Honesty Is The Best Policy, Or How I Acknowledged A Toxic Character Trait

I read an article recently, about being ghosted by a friend. I shared in on Facebook and it got a lot of response.

This is apparently a thing people have dealt with (not just me!), and I was so glad I shared it.

We have a tendency to think we're the only ones who go through a thing. I don't know if it's narcissism or entitlement but sometimes we just miss common threads of experience that bind us together.

My recent experience was the loss of a friend during my divorce.

I mostly didn't talk about what wasn't working in my marriage. There were so many reasons for that. First of all, I myself didn't want to think about what wasn't working in my marriage. I had given up thinking that our problems could be solved and had resigned myself to just living with them. I had told myself that I could just push them aside and choose to be happy anyway. Clearly, that was not entirely successful.

I also felt like talking about the issues meant that my friends would know. If they knew, they couldn't unknow. It could change how they felt about my husband, or how they felt about me, or how they felt about us.

So when I announced my divorce, I had to explain why I was getting divorced, which, to good friends who'd never heard anything seriously bad before, seemed really crazy. One friend seemed to come to the conclusion that I was just justifying a decision to leave and be with Shawn. While part of me understands it, the other part of me wonders what it was about me that would lead her to think that way. Wouldn't common sense alone indicate that no one wakes up in a great relationship and says they'd like to end their perfectly happy marriage for no reason?

She made the decision to end our friendship. She didn't ghost me. She was upfront. She said she just couldn't support me through my divorce. She didn't agree with it, and she couldn't be there for me.

It hurt. It wasn't the lingering hurt I'd experienced when a friend disappears without reason. It was the sudden wrenching hurt of being completely misunderstood. Of being left behind at a time when I was clinging to the people who felt safe and familiar. It was the pain of thinking that maybe I really was burdening those who loved me with more than they could handle.

It was fear that I was not a person who was worth loving, worth being there for, worth seeing through the dark. It was my deepest fears of worthlessness realized.

I could blame her for this. I could say she wasn't a loyal friend. I could say she chose to believe the worst of me rather than the best of me. I could say that I would have been there if she'd needed me, and likely still would. All of this is or at least could be accurate. But it's not the whole story. And we learn nothing if we don't tell the whole story.

Because it's also true that it's too easy to put all the blame for the breakdown of any relationship entirely on the other person.

I'm nothing if not self-reflective. I'm constantly pulling apart the threads of my own thought patterns and feelings to see what's working and what isn't, and there is a thread that has come up again and again: I wasn't honest. Not completely.

There was a core of myself and my experience that I hid in order to protect an image of myself. I can wrap it up in not badmouthing my ex-husband, and there's an element of truth there. I can wrap it up in the idea that I wasn't being honest with myself a lot of the time either, which is also true. But neither of these reasons excuse it.

I should have been more honest with myself instead of stuffing the feelings down and covering them up until it all fell apart. That wasn't fair to my ex. I should have been more honest with the people closest to me about how I was struggling. Maybe they would have been disappointed in me. But maybe they also would have been encouraging and understanding.

When we don't trust those closest to us, we miss the opportunity to make ourselves better. We miss the opportunity for our friends to rise to the challenge of caring for us, which in turn will allow us to better care for them when they have need of us. We are not solitary creatures, us humans. We are pack animals by nature, each bearing more burden when we have the strength to and counting on our pack to shoulder more when we can't.

This does not make us weak. Our imperfections do not define us. Our ability to care for one another does. I'm sorry I was not more honest with my ex-friend, just as I'm sorry she chose not to support me. But since the only person I can control is myself, I'm choosing to see what I can learn and what I can carry forth into the future.

We all have some toxic traits, but that's all the more opportunity we have to be better than we were yesterday. And we can be so much better than we were yesterday.

Be Brave. Be Kind. Do Better.

The Path Explained

I wrote the other day about how, for about a year, I felt like I was walking around in my underwear.

If you've never had this experience, lucky you. Seriously, it was pretty awful.

Interestingly, when the saga began, I was invited to tell my "side" of the story. Of course, not in a friendly place. Not amongst people who actually wanted to hear it. Not so there could be any kind of understanding reached, or peace achieved.

No. I was invited to be shamed, more exposed than I already was, and it would have forced people to choose sides.  One thing you should know about me is that most of the time, I really hate having to take sides when I don't think one should have to. I like it when people can get along. Or at least co-exist peacefully.

It seemed to me the only thing worse than having someone tell my story from their perspective, inaccuracies and all, was also sharing mine, engaging in the drama, and making people choose who to believe.

I couldn't take going through that while my life was so rapidly changing around me. I couldn't navigate my changing circumstances, and also campaign for my reputation. Honestly, my reputation didn't seem like the biggest issue I had. My marriage was ending. An amazing relationship had changed my whole life. I needed to take care of myself and my kids.

