1. I’m the Villain

I’m the Villain

M ara

Everyone has a story.

We tell our stories in words, spoken and written, in film, in photographs, in scrapbooks, even through visual art. If we choose to tell them at all, we tell the story of who we are and how we came to be that way. Through our stories, we beg for understanding, forgiveness, and acceptance. We tell them because we long for belonging, and belonging requires understanding, acceptance, and forgiveness.

The entire fictional genre attests to our fascination with stories. The anticipation of those opening lines…. will it draw me in immediately or will it take a few pages? Will I fall in love right away or will it take a few chapters? Many in number are the friends and lovers I have met within the pages of a book. Always the story opens in the middle, the crisis around the next chapter. It is there, in the storm, where we befriend and fall in love, where we bear witness to weakness and bravery, weakness and bravery that must coexist in order for either to exist at all. We travel with them over too many bumps on too short a road, we cheer the hero’s entrance and the saving of the day. Cue happily ever after.

Sigh.

Oh, the bereavement of a closed book when I must say goodbye to my newfound companions!

They’re just stories, but I love them. They’re not real, but they touch something in me that is.

Everyone has a story.

A series of snapshots, those pivotal points and chapters in a person's life that shape who they are and where they go. We get to choose which snapshots we reveal and which we tuck away into a shoebox at the back of the closet. Hidden or shared, they tell the story of our lives.

If my story were laid out upon the pages of a book, I fear I’d be the villain.

I get jealous, and when I’m jealous, I’m mean. More often a problem in our early years, over time I learned to temper my reactions because I saw how much I hurt him. I didn’t want to behave like that, but the feelings are strong and difficult to fight through .

It’s not easy to love a hot guy when you’re a chubby. Tall, dark, and handsome walks in and every female eye is drawn. Usually in the journey back up his long frame they catch the hand he’s holding and envy registers on their faces as their gazes slide over to me. Envy that is quickly replaced by surprise and followed by a smirk. That’s the women. The men, they differ. Some wouldn’t mind a taste, and some look at me with the same disdain as the women. Worse is when they look at him with pity. In those moments, I desperately want to put a paper bag over my head, and sometimes I want to die.

I know what they think of me. I can feel their thoughts, see it in their eyes, the slant of their mouths.

I don’t know what Zale thinks of me. Of course, he tells me, but I find it difficult to believe. It kills me that I can’t ever know for sure. If I could get into his head for a moment, just a minute so I could know for myself the way he sees me, then, I could believe.

I try to believe, but the evidence given to me by my own eyes defies me.

I am chubby. I have thick thighs, chubby arms, a tummy, and round hips. I have a waist. This is true. Also, my breasts, which were beautiful when I was young, are still surprisingly good. Long, bouncy, chocolate curls, with a scattering of silver locks highlight a face that is round and all too expressive of my feelings. My eyes are brown, my mouth is small but cute, my nose is okay.

I wish I had more time to look after myself, exercise, shop, get my hair done, but my Olivia is needy, not as much now that she’s twelve, but she still needs more care than your average bear .

Who am I kidding?

Even if I had more time to exercise, I’ve always been chubby. At forty-four it's a lot less likely to change than it was in my twenties. And back then it was near impossible.

I am what I am.

Doesn’t mean I have to like it.

I often journaled before I sat down to do my serious writing, which is ironic, since my journal entries were serious and reflected my darkest thoughts and my serious writing was about a great fluffy cat named Parsley, and his Labrador sidekick, Spud.

It felt both good and bad to expel the dark; good to purge it but when reading it back to myself, I was disappointed and distressed with how little I’d progressed in my mission to like myself.

I needed to be kinder. I was slipping a bit, slipping back into some old patterns. Lately I was getting mad with little provocation. I wanted to throw something, lots of things maybe. In my mind I was Bellatrix, dancing through the destruction wrought by her own hand at Hogwarts. I understood her, she needed to balance the chaos and destruction within by creating it in the world around her.

I, too, craved balance. I fantasized about throwing my cell phone through the television. I envisioned the burst of glass and sparks, the shock of the crash, but I didn’t want to clean up the mess, or scare Zale and Olivia. More than likely, there was some safety coating that would prohibit that kind of explosion, guaranteeing a highly unsatisfactory outcome all around.

