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

2004, part two: living with my parents, divorce prep, Maui, skydiving and turning 35

Lauren and me on the zoo train, spring 2004

Once I’d solved the problem of who got the house–no one got it–my husband and I decided not to spend $10k each on lawyers and use an mediator instead. We painstakingly created a divorce agreement that spelled out everything we could think of in order to ward off future arguments. Putting the document together was easier than we both expected. It was a project, and we always were good at those. The one aspect we didn’t tackle was child support and maintenance. We knew it would be touchy and needed a mediator to help us through it.

I sadly put my old cat, Tyson, to sleep. He had gone from being a fat, happy 15-year-old cat to skinny, arthritic and toothless in the previous six months. Had I been paying attention to his suffering, I would have acted out of kindness much sooner, but my own suffering blinded me to anyone else’s. I’m still ashamed of myself for letting him hurt for so long.

At the end of March, we packed up our house, leaving a  few items behind to stage it. My parents agreed to take in me, Lauren, our dog Sunny and cat Percy, and store my stuff in the single-car garage next to their house.

The weekend before I moved in with my parents, I bought myself a new bed. A virgin bed, a queen. Never again, I swore, would I buy a king bed. My husband and I slept on a full bed for the first three years of our relationship; when we bought our king mattress, we stopped having sex as often. Soon, a ridge had built up between us, physically and emotionally. I had even written a poem about us clinging to our opposite coasts. I negotiated an excellent price on a high-end bed. I think my ample cleavage helped the salesman throw in the frame and delivery.

I also bought a silver Tiffany ring shaped like an O to signify my connection with myself. I called it my divorce ring. I paid for it from our joint account. These purchases were just the beginning of a spending spree that would leave me in deep water a year later. I definitely had moving from joint salary of about $150k to solo salary of about $45k. I’m not sure I’ve completely learned that lesson.

April

My dad was furious with my husband. My mom, who had considered him her friend, tried as usual not to take sides, which also hurt me. Now was the time for her not to be neutral. She didn’t need to disparage him, but she didn’t need to help me see his side of things either. My therapist helped keep me upright. I refused psych drugs, even Valium. I drank a lot of wine.

I moved into my parents’ large suburban house, carefully pushing my grandmother’s antique piano into the garage and setting up my bedroom in my sister’s old room. For the first month, my folks went on two cruises, and I had the house to myself when Lauren wasn’t with me. It felt like a vacation. My disintegration slowed, not because I was working through it, but because I was stuffing it.

I went to the gym almost every day. I stopped eating all sugar. I began growing my hair out. My appetite diminished to nothing, and I learned that while I eat to ease stress and depression, at their highest intensities I stop eating. The pounds dropped off–20, to be exact, in 7 weeks. Nothing beats the divorce weight loss plan. I wanted to be sexy.

Lauren began having night terrors almost immediately upon moving–but only when she was with me. She’d wake up screaming for her daddy, and nothing would soothe her. I was so angry, and hurt. I pushed her away, leaving my mom to care for her while I vegged in my room with the door closed.

Every night Lauren was with me, her dad called to say goodnight at 8 pm. And every night she was with him, I called her at 8 to say goodnight. The ritual was important for all of us–still is. I simultaneously missed her and didn’t miss her at all, hated him and regretted him and loved him and wanted to kill him. I felt like I was trapped inside a giant bowl of sloshing water, forever seasick and unable to see where I was.

We put our house on the market, priced about $20,000 more than what we paid for it. We were used to houses selling in days for big profits (ah, those were the days), and we started getting nervous when we’d had lots of showings but no offers. Our Realtor told us to hold tight, so we did.

By the end of April, my husband and I had met with the mediator and filed for divorce. Money was an issue: we settled on a generous amount of child support until I began working full-time (if I could at my job–I’d asked and been turned down), then an amount based upon the state’s worksheet, and four-and-a-half years of a small amount of maintenance. Although my husband made more than double my salary, because he would both be paying for Lauren’s childcare and her health insurance, he didn’t technically owe me as much support as he eventually offered. In return for his generosity, I took on more of the credit card debt, a decision I would later regret.

My work was definitely suffering. I was distracted not only by all of these emotions I couldn’t name, but also by match.com and Yahoo! personals. By the end of the first month living at my parents’, I had built my online dating profile.

Sadly, I realized that I didn’t have interests to speak of outside of reading and scrapbooking. “And who wants to date a girl who does nothing but that?” I lamented to my sister over a glass of wine.

