You are the protagonist

framing. part 2 of 2 (part 1)

“I need you to help me leave my husband”.

Mike and I were in couples therapy. Like any relationship, there were good weeks and bad weeks. Our oscillation had drearily settled around a low and unsustainable set point. We made an appointment with Charles; a kind young man, calm and always impeccably dressed. He sat at the edge of his leather chair in a tailored tweed vest and a perfectly rumpled button-down, his small elegant notebook perched on his knee. His insightful eyes radiated focused energy in a way somewhat incongruous with his fashionable je ne sais crois. In the beginning, I often felt as though we communicated telepathically across the small room, silently aligned in our efforts to pull Mike out of his dark cloud. Charles would meet my eyes briefly and broach a new way of thinking about the issue at hand. I’d infer his intention, adding my voice where I thought it would help most to advance the strategy. Sometimes, I felt like we had made progress. Charles would take my hand between his warm palms as we left, his eyes meeting mine, willing me to be filled with his hope. We were comrades in arms. “Have a great week, Michelle.”

The good weeks made it hard for me to break away. Over time though, I started to see the overall patterns were not in my favor. Still, I had a hard time letting go of the hope. Charles and I were working on it, doggedly. Eventually, one bad week, I made a choice. I made a solo appointment with a new therapist.

“I need you to help me leave my husband”.

Thirty minutes of conversation later, I felt in the subtext an angle toward reconciliation… The suggestion tested every fiber of my resolve. But hope was what couples therapy had been for. I had done my homework. I had tried. She didn’t understand yet. This was for me. I had changed my goal. I wanted — needed — to be strong enough to leave when it was time. I wanted to have hope for myself, alone, having walked away. I wanted to be able to choose my future without feeling selfish for having done so, or at least, forgive myself and make peace with it.

I cut her off.

“I need you to help me leave him.”

It had been a painful and difficult journey to get to the point where I could make that request. I had to change the story I was telling myself about how it was all playing out, the story of my marriage. I was at once the pathetic and villainous supporting character, Mike’s selfish and evil foil: weak and useless. A parasite. I had to change that into a narrative in which I was the protagonist. Choose my own adventure. I had to accept the idea that not giving Mike another chance didn’t mean it was all my fault, though that might be what he would take as his truth. It had been hard work, and continued to be. And he wasn’t even asking for another chance, yet.

Mike and I decided later, jointly, to separate. I spent those months couch-surfing or home alone with L. Bird-nesting. L was our little hatchling, stably in place while we alternated who was in the nest with her. We bird-nested for a while, and though it was a vast improvement over living together in our toxic, disillusioned state, it was not a permanent solution. I found my own place and agreed to a move-out date. Things were already complicated in most senses of the word, but logistically shortly got added to the list. When moving day arrived, I would couch-surf for one last week or two. I kept my fingers crossed that it would only be one week, and L would join my couch-surfing adventure for only a short stint. It was not to be quite that simple.

A few hours after I loaded up the truck and drove away, I answered a phone call from Mike. My moving out was unexpectedly tough on him. He thought he’d be relieved but found himself unable to manage the sudden change. I was concerned for his well-being as he oscillated between angry agitation and profound sadness. He told me he couldn’t face L. I felt like he needed me. But then, this was precisely what he didn’t need. He needed something, someone — else. I wasn’t his comfort anymore. I hadn’t been for a while.

I felt the full weight of this, our joint decision, on my shoulders. I felt responsible for bringing us all through this in one piece, somehow. I was there now, at that crossroad I had begun preparing for the day I made my solo therapy appointment. It broke my heart to imagine him alone that evening, in our old place, now only his, surrounded by memories. But it broke my heart even more to imagine him driftless, out there, finding a place to “be away” for the night. I had parked the UHaul on the street in my new neighborhood for what I expected to be a week or more. I didn’t have many options myself. I wasn’t going to be able to spare anyone heartbreak that night.

I strove for the appearance of calm collection as I surprised L and the babysitter by coming back home to pick her up. I called Mike’s best friend. “Can’t talk long, L and I are on our way out! Oh, did you know I moved today? Our friend would probably appreciate a phone call or a visit, let me know how it goes!”, I chirruped brightly as I loaded L into her carseat. L was a little confused, but happy to see me and thankfully, not concerned. I, on the other hand, was struggling to stay in the eye of the storm. Once she was buckled in, I loaded myself in the front seat and sat, resisting an existential crisis as my thumb hovered over the box at the top of google maps: destination. To which couch? And for how long?

