a certain age who are not married or lack offspring of her own.  We are taught that our divine gift is the ability to mother everyone in every circumstance.  Our “mother heart” is the thing that connects us to our divinity. It’s meant to make us feel useful and valuable in a culture where motherhood is often (some would say erroneously) equated with the highest form of personal spiritual power.  Sigh. I get it, I understand, I know.  But here’s where it gets confusing.  

KaRyn: The Weirdness

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addiction recovery, children, codependency, consciousness, family, Getting the Love You Want, Harville Hendrix, healing, KaRyn, marriage, treatment

There are no pictures to go with this post because don’t nobody want to capture this day in photos.  It’s not a particularly bad day or anything…I mean, 76 degrees, partly sunny, good hair day, didn’t hate what I wore to work…but there’s something sinister lurking in this day that had me leaning toward tears on more than one occasion.  

Here are the facts:

FACT 1:   The K’s are with me for two weeks while their mom and step dad are in a foreign country picking up a missionary.  This is nice.  I like having them around even with the incessant bickering that accompanies their presence.   Quick rambling story that I actually think has some relevance:  Sunday, on our way back from visiting Justin, K1 was eating some watermelon in the backseat (don’t judge me) and threatening K2 with seed-spitting grossness.  We were on a side street headed toward the highway when I realized with a certain amount of panic that this back and forth and back and forth could go on the entire 45 minute drive home and no amount of Prairie Home Companion cheesyness could drown it all out.  

So right before we got to the onramp, I pulled the car over in front of a horse pasture, opened my door, walked around the back of the car and opened K1’s door.  Without a word, I snatched the watermelon from his hand and calmly threw it into the horse pasture while he looked on, horrified.  I laughed a little when K2 said, “I guess the horses are having watermelon for dinner.” and started back to my door, giving myself a silent high five.  “Self, ” I said, “You were poised and calm.  Well done!” But then I noticed that K1 was crumpled in the back seat sobbing for the loss of his watermelon and I realized that all my poise and calm and silence had actually been kind of terrifying and unfair.  After a moment of thinking as I so often do, “Dude, get over it…it was watermelon.”  I checked in with myself and unfortunately still had that feeling…yep… terrifying and unfair.  “Self,” I said, “You gotta do the right thing.”  Though I still felt kind of justified in the reasoning for my behavior (seriously, 45 minutes is almost an hour) I said, “Hey, you know what?  We all probably could have done some things differently in this here situation.  Me, for example.  I could have asked you to stop and told you that I was going to remove the offending watermelon.  I should have communicated my feelings (though you and I both know it would have done no good) and then been less reactionary and for that I’m truly sorry.  What could you have done differently?”  K2 chirped up immediately that she should have asked for help from me but K1 is a lot like his Dad and was not ready to talk about how he was feeling right after the incident.  When we made it home after an absolutely noise-free, watermelon-free, NPR-heavy car ride, K1 finally said, “I forgive you.  I guess I could have not spit any watermelon seeds in the first place.” And that was that.  We’ve been calling this “The Watermelon Incident of 2014” all week and now we can joke about it.  There’s nothing quite like children to show you the worst parts of yourself and force you to face it head on.

FACT 2: I’m reading a book that Ted (not his real name) invited me and Justin to read so that we can begin to work through our relationship lumps.  Ok, so I realized ‘relationship lumps’ is not going to make it into the urban dictionary any time soon, but I don’t really know what else to call them.  ‘Problems’ is too heavy and somehow the idea of it all just being like these masses under the surface seems about right.  The book is called, “Getting the Love You Want” by Dr. Harville Hendrix.  I know, I know.  This sounds like a made up book by a made up Dr. in a Bridget Jones novel, but I assure you, it is real.  And it’s tricky.  

The first half of the book is all about why we choose the partners we choose and I’m afraid the news is NOT good.  Basically, he proposes (with much more scientific language than I can distill) that we choose partners for three reasons: 1. to heal childhood wounds inflicted by our primary caretakers (we chose someone who reminded us in some way of our parents in order to rewrite our story)  2. to free us from our repressed self (we chose someone who owns characteristics in themselves that we used to have in ourselves and have since shut down because of societal norms) 3. I can’t remember this one, read the book yourself.

I think it all freaked me out…this theory and the way it mirrored many of the things I’ve intuited but didn’t have a name for over the years of self-reflection.  If falling in love has seemed a mystery to me then falling in love with Justin was even more so, but I have always suspected there were some patterns in the men I fell for and even now, I see, I see.  And seeing can be painful.  Like the watermelon incident of 2014.  Conscious or unconscious as the choices may have been at the time, I can now understand things in light of a new perspective – colors are sharper, deeper and more symbolic than ever …. and that shit means that I have to behave differently (sorry for the swear).  I have to allow the revelation to become part of my current system of belief and then I have to do something about it all if I am to remain a person of integrity.  Like Jung so aptly said, “There is no birth of consciousness without pain.”  Right on, brother Jung, right on.

