Happy Birthday, Tang and Cigarettes

Happy birthday to my blog.

Well, it was actually Friday, but I had a story to finish. So today I post the first blog in my third year of blogging. Faithfully, through thick and thin, through laughter and tears, through triumphs and defeats. Every day, Monday through Friday. Fifty-two weeks a year. Each day the same circus with an occasional variation on the ensemble of clowns, saving one, the clown in charge, me.

And how far we've traveled, you and I, in the past two years.

I remember the insanity of Chuck and Em's wedding bringing some things sharply into focus and actually giving life to this blog. It was as if I'd turned a stone in a lovely garden to find maggots and grubs and worms and toads. The experience had been painful for J. and me. I'd spared my kids the hurt of it, but there was more hurt yet to come.

In the year that followed I began to see J. with the same clarity. What he'd become. The lows he'd stooped to. The liberties he'd taken, and worse, the liberties he'd felt entitled to take. The worst were those he took and lied about, but I'd discovered anyway. The lying was defining for me.

I am not sure my exit from his life was entirely about his feelings for me (though the bizarre life sized, unauthorized tattoo of my Facebook profile picture on his scrawny little thigh sort of suggests that he was infatuated to a degree that surpassed mere garden variety insanity.) I can't even look at the actual photo, it creeps me out so badly. It's a shame. It was a most flattering shot of me, looking fine with all of my fine girlfriends on one of our Rock Star vacations to Arizona. I hope it isn't ruined for them too. But that would be just J.'s style. Scorch someone else's beloved "something" to suit his own pathetic interests.

But it could have been just one more of his outrageous grand gestures to prove to me that he was madly in love with me. ("Madly" doesn't even scratch the surface, frankly.) Just like driving two hours to show up at Girls Weekend or driving me to an interview in Harrisburg as a sign of support for my career.

But really, it was all just so that I'd stay close. Stay stupid. Stay in a state of unwavering willingness to help. To pitch in. To provide Christmas for his girls when he'd hit a rough financial patch. To help him move. To go against my principles and get roped into his insane schemes. To trust him when he demonstrated time and time again that I could not. Should not. I kept going back into the burning building over and over again, trying to salvage something meaningful, and getting scorched each time.

But I've happily, joyfully, left that in the past and have enjoyed falling in love and being in love with Scott. Our future is in Fate's hands, as all the usual pressures try to tear at the fabric of our relationship in spite of our devotion. But no matter where we take this road, I have learned a lot about myself and about love and about the goodness of other people. J. is an anomaly. A sad, pathetic, insignificant wart on all that is beautiful in this world. And I know I am deserving of so much more. Scott. His girls. His love and his kindnesses.

Scott and I have shared much, have enjoyed much, have adventured much. I am a happier, healthier, smilier, more boyant version of myself. He has shown me a way to take serious things seriously without taking it all too seriously. We've taken our overwhelming lives and put them in a much better perspective. I am more peaceful than I've ever been. And my kids have never been in better emotional health.

I have had not one, but two full on blow out rifts with my mother. Both around the holidays. The first nagged at me; implored me to mend it. The second was much more permanent in its finality. My mother wants me to be the subservient, obedient, controllable fool she has always thought my siblings and me to be. When I refused, she rejected me. And I her. Period. Nothing since has compelled me to call her or invite her back in to my life. I doubt that will be a door I'll open.

But compared to the beginning of the first and second years of my blog, I am in a place of realitive peace. And so as I start year three in the blogosphere, I realize that a life of near bliss and contentment is far less entertaining than one filled with chaos and heartache, but I am committed to sharing my musings five days a week, if only as a diary for my children to read one day. And of course for my own sense of sanity. Putting words to my experiences has always helped me make sense of them, even when they defy logic and intuition.

So happy birthday to my blog. Tang and Cigarettes, in many ways, you've saved me. Even if only from myself.