Everything Can Be True

So this may not seem like it but it is written to praise a man whom I love(d) with all my heart — the father of my children. He was a Viking prince, all guy, with broad shoulders and a tender heart. He knew I was his from the moment he first saw me but it took him ten years to convince me he was mine. Then things moved quickly — date in February, married in December, fine fat baby boy the following April. Not long after that gorgeous baby came I realized that all the money was gone, all the savings in every account.

Then I knew he was a cocaine addict and that became the central fact of our existence for a dozen years. We were on a three year cycle: year one something terrible would happen, I would leave, he would go into treatment, then we would have the fraught fingernails on glass months of early recovery. Year two would be paradise. Year three things would start slipping, things would go missing, phone calls at odd hours, strange cars in front of the house at night. Then the next really horrible thing would happen and rinse wash and repeat.

I will tell you that things were sometimes so awful that I could not even hold them in my mind. There were always bruises on my arms. The constant negativity felt like it was coming not from a human but from a dark entity who had taken him over. And yet he was also so often filled with such sweetness and light and did his best to take care of me and loved his children so.

But, finally, after twelve years I had to leave for good. I have never been right since then. It was like removing my arm with a pen knife, reaching into my throat and pulling out my heart. You will say gaslighting. You will say trauma bonding. But I will say everything can be true, the dark and the light.