Escape: I know what it all looks like.

So, at bedtime last night, my husband offered to give me a back rub. It had been a particularly long, and difficult day. When he finished up, he told me he hoped that the day had at least ended better than it had begun.

It did.

May and June aren't great months in the Blanchard house. Just about a week ago, we marked the second anniversary of the tornado that cut a path through Jeph's home town--this year, just on the heels of a similar tornado cutting through a town in Oklahoma. Yesterday, I quietly, but tearfully marked the anniversary of the day we found out we would be parents. I'm still a little weepy today. This weekend, we will mark the anniversary of Jeph going into the hospital with a pulmonary embolism; and in a couple more weeks, the beginning of the crazy roller coaster ride that became my miscarriage.

It's a lot. Last August, I had the opportunity to take a survey about life stress. I think I ticked off most of the life events that can wreak havoc with your stress load. I decided yesterday that time isn't kind. The days you most want to forget always seem to find you again anyway.

Super handsome

And I know I'm not the only one marking these things. Of course, Jeph is too, in his own ways. He'll be embarrassed that I mention this, but lately, he's been worried about his hair. He thinks it's thinning. I disagree. My husband has never looked better, and I have never loved him more. But that's an argument unto itself. He came home from getting it cut last night, and said he mentioned this concern. His stylist asked him about stress, and after Jeph listed all the things that are swirling around for him--for us--his stylist wasn't at all surprised about his concerns--valid or not.

We all deal with hard times and stress in different ways. It's true that some are negative and some are positive. Many are somewhere in between.

I find myself feeling very needy--sometimes like a bottomless pit. I've allowed myself to worry less about how healthy I'm eating--or how much. I fixate on silly things. I look for ways to escape. Sometimes, all of that gets me in trouble. I, like George W. Bush, become "the decider" about things. Luckily, for the rest of the world, none of the wild hairs I get land me at war with a foreign country.

It could be worse.

I think we all have moments when we see that someone else is going through something horrible, and we don't feel we have the right to be feeling as badly about something in our own lives as we do. I know that I feel that way a lot. I also know I have made it through some really tough things in life and I have so many things for which I am so grateful.

My husband is forever telling me how strong I am. Sometimes, that doesn't help. If I sit and think about surviving a childhood embroiled in domestic violence, psychological and sexual abuse, I kind of feel the expectation from the world at large that I should be able to get through anything. It doesn't make sense that I can't cope with the last year. It doesn't make sense that I find myself constantly trying to fill a hole with things that can't possibly fit that hole's shape.

But that's what many of us do. Mostly because whatever tragedy we survived by the skin of our teeth was exactly that--by the skin of our teeth. It wasn't because we knew how, or because we did it the "right" way. We just managed, and somehow, even into middle adulthood, we haven't necessarily learned better methods through osmosis.

Sometimes, I would argue, in the midst of feeling lost in the dark, whatever way you find to catch a glimpse of the light--even if only from time to time, is a "right" way. But sometimes, I think I feel that way because I just get tired of the expectation of getting it right.

And so, I run. And so, I stumble.

Sometimes you feel you could slip through the cracks.

I tend not to be able to sit with the quiet aftermath of things. I need to be on the go. Last fall, that need took us to Ireland for nine days. It stemmed from a deeply seated need to escape from everything I needed to disconnect from, to everything I needed to reconnect to--for however brief that time would be. At least one friend of mine follows a similar pattern, or coping style. I couldn't return to Ireland with her this spring, so, I find myself escaping to little things at every turn I can. I'm leap-frogging from one moment to the next.

I'm not calling it sane. I'm just calling it what it is. Today, I ran on the treadmill for a little over a half hour. While I was running, I could "get away" from the ever looming "it." As soon as I stopped, I felt the lump and the tears reforming again. When I think of how cruel all those days seemed before, and I know that they are all returning, I don't want to see them. I want to be someplace else.

The reality is, I did survive a horrible childhood, and I overcame a lot. Right or wrong, how the real world works or not, I thought all that turmoil was done. It may not make sense in print, but I think many of us who "get through" whatever it is we get through, end up believing that it must be all down hill from there. I know I did. I didn't have a long recovery phase of therapy after all of that. There wasn't a transition from terrible to potentially wonderful, and I didn't even think I needed it. I was just ready to live my life. It never occurred to me that I hadn't already gotten through the "worst of it." There were so many times I thought we would all die, just being alive and free was good enough.

It's not all bad.

I am by most people's definitions very successful. I have a great husband, a fantastic dog, a job and a roof over my head. I get to do many amazing things. But no matter how great everything looks from the outside, only a very few people know what it feels like from the inside to have marked any of these days.

Marking another escape.

People wander in and out of our lives at the hard times. Good friends offer their shoulders when the wounds are fresh. But many times, we are left alone to face the recurrence of those days, and the sense of loss that seldom wanes. I know, logically, that I can't escape from any of it. But until I figure out how to get to the light some other way, I am probably going to keep limping along.

And my escape is going to look, to the outside world, like an amazingly raucous time.

Artificial Nocturne--Metric

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