The Last Decade: 2003

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

2003: The beginning of the end

January

Duncan had his final chemo treatment in the middle of the month, and we crossed our fingers that he would remain healthy for a couple of years. The vets and techs said they’d miss him. He was such a funny dog, very headstrong, always laughing unless he was bothering you to throw a tennis ball. They didn’t kennel him while he was at the cancer clinic for the day, instead letting him become an unofficial office mascot. They quickly learned that any food was fair game; a tech lost her sandwich in a split second when she turned her back on it … and on Duncan. Despite losing all the long feathery fur on his butt and legs, he was still a gorgeous specimen, as he had been bred to be.  A week or so after his final treatment, he was as vigorous as our other five-year-old golden, Sunny, and back to terrorizing the squirrels in the backyard.

My husband and I decided to do the Atkins Diet. Of course, being a guy, he lost 30 pounds during the induction period, while I lost 12. I was still at my heaviest non-pregnant weight: 193 pounds. My body, which just a decade before had strutted in a size 4 swimsuit across the Miss Colorado stage, was a size 16. I was disgusted with myself.

February

In February, we traveled to Brownsville, Texas, to spend time with my husband’s father. Lauren must have sensed that her grandpa is an unpleasant person, because she did not want to go. She’d flown just fine before on a couple of occasions, but on the connecting flight between Houston and Brownsville, we were that family with the kid who screamed. The whole time. We tried knocking her out with Benadryl to no avail. When we got to my in-laws house, we were appalled that they had done zero babyproofing: A loaded shotgun was tucked in the corner next to the front door, for example. Loaded. Lauren cried and cried, and her grandfather was a total jerk about it. We stayed for three days (about 70 hours too long), getting to know his two parrots, touring the factory he runs in Mexico, going to the beach on Mustang Island and watching the para-surfers. Our daughter was peaceful on the flights home.

March

In March, Duncan was acting tired again, and the telltale lumps were back in his neck. We took him to the vet cancer clinic, and they confirmed his lymphoma had recurred. Already almost $8,000 in debt for his first round of treatment, and knowing there weren’t many other treatments available for a second round, we decided not to treat him again. The decision broke our hearts.

Lauren discovered the joy of dress up, digging into my nightgowns and T-shirts and putting on my shoes. Her binky and Clover, the teddy bear that Santa brought at her first Christmas in 2001, were her constant companions. Her hair grew longer, and she loved me putting her hair in “pony hair”–two sticky-up pigtails on top of her head. She ran and climbed and loved being pushed high on the swing and sliding down the tallest slides she could find. As a baby, she loved being tossed into the air, almost touching the ceiling, and falling into her dad’s arms. We loved her daredevil spirit. She was talking well, and I came into my own more as a mother because I could figure out what she wanted. She went from baby to toddler in the blink of an eye.

I lost another five pounds or so doing Atkins, and then quit when the pounds stopped coming off at all. I still hated my body. I joined a gym, but my husband whined when I went. He didn’t like me to have any kind of life outside of him. When we’d do social things, he pouted most of the time because the outings were mostly with my friends, not his. Because he didn’t have any to speak of outside of his brother-in-law.

Toward the end of the month, Denver got hit by a record blizzard. We were snowed in for three days. I measured 39 inches of snow in our backyard. Once we were dug out, we took Lauren sledding for the first time. I remember feeling very frustrated at my husband as I snapped pictures of him sliding down a small hill with our daughter. This is what we should have been doing: wrapping up in ski clothes and tramping up and down a snowy hill, making memories. I didn’t know what I wanted, but it wasn’t this, with him.

April

My mother was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis when she was 34, just after she gave birth to my sister. I noticed at Easter that she looked pale, almost gray.  She helped Lauren decorate Easter eggs, and Lauren worried about Grammy’s crooked fingers. She was almost 2, old enough to start noticing the details of the world around her.

I continued with my scrapbooking and reading, delving further into study of Black Hat Feng Shui and meditation. The work allowed me to withdraw even more from my painful world. My postpartum depression–if you can call it that, almost 2 years after birth–was still visiting me like a ghost. I had bursts of anger that led me to scream at anyone in the vicinity, including Lauren. I’d almost immediately apologize, but I knew I was causing damage.

One night, my cat Tyson, who was a kitten I’d adopted with Dan in 1988, tried to sleep on my feet at the end of the bed. I was particularly angry that night, and I pushed him off the bed. It was the beginning of the end for him. He started to limp soon after, and had a hard time getting into his litter box. I took him to the vet and she was concerned he was dehydrated. I began administering a nightly IV bolus of fluids.

