This post is part of the "Weight and See" series and will be archived with those posts. Part of any effort to make the much needed lifesaving lifestyle changes is addressing the emotional issues that impact not only mental health, but physical health as well. Part of my way of dealing with these issues is to write about them and then focus on changing how I react to the emotional stress and trauma that has led me to emotionally eat myself to near-fatal morbid obesity.
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On the drive to the airport I stared out the window of the passing Seattle landscape. Everything was verdant and lush and the sky was a bright blue. I wondered what the sort of welcome the Colorado skies would give me. It had been more than ten years since I'd been in Colorado and back then, it was late winter and everything was covered with snow.
Michelle handed me a small gift bag and told me to open it when I was on the plane and we had reached cruising altitude. She asked me how I was feeling and if I was sure I wanted to do this? I told her that I didn't know what else I was supposed to do and this seemed like the only thing to do.
When I first started writing about this and posted Part I, I asked my mom what I was like during that time. She told me that I was very distant and that even if she or anyone else had tried to talk me out leaving for Colorado, it wouldn't have been comprehended because at that point I was too far gone. I think at that point in time, almost five years after Joshua's death, she realized I wasn't emotionally healthy and hadn't ever come to terms with the loss of my son nor had I grieved.
Michelle and I arrived at the airport about ninety minutes before my flight was scheduled to leave. She handed me a miniature package of Kleenex and hugged me for what seemed like an eternity. She put her hands on the sides of my face and told me she was praying for me and that she loved me and to please call her if I needed anything, even if it was just to talk. She helped me hand my baggage to a Sky Cap and we both watched in silence as my luggage was wheeled into the airport and then she gave me one last hug, said goodbye, got into her car and slowly drove away. Before driving completely out of my line of sight, she slowed her car, turned around in the drivers seat and waved one last time.
I stood there for what seemed like an eternity while people milled around me, coming and going, hailing taxis, embracing loved ones, and just stared off into the Seattle skyline. A Sky Cap bumped into me and broke my silent reverie and only then did I pick up my carry-on bags and make my way into the airport to check in for my flight.
Once checked in I made my way through security and to my gate where I sat, practically numb. In the days before 9/11, family members and loved ones were still able to accompany travellers to their gates and wait with them before they boarded their planes. I recall watching a small family with a little girl who appeared to be about three years old, pass the little girl between what I assumed were grandparents, and they all played with her, hugged her and told her how much they would miss her. The older lady who was holding the little girl, her grandmother I imagine, would occasionally dab her eyes with a tissue, and then she'd blot her cheeks with powder from a compact and freshen her bright red lipstick. The little lip-prints her lipstick made on the little girls plump cheeks still stand out in my mind, some sixteen years later.
I wasn't sure how I was supposed to feel watching this play out in front of me, having said goodbye to my own three small children. Obviously the situations were not the same, but I wondered if I should be sitting there in tears at the memory of having watched my own babies drive off into the distance only a few hours earlier? It felt very strange to be sitting alone without my own children climbing on me, asking me for breakfast and then daring one another to ask mommy if they could watch a Disney video and eat their cereal in the living room. I almost felt like I didn't know what to do with myself.
I walked down the corridor to a small shop and bought something to drink and a magazine. I went back to my seat at the gate and opened the magazine but just stared at the pages. I remember colors and the shiny smooth feel of the glossy pages but not what was pictured or printed on them.
Eventually we were called to board the flight and I took a deep breath. I walked to the gate and handed over my boarding passes and walked down the jet-way, onto the plane and looked for my seat. I was so grateful to be seated in the rear of the plane. What I hadn't expected was to run into a flight attendant, Sheree, who I'd gotten to know via working with that airline. Thankfully the small-talk was kept to a minimum when she noticed I looked like hell and in her chipper southern accent said, "Oh darlin' you look like sumthin that hasn't slept in a week and then been beat all to heck and back. I'll bring you a pillow and some blankets and sneak a drink from First Class back here. I'll fix you right up!"
