Like Glass

April 4^th. Finally a warm spring day! I’m sick again, or rather still but intend to be outside as much as my weakened body will allow. Eric is outside and on the phone, as usual.  I walk up to him and put my aching head on his chest.  Eric always smells good to me, clean, natural like fresh tilled soil and salt.  I rest listening to his heartbeat and phone conversation he puts his hand on my back.  His hands are large and strong, like the rest of him.  I love the feel of his hand on my back I feel protected and small. Eric has a dancer’s body, chiseled and muscular, broad shoulders, tapered waist.  He seems to me to be a living paradox; the body of The David dressed in dirty farm clothes, and wearing a white scraggly beard.  Sometimes I stare at him while he’s sleeping. I try to imagine what he looked like when he was younger, with more hair on his head and less on his face.  There is a fifteen year gap between me and Eric. From time to time, and lately more often than not I feel those years between us like a bridge he long ago crossed and one I am just contemplating crossing.  The water between us in that gap is choppy, with gusty winds and sea devils which often make it impossible for me to hear what he is saying from the other side. He doesn’t hear what I am saying partly because of the conditions of the air and sea and partly because he has no need to look back over that bridge he crossed so long ago.

Eric is on the phone with a counselor from one of the many drug and alcohol rehabs who regularly call us looking to place one of their patients into group housing.  Eric and I run a 12 step recovery house for women with substance abuse issues.  More accurately described; Eric owns and runs it I am sort of an “ornament” that gets paid.  At least that’s how I feel.  Especially when I am sick.  One of the reasons Eric and I share an interest in running a house like this is because he and I both are in recovery for our own torrid and dramatic past relationships with Alcohol.  Eric has been sober for 20 years.  I stopped drinking three years ago; the sober part is just beginning for me.  After 35 years of drinking and the last 15 of them heavy daily drinking I’m finding, while piecing together the shards of glass that are my life, the dense fog that alcoholism left in it’s wake very slow to dissipate and lift .  I am only beginning to see glimpses of blue sky. As the months and years roll by the shards of glass become more rounded and soft like the sea glass I used to collect at the beach when I was small.  Those beautiful treasures from a North Carolina vacation lined my childhood bedroom window and when the light shined on them they lit up my whole room with wondrous color and magic.  Some days sobriety feels like the memory of my childhood sea glass collection on a bright sunny day and sometimes the treasures are just cold dark stones sitting on a dusty windowsill waiting for a break in the clouds.

Waiting for Eric to get off the phone I need to sit down I feel so weak. I have been sick it seems since the day I got sober!  Never before have I been sick in my life, well except of course for the very deadly disease of alcoholism.  I never even had a cavity until I was in my late 30’s.  Since I’ve been sober my ailments consist of and are hopefully limited to; a condition called Adenomyosis which is a medical condition characterized by the presence of ectopic glandular tissue found in muscle….blah, blah, blah it causes INTENSE pain and almost constant periods resulting in sever anemia.  I battled that disease for months.  I tried acupuncture, herbs, vitamins, prayer and voodoo.  Nothing worked.  I had such a hard time letting go of my uterus, the womb that so flawlessly and lovingly housed each of my babies.  Being pregnant and giving birth seems like the only perfect thing I’ve ever done. That organ was sort of my identity and my power but I was too sick to hold onto it and had to let it go.  While healing from that surgery I suffered a sudden and serious tooth abscess.  During that recovery I contracted Lyme disease and have been struggling with that, in and out of hospitals and chronic debilitating pain ever since.  When I mention the fact that I was never sick before I stopped drinking my oldest son said “Well of course not Mom.  Pouring all that antifreeze into your system day after day year after year, what germ or bacteria could survive!”  I thought I had successfully hidden most of my drinking from my children…they always know.

