I Am A Pearl.

After the text, and between bouts of crying over these last two weeks, I knew I needed to write; to process and cope and try to make sense about a choice I made. To try to articulate who I am, and who I am not.

I am resorting to metaphor. I’ve decided that the best metaphor is a pearl: that rare, iridescent jewel created by an oyster’s protection against a harmful and life-threatening irritant. The homely bivalve, with its rigid, spiny exterior, reveals an inside shell that’s milky and pale and soft, shades of the palest pinks and yellows and blues harboring its fruit: the delicious, edible oyster. When something threatens the oyster — a grain of the ocean’s floor, or a parasite — the mollusk responds by coating the harmful intruder with a pearl sac of cells and secretions.

Over and over, the oyster repeats this process, protecting itself from the intruder, wrapping it in a covering, taking something ugly and hurtful and life-threatening, and creating something lovely and unique and, in the end, rare and beautiful. The pearl.

Whether or not the world thinks I’m beautiful or rare or lovely is, frankly, irrelevant.

I liken myself to an oyster and its pearl because I am all of those things.

I have parts of me that are beautiful: a generous and forgiving soul is chief among them, I think.

And I have parts of me that are ugly: the alcoholic who developed — in my late 40s and after just a few years of drinking — following my discovery of a soul-crushing betrayal that changed me forever, undermining much of the progress I had made in restoring my self-esteem.

I have hurt people with my drinking by behaving bizarrely and stupidly and selfishly: phone calls I don’t remember, words I cannot recall, or unsay.

I have isolated myself when confronted with pain, unable to do the work to move on by processing the experiences and remnants of my past.

Yet, I have let people in, let them pry open the edges of my shell and have a good, deep look at my insides.

I have been honest and raw and pure.

I have answered questions about the darkest, ugliest parts of my life; recalling and dissecting memories of things I’ve worked to forget.

I have allowed people I love to pick at my scars and rupture the tissue, giving them a look under the ‘healed’ place so that they could understand me more fully.

And I’ve done this because I want to be understood and loved for who I am: the good, the not-so-good, the hurt and wounded little girl encased within the warrior woman, the one who gets up every day and presses on, with empathy and love and concern for others.

The pearl inside the oyster.

I have been in love three men in my life, and I married two of them.

Each of these relationships has contributed to the layers of the sac that made the pearl, guarding against the pain of real and potential hurt if left exposed.

I married B when I was a couple of months past 21. I’d known him since I was 16 and decided that I would marry him one day. That was met with laughter by my girlfriends: they couldn’t get over his bellbottoms and West Virginia accent; I couldn’t get over his accent and intellect. B was five years older; the oldest son in a middle-class, two-parent home, where the mom and dad were, essentially, the Cleavers. Or so it seemed. In any event, his parents’ racism wore me down, along with my inability to live in a place where few people ever moved away.

I stuck it out for 13 years in those Appalachian hills, escaping finally at 33 when I found my dream job as a newswoman at a terrific Pennsylvania newspaper. The job didn’t last. Its bottom-line was far too attractive to a (now bankrupt) media group and, as lowest on the union totem pole, I was laid off after just 7 months.

Armed with awards from my journalism career, and a belief that I could eventually go anywhere, I returned to New England. Not Rhode Island, where I grew up, but to Connecticut, accepting a reporting gig at an afternoon daily in a suburb of Hartford. It was close enough to my family, without being too close.

I wasn’t used to the early morning deadline and was doubting my choice to take the job. I remember being on the phone with my mother one morning after my 8:50 am deadline, a few days after I started.

The guy next to me is cute, I told her, but what a prick. I couldn’t figure out how to send my story on this shitty computer system, and I looked right at him and asked him for help and he swiveled his chair and turned away from me.

My mother laughed. Give it time, she said.

As it turned out, D and I fell in love in that newsroom. I loved how he, in his Oxford buttondowns and tie, raced off to crime scenes and court dates. We bonded over shitty coffee and smokes and politics in those exhilarating, post-deadline minutes. We bonded over beer and darts and music in a watering hole popular with other writers.

