3L

So odd for school to be nearly over. Two years of my life past, another half year to go before I graduate. So much time, so little time.

Normally I get to school around 5 and go straight into the classroom and hang out in the quiet, but today, I was there early in order to review an exam from last semester. So rather than go into the classroom at 4 and sit for 2 hours, I chose to sit in the open cafe area for a while and get a little sunlight. Some summer-start 1Ls were sitting at the table next to me, studying - HA! - criminal law.

As I was putzing around on the net, killing time, I was listening to their conversation drift past. It's so funny how cool they think they are. I say this not to be snotty, nor to suggest that they're being snotty. They're not. They're just in awe of themselves for even getting here, and, because they're only taking a single summer class, they're thinking that it isn't so bad. Oh, somewhere deep down, they realize that fall will be more difficult because they'll have more classes, but they haven't quite internalized that; they've still got the dream that they might actually be at the top of their class. Heh.

Come September that will change. Sort of. For the first few weeks of the semester, as they get used to their new class sections, they'll be riding high on adrenaline and fear. Just learning the language will be challenging. Then somewhere around the fifth week of the semester, they'll go back to thinking "Gee, this isn't so bad." Because it won't be. For a while. They do ease you in at this school -- they don't just drop you in the deep and and expect you to breaststroke. Only the 1Ls don't know that. They've heard the horror stories and they're on tenterhooks because of it. But at the same time, they're wondering if indeed they aren't better at this than they expected.

And then October arrives, and the first of the legal writing assignments is due. Suddenly, there are far more grim faces than cocky ones. And it will stay that way through the rest of the year, only they don't know yet. They don't know about the hell of the reading period and the first slate of exams. They don't know about the February slump -- where everyone goes through a bad patch because they're taking the same classes with the same people in the same seats, and it feels like they never even got a Christmas break.

What's worse, though, is that in May of next year, they'll think they're awesome again, for having gotten through the first year. And they are; no doubt about it. It's no small achievement. But the 1L year is nothing compared to the 2L year. And nothing - NOTHING - can prepare them for that.

There's a saying in the law school world: First year they scare you to death, second year they work you to death, third year they bore you to death. I can unequivocally say that the first two are accurate to a letter. The 2L year is a MASS amount of work, and even the best students feel as if they are perennially behind. It really does make the first year look easy.

I'm glad to be on the other side of both of those. One more semester to go. One more PACKED semester, but that's it. Then the final hurdle -- the bar. It's nice to be the one who is so close to being finished, rather than the one looking at the 3Ls with wistful envy.

Knots

I realized today - with gut churning certainty - that I am utterly unprepared for the day I find out that my ex is dating again. It will happen, eventually, and I want to be ready. But I ain't gonna be. It's gonna sneak up on me and slap me so hard that I won't be able to breathe, and I will be down for the count -- at least for a while. And everyone in my life will suffer alongside me because of it.

As I was picking up our daughter from his house this afternoon, I noticed a wood and bead bracelet on his wrist. It was clearly not something the kiddo made, and it's utterly unlike him to randomly wear "jewelry." I asked him if it was a mala (Tibetan Buddhist prayer beads), though I knew it wasn't because I wanted to know where it came from. Of course it wasn't my business, but I wanted to know precisely because it's odd for him to wear adornments of any kind, and my first thought was that it was a gift. He said it was just a thing...a little Pike Place Market thingy.

This would have caused my radar to start pinging like crazy, except that his mother was in town not two weeks ago, and they had gone to Pike Place Market. Given that, it seems unlikely that it was a gift from a female friend. Of course my darker being immediately thought that maybe he WAS dating someone and he was introducing her to his mom already!! Nothing like the voice of paranoia to make a girl feel fresh and confident.

I banished those thoughts immediately, but the fact that they were there, loud and clear, tells me that I have to deal with this sooner or later, and I am totally unready. The thing is, I want him to date. I want him to move on. I want to know that he's healing, and that he won't be alone for the rest of his life. Except, of course, I don't, and therein lies the conflict. Some part of me wants him to forever pine away for me. I want to be irreplaceable. Who doesn't?

My own guilt is all wrapped up in this like fat, juicy fly in a web. I want him to find someone so I know that my leaving him for someone else (to his eyes, anyway) didn't leaving him forever gutted. If he's happy and partnered, then my guilt at my own happiness without him is less piquant, less sharp. I want to know that perhaps the fact that I tore his family asunder has led to something as good or better than what he had.

The flip side is as I said above: I don't want him to find anyone else, because I want him to pine away for me, missing me because I am the best thing he ever had. I want him thinking he should have done more to keep me. I want him to see his role in the events that led to my departure from our marriage. And then there's the whole weirdness wrapped up with the idea that some woman I don't know will be involved in our child's life. No, I'm not worried about his eventual choice -- he'll choose wisely. I have no fear of that. Nor am I afraid of being replaced, really. It's more the idea that my daughter will have a relationship with another adult woman and I'll have no say in the formation and development of that relationship. I won't be able to guide it; I'll have to trust him to do that, which I do, but it still leaves me feeling squidgy.

