Finding My Feet

An earthquake doesn't happen overnight. It is a culmination of the earth's fissures that hiss and crack quarter inches at a time over years as one tectonic plate moves slightly northward while the mainland sustains its place. The ground of my happiness was moving without much awareness on my part as I had one foot in a marriage that was sliding northward and a life at home that began to show deep cracks in its foundations. I was happy waddling around with my second pregnancy, sharing days at the beach, in backyards and sideyards with my sister in law and other young mothers starting families. We drank wine, fresca, diet pepsi and packed picnics, visited our families in town, compared potty training stories and managed to socialize between naptimes, errands and visits from loving grandparents, aunties and uncles.

It was a time of sunshine, swimming pools and barbeques, playhouses, fisher price musical instruments, trikes, foggy mornings and occasional rainy days. My daughters were happy girls and I was an ecstatic mommy, finding pleasure and humor in simple things--attending church, going to aerobics--and their blooming personalities. Steffie loved her baths and being in any kind of water. She was like a round little buoy, bobbing around in jacuzzis, bathtubs and swimming pools--concrete ones and plastic blowups, a garden hose or sprinklers. Amanda constantly donned belts, snowhats, two different shoes, purses and costume jewelry while showing great skill in taking things off and putting something else on with each trip to her room or toybox. Her curiosities were boundless. She was about thirteen months when I left my job and did not enter day care except into the loving arms of family members until she entered kindergarten. Stephanie was almost three.

Throughout those easygoing days and joyful routines, I began to notice cracks in my marriage marked by silences, my own growing dis-ease and sudden spurts of great distance that created an internal conflict between the real happiness of my days and shadows that crept over our ties as he worked harder and I hung on by my fingernails to the man that I loved. I could not reach him, but could feel a groundswell of necessity growing that led me to consider ways that I could bring income into the home. When I was eight months pregnant with Steffie, I applied for a job as a department store Santa, but was told that my voice was too high for the position.

I spent the next year in ignorant bliss and my first step toward self-liberation when I bought a forty dollar double stroller so I could take walks outside with both kids, whose little legs could only take them so far before they needed to be carried. I did not want to return to the insurance company, so began to consider options for making a living while being available to my daughters. I settled on the idea of going back to school to qualify myself to teach--only imagining myself in a high school or middle school, but found out that it would take one year less to become qualified if I just earned a Master's degree to be able to teach Public Speaking at local community colleges.

I started slowly, signing up for one class as a non-matriculated student. I barely got off the ground, having to drop the class when I ended up in the hospital bent over in severe pain, walking as if I had a lawn chair glued to my backside, only to be admitted to undergo surgery for kidney stones that would not pass on their own. While I was in the hospital I noticed the first serious crack in family unity. I pleaded to see my kids after several days in the hospital, only to wake each hour to an empty room and my maternal need to see their cheerful faces.

After returning home, I was in a weakened state and what happened next does not bear repeating. It is enough to say I was alone, without money, job, groceries or knowledge of where my husband was for weeks. I borrowed twenty dollars from my parents to sustain us for a short time, but something had broken that could not and would not ever quite be repaired. We had bumped up against our limitations of tolerance, understanding and meaningful communication. There was a giant billboard staring me in the face with a message that I needed to engineer the start of a motor that would spurt and pop and then die. In order to sort things out, I made an appointment with a counselor and I remember telling her that I didn't quite understand what was happening. I wasn't sleeping well, had two beautiful children and a husband who loved me. What was wrong?

After I regained my physical strength, I found a waitressing job with perfect hours to pay for my school without leaving the kids during the day. I worked a 4:00 to 8:00 p.m. shift four or five nights at a local seafood restaraunt. The conditions of reconciliation with my husband consisted of counseling, eight months of virtual strangers passing one another long enough to hand off the kids between work shifts, my re-entry into school on the weeknight I didn't work and my husband's periodic disappearances marked by nothing I was aware of and/or a hand-scribbled note in my mailbox ending our marriage.

The disappearances became unbearable as I had to explain the inexplicable to myself and the girls. The happier I got, the more frequent the disappearances occurred. It all came to a crescendo when I got my first teaching post--a part time gig that was an extension course run by a local community college to teach Public Speaking to non-traditional (mostly female) students. It was my second night of a once weekly class, and I had been with the kids all day. Something went terribly awry when the child-handoff began. It was the worst moment of my life to this day and my greatest moment of clarity before or since then. I realized I had no choices left. Any options I had dreamed or imagined were starkly, brutally, permanently stolen, forcing me kicking and screaming down a new life's path that I wasn't sure I wanted, but knew I had to fulfill.

As I drove to my second night of teaching ever in my life knowing I would arrive late, I gripped my steering wheel with all the care and concentration I could muster at the time, only to be brought to hysterical laughter and tears when a tailgating driver passed me angrily and flipped me the bird. That was the cherry that topped the day. I made it through that class on autopilot and found my children at home with their grandfather, safe and sleeping in a crib and a bed as I hovered over their peace, wrought with concern about how I would do what was needed but knowing that as their mother, I would find a way.

There are two sides to every story and I am wary of this post, having tried to convey the struggle I experienced while trying not to demonize or speak for my husband, who was then and is now a good man who loves his daughters. I have attempted to convey my confusion because I never stopped loving him, but was unsuccessful in finding a way to learn why he disappeared or where he went, understand what was never explained to me, or to be able to pretend that what had just happened did not. Couples who can talk to each other would have been able to sustain a marital longevity I had expected and longed for. It's not possible to do "better" when what you're doing wrong or who you are to the other is a complete mystery.