Sheree did her best to make me comfortable and not ask too many questions. I had in fact, not been sleeping well at all lately. Nowadays when I have insomnia it's because my thoughts are whirling around in my head in a blur, but back then, the numbness was so acute and so heavy that I'd lay there at night hoping it would swallow me whole...waiting for it to swallow me. I'd wake up in the morning, eyes ringed with dark gray circles and be disappointed that I was still conscious enough to notice how unfortunate looking I was becoming.
The flight into Denver was blessedly empty and I had an entire row of three seats to myself. I leaned my head against the window as the plane taxied out to the run way and then took off into that bright blue Seattle sky. As we ascended I looked towards the place where "home" was and briefly wondered what my kids were doing and if they were happy that their ghost of a mother wasn't there, shuffling her feet through the morning. mumbling answers in responses to small voices filled with questions about the day to come. I knew that M's family was furious with me and the thought did cross my mind that they might be helping M draw up papers to divorce me and perhaps make sure I'd not get custody of the kids. In the back of my mind I thought that maybe I was too far gone to even be upset if that scenario were actually played out and perhaps it might be what was best for them anyhow.
Sheree quietly walked up down the corridor of the plane with her arms full of mini bottles of wine, various spirits, and a clear plastic cup filled almost to overflowing with ice. She asked me to take my pick. I wasn't even sure what I was looking at because I'd just noticed that my eyes were filled with tears. I quickly brushed them away so that they wouldn't overflow and run down my cheeks. I had never had wine before and only heard about something called a "Gin and Tonic" so that's what I chose. Sheree pulled my tray table down for me, set a napkin on it and placed the tiny bottle of Tanqueray Gin near the cup and then a bottle of Schwepps Tonic Water next to it. She gave me a couple of packages of Biscoff cookies and then walked back towards the front of the plane.
I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do with the gin and tonic so I opened the gin, sniffed it and decided that maybe I'd put a little on my finger and see if I even liked it, before deciding whether to drink it or not. I tilted the small green bottle bottle on my finger, much like you would if you were about to dab a little perfume behind your ear, placed my finger tip on my tongue and immediately decided it tasted like actual perfume. I screwed the cap back on the bottle and placed it in the seat back in front of me.
I twisted the top off of the bottle of tonic water and watched it fizz and foam as I poured it over the ice. I stared at the tonic water for a long time and watched the bubbles dance just above the rim of the cup. The water seemed everything opposite of what I was. It was alive and bubbly. I imagined it as having a personality of it's own...something that I had lost, or rather, had been buried five years prior. I took a small sip of the tonic water and noticed it was crisp and a little tart. Again, the total opposite of what I'd become. I had become stale and lifeless. I started to wonder if even going to Colorado would make a difference. It wouldn't change what was, it wouldn't bring back what was gone forever.
I don't know how long I sat there and stared at that cup of tonic water, but before I knew it, the pilot was announcing our descent into Denver and asking the flight attendants to prepare the cabin for landing. It was right at that point that I started to become very nervous. I knew that it was only a short flight from Denver into Colorado Springs where Mitch would be waiting for me at the gate. What if I was no longer able to socialize with regular people to the point of being unreceptive to whatever help or respite he and his mother were trying to offer me? While I was still back in Washington state, I knew I was headed for a very bad place if something didn't change. But what magical panacea awaited me in Colorado that would change all of that?
I don't remember much of the change between flights, or the actual flight into Colorado Springs with the exception of becoming ill almost immediately after taking my seat on that small commuter plane. Looking back I'm sure it was nerves, but it unsettled me just the same. I did take an extra long time leaving the plane because I needed to brush my teeth. I'm not sure why I didn't do it in-flight.
When I think back to those moments, today, it's all in something akin to a bizarre slow motion movie. I recall it being warmer than it was in Seattle and smelling different. My ears still hadn't popped yet and every sound seemed muffled - like it was wrapped in cotton batting. I slowly made my way into the the arrival area at the gate and there was Mitch, standing there looking less like the picture of the rugged mountain man I had drawn a mental image of, and more like a good-hearted, athletic fellow with a broad smile to match his shoulders, and a friendly twinkle in his light blue eyes.