So, instead, I put my head down. I put one foot in front of the other and kept going. I hoped that eventually my character and good nature would belie the story told about me. For those unappeased, the truth probably never mattered anyway.

People love to gossip, especially when it has no real bearing on their life at all. For my life, however,  it felt invasive. Like I said, I felt like I was walking around in my underwear, unaware of what people had heard, unaware of what they believed. Hopeful that if they had questions, they would ask me.

Here in the middle of America, however, not everyone thinks everything is their business. That is so different from the coast I grew up on.

I talked to people I knew had heard things, and we discussed the weather, local politics, the state of our schools, and the disposition of our children. Occasionally they would ask a dear friend of mine, "How is Anne? Is she okay?" because they genuinely wanted to know, and they genuinely didn't want to make my life any harder by asking me.

I can't tell you how much I appreciated that. I was in such an odd place. My sixteen-year marriage was falling apart, and I was all out of energy to try to save it. My husband and I had been seeing other people. I had met Shawn and was suddenly gifted with a relationship that worked in every way, and my marriage spiraled downward quickly as my ex and I each reacted to the reality we were confronted with.

Shawn ended the other relationship that he had been in, with someone I knew and had been friends with (they were not exclusive). That relationship ended not with a whimper, but with an explosion of emotion. Break-ups are hard, they hurt, but I was thoroughly unprepared for what followed.

There were posts written about me, my marriage, and my relationship frequently on facebook. Friends were stopped at schools and grocery stores to talk about me and about what was happening with Shawn and with my family.

I stayed quiet. I didn't post about it. I didn't rush to tell my side. I withdrew. There were so many other reasons I stayed quiet.

Let me go back a little...

The summer I turned 18, I was sexually assaulted. The perpetrator, a slightly older friend who often provided alcohol for parties and get together's, was pulled off of me as I was screaming for him to stop, and he was trying to force himself on me. When it was over, the friend who pulled him off of me made it clear that she didn't really think he was going to rape me. She was sure he would have stopped eventually. I really shouldn't make a big deal out of it.

Harder than the assault itself was having him show up to social events. People knew what had happened and chose to believe that it was a misunderstanding and that since I hadn't been raped, it wasn't an assault. I would have panic attacks and have to leave. I was told I was being dramatic. I was so young. Maybe I was being dramatic. But it hurt so much that my experience didn't matter. Later he was killed in a car accident and became practically sainted amongst that group of friends.

That experience made it clear to me that there is a price to pay for people to believe you. I know what it feels like to speak my truth and not be believed by people who should have, because they didn't want to pay that cost. In the end, I preferred to not to make people choose. What was true, wasn't really relevant.

My truth was that I was being harassed.

I blocked my harasser on Facebook at first, then texts. I blocked them via email when the harassment took that route, they took to emailing me from their work email. I blocked that one, too. When I got my new email address after getting married, I had to block them all over again, as they quickly got ahold of it and the messages started again. They encouraged someone to message my father and tell him things that weren't true about Shawn, in the hopes that he would...I don't know....step in and tell his 40-year-old daughter to leave him? I'm not sure. It was bizarre.

When they ran out of ways to contact me, they continued to post. Even taking joy in a surgical complication I had, saying that it was karma, that Shawn was toxic, and that it manifested itself physically for me.

I had a friend come to me concerned. She told me that as someone who is empathetic, I tend to internalize negative energy, and she genuinely felt that living so close to someone who wished me ill on a daily basis, was affecting my health.

I don't know if it was the toxicity of my harasser that played into my complications, but it did have an effect. I was experiencing anxiety and sometimes panic. When I went to public places, I scanned the parking lot for their car, both terrified of running into them, and unwilling to stop living my life because of them.

Something had to change.

So, I did a little housecleaning, lining my windows with a bit of salt, cleaning the front and back porches and doors with a rosemary wash to clear away negative energy. Hey, I'm a Pagan. This is what I do. Even if the effect is just a placebo for my mind, that's a powerful kind of magic all it's own.

Part of me would like to take apart all the things that were said about Shawn and me. Part of me would like to defend us. I would like to explain why I think those things were said, and what they mean. But at this point, I feel to do so would only give those words more power. A power they never should have had in the first place. And people who truly know me, who truly know Shawn, already know the truth about us and who we are.

I don't tell you about the harassment because I want to be a victim. I share this only because it has such an effect on how vulnerable and exposed I felt for months. The person harassing me felt justified in their behavior and I was unable to stop it. All I could do was shut down the avenues of communication, and hope that in time, they would move on to something else.

I'm not naming my harasser here, because this isn't their story. I'm really only sharing this at all because I need to have some ownership of it. Because this part is my story to tell. And because I needed to let it out.