Eric gets off the phone and informs me we will be interviewing yet another woman who wishes to become a house member next week. The recovery house is a piece of work that speaks to me.  Working with women on this level I find appealing.  I never did and still don’t fit into the PTA, monthly card game, soccer mom crowd.  That crowd and those things remind me of a bowl of fake fruit.  The fruit looks perfect and appealing but there’s no juice.  Working and communicating with women at this real and often raw level there is sustenance.  Bruised and blemished myself I understand and fit right in with this crowd. I can sink my teeth into this organic work and come away feeling a nourishment of soul.

While inconsistent, in terms of time spent or hours logged with my role (I cynically refer to as “Ornament”) at the recovery house when I do show up for work, I am fully present and committed to whatever “work” there is to do.  It reminds me of when I worked as a doula and a midwife’s assistant.  When attending a birth I was able to be 100% committed to giving these laboring mothers and babies all the love and knowledge I had. Helping them stay on their path reminding them of their desires while remaining unattached to the outcome. When I enter the recovery house it’s often because of a call of distress. Imagine that…a house full of women not always getting along.  I approach the house with an open loving heart but protect myself with equally loving boundaries.  I remember being very newly sober.  It’s as if someone is shining an integration spotlight in your face 24/7 after you’ve been in a dark cave or a coma for years and years.  It’s a frightening place to be, a panic similar to a drowning person trying to save themselves. If the lifeguard is not careful both the victim and the person who knows how to swim will drown.  I have been “swimming” a bit longer than most of the women at the house but am not close to having my lifeguard certificate.  Again, like attending births, I was not a doctor, midwife or even a nurse, I have simply been there and know the labor pains are temporary, not only are they temporary but when I allowed myself to surrender to them, allowed myself to go right where the pain was, face it and stop trying to hold it all in my throat it no longer hurt and the door, my cervix in this case, would open up a little more becoming ever more ready to give birth.  In between those contractions there is a resting period.  My birthing clients, much like the recovery house women, would take this time that they could be resting to worry about the next contraction-the next court date or unpleasant interaction with a difficult house member.  “Shhhh,” I would comfort the laboring mom.  “You are done for now.  There is nothing, absolutely nothing you need to do at this moment but rest.”  Some of these moms would actually sleep albeit only two or three minutes but those are the moms who continued to open with little trouble and usually no need for intervention as opposed to the moms who for whatever reasons would not let themselves rest.  Worry and fear lead to exhaustion, exhaustion often lead to complications and interventions but in the end in both cases a beautiful baby was born.  Some of us choose a longer more difficult path.  Of course this is a simplified metaphor, labor and birth like life, can be full of unforeseen obstacles that we have no control over whatsoever.  One of my most important roles while attending births and while working at the recovery house is listening.

Abby lived at the recovery house for a short time. It was late spring when she came to interview to become a house member.  We were all assembled on the back porch, the cigarette smoke hung like a low heavy cloud under the roof of the porch.  Abby was a thin wiry woman with gleaming black skin.  “Yes, Suh, Yes Ma’am.” Abby would say to me Eric and everyone else who spoke to her. 

“Abby, there’s no need for formalities here.  You are interviewing to become part of a family not for a professional position.” We told her.

Abby was accepted into the house.  There was a sweetness of spirit about her, a naive quality that made her very loveable, at least to us.  But as I suspected Abby was difficult to live with.  She not only suffered from substance abuse but was duly diagnosed with a psychiatric condition.  This condition, even though she was under a doctors care and was medicated, made Abby’s behavior beyond hyper.  She would be up at all hours of the night and display odd behavior that made the other house members suspect her of using.  I was called to come to the house one evening to pee test Abby for drugs. 

“Abby I need to come into the bathroom with you Okay?  You don’t need to be shy around me…” I began to reassure her but before I could finish my sentence to sit on the toilet Abby threw her night gown up in an exaggerated movement. Her night gown flew over her head and her thin naked black body was completely exposed.  She did not look like a woman my age, mid forties, which she was but like an eleven or twelve year old girl, so thin with only little budding nipples, no real breasts.  The pee test is for drugs.  To test for alcohol there is a swab that goes under the tongue.  I asked Abby to open her mouth and I held the swab for her for ten seconds, the recommended time.  In those ten seconds I studied Abby’s face, which also reminded me of a small child.  Her beautiful skin was shinny and flawless her eyes wandered around the room, her mind obviously in another world acting like five year olds do when you take their temperature. 

