Waking Up

Earlier this week it dawned on me that tomorrow is the 9th anniversary of the day I abruptly woke up. While it's not a day I've celebrated in the past, I think the time to do so has arrived. I've decided to start by sharing an excerpt from the book I'm working on. Thanks in advance for being my first readers!

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There I was in Stepford, in the beautiful neo-colonial with the two-car garage and the manicured postage stamp of a yard, with the husband and the two children, one of each, both academic and extracurricular dynamos, and the two dogs. I was marinating in a privilege of which I was wholly unaware. Turns out, I wasn’t aware of much, because, as with most sleepwalkers, I might dimly recall the odd action or emotion, but I had no clue I was asleep.

And boy, was I enjoying it. I just kept pressing that metaphorical snooze button. If I stayed asleep, I didn’t have to see the serious fault lines that had formed in my marriage, or that I was the only one rowing, or that we were all so disconnected. From the outside it looked so perfect. Who was I to say it wasn’t?

Although I prided myself on being intuitive and had even had a few premonitions over the years, the day I woke up, an unforgettably gorgeous Indian summer Tuesday, I did not see even a glimmer of our personal Armageddon on the horizon. It started out identically to all the others. Before dawn I’d slipped into my uniform of jeans, a t-shirt, and sneakers, and began my rounds: feeding and exercising our two incorrigible hounds, watering my container garden on the deck that had become my refuge, planning the day for our family of four. By early afternoon I’d walked five miles, taken several calls from my daughter’s school and her doctors to discuss her mystery illness, tidied the house, brainstormed with my son about alternatives to college, started dinner preparations, and finally sat down to squeeze in a couple of hours of my paid work cataloging rare books for a local monastery. A few minutes later, the bottom had fallen out.

While my husband subsequently recalled “a bad mood” and “a little yelling” as a "result" of my being “nasty and domineering”, the totally unprovoked, physically threatening, verbally venomous attack is seared in my memory. As is the distinct voice I heard after the shouting had stopped, the door had slammed, and my adrenaline surge had receded enough that I was no longer deafened by my racing heartbeat.

Honey, you are running out of time. Wake the fuck up.

So just like the amnesiac in an old B movie who hits her head and is instantly returned to reality, I did. I saw that the vicious cycle we’d been trapped in was never going to change. That there might be periods of calm, but the trend was increasingly downward, and the storms were increasingly frequent and severe. I could do more and be more and sacrifice more, as I’d been doing for years, and it would never be enough. There’d be more lofty words and broken promises, but my husband was never going to be a real partner, a co-parent, or even a reasonable roommate. His contempt would be waiting for me around every corner. His negativity would continue to drag all of us down. And his paranoia and superiority would preclude us from getting help.

Conventional wisdom holds that, in order to avoid trauma, a sleepwalker should not be awakened abruptly. Of course, waking up to a bad dream is not the same as waking up from a bad dream. But I imagine the terror and disorientation are similar. I was fifty-seven, shit scared, and mystified. Which wrong turn deposited me here, and how would I find the maze’s exit?

Waking up that day felt like an ending but of course it was just the beginning. Once I determined that the marriage was not salvageable, that I could not allow my daughter to witness such treatment or my son to imagine it was okay, I began what I thought would be a finite process of disentanglement. But soon I had to wake up to the fact that my husband had never had anybody’s best interests at heart: to him it was a game which he would destroy me and his children and even his better self to win. Which means I eventually also had to wake up to the fact that I had spent twenty-five years as little more than a convenience, one that was ultimately easily discarded. And when I woke up to the fact that accepting crumbs for so long meant I must have some sort of problem (or as my cruel inner voice put it, what the fuck is WRONG with you?), I began the long, excruciatingly painful process of waking up to the severity and longstanding nature of the problem, which had its roots in unresolved childhood trauma.

For a long time, I saw that watershed day as the rudest of awakenings. As the day that, although long overdue, shattered our lives irretrievably. I now see it as not only the first in a series of awakenings, but as a precious gift, as it was the first wobbly step on the path to healing and growth; to my freedom, to the life I am so euphorically grateful for today.

An equally priceless gift derived from this whole enterprise is that, as I recovered, I stopped pressing the snooze button. I became ready to embrace the real world and all of its vagaries. It took a while, and lots of practice, but somewhere along the way, I learned to stay awake, no matter what.