Fair Lady

Over the weekend, I introduced my kids to My Fair Lady starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison.


I don't remember the last time I saw the movie in it's entirety.  It's been years.  During those years, I've gone through therapy and support groups.  My body has been raked through the coals of inflammation.  In short, there's been a transformation.
Watching Eliza Doolittle transform before my eyes was a different experience this time.

I watched her as a flower girl with dirt on her face.  I watched her moan and cry out.  I watched the longing in her eyes to become something more, and I watched that longing turn placidly into acceptance.
A dust-covered flower girl WAS WHAT SHE WAS.  Period.

Then I watched her find a glimmer of hope.  I watched her face as she realized that maybe -just maybe -she could change.

I watched as she washed her body, changed her clothes from rags to soft, feminine cloth.  Her hair went from harsh to soft.
She began to CARE for herself -externally and internally.  She cared for her body, her hair, her clothes.  And her internal worth began growing.  She began to feel and know her worth.

I thought of my Step 9 to myself -my amends to myself.  For my 30th birthday, I pulled an Eliza Doolittle Project without really calling it that.  I bought new underwear and a new outfit.  I had my hair cut and dyed.  I ate at my favorite restaurant.  Most importantly: I promised myself that I would always care for myself.  That I would continue to buy bras and mascara when it made sense and not 2 years afterward.  I would drink water and green juices.  I would eat protein and walk, walk, walk with my shoulders back and my face to the breeze.  I would inhale the love of God instead of the hate of self.

But we are works of progress, amIright?
And progress isn't progress without REGRESS to back it up.

In the beginning of November, a police officer was shot and killed in the line of duty an hour away from where I sit right now.  In my county.  In the county my husband works for as a police officer.
As my heart stalled, my husband drove straight for the gunfire.
And yeah.
Shots were fired his way.
While I sat on the couch, wrapped in my husband's cop shirt.

It was surreal.  This addiction messes with EVERYthing.  I love Danny and I struggle with the addiction side of him.  Divorce has been a very real option for us.  We've separated at times.  When times like that hit, I was conflicted every day -sending him to the battlefront.
"I love you.  I'm scared."
That feels like the two lines I've lived by as the wife of a cop and the wife of an addict.
I love you, Danny and I'm scared as hell.

Don't hurt me.
Don't get hurt.

That night -the night he ran to the gunfire and I tried to remember what it felt like to care about dinner and laundry -something inside of me broke.

I haven't had my hair done.  I haven't bought mascara.
I haven't exercised.
I haven't cared for myself.

My writing has struggle.  Where once words flowed through my mind and out of my fingers, I found nothing but blank space that I filled up with a Victorian-Era murder-mystery.
And now that that's over, I found The Great British Baking Show.
#bingebabybinge

I didn't even realize it had happened.  I just thought maybe the holidays were so busy they killed me.
I thought maybe it was being a mom to 3.  Maybe it was just the whole healing thing?

As I sat with the ladies in my writing group two weeks ago, one of them said, "We haven't had anything from you in MONTHS."
"Yeah," I nodded.  I tried to come up with an excuse, but they all seemed to get jammed in my throat as I realized the last time I'd written anything for hobby purposes was the day before The Shooting.

"I haven't written anything since The Cop Shooting," I said, realizing it for the first time as I said it.
"Makes sense," the ladies in my group said, almost in unison.

I see it now.  I SEE IT.
I just don't see yet how to get back up, to turn back on.  What does it all mean?  And how deeply is it affecting me EXACTLY?
Or has it just triggered other issues that were lying dormant, waiting for some kind of trauma to wake them up?

Cue help.
Self-help is the trickiest snitch in the world.  It means well but always bites me in the bum.  But in the last year, I've haltingly picked up SAFER self-help options, and so far it's going okay because for the most part (hello, progress and regress) God is driving this serenity train.
So I made an appointment with a coach -a well-being coach?  A health coach?
Basically, someone who can take my hands and put them over my heart and teach me how to open it and retrieve the answers that are now, themselves, lying dormant.