My 35th birthday was fast approaching, and I decided that this was the year of the Strong Woman. I would prove to myself, and to the world, that I could do anything I put my mind to. I would create New Interests so I wouldn’t be this crazy single mom with a ton of baggage dragging behind her. At least not until date number 4.

Counseling continued as I learned to name the muddle of emotions that coursed through my body–something I didn’t learn growing up. I went on my first date, meeting a history professor a few years my senior for dinner. We had a second date, at which I learned was  a nutjob, but what’s a better to break your dating cherry with after 12 years than someone completely unsuitable for you?

I had a psychic reading in which I learned that my ex would always be an ass about money (boy was she right) and that our house would sell in June (she was right again). She said I would be alone for a few years, then would fall in love again. This new relationship would last about five years; she wouldn’t say how it would end, but said that nothing is written in stone. She’d previously (and accurately) told me my birthmother spent half of her time in the mountains and half by the ocean, and that I wouldn’t get pregnant until  tried to find her. She suggested that I would benefit from a trip to visit Laura.

May

On the edge of the world in Maui

Laura welcomed the idea of my visiting her for a while. I had only spent a few hours with her in the three years I’d known her. I felt in my heart that I needed to be near the ocean, which always heals me, and with someone who didn’t know my past. I cashed in 60,000 frequent flier miles and flew first class to Hawaii, with an overnight in LA to see my brother on the way. It was fun to hang out with him in his adopted city for a day, to have drinks at a swank rooftop hotel bar, to see Venice Beach for the first time.

When I arrived on Maui, I met my brother Eric for the first time. Within the first 30 minutes he had convinced me to buy this special anti-EMF medallion for $100 (a family discount) by proving its effectiveness using muscle testing. I had to admit that wearing it made me feel better.I still wear it on bad days. It helps me balance.

I spent the first few days writing, doing yoga, getting massages and Reiki from Laura, a Reiki master, and sitting on the beach.

I fell in love with Big Beach, the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. I slept, and slept some more. Laura returned my rental car, insisting I drive hers. She gave me the tapes for Eckhardt Tolle’s The Power of Now, which I listened to as I drove her Jeep to Lahaina and Kana’pali.

We went hiking together. I was so afraid of saying the wrong thing I wasn’t my chatty self. I took pictures, but was afraid to ask her if we could take a picture together.

I drove alone up to the windward side of the island, with its steep cliffs and crashing surf. I found myself drawn to the edge of the world, following a path strewn with hundreds of rock cairns. The air was electric with god. I took off my flip flops and climbed to the edge of a cliff and began to scream into the wind. I threw rocks at the water several hundred feet below me. I popped the poisonous blister that festered inside my chest and let out as much yuck as I could. After about 30 minutes, I stopped and looked around me, and noticed a man, shirtless and in red shorts, standing about 1,000 yards away from me, shaking his fists into the wind.

At the weekend, Laura, Eric and I went camping on the Road to Hana. We hiked up the Pipiwai Trail, passing the Seven Sacred Pools. Eric kept daring me to jump off the tall cliffs into the pools below. I was chicken. The trail led us to a bamboo forest, which ate all sound other than the otherworldly clicking of the tall reeds. We celebrated our two-hour trek with the view of Waimoku Falls, falling 400-feet down a solid lava wall. It seemed that everywhere I turned I felt god there, wrapping me in hope and healing. On the way back down, I took Eric’s dare and jumped off a 20-foot cliff into a deep pool of water. I felt like I would never again reach the surface and the air, and realized that was exactly how I had felt for the previous six years of my life.The next morning, we drove to the top of Haleakala. Stunning doesn’t begin to describe that view.

Over the next week, I relaxed more. I snorkeled with turtles and got seasick from the buffeting waves. I spent hours on Big Beach reading and listening to Tolle and writing the first several chapters of a novel and doing nothing.

One night, Laura and I went to see a movie. It was disaster movie–we both like them–and at one tense moment, I looked over at her. To my shock, she and I were sitting in the exact same position: left ankle crossed over right, left fist tucked under right elbow, right hand near the mouth. I began to cry. I had never before seen anyone with my exact same body language. Laura and I don’t look much alike. I look like my birthfather, but with my mother’s coloring and temperament. When you are adopted, it’s hard to know who you are when you can’t see who you belong to. Finally, at that moment, I felt like I was a part of her.