We bonded, too, over our dysfunctional upbringings.

My mother was just two months away of dying from lung cancer when she met D, the year after I’d moved to Connecticut. I’d brought him to Rhode Island to meet the woman who was the greatest influence in my life, for better and worse, and wanted her opinion of him.

Dying of cancer gave my mother the freedom to say whatever she wanted; she told me she wanted me to be happy, but that I needed someone to challenge me. A strong man.

D was strong; he helped prop me up following her death, and he’d been there for me through the unexpected death of my older brother seven months prior.

I had let him in; I invited D to look beyond my snarky exterior and lift up the shell. Probe my heart, see my soul, feel my joy, look at my pain.

Here I am, I said. All of me.

D surprised me by not running. He looked inside me and did not judge. And in the ensuing 16 years, he has held me when I have broken; he helped me put myself back together when I have shattered.

D and I had a pretty good run: he is the father of my only child, the girl her grandmother never got to meet, but for whom she is named. I owe him my life for that. Scratch that: I owe him a deep and eternal gratitude for making me a mother, even if I’m not the mother I’d hoped to be.

I don’t expect absolute, unconditional love and I don’t have it in me to give, either. There are dealbreakers for me in love relationships, like infidelity and dishonesty, and that is healthy. A doormat I am not.

I have learned a lot in our time together. What I need and have to give; what I will tolerate and what I cannot. What it feels like to be deeply loved, and what it feels like to have my heart torn from my chest and shredded into a bloodied mass of torn bits, never to be the same.

D and I will be connected, forever, by this beautiful young woman we birthed. We will always be part of each other’s lives, always part of each other, even when we are not. We have shared experiences that no one else can ever have, or take away from the part of us that was ‘us.’

In the 11 months since I told D that I wanted a divorce we have become, in some ways, even better friends.

He did not rage when, months after I told him I want a divorce, I fell deeply and wholly in love with someone else. D genuinely wants me to be happy, even if it is not with him.

He did not turn away, when I crashed in August, when my depression had enveloped me to a degree of darkness that was life-threatening. D drove me to the hospital in the middle of the night, and brought me new shoes days later so that I could shed my suicide sneakers.*

He brought our daughter to the hospital so that she could see that her mother was okay; that she was going to be fine and heal and return home a better version of herself.

On the morning I was discharged from hospital, D received a message from the man I am in love with. D assured him that he had nothing to do with the breakdown of our marriage, and that I am, in fact, a really good person. I think that is testament to D’s character, and the love and respect we have for each other.

D has been there for me, when I slipped and drank, after weeks of sobriety. Not approving, but knowing that recovery can be challenging at times. His support has added layers to the pearl.

My heart, at the moment, aches with an emptiness that I can physically feel, like the bone-deep chill that rips through your body on a windy and raw winter day.

Love has a way of doing that sometimes.

I hurt deeply and I have hurt others, just as deeply, of that I am certain. My recent slip, a stupid, unnecessary Thursday night drunk after 45 days of sobriety, has landed me in this place. If I could undo it, I would. I cannot. I am living with that choice and the fallout. Still, when I fell I did not stay down. I got up, took stock, and began moving forward as I had planned: soberly.

I have hope. I opened my shell; allowed the hinge to come up and showed my innards to this intelligent, beautiful, sensitive, kind, thoughtful man. The dark and ugly; the rich and colorful patina of my inside shell. The layers.

I tried to explain how I became who I now am. I had to tell hard truths about some of my behaviour this summer, knowing that he could, ultimately and with good conscience, walk away. He did not. He tried to understand me. Until he couldn’t. And I I understand why he needs me to be clean and sober; I need it, and want it, too.

This is so hard. The lessons of self-discovery have at times been cruel.

But this I know: the experiences and highs and deep lows of the last year have grown my pearl, in size and depth and richness of glow.

No matter: my pearl grows, inside this house of my heart.

Note: *suicide sneakers have the laces removed and replaced with a small strip of Velcro. To wit: