Today I Told DB

Today I finally talked to DB and I think I can finally lay the issue to rest. Each one of the friends that you brought into my life, the ones I feared I had lost in losing you, know my truth. It is enough. I did not ask any of them to pick between us. I know the heart is large enough to love us both. Yet to be honest, to be real in my relationships with them, I couldn't pretend that this great gaping hole wasn't blown out of my life history. Whatever happens to those relationships from here forward is no longer about you. It is about me. It is about my relationship with that person outside the context of you.

So much of my adult life was in the context of you. Too much of it. I didn't see that until you were gone and I finally saw how enmeshed we had been. Learning to live in this new reality hasn't been a smooth process and it has taken me nearly two years to finally gather the courage and make the decision to speak my truth to DB. He apologized to me on your behalf. How sad is that? He filled in a few gaps for me. There is a girl. I hope and pray she is the one and that the two of you are beautifully happy together. I hope you have the courage to be honest with her about where you have fallen and the places you are weak so that she can help you up and help you to be strong. I wish you joy. Despite everything. I wish you joy.

Life Interrupted

I started back writing in this blog a bit last March with the intent of making doing so a regular thing but life got rather dramatically interrupted shortly after that post and remains so to this day. We are among the many victims of the May floods of 2010 that hit much of Tennessee. I am sitting on the landing between the living room and the dining room, both remain emptied of furniture and stripped to the bare concrete/asbestos tile floors. The living room is virtually empty. A vacuum cleaner, a broom, a fan and a work light are the only items there. The dining room is less organized. A blanket covered in kitchen items to be kept and another covered in kitchen items to be donated, a drying rack where several pieces of delicate laundry are drying, a step stool that acts as the desk for my notebook computer, a tv tray where I cook much of our food, a large trash can and the various blinking electronic devices that connect me still to the internet world. It is like living in a really poorly equipped college dormitory. At least we are back home. It was three weeks before I could be inside the house at all due to the dampness and the mold. It was another three weeks before the last of the soggy, damaged parquet hardwood gave up its hold on the concrete sub-floors and was finally removed from the house. Four weeks of air-conditioner problems in one of the hottest Memphis summers in decades kept us out at the last. After that was resolved there was nothing that would keep us from moving back home.

I understand now the doggedness of the survivors of Katrina. The seemingly irrational drive to save what to someone on the outside looking in would seem much wiser to simply walk away from. This is HOME. This is the house where our daughter was conceived and to which we brought her home from the hospital. It is the only home she has ever known. This is the house where a dozen church kids looked beyond the mess and disorder and saw welcome anyway. This is the house that we invested our own blood, sweat and tears in when we moved in, still newlyweds, 16 and a half years ago. This is the home we never intended to make our forever home but that somehow became that while we were busy building our lives. So even though the loans we are taking to put it back together will result in us being hopelessly upside down, walking away and letting the bank take her isn't an option. It just isn't.

Life has been interrupted for sure but we will find our way somehow back home.