In the midst of this, I divorced. Within a week, Shawn and I went down and got a marriage license. We married 17 days after my divorce was finalized. We just couldn't see the point of waiting to start our life together. It was the best decision I made. I love this man fiercely.

In the end, I knew that people would have their own thoughts and feelings about my life choices. That's the way it always is, isn't it? Choosing him, and a life together was worth it. As hard as it's been to get to this place, I'm happy here. Everything in life isn't perfect. It never is. But we will face it together. What more could I ask for?

F*ck The Patriarcy

Artwork by Boss Dotty (Available as a card here)

Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court today. I, like women across America, have a lot of feelings about that.

I believe Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. I believe that Brett Kavanaugh may not remember it, due to drink, and the fact that for him it was playing, while for her it was trauma. I believe Mark Judge may have forgotten about it, as it didn't significantly alter the course of his life. Or maybe he's just protecting his friend, and jumping on top of them was a way to stop it because he could see what was happening. That, I honestly don't know.

I know that Judge Kavanaugh was very good at playing the role he was raised for.

When I first wrote this post (it's been a long day, and I've rewritten this post several times, only to then lose it and have to start over) I decided to write about my own experiences. My rape. My sexual assault. But why should I have to? Why should we women have to keep ripping ourselves open and exposing our most vulnerable parts in order to be believed and validated?

I can't prove what happened to me. But I know. And the men who hurt me know what they did.

The bar to convict someone of a crime is understandably high. One should have a significant amount of evidence in order to justify the revocation of liberty and the loss of freedom. But no one was asking for Judge Kavanaugh to be incarcerated. All that was asked for was that...perhaps...he shouldn't get to serve on the most powerful court in America.

I have to say, Brett Kavanaugh is fulfilling his promise as a white prep school boy. I also grew up in an affluent and conservative area, albeit on the other coast. It was made clear to me at a very young age that young men held promise, and we were not to get in their way. As long as they held up the image of respectability in public, they could pretty much do whatever they wanted in private.

We, as female bodies, were their entertainment. It was our job to protect ourselves, but we also were taught we were taught we weren't smart enough to interpret our own experiences. Things that happened to us were downplayed. Boys will be boys, after all. Of course, that was if we told anyone. #WhyIDidntReport has become a thing in these last few weeks and I'm struck by how often our reasons revolved around either the inability to be believed or the need to protect men in our lives from all the feelings they might have about what was done to our bodies when no one was looking.

These last few weeks have shown me a few things. Not the least of which is that the Patriarchy that supports the elite white men in our country, must be pulled down,, brick by fucking brick, with our bare hands. With it will come homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, ableism, and white supremacy. 

We are strong enough. We are capable enough. We must do it. 

In November we will go out and vote. But beyond that, we need to run for office. We need to get involved. We need to show up in an intersectional way for our brothers and sisters who are also fighting battles against the system that drowns out our voices.

I have been violated. But I am all done being a victim. Who's with me?

The Things We Learn Along The Way

I need to preface this post with something: For the last year, I feel like I've been walking around in my underwear. My marriage failed. I got remarried. And I found out that the not so small town I live in, is a smaller town than I realized. I never knew what people knew about me, or what people thought about me. It made me feel exceptionally exposed. I will definitely be writing about it as the experience heavily influenced my decision to start this blog.

I'm sick of feeling like I'm being vulnerable without any control over how. So, honestly, writing this blog is empowering for me. It's likewise terrifying for me.

If I talk about my experiences, my thoughts, and my feelings, other people get to have thoughts and opinions about them. I'm writing it anyway, because I also know that people can provide support. They can tell me about the ideas that resonate with them. And they can help me learn and grow. So, while I'm scared, I'm writing anyway. And today is a particularly emotional day. What emotion it is, I'm not entirely sure. It's a bunch of them.

You see, today would have been my 17th wedding anniversary.

Instead, I am both divorced, and remarried.

That is so strange to me.

I didn't get married for a little while. I got married forever. Or at least I planned forever. I thought if I did everything right, if I tried hard enough, if I worked hard enough, I could create the family I dreamed of.

I don't know why it didn't occur to me that not only was a marriage not just me, but even if that were true, I was never going to do everything right. I could never try hard enough or work hard enough to make a marriage work all by myself. And I was so far from perfect in how hard I tried and worked. I definitely did not do everything right.

I could sit here and list all the things I think he did wrong. All the ways in which I was hurt. All the little wounds that I buried and built up scar tissue over time. But wow would that be unfair. As I've pointed out, he isn't here to defend himself, and the story would be so incredibly one-sided.

Besides, I've done that. I spent months doing it, and not only is it not healthy, but it's kinda bullshit.

