CHAPTER 1

“This was what could happen to you: you could end up this far from where you thought you were going.”

― Wally Lamb, She's Come Undone

Looking Out

We’ve all got a story about how we came to a moment when we realized we were out of touch with the woman we thought we were becoming, the life we thought we were going to live. This is mine. I was sitting in my closet facing out my front window overlooking my cul-de-sac. It was 10:05 in the morning and the skies were grey and the grass was brown and the trees looked like skeletons with their decrepit little arms and spidery veins reaching towards the unseen sun. We didn’t know it yet, but the tree in front of our house was dying. That spring, it’s leaves would not return. There would be no green markers, no signs of life and rebirth or the imagery we so love pointing us toward the purpose of seasons. No, that year, the tree would come down because an arborist would confirm, it was in fact, dead.

It was January, the new year when we determine to be resolute, full of hope and belief. Any other year and I would have been penning a vision, capturing words to define my anticipation of the good things we would bring to bear in the next twelve months. On this cold morning, I couldn’t see past Grief.  

I was only a few weeks removed from twelve years of Agency life—a freelance marketing and communications consultant turned small business owner in partnership with my sister, Ashley. This one place had been the depository for my entire body of professional work. We went from moms around the dining room table to teams inside an office building in a sudden and sweeping season of growth. We were boss ladies, entrepreneurs building the bike while we were riding it, in an exciting and daring adventure where we determined everything is figureoutable. Building. Tinkering. Growing.

From the outside, I appeared to be living the modern woman’s dream—bustling career, business owner earning the badge of “Best Places to Work” in our city, successful and handsome husband, two adorable kids, three dogs living in our custom-built home and long-time members at a large church in our community where eventually my husband would become an elder.

But on the inside, I was dying. Clients and coworkers had more say over my schedule, my sleep and my thought life than I did. Codependency crept in and I let someone else have my voice; I stepped into the shadow, as I am known to do, comfortable to be unseen. I lost my True Self in the dark side of this hollowed-out life where work consumed every waking hour. That voracious hunger to be everything all at once: mom-of-the-year, award-winning creative, fresh-baked at the bake sale, hosting the baby shower, volunteering at church and out in the community, staying thin, having plenty of sex, and generally people-pleasing my way through life brought me to my knees. I was living someone else’s dream and it was a total nightmare.

But who could see me dying? Who could see my panic attack, my heaving sobs and desperate attempts to catch my breath with my head down bent down between my legs in the back of Josh’s car while he and the kids ate lunch inside of his friend’s lake house? Who could see me sobbing in the parking lot of my own office building? Who could see the scale sliding down edging its way towards two digits? Who would notice as I discreetly placed my fingers on neck to check my own pulse before handing my arm over to the nurse during my annual exam?

In this double down on change, our family said goodbye to our church of thirteen years at the very same time I was walking away from my entire career. Church, always a point of passion was suddenly a loaded word. Another arena for me to exist in the shadows, a fractured version of myself.

Sometimes when you are swimming against the current you have to admit that you are really going the wrong direction. Continuing in the wrong direction may simply be poor judgment no matter how many times you call it perseverance.

I felt stripped and raw, like the darkness of now was the only reality. My work home and church home cut off in a thoughtful, but desperate decision for change. It was like I’d lost a leg and an eye.  I was limping and could not see.

My son, Eli, was four. I had a few hours in the house three days a week while he was at preschool. I was devastatingly alone with my new companion—Silence. I thought she was going to be a gentle friend. I thought I needed her; anything to make the chaos and cacophony stop. But she is anything but demure. Silence, before you get to know her is overt and deafening. She made me uncomfortable. She reminded me that Loneliness was there too. I couldn’t see Hope. I didn’t know where she’d gone.

I was searching for the words which I could use to cover myself and my wounds, to escape Silence and Loneliness. Words had always been my salve, my best antidote to the pain. Fear was there too and he said I left all my best words behind, I gave them away too flippantly and for all the wrong reasons and to all the wrong people: the church and the business and the clients. Fear said I did not save anything worth using. I was empty.  

This was the story I told myself: you’re 34 and you’re finished. This choice to come home, this hope you have for restoration and healing and resolve is the end to the other chapter. Your creative working life is over and you will never find a church home. The end.  

Unwinding

I decided I could not go back into the closet the next day. I could not stare at the dying tree. I sat down by the fireplace and opened a book; the lifelines I still clung to while avoiding Silence and Loneliness. My Friend, who I left at the Agency and at the Church, brought me a copy of Simply Tuesday, a treasured little read by Emily Freeman on not just accepting but moving towards our smallness. In the moment, I both like the idea and don’t like it at all. I’m confounded by my Smallness.

Across from me on this morning was the “other chair.” The one where all the crap gets thrown when we walk in the door. It holds a reflection of the life of the family each day—backpacks, purses, coats, books, shoes, laundry, lists, board games, dogs. On this particular morning, it held the dry cleaning, four items which needed to find their way to someone who can sew (oops, not me) and a pair of my husband’s shoes in need of resoling. These were my tasks for the day.  

It was going to take some time to unwind.  My new season offered small windows to step into when the kids weren’t pooping their pants and the dogs weren’t darting into the street and I was not out doing the mother trucking errands. I called my husband from the pickup in front of the dry cleaners, “Who was doing all of this?  How were we functioning?”   

At the same time the previous year, I was pulling together the production of fundraising events for clients. Writing scripts. Bringing vision. Leading. Collaborating. Daring greatly, so I believed.

But on that small morning, I set my book down and I hugged my husband before he left to catch an airplane. Like really hugged him. I asked him about his week; what the days held between then and our weekend together. “Four planes,” he said. And did I have any Tylenol PM for him to leave at his residence in Baton Rouge. I felt him pick up that thing he sets down when he walks in the door on Friday evenings and put it back onto his shoulders for the week to come. I saw his heaviness, his gearing up for the challenge, and suddenly, I saw his need for me. There was an unspoken burden bearing down on him I had not seen before. I wondered what it was like for him when he shouldered this alone; when I was not making time for regular meals, much less the dry cleaning, or real connection.

Instead of re-living the guilt I had been processing through, I hugged him on his way out and held him for that extra moment, hoping our embrace could say the words I could not yet say, “Please forgive me.” 

“I love you,” I whispered instead and cried when I closed the door because I was thankful I could see him for the first time in a long time and, even if just for a moment, ease his heaviness with my day’s small tasks.