(Alternately titled Goldilocks and the 3 Husbands because it's funny.)
Someone sent me an email recently asking me what my deal is. That was it. One line. What's your deal?
If that wasn't a rude demand for something for nothing I don't know what is.
And then it occurred to me that I've removed all of the archives that would have led readers back to oh, 2004. Even though nothing much happened until 2006. That was the year I think the world as I know it exploded.
Here's a really truncated look back because I can barely do this but it's been demanded of me and who am I to ignore a direct command, ever? To match, it's staccato, and just as rude. There will be no poetry today.
In April of 2006, I left my husband, Cole. We had been married for 12 years. We had two small kids, Ruth, who was 6 at the time, and Henry, who was 4. Cole was sexually abusive. I was submissive and already incredibly fragile.
I left Cole for Jacob, one of Cole's best friends, one of mine, too. Jacob and I had fought our feelings for years. Maybe I was never one to play very fairly. I tried hard to be a good wife, though. The separation began amicably enough but stopped the night Cole broke into the house when I was there alone and hurt me. He broke a lot of bones, I'm five feet tall and 95 pounds, fighting back was a fool's game. Jacob saved my life that night like he had several times before and Cole went to jail. Two months later Cole suffered a massive heart attack and died. He was 37. We were not yet divorced.
That was when something in my head broke and I was never the same again.
This was also when I learned to stop waiting.
In August, Jacob took me for a hot air balloon ride. He proposed. I said yes. We were married two days later in his church. He was a Unitarian Christian minister. Someone else performed the ceremony. In September we got pregnant and in October we learned that the pregnancy was ectopic. My head got a lot worse after that, but so did Jacob's and we struggled mightily through the next full year trying to stay afloat. He was trying to fix everything and I kept trying to break it, too busy to notice things that were going on around me. Trying to keep normal going when normal had packed up and moved away.
We tried to embark on the romance of the century and you got to go along for that ride and that's one of the reasons I have taken off those entries. It hurts, you will never understand how much it hurts.
In October of 2007, Jacob left me. Left us. Just up and said he was already gone. That he wasn't a good person, that he needed to leave. I broke a little more. The resiliency of this one little human must be positively outstanding. I foundered around numb for a week and then on Jacob's birthday, my friends came and told me that he was dead, having taken his own life the night before, leaving behind some incredibly detailed instructions, provided to ensure that I would understand exactly what had happened to him and to us. Sometimes, to this day, I do understand and sometimes I don't get it at all.
This was when my head went on vacation completely. I did a lot of very self-destructive things and then I went away to a lovely place where they fix heads like mine. I came home weeks later, too soon, incapable of being any better off but loathe to abandon my children the way that Jacob had abandoned us. I continued to be self-destructive for a long time after coming home. Honestly I still am sometimes.
The winter I came home when Ben began to show me who he really was. I liked that person. And Bridget doesn't wait anymore. There is no point.
Honestly, I knew what he felt for me. Those of you who have read here for years have witnessed almost first hand our comment wars online and real-life difficulties we've both written about extensively but we've never had a dealbreaker, he's my boomerang boy. He always came back. Ben has an unconventional job that I don't talk about much and he may or may not be on the road or in the studio for a good three-quarters of most years but if you ask me I will tell you he's a door-to-door tattoo machine salesman. Hell, we have enough tattoos between us to make a stab at the truth with that one. He is none of your business in that respect so don't ask me what our last name is or if he's famous because that is the only time you will ever catch me in a lie anymore. I'm fine with that.
So I stopped playing and started looking at him a lot different in January of 2008 and by April we were married and oh, here she goes just like Elizabeth Taylor but really, Ben and I bicker just enough to pass for normal, married people and so far so good. He went to rehab this past winter and is currently celebrating seventy-nine days sober. He's been through more than I have, but that's for another day, again. I'm just trying to get through this.
When I'm not sharing too much information with the readers who wander in and out and number in the thousands now (thank you for the daily collection of outraged emails) I write short stories and novels too and I look after my friends and my two not-so-little kids (Ruth will be 10 this summer, Henry will be 8 and yes, they were named for candy bars but it could have been worse if I liked Kit-Kats and 3 Musketeers) and I cook dinner for a crowd every night. Friends that I write about include Lochlan, PJ, Christian, August, Joel, Sam, Duncan, Andrew, Daniel, Schuyler, Dalton, Dylan, Corey, Robin, Mark, Caleb and Chris. Some are awesome, some are evil. Who is which depends on the day. Some are very reluctant to be written about. Others, not so much. Some come and go. Others never budge. I am lucky to have them and lucky they love us so much.
I like to snowboard and climb rocks (very low rocks because I'm afraid of heights) and slow-dance and lap-dance and eat cake and cotton candy and draw cartoons and make up words and listen to music and play music on my violin and my piano.
I read music lyrics like other people read the newspaper because I have a degenerative hearing loss that someday not so far off in my future will leave me with only the music in my head and I'll be damned if I'm going to forget the words when the time comes.
That's my deal, in a nutshell. What's yours?