Mitch approached me and immediately took my carry-on bags and looked at me and asked if he could give me a hug? I wasn't sure how I was supposed to answer that. It was a simple enough question, I knew how to speak, but couldn't form the words. So I nodded that yes, it was alright. What happened wasn't so much a full hug as it was me, standing there, stiff as a board while he tried his best to not make it appear as if he wanted anything more than to make me comfortable. He stepped back and I immediately apologized. I knew, in my head, that the hug was nothing more than a gesture of welcome and friendship and comfort, but it had been such a long time since I'd let myself respond to genuine human compassion and kindness and allowed myself to feel like I deserved it, that I didn't know what to do. Mitch stood there for a minute grinning as he looked at me, trying to figure out what to make of the scared, depressed, disheveled 27 year old woman standing in front of him, and then he said, "You're going to be alright. You might not believe it, but you will. You're in a safe place. Before you do anything else though, let's sit down for a minute so you can take a deep breath."
I was so relieved to be able to just sit down, on something other than a seat screwed to the bottom of a flying, bouncing metal tube, that I let out an audible sigh. Mitch asked me how my flights were and I told him they were fine but that the last one was a little bit turbulent. I asked him how his daughter Sasha was, inquired about his mother and then once the chit chat was over, we decided to head down to baggage claim to get my luggage before the airline decided to send it back to where it came from.
I'm grateful that we took that time to just sit and take a breath. I was obviously very nervous, a fact I think he was expecting and he wanted to take the time to make sure I was comfortable with a man who I'd never met before, who had told his mother enough about me so that she was comfortable enough to open her home to me. I'm sure others who are reading this are wondering if I'd completely lost my mind, after all, he could have been some deranged psychopath who may have ended up doing God-only-knows-what-to-me. However, during the time it took us to walk to the baggage claim area, pick up my bags, load them into his car and drive to his mother's home, there was an odd feeling of calm that came over me.
I sat back in the passenger seat of Mitch's car and took in the amazing Rocky Mountains that seemed to loom larger than anything I'd ever seen before, framed in brilliant reds and purples from the setting sun. The colors seemed to soften the harsh edges of the jutting craggy mountains. I took deep breaths of the air and yawned almost constantly. I felt like I'd been holding my breath for years. Yet I felt a calmness that I hadn't felt in a long time. I still wasn't sure what was ultimately going to happen to me, but there wasn't the same pressing longing for it to happen. I wasn't sitting there wishing to dissolve into nothing. I was breathing, truly taking part in the physical act of inhaling and exhaling and noticing how it felt, for the first time in a very long time.
I was nearly asleep by the time we arrived at Mitch's mother's home and it took me a few minutes to figure out how to coordinate my arms and legs so that I could open the car door and then stand up. I was a little worried about what sort of an impression this lost soul was going to make on his mother. I needn't have worried at all. The tiny lady who answered the door had the same broad smile as her son, identical twinkly blue eyes and while she might have been so small in stature, her heart was large and full and she immediately embraced me the biggest hug I'd ever received. Miss Lillian as I'd come to call her, may have been petite, but her personality, slight Irish brogue, and her compassion and hospitality were larger than life.
Mitch chided his mother for nearly knocking me over before I'd even set foot inside the door and she just laughed. I can't remember if I returned the hug or just stood there like a statue, but it didn't seem to bother her either way. I think she knew I was broken inside and later I'd come to realize that considerable hug was the first outward sign of compassion that I'd allowed to pass through the stone battlements that I had built around myself.
A lot of that first night in Colorado Springs was a blur. What I do recall was the phone call I made back to my kids in Washington and the searing pain I felt when I heard their voices. "Hey mommy, when you coming home? We had fun with daddy.... we played outside, we miss you. We're gonna go to gran and papas house tomorrow and plant corn!"