“You’re clean Abby.” I said

“I know.” She said without seeming offended.

“Can we talk?”  I asked

“Yes, ma’am.”

Up in Abby’s room she invited me to sit on the bed.  I explained how her behavior was causing concern in the house.  She listened then hopped up to show me pictures of her family.

“This one is of me when I was a kid.  There’s my ma, well not my real ma but my foster ma.” She explained “Haha” she laughed “Look at me in that dress, I was so skinny!”  Yes she was even skinner than she is now “These are some of my foster brothers. That one was nice to me. That one hurt me.” She put the pictures down and sat on the bed.  Abby was up and down fiddling with this nibbling at that, looking all around the room while we talked.  It just seemed impossible for her to sit still.  I could see why the women were having trouble living with such a constant and unpredictable current in the house. 

“That foster brother who hurt me..” she began.  “He rapped me and I got pregnant.  I was only 15 years old.”  I listened.

Abby told me the story of the pregnancy and how no one believed her about who the father was.  She told me how she lived through all that retaining her sanity because at least she would have a baby to love and take care of.  I understood that.  I understood the absolute unconditional love a mother can feel for her baby inside and outside of her body. Abby seemed to find the same strength and power of that love within her and apply it to that baby. 

“When my baby was born there was something wrong with how she was put together.  She had an esophageal fistula plus a heart condition..ano, no tettril…no…hydro…” Abby struggled to remember the term for the condition.  “I can’t remember what its called” she said “but they fixed the eating problem. “They couldn’t fix the other problem. She lived for a year.  One night I got a call from the hospital where she was at. ‘Come quick Abby’ they told me.  I got a ride to the hospital and they put her in my arms.  I held her for four hours.  Her breathing became raspy like but I just held her.  Then she died.  I kept holding her until she was cold. After she died…”Abby said looking at me deeply. “I snapped, you know went crazy. Later I started seeing the psychiatrist and he put me on all this medication.”

Abby told me all of this without showing any emotion, like it was a fictional story from a bad movie she had seen years ago.  Her emotions did not outwardly change but her behavior did.  It took Abby an hour to tell me the whole story and the more she talked the calmer she became.  She stopped fidgeting and her eyes were fixed on mine as she talked.  When she was finished we both sat there in silence for probably five minutes.  The river of white water rapids and dangerous currents that was normally Abby’s personality had found its way to a deep still place, currents moving underneath but the surface so still it was like glass.

I don’t feel like an ornament when I’m with Abby, I feel like a sister.  I only feel like an ornament when I’m dealing with Eric, trying to understand his language coming from the other side of that bridge. I have my own language and will cross that bridge in my own time.  Like labor and storms all I can do is rest (or worry) in between each contraction, each watery gust of wind.  Abby moved on from our house to a place where there is more hands on professional help for her.  I miss her sweet funny personality.  I will forever remember Abby, desperate for cigarettes the night after our talk. I took her to the nearby gas station. I parked the car, planning to go in to the store for her as she was dressed in her night gown.  But the wild white rapids had surfaced again for Abby and before I could unbuckle my seat-belt she was out the door.  Running across the parking lot in her pink fuzzy slippers that matched the pink fuzzy curlers in her hair.  Her bathrobe three times too big for her cinched around her tiny waist and dragging on the ground.  Seeing this funny little woman run across the parking lot in her bathrobe and slippers no one, not knowing her would guess the deep love and loss she suffered and the deep love she still has to give.  This recovery house, whether I am ornament, sister or business partner, continues to remind me deep down in every one of us is a story of joy and pain of love and loss we are all alike at the core.  Even those soccer moms have a story. When the water is still enough and if we listen we can see through the surface, we can hear the story.