I know that everything I feel when the time comes will only be a reflection of what I've put my ex through. He's had to silently deal with me having a relationship with a man I never could stop loving - a man I loved before I even knew my ex. He's had to suffer the pain and humiliation of finding out that he was never my first choice - that he was second best in my heart. He's had to watch as I moved out, moved on, took his daughter from his daily life, and lived for myself. He's had to hear his daughter mention the man that I love, hear her say how much she likes him.

Every time I think of how I'd feel if someone told me that I was their second choice - that they'd 'settled' for me -my insides twist up and I feel like dying. And yet that's what I did to him, and dammit, he didn't deserve it. For all his flaws and inconsistencies, he did not deserve it.

The karma on this one is gonna be a bitch. Even now, after two years, I wish I could go hug him and cry on his shoulder and tell him how sorry I am. I wish there was some way for him to know that I didn't want things to happen this way, that I tried, and that I wish things could have been different. I wish there was some way I could make up for it.

As it is, the best I can do is hope that someone out there will make him first in their heart.

I Want a Do-Over

I admit some sadness about the fact that I will never again have a baby resting against my shoulder. I won't be able to nuzzle the back of an infant's neck, or smell the top of its head. I actually think I'll miss snuggling a tiny body in the crook of my arm.

So much internal conflict. I know I'll never have another child, and while I'm glad of that, I also regret it. Depression cheated me out of enjoying the first two years of of my daughter's life. There were some nice times, I'm sure, but I don't remember them. My life was a grey fog, punctuated by periods of internal screaming. I flat out hated it. Not her, never her. But the immensity and overwhelming nature of it all; the sheer, unceasing marathon. It was like walking through wet, knee high concrete.

It is only now, with a proper mental health diagnosis, a divorce, and some recognition that time passes and children actually become functioning, self-aware human beings, that I am actually starting to wish I could do it again. Not because I think there's some ideal waiting for me, but to at least give my self a chance to remember the earliest days of my child's life with something other than abject horror.

Continental Divide

I feel like we're drifting again. We try not to, but it's hard because we have so little shared context - he lives in his world, and I, in mine. His world is gaming and computers and movies and beer with his friends. My world is law and motherhood and novels and long conversations with my friends. He cleans his room; I clean my house. His free time is all his own; my free time is rarely my own. He hasn't lived with a partner in many years; I haven't lived without a partner until recently.

Our worlds do overlap in places, but I worry that there is not enough to sustain us. I want to believe - REALLY want to believe - it's all a distance issue; that when he and I are in the same city, we'll have more to say to one another. Cause we certainly don't now. He calls and we end up going through the motions of saying "hello, howareyou, I love you, I want to marry you." Then we sit in silence, until one of us either comes up with a topic of discussion or we hang up. Usually we hang up. It's getting to the point where I want to tell him not to call unless he has something to say.

Part of the problem is the time difference: when he calls, it's after his day is done, but mine is still going on. So he's tired, and I'm usually in the middle of studying or getting dinner ready for the child and I. And since I don't get out of class until 9:30pm, he's long asleep by the time I can and want to talk. Weekends aren't a whole lot better because although we have the time, there's still not a ton to talk about. It's not that I need long, profound conversations. I don't. I have other friends who fulfill that need. But I do need conversation of some sort. Dialogue. Sharing. SOMETHING.

And as much as I'm excited that he'll be moving here in the not too distant, I'm also terrified. Terrified that it WON'T get better when we're together. Terrified that he'll get out here, and it won't be right. Terrified that I'll have misgivings. I would like to resolve these fears before he moves out here, but the only way they CAN resolve is by him being here. It's such a huge risk. A huge, huge risk. And I've screwed up royally before. I really don't want to do it again.

I want so much for it to work for us, and I'm so afraid it won't, that part of me wants to just end it now, and be alone. Not have to deal with ANY partners in my life. Just go on about my life, without the pressure and stress and, yes, joys of a relationship. Just get a job, save some money, buy a little place in a cohousing group or an urban commune, and raise my daughter. Then, when she's grown and I am old, retire to someplace semi rural where I can have some goats and chickens and a horse and some dogs and a vegetable garden, and be an earthy, eccentric old lady who still takes occasional cases to keep her brain in good working order. I could paint. And read. And learn how to make cheese and how to cure prosciutto. And every now and again, he would come for a visit, or I would go to him.

Yet the thought of a life without the man I've loved since I was 18 causes an ache in the pit of my stomache. He is, quite literally, the man of my dreams. The one I've waited for all these years. How can I NOT try? How can I not give him everything I have? How can I not honor him with that?

Crap. I hate this.

