I rigged an election trying to be Golden. I spent sixteen years with my head in a toilet trying to be light. I drank myself numb for a decade, trying to be pleasant. I’ve giggled at and slept with assholes, trying to be touchable. I’ve held my tongue so hard I tasted blood, trying to be gentle. I’ve spent thousands on potions and poisons, trying to be youthful. I have denied myself for decades, trying to be pure.
Several months after I found out my husband had repeatedly been unfaithful, I still didn’t know whether I’d stay or go. I didn’t even know if the new throw pillow on my couch would stay or go. I was a terribly indecisive woman. When I told the counselor at my kids’ school how uncertain I felt, she said, “It’s not hard decisions that mess up kids, it’s indecision. Your kids need to know which way this is going to go.”
I said, “Well, they can’t know until I know.”
She said, “You need to figure out how to know.”
Back then, the only way I knew how to know was to poll and research. I began polling. I called each of my friends, hoping that they would know what I should do. Next I began my research. I read every article I could find about infidelity, divorce, and children, hoping the experts would know what I should do. My polling and research results were maddeningly inconclusive.
Finally, I turned to the World Wide Web to see if an invisible conglomeration of strangers, trolls, and bots knew what I should do with my one wild and precious life. That is how I found myself in bed at 3:00 A.M., shoveling Ben & Jerry’s into my mouth, typing into my Google search bar:
What should I do if my husband is a cheater but also an amazing dad?
My seventeen-year-old son, Chase, and his friends are in the family room watching a movie. I’ve been trying to leave them alone, but it’s hard for me. I understand that most teenagers think their moms are uncool, but I am certain I’m the exception.
I stand at the door and peek inside. The boys are draped all over the couch. The girls have arranged themselves in tiny, tidy roly-poly piles on the floor. My young daughters are perched at the feet of the older girls, quietly worshipping.
My son looks over at me and half smiles. “Hi, Mom.”
I need an excuse to be there, so I ask, “Anybody hungry?”
What comes next seems to unfold in slow motion.
Every single boy keeps his eyes on the TV and says, “YES!”
The girls are silent at first. Then each girl diverts her eyes from the television screen and scans the faces of the other girls. Each looks to a friend’s face to discover if she herself is hungry. Some kind of telepathy is happening among them. They are polling. They are researching. They are gathering consensus, permission, or denial.
Somehow the collective silently appoints a French-braided, freckle-nosed spokesgirl.
She looks away from the faces of her friends and over at me. She smiles politely and says, “We’re fine, thank you.”
The boys looked inside themselves. The girls looked outside themselves.
We forgot how to know when we learned how to please.
This is why we live hungry.
My friend Ashley took her first hot yoga class recently. She walked into the room, unrolled her mat, sat down, and waited for something to happen.
“It was exceptionally hot in there,” she told me.
When the instructor—young and confident—finally walked into the room, Ashley was already dripping with sweat. The instructor announced, “We’ll start soon. You are going to get very hot, but you can’t leave this room. No matter how you begin to feel, stay strong. Don’t leave. This is the work.”
The class got started, and a few minutes in, the walls began to close in on Ashley. She felt light-headed and sick. Each breath became harder and harder to come by. Twice her vision became spotty, then briefly went black. She looked at the door and felt desperate to run toward it. She spent ninety minutes terrified, close to hyperventilating, holding back tears. But she did not leave that room.
The moment the instructor ended the class and opened the door, Ashley jumped off her mat and ran into the hallway. She kept her hand over her mouth until she found the bathroom. She threw the door open and vomited all over the sink, the wall, the floor.
While she was on her hands and knees wiping up her own puke with paper towels, she thought: What is wrong with me? Why did I stay and suffer? The door wasn’t even locked.
When I was a little girl, my godmother gave me a snow globe as a birthday gift. It was small and round, like a palm-sized crystal ball. In its center stood a red dragon with sparkly scales, bright green eyes, and fiery wings. When I first took it home, I put it on the nightstand beside my bed. Then I’d lie awake at night, wide-eyed, feeling afraid that the dragon existed so close to me in the dark. So one night I climbed out of bed and moved the snow globe to the highest shelf in my room.
Every once in a while, only in the light of day, I’d pull my desk chair over, climb up, and pull the snow globe off the shelf. I’d shake it, get still, and watch the snowflakes swirl. As they began to settle, the fiery red dragon in the center of the globe would emerge, and I’d feel a chilly thrill. That dragon was magical and scary, always there, unmoving, just waiting.
* * *
My friend Megan is five years sober now after a decade of alcohol and drug abuse. Lately, she’s been trying to figure out what happened to her—how addiction had taken over the life of such a strong woman.
On Megan’s wedding day, she sat in the back of the chapel knowing she didn’t want to marry the man waiting for her at the end of the aisle. She knew it from her roots.
She married him anyway, because she was thirty-five years old and getting married was what she was supposed to do. She married him anyway, because there were so many people she would have disappointed if she had called it off. There was only one of her, so she disappointed herself instead. She said “I do” while her insides said “I don’t,” and then she spent the next decade trying not to know what she knew: that she had betrayed herself and that her life would not really begin until she stopped betraying herself. The only way not to know was to get wasted and stay that way, so she started drinking heavily during her honeymoon. The drunker she became, the more distance she felt from the dragon inside her. After a while, the booze and drugs became her problem, which was convenient because she didn’t have to deal with her real problem anymore.
* * *
We’re like snow globes: We spend all of our time, energy, words, and money creating a flurry, trying not to know, making sure that the snow doesn’t settle so we never have to face the fiery truth inside us—solid and unmoving.