May

On May 5, I decided we needed a tomato for our dinner salad, backed the Jeep Grand Cherokee out of our garage and headed to the supermarket. At the intersection leaving our neighborhood, I stopped at the stop sign to pop in a Sheryl Crow CD and crank up the tunes. Did I want to go to King Soopers, or Wal-Mart? Wal-Mart was closer, to the left up Belleview then right on Chambers. King Soopers required waiting for several lights. Wal-Mart it was. I looked left, right, left again. I remember noticing a car up the street, but it seemed far enough away for me to turn.

I was wrong.

I don’t remember much of the next few days. The paramedics told me that I had turned left in front of a Toyota Camry. The driver was speeding: brake marks showed he was going about 60 in a 30. He hit me hard enough to spin my SUV one and a half times. The left  side of my head collided with the door frame. I vaguely remember being in an ambulance, being in the MRI machine, in the ER. My mom came. My husband came with Lauren. X-rays showed no broken bones and no obvious bleeds in my brain. My pelvis and left hip showed signs of being dislocated. I was prescribed vicodin and muscle relaxants and physical therapy. A cop came in and gave me a ticket for reckless driving. Apparently, even though the driver’s blood alcohol content was over the legal limit, and he was going twice the speed limit, the accident was my fault for taking his right of way. The reckless driving ticket came because both of us went to the hospital.

The next day, my chiropractor called 911 again when she noticed my left pupil was fully open in a bright room. I took another ambulance ride and spent another four hours in the ER, getting a CT and MRI of my brain. My optic nerve was swollen, but the scans showed no bleeding in my brain, thank goodness. I took a week off of work, then went back on a very modified schedule. I could not remember anything without writing it down. I struggled to find the names for common objects, like chair or door (very scary for a professional writer to be unable to access her huge vocabulary). I couldn’t sit at my desk for more than 20 minutes without needing to lie down with ice packs for 20 minutes. My office mate got used to working by the light of her desk lamp, because the overhead fluorescent lights gave me an instant migraine.  My chiropractor introduced me to a neuro-rehab doctor, and I spent the next three months visiting her and a physical therapist, trying to get my mind back.

On May 10, as I recuperated, I noticed that Duncan was acting strangely. He had a faraway look in his eyes. They had lost their happy puppy spark. I let him out in the backyard to play fetch, and when I tossed the ball, he just watched it fly and didn’t chase. This is a dog who would bark for an hour until you threw the ball for him. Something was wrong. I called my husband, who called the vet. By the time he got home, Duncan was laying on his side, panting, in the back yard and would not get up. We knew it was his last day. We arranged to take him to the vet the next morning at 10.

Then, a miracle: Duncan perked up. We took him and Sunny and Lauren to the dog park, and he played like he was renewed. He chased the ball. He played with the other dogs. The light in his eyes was back. That night, my husband slept with him on the couch; his play time exhausted him so he couldn’t climb the stairs to our bedroom, and neither of us wanted to carry all 95 pounds of him. About 6 am, I came downstairs to check on him, and he was laying in the backyard, panting hard, staring into the distance. The vet offered to come to our house. I didn’t want him to die there, in front of Lauren. Instead, we loaded him into the back of our Volvo station wagon, dropped Lauren at my mom’s, and took him to the vet. I sang You Are My Sunshine the whole way there. I said my goodbyes in the clinic room, kissing him and sobbing. His fur was so soft. He was in so much pain, groaning and whining. It was awful. But I couldn’t be there, in the room. I couldn’t watch him die. So my husband stayed with him. He said it was unforgivable of me, to make him do that alone.

Memorial Day meant a road trip for us. I found a cute cabin on a llama ranch near Colorado Springs. The trip was a disaster. Stress had always caused stomach aches for me, and the three days spent in crappy weather in an adorable cabin with a wood-burning stove triggered cramps that kept me in the fetal position. We tried our usual gin tournament, but I just wasn’t up to it.  We were grieving Duncan, our baby. I was still in crazy amounts of pain from my accident. The trip was a mistake.

June

One day, my mom couldn’t make it up the single flight of stairs in her house. She went to her doctor, saying she thought something was wrong with her heart. She wasn’t having any typical heart attack symptoms. Rather, she just had a feeling. The cardiologist found the main artery leading into her heart was 98% blocked. She was weeks–days–away from a life-ending heart attack. The doctors prescribed medicine and scheduled surgery. Before hand, I used my feng shui training to cleanse and bless her bedroom at home. I gave her healing meditations to say before and after surgery. When she was in the OR, I feng shui’ed her hospital room, putting up tiny mirrors on dagger-like extruding corners, saging the room despite a “no smoking” rule. She made it through the surgery mightily and recovered faster than doctors expected.

I turned 34. Ten days later, Lauren turned 2.

