The Last Decade: 2000

As I look back on my life over the past decade, I don’t recognize the woman I was 10 years ago: scared, unconscious, trapped. The past decade contained a series of events and mini-awakenings that have led me here. I know I am not fully conscious … yet. But unlike 10 years ago, I can imagine the fulfilled, happy, awakened woman I will be at the turn of the next decade. In an exercise that is almost purely selfish, in the next several posts I’ll be taking a snapshot-heavy look back and where I was each year during the past 10 years, and what my major achievements and losses were. It’s the losses, I believe, that move us forward the most.

2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004-1, 2004-2, 2004-3, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009

2000: Breedfest 2000, freelancing, the affair, making Lauren

Winter

I spent New Year’s Eve 1999 on call for the media for my PR job at a hospital. While all of my friends were partying like it was 1999 (because it was), I sat on my couch, grumpy and alone, waiting for the Y2k bug to destroy the world. I got an all-clear call at 1 am, meaning now I could travel more than 20 minutes from the hospital and drink. I went to bed instead, and unhappily listened to my husband’s story of the party-to-end-all-parties the next morning. It was the beginning of the end of my tolerance for that job.

I went off birth control in January with the hopes that trying to get pregnant would rekindle the sexual spark in my marriage. We did wind up having sex a lot more often, but the mechanical, honey-come-home-I’m-ovulating trysts were unsatisfying enough that we called it Breedfest 2000. I went from being relieved to get my period to despair over that first smear of blood.

Spring

I experienced the girls trip of a lifetime to Chicago with four high school friends, during which I started drinking at 10 am on Saturday and found myself watching the sun come up from another bar–the first and only time I’ve ever drank for almost 24 hours straight. It was a legendary experience that we still laugh about to this day–especially about Big Pete and his emerald-encrusted pinkie ring.

My husband and I finished our complete kitchen gut-and-remodel, yet another project we did well together. We took the golden retrievers to the dog park, laughed at our cat, Hangar, who made friends with all the neighbors including a huge black Newfoundland who previously ate cats. I charted my temperature and checked for other signs of ovulation. I turned 31. I continued with my poetry classes–my one expression of love for the world, of myself. My one place of honesty.

Summer

In May, my husband finished his master’s degree and by mid-summer had scored a high five-figure job that doubled his income. In August, I quit my job to start my freelance writing business and start working on my novel and poetry. My husband was unsupportive, equating my desire to be a writer for a living with his desire to be a professional fly fisherman. I quickly stuffed the creative writing projects into drawers and focused on making money.

It took me six weeks to decompress from my toxic job. I started walking every morning, working out with a weight machine we’d bought off an infomercial. I lost about 10 pounds, bought some new lingerie. But not for my husband. Because I had reconnected with my college fiance, Dan, still hopelessly in love with him. We had lunch. We talked on the phone, texted before texting was cool. Emails were long and heartfelt. He bought me a Mont Blanc pen to encourage my writing. We went to a movie, made out in the back row, but didn’t sleep together.

Fall

My grandfather died on Sept. 1 after three years of heartbreak-related illnesses following the death of his One True Love, Vera Mae, in August 1997. I wrote a poem about his growing dementia that eventually won a statewide poetry award.  I wrote another poem, never refined, about that day in the hospital, smelling my grandmother as her spirit entered the room to take him away.

The next week, I lost my best friend Suzanne over the scandal during a trip to visit her, and Napa, with my husband in September. She always had a thing for him, I know, and she told me that if I didn’t tell him, she would. At that point, Labor Day, I hadn’t slept with Dan. I had just rekindled something that had never died for either of us. There was nothing to tell. Yet.

I had my first root canal and crown, which crumbled in my mouth as I ate steamed mussels along the Northern California coast with soon-to-be-ex best friend and husband on Labor Day. All of those dreams I had of my teeth crumbling in my mouth? Nothing like the real thing, but equally as symbolic. The beginning of the crumbling.

September, and still not pregnant. Recklessly, and just once, I met Dan at an East Colfax motel. It was funny, we thought. The sex wasn’t as good as I remembered, and it was bittersweet, there upon the ratty bedspread on a bed that vibrated when you put quarters into it. I asked him to leave his wife. He told me he couldn’t because she was pregnant again. I told him I never thought I’d have children with anyone except him. He told me it would never happen. He crushed me, again. Again.

I paid $450 to initiate the search for my birthmother. A psychic told me a few months earlier that I had made a pact with myself at a cellular level that I would not have a child until I knew where I came from. I did some tests that told me my luteal cycle was all but absent, which I then tried to fix using acupuncture. No luteal cycle = no pregnancy.

At the beginning of October, guilt consumed me and I wrote my husband a letter, left it for him to find as I went out for dinner with my sister. I partially confessed my affair under threat of exposure from my now-ex best friend. That was Friday. He left, went to his sister’s–a theme for the coming several years. The next day, we were in a wedding together, and wound up having goodbye sex at the reception. A few days later, he came back. Then I discovered the goal we’d been working toward for 10 months had been achieved. I was pregnant.

On Thanksgiving Day, my dad’s mom died from breast cancer 30+ years after she’d had a double mastectomy. It was the last time I saw my grandfather, who had become almost completely incapacitated by stroke after stroke, alive and smiling and joking.

I applied to and was accepted at three of five Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing programs. I took my first solo trip to St. Louis on a college-scouting excursion, learning that the students in the Washington University MFA program were paying upwards of $40k for a degree and coveted the exact job I already had. I also learned that my plan for teaching college creative writing would lead me to a vagabond life, seeking a permanent tenured home at $25k a year. Not quite what I pictured for my family. I tried to forget Dan.

I traveled to New York for the first time on a similar trip and stayed at the Chelsea Hotel for five days, exploring the amazing city the week before Christmas. I had planned to meet Dan there. Instead, my husband joined me. We always did travel well together, but on this trip, there was a sad silence between us, knowing, I think, that it was over but both stubbornly refusing to admit it.

I was in such turmoil: should I go to grad school and move my family across the country? Should I give up and find a real job? How could I recover from the continued heartbreak over Dan? How could I survive two more decades in a loveless marriage, for the sake of the child?