This is so messy, you guys.
And I look messy.

But as I watched Eliza Doolittle emerge in her diamonds and jewels, I knew that it was me, in my own messy way.
I wear my jewels on the inside.

Less-Worried

I brought a lot of books to our marriage.  Poor Danny had no idea what he was getting into, no idea that I dreamed of one day filling an entire room with The Written Word and fancy leather chairs and maybe a few smoking jackets for good measure.
I had classics I'd collected (some bought, some stolen from a high school that shall remain nameless...), a beat up slam poetry book, scriptures, churchy books, a book about a woman named Alicia who lost her entire family during WWII!  As the years went on, I collected more and more.
One year for Christmas Danny bought me a bookcase, and I filled it.  FILLED it.
Last summer, I tried that Kondo Method of cleaning where you get rid of books that don't fill your gills with guts and glory, and I think I tossed the slam poetry book and one of Dr. Laura's books about feeding husbands properly or some shizz like that.
I guess slam poetry lost some luster between midnight feedings and overdraft fees...
I won't even get started on why Dr. Laura doesn't bring me joy.

In fact, I'll drop all the booky stuff and just say what I came to say: Danny has a mountain of cop books (case law is apparently very important), so he gets the bottom shelf.
His one other contribution to our bookcase is THREE paperback books by CS Lewis: the first three in the Narnia series.  He'd picked them up as a kid and just sort of never let loose of them.

Having fallen in a sort of fantastical love with the way Lewis moves words around, it started to bug me that I'd never read them.  Danny and I have been trying to read them together.

As we've read his words, I keep thinking about a quote of his that has meant so much to me.  I wanted to share it here:

“[To have Faith in Christ] means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you.”

It reminds me so much of Step 3, but also?  It is what recovery is to me daily.  Handing myself, my will and my day over to God because I trust Him -THAT is the goal that SOMEtimes I meet and SOMEtimes I don't.  I think of another great wordsmith, one Dr. Seuss, who said very wisely,

"You won't lag behind, because you'll have the speed.You'll pass the whole gang and you'll soon take the lead.Wherever you fly, you'll be best of the best.Wherever you go, you will top all the rest.
Except when you don't.Because, sometimes, you won't.
I'm sorry to say sobut, sadly, it's truethat Bang-upsand Hang-upscan happen to you."

Bang-ups and Hang-ups.  I was reading in my scriptures today about how God GIVES us weaknesses, and I got hung-up on that word, "gives."  Such a positive word. God gives us all good things, so surely my weaknesses must be good?  I recently listened to a Monk talk about how he quit having panic attacks when he accepted the panic as his friend.  He quit fighting it and accepted it.  

In 12-step talk, I think we'd say, "he surrendered it."

Because you can't surrender something unless you've accepted it.

I think back a few months ago to the sacred time I spent with my Granny who gently rubbed my feet and talked of the time in her life when she was left alone with eight children.  How did she survive that?

With God.

"I'm so grateful for those days," she said, "I didn't know it then, but God was giving me exactly what I needed.  I see it now, and I just remind myself when things get hard that God is always giving me what I need.  He is so compassionate."

Compassionate because He gives us adversity.

Generous because He gives us weaknesses.

It seems counter-intuitive, but honestly, I don't think God is much interested in the intellect of men and their worldly philosophies.  I think He's more interested in truth, simplicity, peace, meekness (the less-mentioned virtue, the underestimated underdog!), charity, love, humility, purity of heart, and willingness.

A less-worried world is what God is after.

A world where men worry less about battlefronts and more about the divine smolder sparking around inside of their own chests.

A world where the battlefronts surrender to the love of a neighbor.

Lately my life has taken on a small shift that has made a big difference, like the small shift in a track that causes a train to land in one city rather than another.

Life has become much less about RECOVERY and much more about simply HEALING and living genuinely with my whole heart forward.  I can't imagine I'll ever be off this track, and though I'm sure I'll miss out on ending up in a City That Might Have Been, I'll end up in A New City more suited to my needs.

A less-worried city.