About a month before, I’d seen a boy, about 5, pull his binky out of his mouth to spout a complete sentence to his mother. I decided it was time for Lauren to lose the binky. We started telling her a story about the Binky Fairy, who came and took all of the binkies from big girls who turned 2 and gave them to little babies who needed them. In exchange, the Binky Fairy would bring her a Big Girl Toy. The day before her birthday, I helped her decorate a special Binky Box, into which we deposited all 7 of her pacifiers. Right before bedtime, we set the box on the floor beside her crib. Later that night, her dad and I moved a large plastic slide into her room and hid the Binky Box in our closet. She was thrilled when she woke up and never asked for a binky again.

We had a big party for her again, about 30 people and a key lime pie for dessert. All of her family was there. As usual, my husband cleaned the house while I prepped for the party. I asked him to take a picture of me so we could show I actually existed. He blew me off, so I set my camera on timer and took a staged, cheesy, Martha Stewart-ish photo of myself. I remember being crushed by the act of it. I felt invisible in my own life.

Summer

We took Lauren to one of those parking-lot fairs that seem to crop up like dandelions each summer, and she loved soaring in the airplanes again and again, our little daredevil. We went to the zoo, and she continued her love affair with the carousel. She, her dad and I had the water fight to end all water fights with the hose, soaking her diaper until it looked like a giant marshmallow and she stripped naked in the front yard. Her dad took one of my favorite pictures of me and her … under  pressure from me. I don’t know why he didn’t want to take pictures of me with his daughter. He just didn’t.

I decided not to fight the traffic ticket. I went to court, talked to the DA, and told him about my injuries. He felt sorry for me, especially since the driver of the other car got a ticket for drunk driving, and he knocked it down to a 4-point ticket with a fine of about $250. The car was totaled, and I bought a Volvo sedan with a curtain of airbags around every hard surface inside the car.

I was still in a world of hurt, going to the chiropractor and rehab several times a week. By late summer, my memory was starting to return, but the headaches would come out of nowhere, causing me to stumble and, on occasion, vomit. When I went in for a follow-up MRI in late August, my husband wouldn’t take me. My mom drove me instead.  I tried to talk to her about our marital problems, and she told me that marriage was a commitment, and insinuated that love never lasts so I shouldn’t expect it to. Later that night, my husband confessed he thought I was faking it, milking the accident for attention, and he didn’t want to be part of it.

Fall

Once again, I planned a family getaway to a condo in Dillon for Labor Day. We took Lauren on a short hike, and I had to stop several times on the way. I couldn’t carry her in the backpack, which pissed my husband off to no end. We hiked up to a lake, and we sat by the shore and ate mushed up peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. He and I were in our own separate worlds, barely speaking. Lauren babbled happily between us. I wonder now if she felt the tension and was trying to make the peace. The weekend was a general disaster. We fought and fought over the stupidest things–the waiter taking too long at dinner, how fast to drive in the rain. I was so grateful for the TV and the movies we’d brought along. And my book, the best escape of all.

My sister got married in late September, just a few days after my 8th wedding anniversary. I was miserable in my bridesmaid dress, which did not fit well despite full-body Spanx. Lauren was the flower girl, precious in her white dress. My husband was an absolute dick all day, grumping around, being a jerk when our daughter got gun shy about walking down the aisle by herself, refusing to smile for the camera. I was so embarrassed at his behavior.

We refinanced our house, paying off all of our credit cards and our cars, and Duncan’s medical bills by taking out equity. It’s what everyone was doing. We also took out about $5,000 of equity to put in new carpet and new kitchen countertops. When we arrived at the closing company, the loan terms were not what we expected. A huge fee would almost wipe out our remaining equity. I did not want to close, but my husband said he did not want to embarrass himself by walking. I argued it would be more embarrassing to lose almost $10,000 of our remaining equity. He won the fight, and I resented him for it.

Right before Thanksgiving, I got the flu. I was aching, sneezing, coughing, and feverish. And I was out of both kleenex and pain reliever, so I asked my husband to go to the store to get me some. He refused. I drove to the store in my pajamas and slippers to get what I needed. I felt such despair that the man I would be spending the rest of my life with hated me so fiercely that he would not run a simple errand when I was in need.

I didn’t hate him, yet. But almost. I was so sad. And yet, I moved ahead with planning a January week-long trip to a beach house in Georgia, hoping for a little bit of sun in the darkest time of my year. My depression was crushing. My marriage was in shambles, as we were barely talking and never touching. My back was still a mess, and my gut was a mess. My body was trying to tell me what my head refused to believe: my life sucked, and I needed a major change. I was too scared, and felt too powerless to change anything. I thought this would be my life forever.