Which isn't to say that I think he was perfect and did everything right, but it doesn't give me room to take responsibility for my part, to learn from it, to grow from it. It's childish and short sighted, and I can NOT allow myself to stagnate from bitterness. That's not who I am.

So, can I tell you what I think I've learned?

One of my biggest mistakes was trying to be responsible for his feelings, and thinking he was responsible for mine.

Think about this with me for a minute. I spent years truing to prevent him from feeling negative things, because I didn't want to be responsible for his feelings. I dedicated a lot of time and energy to this. I took on worry and anxiety alone for this, which ultimately created a fundamental dishonesty between us that was so unfair to him, because it didn't allow him the room to learn and grow. The way shared worry and anxiety do.

When he said or did something that I found hurtful, I made him responsible for how I felt about it, but also tried to push those feelings down thinking I could let them go, often without real resolution. Finding resolution meant confrontation and dealing with his feelings, which I didn't want to do.

That was a toxic combination.

I have tried to give myself room to grieve the marriage I thought I'd have, and the marriage I actually had. It's been a strange juxtaposition of emotion with the happiness of finding my new husband and getting remarried. I have felt sometimes like I wasn't allowed to be sad about my previous marriage ending.

I have had to tell myself repeatedly that I am allowed to have feelings. They don't always have to be the feelings I think I'm supposed to have.

Relationships are complicated. And we have the right to grieve the loss of them, even if it was the right choice. This is true for marriages, friendships, and even toxic family relationships. We have the right to mourn the loss of what we had, and what we wish we'd had.

This post may have been a little all over the map. But today I keep thinking about the good, the bad, and the ugly of my previous marriage, and since the only person I can control is me, I felt like it was important to acknowledge my part in what failed, and to acknowledge that I'm not over it yet. It feels like a deep failure on my part. So I have to learn and do better this time.

I'm Not That Great, And That's Okay

There is too much pressure on women. There. I said it. Like it was a surprise. Like you didn't already know.

Whether it's social media, or the blogosphere, or our self help books, or the other moms in the drop off lane at school, we all have an image we're trying to live up to, and we all know how we're failing, don't we?

Personally, I always wanted to be a mom. Ever since I was a little girl, I had an image of who I was or was going to be: a wife, mother, and caregiver. And I became that! I threw my whole self into that identity. I wanted to be the best mom who did everything right.

Of course it turned out my kids didn't fit into my perfect image. For example, one of my autistic kids was an escape artist. If I turned my back long enough to go to the bathroom, he could be out a window and halfway down the street. I knew it made me look inattentive. But I spent years trying to stay ahead of his escapes and was never 100% successful.

Then I struggled between helicoptering and free ranging. You know people have opinions about it either way. If I gave my kids a little freedom to go outside, and they got into trouble (like kids do) that was my fault. If I never gave them freedom, that was my fault. If I spent time with them outside and couldn't get housework done, that was also my fault.

I struggled...not with whether or not I was doing a good job. I mean, I wanted to be good at everything I wanted to be, but I also accepted that the best I could do was my best.

Let me say that once more for the people in the back: THE BEST YOU CAN DO IS YOUR BEST. Not someone else's best. Maybe not what your best was last week, or next week, or tomorrow. Your best is your best right now.

I'll be honest, sometimes my best isn't that great. I lean toward procrastination (something I actively fight against with varying levels of success). Sometimes I pass up time that I could be really engaging with my kids because I'd like to watch an episode of Grey's Anatomy (yeah, I still watch that show). Sometimes I forget to go through backpacks, or sign permission slips, or whatever the thing is that needs to be done today.

The truth is, I'm not that great. I'm not super special. I'm not a perfect mom. And that's okay. Because I've come undone and put myself back together. Because I've spent nights at the bedside of a child who couldn't tell me what was wrong, and couldn't be left alone. Because I make space for a handful of younger humans to have feelings and learn and know that they are loved. And because I keep trying to do better.

I'm not that great. But I'm doing my best. And I keep going.

There To Here

I wanted a place to write about my journey. From mom blogger to divorcee, to new wife, to new blended family.

I used to write about everything. I'd tell people about my pregnancies, births, issues with my kids. I told the world about the loss of my daughter, and when my son was diagnosed with a rare birth defect.

I laid so much bare for anyone to see, but there were stories I wasn't telling. A life I wasn't sharing.

Now I want to write, to process, but I'm also more protective. I don't want this to be about my children. It's my story.

I don't want it to be about my ex-husband, because he isn't here to defend himself, and because that story isn't entirely mine. I will find a way, because I need to let it out. I'm just finding how to balance a need for privacy with a need to share.

What can I say, I'm an exercise in contradiction.

I came undone, and I've put myself back together. I'm changed and I'm not.

This blog is an exploration of a life. Not a special one. But mine.