Suicide

A young woman killed herself the other day. She was an activist for young parents, being a young mother herself. By all accounts she was fierce, vocal, strong, and proud. She'd done much to politicize young parenthood -- she rallied girls with children to get active, to finish school, to take charge of their bodies, to fight for their rights, and to not put up with the privileged bullshit of older, wealthier, whiter parents.

Word is that although it looked like a suicide, it was not intentional. I don't know if this is true or not. I didn't know her. Those who knew her say she was troubled -- sad and angry and lonely and full of pain. This was who she was. She struggled with mental health issues, though in what form I don't know.

My response upon reading of her death was unkind. I thought, "Why you selfish little shit." And I stand by that thought.

You see, I struggle with mental health issues. Out of nowhere they appeared on my horizon, darkening my skies. There was no warning -- no family history, no suicides in my family, no courses of therapy or antidepressants for any of us. That isn't to say that maybe there shouldn't have been. Indeed, it healing myself, I've come to see that there probably WAS a history of something -- the numerous relatives with alcoholism alone would suggest that, no? But hindsight, of course, is 20/20.

So my own mental illness seemed to spring from nowhere. And I have struggled with it. I have a variant of bipolar called 'bipolar 2' or 'soft bipolar.' It means I get all the depression of a person with unipolar depression, but it's punctuated by these LOVELY little manic episodes that aren't as severe as true mania, but nonetheless leave my head spinning.

The problem lies in the diagnosis; because the manias are farther apart and not nearly as severe as true bipolar manias, they often get mistaken for "normal" periods, especially when the sufferer is fairly high strung to begin with (which s/he usually is...wouldn't ya know). So the incorrect diagnosis - usually of unipolar depression -- leads to incorrect treatment -- usually SSRIs or some such anti-depressant. Now this eases the depression initially, but it tends to trigger rapid cycling and more frequent manias. And even in cases where it doesn't, the SSRIs, etc., only do so much good, because the depressed brain and the bipolar brain aren't exactly alike. So, with traditional anti-Ds, you sort of hit a wall.

Anyway, my digression here is to illustrate that I went wrongly diagnosed for a LONG time. Sure, I was getting my depression treated, but when a cycled up, no one caught (not even me) that things were still not right. All of this led to a severe crash earlier this year.

I came very close to suicide. VERY close. Past thinking about it, past picturing myself out of the picture, past ideating, and on to buying the razors and having them out of the package. There was no miracle zot that kept me from it, no voice of god, no stunning realization that there was hope after all, no knight in shining armor to knock the razor out of my hand as it trembled above my forearm. It doesn't actually work like that. That's the stuff of Hollywood.

Because, you see, choosing to kill oneself is, I have learned, rarely a decision one makes over night. It is not a rash. That's the real horror of it. It's slow and deliberate...it involves planning, thinking, hoping for some answer to come in the darkness. It is the result not of great traumas, but of being worn away slowly, like sandpaper on a block of wood, until there's nothing left but dust. There is no drama, and certainly no melodrama to it; it's almost mundane, because you've been living with the fatigue of it for so long.

I did not do it, though. Close as I came, I didn't do it, because in the end, my child's life meant more to me than my own. To cause her to suffer because I didn't want to anymore was unthinkable to me. Yes, I thought she'd be better off without me. I said it more than once, and believed it a lot of the time. But, I knew from experience that my death would WOULDN'T leave her better off.

You see, I lost my own father to alcohol when I was nine. I KNOW what it is to lose a parent suddenly when you are young. I KNOW how it sets your world on an axis so wobbly that it takes years to feel stable and secure again. I KNOW how it leaves a child with fear that people will abandon her. And that from a death that WASN'T planned. How much more cruel to willingly choose death over remaining in the child's life. How cruel and selfish.

So I fought. I summoned up something very primal and very deep and I fought. I ended up hurting someone I love very much. My life turned inside out in the ugliest of ways and I am still picking up the pieces from it. But in the end, I got a correct diagnosis, new drugs, a little relief. I was willing to tear my life apart and put it back together again despite the pain and fear and anguish I was feeling, so that my daughter wouldn't have to live through what I had to live through.

So you see why I think of this young woman as selfish. I am angry with her for forever fucking her son up. I know she would never abandon him in life, so why do so in death? Why cause him such pain. If he meant ANYTHING to her, she should have fought for her own life as if she was fighting for his. She should have fought like hell.

And if it wasn't intentional? Then she isn't worth my pity. Although many are saying it wasn't suicide, it apparently LOOKED like it, which means that it wasn't accidental a la "the toaster fell into the sink while she was doing dishes" or "she slipped in the tub." So what does this mean? That it was a part of a drama. There was drinking, there was a fight with her partner. And she ran with it. Wanting to be oh so tragic. Well, she certainly got that, didn't she? I'd say "grow up" but...

Such a waste. Such a selfish fucking waste.