The good news is that Jung prefaced that line with this one “Seldom or never does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly without crisis.”  And that reminds me that a marriage CAN evolve and it can develop.  Yes, there must be crisis in the pursuit of this beast we call marriage, but if harnessed and explored and owned, that crisis can bear fruit…it can bring the love we want.  And the part I think gives me the most hope is that I want love.  I want to love.  This is all I’ve ever wanted in life and I am willing and able to trudge through the valley of the shadow of death to get it.  I think Justin is too and we’re doing it.  Nothing smooth about it but plenty of hope.

Fact 3: My mom is coming tomorrow! There is safety in them there hills!  I’ve been holding on to this mountain for over a month now, gripping the edge of sanity on more than one occasion.  I’ve been pretending at being a mature, together adult life form.  But now that Susan is on her way, I’m relaxing my grip.  I find myself longing to let her clean my bathroom and organize my dusty bookshelves.  its ok if my mom knows that I haven’t cleaned out the refrigerator in over a month and I’m pretty sure there is something dead in there.  She’ll probably make me dinner more than once and she won’t judge me for letting grandpa the cat lick the bathtub water (because I feel cat-parent guilt at being gone so much and feeding her dry cat food).  

Fact 4: I haven’t allowed myself real space to process or think.  I have purposely created noise around me. No meditation. Sparse journal entries.  Crappy prayers.  I read the book but I don’t want to really think about it too much or else I start feeling sad. 

So all in all…there’s a lot of self-reflection and self-doubt and self-ishness going on for me right now.  I’m full of weirdness and not sure where to put it all.  THis isn’t really even about Justin’s addiction but more about my own muddled side of the street.  He’s in there sitting in circles and eating vegetables.  I’m out here killing all his plants, not exercising and eating tortilla chips for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  And that, folks, is what it’s like to be me today.  

KaRyn: The Witness

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12 step meetings, addiction recovery, christianity, circling, codependency, emotions, healing, judgement, KaRyn, witnessing

Justin has a group meeting every morning and every night.  From what he describes, the “community” gathers in a circle and they share and listen and give feedback and receive feedback.  He once said that this circle is an important part of his ability to hear and tell the truth.  He feels safe in the circle. He feels supported.  In fact, he told me yesterday that when he and I go into the “ring of fire” during the last day of family day to confront the way addiction has impacted our family head on, he is looking forward to having his tribe, his community gathered around him – a chain linked wall of “I see you. I know your pain. I know the pain you’ve caused. You are still valuable.”  It will give him ears to hear and eyes to see and hope that he can still be loved.

I mentioned that I am enamored right now with the idea of witnessing.  I’ve been thinking all day about what that means to me and I think that to my understanding, witnessing is not about judging or giving advice.  It’s not about testifying for or against someone or something.  It’s not about helping to fix problems or jumping in to make sense of anything.  Witnessing is the silent act of being present to someone else’s reality.  Standing (an active stance) to say I was there and I saw it and it was real.  It’s about testifying of someone or something simply because it is true.  It doesn’t require moral judgement because witnessing is devoid of self.  It is easy to witness of Christ because he was perfect and true and it doesn’t require us to set aside our system of moral beliefs to be his witness.  But people…people are a little harder.  We are imperfect and that is easy to see. I think that to witness another person wholly, we really have to do some serious soul work ourselves. 

KaRyn: Flowers & Weeds

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addiction recovery, codependency, generational burden, healing, KaRyn, LDS, plants, strength, weakness

Justin is a meticulous gardener.  He has a magic way with yards and trees and shrubbery and dirt. Just ask anyone in our neighborhood…I’m pretty sure our cute little duplex was the ghetto eyesore of the street before Justin got his grubby be-gloved hands on it.  Now we have beautiful manicured rose bushes, a visible lilac tree (I seriously love lilacs and don’t remember seeing this tree before this year) and grass where once there was a dirt pile that doubled as a garbage pit.  Sometimes, the overly grateful neighbors will just sort of wander back there to see what he’s done and they’ll be sucked into a narrated tour of his efforts.  He’s proud of it and he deserves to be.  It’s a true gift. 

Justin: Keen Minds, Kind Hearts

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12 steps, AA, Addiction, chemical dependency, drug abuse, family, healing, hope, marriage, recovery, trust

Day 8 of Justin’s Recovery. This is a long video, but it’s full of Justin’s true heart. He talks about the need to conquer fear, numbing, and let himself feel and express emotion. “I don’t have to live with the fear; I don’t have to live with irrational fears that I have…I feel free.” This is a vulnerable expression of what it’s like to be an addict in recovery.

Justin: The Wound

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Addiction, healing, hope, Justin, pain, recovery

Day 3 of Justin’s rehab.  This gets real.