I found myself back at Paul and Madeline’s place late that night. L slept blithely in her carseat as Madeline slid into the passenger seat in the dark. We sat there, whispering hypotheticals. Being surrounded by people I loved and trusted was my first choice, but the balance of practical factors was in favor of a medium-term solution closer to L’s daycare. Madeline kept watch over L as I fetched the key to my coworker George’s house from his desk at the lab. George and his wife were on vacation, and had offered to let us stay in their home while they were away. I had not planned to take them up on their offer. There was little in this day that I had planned.

Madeline hugged me as I dropped her back at home. “It’s not your fault.” she whispered as she held me close. I pushed back the tears and tucked that thought away for a less chaotic moment. And we were off again.

I couldn’t quite believe the form the world around me had taken, and thus experienced it as a series of time-fragments: like watching a movie shot with a low speed stobelight. A midnight dinner of Cheerios and milk hastily bought at the gas station around the corner. Making up a bed in a house I had never been to. Crawling in beside my daughter. I lay awake for quite some time, listening to L’s rhythmic breathing, finally letting the storm blow through me, wondering what I had done. How was I ever going to make this work, alone.

We stayed at my coworker’s house for almost 2 weeks. I was entrenched in the middle of some big projects at work and we kept the same routines as much as one possibly can in someone else’s home. L spent all her time with me while Mike adjusted. It was a strange in-between time and place. Our stuff moved from the UHaul into a little heap in George’s garage. A small suitcase migrated into George’s spare room, a medium-sized box of random toys made its way to the living room.

In the midst of this, my PhD advisor, Alan, offered me a chance to write an article summarizing and reviewing another group’s recent findings for a pretty high profile journal in my field. Having chosen to put all my eggs in the science basket after giving up medicine, I felt more than a little behind, and a lot of internal pressure to succeed. Writing this review was the kind of opportunity I felt was critical in this point in my career: when everything was uncertain and I was stuck in a precarious situation. I worried it was going to be hard to keep up the momentum and continue what I had been training for. But then again, I was stuck in this precarious situation — could I even do it?

I made a habit of “joking” with my friends that I was “homeless”. It was callous and untrue, of course, but it scratched the surface of the upheaval I felt. One afternoon at daycare pick-up, L’s teacher took me aside and asked if we were ok. My insides crumpled with shame as she explained that L had casually told her teachers we were homeless. I was a stupid fool. I had neglected the importance the story I was telling myself. It was L’s story too. I changed plans, L and I grabbing a slice of pizza and going to the park. We sat on a bench overlooking a large fountain and had what qualifies as a long conversation with a toddler. I told her that homeless means you have nowhere to live, which is a terrible thing. I was wrong to have said that about us. I tried to keep it neutral, just a correction of vocabulary — but my daughter is no slouch. I knew she grasped there was something there I was not quite explaining. I struggled to see in her eyes if she understood. Though, in the way of children, the conversation resolved spontaneously, without that certainty. It was time to play on the swings. I hoped I had undone some of the damage I had wrought. Band-aid applied, I resolved to do better going forward. Nothing was more important. I needed to be better than this.

Meanwhile, the rest of my life didn’t wait. Alan’s offer to write the review with him remained, another opportunity to fail at something notable. But, Alan believed in me. I still sometimes can’t believe I said yes. In between all of those days of juggling commuting logistics, laundry, childcare, and getting dinner on the table in an unfamiliar place, constantly worrying about whether Mike was ok, whether L was going to be ok , how I had royally screwed things up — I spent my nights writing. Writing poorly. Because focusing was hard.

The evening we submitted the proof to the editors sticks out in my memory, though for the time it was not unique.

It was one of those days at work when everything starts crawling at 4:30. I was refreshing my email inbox again and again, all the while doing a rapid mental calculus. If the editor calls now, I’ll have 5 minutes to finish the edits and send it out and catch the bus to get home for dinner…. now, if I run to the bus… As the time ticked on my energy only accumulated, like a compressed spring, ready to fly. When the call comes, I’ve already texted the babysitter to have dinner with L without me. From there, it’s like a race. Edits are discussed and made, emails written, attachments attached, back and forth about attachments being messed up are accomplished and finally — a sprint to the bus.