Skydiving, June 5, 2004

June

I returned from Maui two weeks before my 35th birthday. I was determined to do something remarkable to mark the occasion and continue to grow New Interests and Roar.

A colleague was a professional skydiver, and she told me about a “boogie”–a gathering of a large group of skydivers–that would happen the first weekend in June at the Longmont airport. I was fascinated and terrified by the idea of jumping out of a perfectly good airplane. Anne promised me the time of my life, so I took her up on an offer to join her.

June 5 was clear and chilly and a bit windy. I spent about 20 minutes in a class learning how to position my body in the air, then waited 2 hours for my turn in the airplane. I had no idea it would take so long to get to an altitude of about 12,000 feet. I went from psyched to nervous to  “fuck Fuck FUCK FUCK FUUUUCCK!” (I know this because it was all caught on video). My tandem coach made us do a somersault out of the plane.

Being in free fall was one of the most mind blowing experiences of my life. The air was LOUD! The world opened up beneath me like a map: here the Flatirons, there Boulder reservoir, and in the distance to the south, Pike’s Peak. It didn’t feel so much like falling as standing in a hurricane. I saw a dark figure soaring toward me: Anne! She flew close and grabbed my hands. For a brief moment, we flew in a formation, then she let go and shot off. A few seconds later, my instructor pulled the chute. Noise became silence. I could hear the blood rushing through my veins. We floated for many minutes–10? 15? I lost track. The adrenaline pooled in my stomach and I became nauseous. Then the ground was approaching, and we hit a dead spot of air, and I landed flat on my ass. Ouch.

My mother was pissed that I would do something as reckless as skydiving when I had a toddler at home. When I called her to tell her I survived, she yelled at me. But I needed it to make me feel alive. And boy did it ever.

Laurel and me, the photo we used on our party invite

The next weekend, Laurel and I turned 35. We celebrated our birthdays, which are three days apart (she’s older), by throwing ourselves a party on the deck at the Emerald Isle, a dive bar with a great deck overlooking Cherry Creek Reservoir and the Front Range. We drank margaritas and ate nachos and had our palms read and talked with our friends as the sun set. I flirted with a guy who turned out to be engaged (bummer) and no one called me a slut. It was one of the best birthdays I’ve ever had.

The next day at 1:30, I arrived at a tattoo parlor and got my third tattoo: a large motif of two dragonflies with their tails twisted into the Gemini symbol on my lower back. The ink symbolized my freedom, taking flight to be the person I was supposed to be, the girl who was trapped inside a woman married to a man she settled for because she never believed anyone could really love her as she was.

The following week, I met Bad Boyfriend Jimmy on lavalife.com. We had great conversations, and for the first time in a very long time, I had sex. And liked it. A lot. He was wrong for me in so many ways–the ultimate bad boy, with a prison record, and married to boot to a woman who lived in another country. But he was exactly what I needed at the time. He didn’t like my baggage, but I got to work a little of it out on a guy who ultimately, wouldn’t matter. I still like him for that.

Dad & me, summer 2004

By mid-June, we still had no offers on the house. I went to pick up some tools from the basement and heard light footsteps on the floor above me. When I went up to investigate, no one was there. That’s when I felt it: Duncan’s energy. His happy, ball-chasing, crazy, golden retriever spirit.  The hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I realized our beloved dog was haunting our house, keeping buyers away. I told my husband, and he immediately went to the house and dug up Duncan’s ashes, which we’d buried in the front garden.

Two days later, we got an offer, slightly under full price. We accepted, each netting less than $5,000 on a house we’d initially invested almost $70,000 in. The $60k we lost included the amount we took out in equity in 2003, thinking we’d be in the house forever, and of course, Realtor fees.

I began looking for a place to live. As much as I love my parents, I learned that our relationship regressed when I lived with them. First, they treated me like I was an adult, then a young adult, then a teenager. By the time July rolled around, I felt (and was probably acting) like I was 15. After figuring out that it would be very difficult and quite expensive to find a rental that would accept me and my pets, I talked to a mortgage broker. I had been a homeowner since 1997, and my husband and I had owned three homes during that time. I didn’t want to rent. I started looking for a house to buy.

I didn’t want to be “that” girl who moves in with her parents and never moves out. Besides, in my own place I could have a social life instead of using Laurel’s spare room like a brothel. Kind of.