There were tears, mostly theirs but there was also a lot of laughter. They were having fun with their daddy and that seemed to outweigh any overriding feeling that my leaving may have left them sad. In my warped mind I interpreted that laughter and happiness to mean that they were just fine...maybe even better, or happier, without me. I hung up after speaking with them thinking that they were genuinely better off without me. I went into the bathroom and sobbed into a towel for what seemed like a very long time.
Once I'd calmed down, I decided that I wanted to lay down for a while. As I lay down on top of the handmade quilt that sat atop the old-fashioned, cherry wood four-posted bed in Miss Lillian's guest room, I felt overwhelmed with a sense of discombobulation. I don't know any other way to describe it. Miss Lillian and Mitch wouldn't let me help out with even the simplest of tasks that night and insisted I rest and I didn't know what to do with myself. I didn't know who I was, outside of a setting I'd been in, day in and day out, twenty four hours a day, for the last several years. Someone always needed something, M demanded his physical intimacy needs be met or he'd stomp off to the shed outside to console himself with Pepsi, cigarettes and baseball cards, Zach needed his diapers changed, the twins wanted another book read to them, and I was always lost in the chaos of life with children or so focused on melting into the gray, that I felt at loose-ends, laying there in that bed with nothing more than the sounds of the birds outside my window, the soft whir of the overhead ceiling fan and the muffled sounds of a Lawrence Welk re-run that Miss Lillian was watching on the television.
I ran my hands over the old quilt and then moved my arms back and forth as if I were making a snow angel. I wondered who I was supposed to be...this woman laying on a strangers antique bed, a woman who had children hundreds of miles away, who knew no one in this town let alone the man she'd been writing too for a few months and now his elderly mother. I'd completely lost the person I was when Joshua died and now here I was, wondering who I was and what I was supposed to be doing? Was I expecting to find myself in Colorado or escape myself? I was also keenly aware that folks back in Seattle were making all sorts of lurid assumptions about my relationship with Mitch and saying that I had left M and my children for this man I didn't even know, in Colorado.
In the week leading up to my departure for Colorado I learned that M had been through all of my bags that I'd been packing as well as my bureau drawers. I had very little to pack because I didn't own much anyhow and what I did have, I basically just tossed into my luggage, no matter how old it was, or what it was...and that included an old box of some sort of gel birth control. Had I taken the time to actually look at what I was tossing into the suitcases I probably would have thrown away those contraceptives especially considering that they were two years old.
M found the box of contraceptives in my suitcase and it only fueled his certainty that I was having some sort of affair with Mitch and that I wasn't leaving to save my sanity, but leaving to consummate this affair. So he took all of the tubes out of that box, opened them up, squeezed out the gel inside them, put them back into the little plastic wrappers, glued the wrappers shut and then placed them back into the box, gluing the box shut. I wouldn't have known this were it not for a particularly nasty fight he and I got into right before I left. He yelled and then I yelled and then he spat at me, "Hey, I found your birth control. Oh yeah, I bet you didn't know I went through all of your stuff, yeah I found it and I emptied it all and then put it all back and glued it shut. You're screwed now!"
I looked at him, my mouth hanging open and started to laugh. I can't remember my exact words but I told him he was full of shit and that there were tampons in there too and I bet he didn't know what those were for, did he want to empty those too?" It was stupid and it only made him angrier and made me more resolute to get out of there.
I laid there that first night and thought back to that ugly exchange between M and me... I wanted nothing more than to find a McDonald's and eat Big Mac after Big Mac until I made myself sick. I wanted to drown out the memories of that phone call to my kids and mute the memories of life with M with meat and cheese and then wash it down with as much Coke as my stomach could hold. Food was really the only friend I'd ever let inside since Joshua died, both literally and figuratively. I finally drifted off into a fitful sleep filled with dreams of M's family throwing boxes of contraceptives at me and laughing like hysterical hyenas.
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