“I am confused about everything,” I wrote. “But I know that when I think about staying married I want to stand outside and scream until I can’t stop screaming …”
Trembling, I hit the send button on the email and walked into the kitchen. I stood statute-still, staring into my two-year old daughter’s playroom.
A sense of calm swept over me and a weight dropped from my throat, through the center of my body into the ground. I felt truckloads of relief.
“Shit,” I thought. I knew what that calm meant.
I was a work-at-home mom running this blog and podcast, calling myself “Inspiring Mama.” I professed to search for solutions to the “problems” in life that make parents unhappy.
And I had just admitted to myself that I might want to separate from my husband. I had just admitted to myself and to one another person that I was so unhappy that I sometimes sliced small cuts in my upper arms with hair-cutting scissors.
Two years ago I disappeared from the online world. Now hundreds of hours of therapy later, I will explain why.
It started with that moment in my kitchen. I didn’t know what was really wrong and I certainly didn’t know what I wanted.
I just knew THIS wasn’t it.
As my readers know, over the past few years I have struggled with postpartum depression. My daughter’s birth turned my entire inner world upside down.
I blamed myself for my unhappiness and retreated inside. I responded to life like someone had broken into my house, but instead of calling for help I just hid under the covers.
In hindsight, the marriage was not the problem. I loved him and he loved me. No one thing went wrong, and no therapist, book, or method could have saved it.
I sometimes even wish he had cheated, or done something I could blame. We had amazing times together that I still treasure.
I’m just not sure I was the one who married him.
Ok, let me back up a bit.
Over the years I have perfected the art of leaving my body. As an exquisitely sensitive child, disassociation was the prefect strategy to avoid overwhelm.
I remember sitting in the car during a fight with my mother, hearing her words but staring out the window, gone. I spent years perfecting a disappearing act where my body stayed, but I didn’t see, hear or feel anything– a puppet Lauren.
In her beautiful book Love Warrior, Glennon Doyle describes this separation between self and world as “sending my representative.” In my teens I started sending my representative full time to look the part of a smart, happy and successful girl.
Piece by piece in my 20s I built myself and my life into exactly what I thought I needed to fit that mold. I went to law school, boasted a successful career, paired with a good looking successful guy and partied like crazy with a big friend circle.
But I didn’t build any of it. My representative did.
When I told people I was leaving my husband they were shocked. If my life were a house it would be huge and beautiful, with granite counter tops and hedges shaped like animals in the front yard.
I collected my experiences in a jar and displayed them on my mantel, telling stories of trips, music festivals, burning mans and huge birthday parties. But I did not feel like a part of any of it.
Truthfully I didn’t feel much at all. My representative had stuffed Real Me in a closet in the back of my beautiful house-life, keeping the messy and emotional parts hidden.
Then when my daughter was born, I started to feel again. But after ignoring my feelings for years, I had no coping mechanisms and fell apart. Therapists called it postpartum depression and anxiety and maybe they were correct.
But I think what really happened was a rebellion.
I think that Real Me had been stuffed into a closet in my perfect life-house. And the second I held that newborn baby, Real Me tasted joy, happiness and vitality.
She wanted more. I wanted more.
The rebellion started as a tiny scream that I could ignore. But it kept getting louder and louder until the screams of Real Me pierced my ears and coursed through my veins.
When I stood in the kitchen that day, Real Me finally screamed so loud that I had to open the closet door and look her in the eye. She walked out, looked around at the life and marriage my representative had built and just said “no.”
Suddenly I was walking out of a thirteen-year relationship into an abyss.
We worked on the marriage for another year, trying to improve communication and deepen our emotional connection. But I felt like an alien in the relationship, unable to communicate or connect with a man who suddenly felt like a stranger.
People in my life and voices in my head may call me a selfish failure for leaving the marriage. A dagger goes through my heart when I hear my daughter correct a story from “mommy and daddy” to “mommy or daddy.”
But deep down I know that I had no choice. As Doyle said in Love Warrior, “If a woman has a choice between saving her soul and saving her marriage, she needs to save her soul.”
Now, two years later I’m scared out of my wits to tell you my story. Yet at the same time I feel like shouting it from the roof.
I left, tore it all down, and I rebuilt it. I fought shame, pain, fear, self-loathing, addiction and loneliness.
And I’m still here.
I don’t have the answers, but I do have an open heart, a way with words, and a desire to heal. Maybe as I re-open this blog you can gain insight, get a laugh, or think twice about hiding Real You.
So if it’s ok with you, I am going to continue to call myself Inspiring Mama. But instead of calling this a happiness hub, I will call this community what it really is for me…a healing hub.
Until next time…
