Tonight I hung out with my oldest friend. She and I have known one another longer than we haven’t and we’ve been through all sorts of struggles and issues together. Somewhere in the middle of our conversations about marriage, sports, hot guys, flirting, guys who flirt with us and are not hot, and public displays of affection with the respective husbands, she mentioned that I was just now becoming somewhat normal again. As a woman who pretty much analyzes everything I say and do (although always after the fact so that when I screw up it’s too late to rectify), I agreed that I have been a bit crazy lately and am finally feeling more grounded.
My progression largely is the result of suddenly living alone after my husband deployed to Iraq. I cannot overstate the overwhelming effect it has on your life when your partner is suddenly gone for a year. Add to that the additional difficulties of moving to a new city and being unemployed and life is bound to get a bit unpredictable. Unlike my friend, my husband, and pretty much everyone I know, I reacted . . . well, let’s just say I responded to the drastic alteration of my circumstances in a fairly dramatic way.
The first three months I spend drunk. This is more difficult that it may seem on the surface. I have an admittedly low tolerance for drink. This is made especially unexpected when you consider my alcoholic roots on the Esterline side and my fervent adoration of Ernest Hemingway. I have been trying to increase my alcohol tolerance for years, to no avail. So while getting drunk is actually quite easy, staying drunk is tricky because how do you maintain a drunken state when you’re pretty much done after four of anything? This was my challenge and I learned to navigate around it by drinking until drunk and then switching to food and water, before once again swinging back around to alcohol. It’s all in the timing really, and for about the first three months it kept me busy.
That’s when I entered the stage I refer to as my “Fuck You” phase. For about the next three months I let myself indulge in self-pity at being alone, anger at being alone, sadness at being alone, and finally reckless self indulgence at being alone. It was not exactly conducive to being an adult, married, responsible or smart. In this phase I pretty much decided I could do whatever I wanted because my husband left me for Iraq, I was lonely and angry and in a huge bitch phase that made me somewhat intolerable to be around. I was entitled to spend all of our money on clothes or new pillows or even socks for that matter, because I was feeling abandoned and angry and was therefore entitled to do anything I felt like doing. Luckily this phase was not combined with the drunken phase or else things could have gotten much, much worse.
The next step in the Ame evolution was redemption and a little self-loathing. At this stage of the game, I realized I was selfish and self-destructive and neither my friends nor my husband deserved to have to deal with my behavior. This is the point at which I began an interestingly versatile routine of carelessness, self-doubt, drunkenness, piousness, and belligerence. It was not the most fun stage of my evolution, but it was the least boring. Most days I’d vacillate between feeling sorry for my husband for having to put up with me and then deciding to go out, drink, flirt and not get a job because I deserved happiness and freedom since the only reason I was in a new town was because I’d moved with his job. Logic and reason in the traditional sense are not so much my friends, but I do have a special brand of Ame logic that allows me to make sense of all of my craziness.
These days, I am in a pretty chill zone. Jeff is set to return in less then three months. I am working out every day. I am realizing that while I am flawed, I’m not evil. Life is . . . well, life is unpredictable enough, I don’t need to add to it. I just want to be worthy of the life I’ve built for myself. If I gain five pounds I’m not freaking out. True, my waistband is cutting into my stomach rolls, but on the plus side, my tits are ginormous. Back on the negative, is the fact that no one is around to enjoy them. Still, I try to take pleasure in just being me, and having a man I love, a cat that is crazy but sweet, and a friend that will tell me when I’m out of control. It has not been a great or perfect year, but it’s been a learning a experience and an opportunity to rediscover who I am on my own while I’m still married. Without these last nine months, I might be getting lost in the identity of a wife, instead of rediscovering me. I like this phase best, because I’m not worried about it or analyzing it, I’m just learning to be.
Nicely said! You go, girly!
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