As I walk in, stomach growling, dinnertime is over and it’s already bedtime. I love those nights when we’re ahead of schedule: where we can linger and giggle over toothpaste bubbles and serving bathtub coffee drinks for exorbitant prices. “fifty thirteen?! for a latte? gracious!”. Not that night. My dinner was on the other side of a long routine of brushing teeth, bathing, changing, stories, cuddles and songs.

Everyone is a little edgy and overtired. I am short-tempered and hangry. I can hear the clock ticking in my head. Why do I care so much about the time tonight? I don’t know, but I do. L is sensitive, she wants extra hugs, extra songs, but at the same time is wired and crazy. All she does is kick and squirm and talk until I go to leave and then she is a complete sobbing mess. I feel myself being sucked into her vortex of desperate emotion. Or maybe she’s sucked into mine. I’m tired and hungry and “why won’t you sleep already!!!!” Sigh. Yes, mom, very helpful — so soothing and relaxing. The longer she is upset the louder that negative voice in my head gets — look what you’ve done! You are terrible at this! I feel more desperate and defeated, and L wails louder. We are planetary bodies, each of us pulled into each other’s gravity. It takes all my extra energy and self-control. I have to stop and take stock. Breathe in. She is tired just like me. Breathe out. Breathe in. She is a kid who needs her mom. Breathe out. I rock my big kid to sleep and as her sobs turn slowly into deep breathing, her body sinks into mine and I find a new state of relaxation.

I had to do that 2 more times that night … Each cry of exhausted despair mirroring my own despondent feeling at being called away from my reheated plate and a new wave of frantic anxiety that I somehow quell as I lull her back to sleep.

I don’t think I was a particularly good mom that night. I don’t think I was a particularly good scientist. It was a culmination of weeks of struggle. This night, when it was finally done, I maybe should have felt relaxed and pleased. Instead I felt, keenly, that I had done nothing. I had only caused suffering. I was fighting to stay afloat, to resist falling victim to the shade cast by my internal negative narrator. Perhaps it is in this fight that the power of this night arises.

We published the article. I don’t think I will ever write an article I am more proud of than the article I wrote that week. Though I hope I write many more that are much better. I’m more established in my lab now, my fingers in multiple fledgling project “pots”. My career remains in the slow and lurching phase of trying to differentiate oneself. Such is the life of the academic scientist. When I need a pep-talk, I reflect back on those weeks, now that my life is more stable. Remembering that night, I am proud. I draw on it to remind myself of my strength. I did that. I see how important it is for me now, and was for me — then, at the end of that day — to find a way to be proud of the fact that I was scraping by the best that I could.

That is all a matter of framing- the story you are telling yourself, about yourself, in your mind. It’s not always easy. In fact, it’s rarely easy. But it’s so important.

My internal movie narrator could suggest that night was a disaster. It certainly felt like it at the time. I felt like I was failing. I could have walked away from that day thinking that I can’t do it. That I’m not doing it. That I’m failing at work and at home. I had over-estimated myself, and what else should I expect besides small hiccups that spiral into disaster?

Or I can choose to feel like I took whatever the universe threw at me, and did it anyway.

Now that feels pretty badass.

As I learned from my beloved middle school algebra teacher: you can pump gas, or you can distribute petroleum.

When I left, I could have believed myself the villain. Truth be told, for the most part, I did. But I also remembered the alternative narrative I had been building for myself: I am not a parasite. I am a strong but imperfect woman. I am enough, even though I too, need. I tried my best. I am doing my best for myself and my daughter.

Couch surfing could have left me feeling like I was a burden on everyone I knew, and that I was never going to be self-sufficient. Or I am the kind of person that my loving and generous friends wanted to help, and that I was wise to accept that help.

In the midst of it, it is hard to see that you are making it through. The story you tell yourself matters. That story is the only way to dispel the negative narrator in your head. She has your voice. You write the script. You have to rewrite that narrative into something kinder and louder. You are persevering.

This is a battle fought anew every day. But every day is also new day, an opportunity to write your story. As I remind myself nights I linger over a microwaved dinner and a glass of wine, netflix on my phone propped next to me at the kitchen table, putting off the work I still have yet to do… you won’t always get style points. What matters is: s*&t got done. Style points don’t count for much. That is success in my book. Live to fight another day. Don’t give up. Be better today. Be even better tomorrow.

You are the narrator of your own story. You may not be entirely in control of the circumstances you encounter, but you are the author of your character.

You can be the victim or the villain. Or you can be the hero. It’s all in how you tell it. You are the protagonist.