Instead, I dug my fingernails into my thighs, and pulled my hair. I’d feel the urge to pull a blade across my skin and make myself bleed. How or why I’d get this urge when I’d never actually cut myself was beyond me. But the urge remained, and instead of giving into it, I used my nails where no one would see. I scraped my nails across my scalp, dug my nails into my head, gripped my hair tightly in my fists and pulled it hard. On my knees, resisting the strength of my hands until I could bear it no longer and my forehead rested on the floor.

This way there was no evidence of the madness.

This scared me, the return of the anger. It made me concerned for Zale and Olivia. I wanted them to have a healthy wife and mother instead of the psycho bitch I secretly feared was truly me.

I made an appointment with my doctor. I wondered if I was going through early menopause, or if my hormone levels were off, I even admitted that I felt tons better after having sex and asked if perhaps there was an antianxiety medication that could simulate whatever hormone it was that I seemed to be lacking. She referred me for a psychiatric assessment.

Sigh. You either run from it or learn from it. So says The Lion King’s great sage, Rafiki. I wasn’t running.

“Olivia?” I called. No answer. “Olivia? Say ‘yes, mommy’. ”

If I didn’t tell Olivia to say ‘yes, mommy’, she would not answer. She didn’t understand why she had to answer. I explained, repeatedly, that when she answers me it tells me that she heard me. She informed me, repeatedly in return, that of course she could hear me, did she not have ears? She was not being cheeky, it’s just that, for her, me telling her that I don’t know if she can hear me is tantamount to me telling her I didn’t know she had ears.

“Yes, Mommy?” She repeated the phrase.

“Can you grab your iPad, your headphones, and your bag of happiness and come into the sunroom?”

“No, Mommy!” she called back. Again, not being cheeky or defiant, just factual.

Olivia had issues transitioning from one activity to another, especially if she was doing something she really enjoyed. One day that would always stand out for me. She was playing with silly putty, pressing it down flat on the table, then slowly peeling it back up. She called me to her, pointed out all the little ‘tendrils’ of silly putty that clung to the table, popping off slowly as she pulled, and told me this was how it was for her when I tried to pull her away from doing something she didn’t want to stop doing.

Clever girl.

I found her in my bedroom watching her show on tv.

“Olivia, how much longer in this episode?”

“I don’t know, Mommy. ”

“Pause and check, little bird.”

Olivia loved wings, had always loved wings. Anything with wings fascinated her and she used to fly around, her little arms mimicking the movement of a bird’s wings. She earned the nickname little bird when she was three and it stuck, along with the fascination with wings.

She paused Netflix. “Six minutes and fourteen seconds.”

“Okay. Finish this episode and don’t start another one. Get your iPad and your bag of happiness, then meet me in the sunroom in six minutes, okay?”

Her bag of happiness was what we called the bag that she filled with her most important belongings. Those items that made the cut, she carried around all day, every day.

“Okay, can I watch now?” Her big brown eyes remained glued to the frozen picture on the tv, but I knew she was paying attention.

“After you finish this episode, we’re going to have Zen time, music time, drawing time, some school time, then lunch. Got that, little bird? Agreed?”

“Agreed. Can I watch tv now?”

“Yes, little bird. See you in six minutes.”

It was a bit of a crap shoot as to whether she would comply in six minutes or not, but even if she didn’t, she made the agreement and she’d be able to leave the tv right away if I had to go back in again to retrieve her, even if she did start a new episode. These negotiations were frustrating but accepting them as part of her process went a long way to avoiding meltdowns, which were infinitely more frustrating and exhausting for both of us. Besides, it would be unfair to set her off if I could avoid it.

I loved my sunroom filled with plants. I loved my pretty writing desk with its curvy legs and tiny drawers, its curvy skirt, and matching curvy-legged chair. Notebooks and sketchbooks lay at the top right corner for fleshing out ideas for Parsley. My laptop lay front and center, ever ready to go, and top left lay a pretty ceramic tray with pencils, markers, and pencil crayons, for both writing, drawing, and homeschooling. I sorted out what I needed for writing and teaching.

This was the room where Olivia and I spent most of our time. It was soothing for both of us. Olivia wandered in, her little cat trotting behind her. We discussed the order she’d like to follow for the morning and got to work.

Well, she did.

I mostly sat and stared at the blank screen on my laptop.

Zale

It hurts to see them suffer. Both his girls struggled to cope with life. All three of them if he included Mara’s younger sister in that equation, and he did. Willa lived with them off and on for several years starting when she was a teenager, and she spent a lot of time with Mara before he arrived on the scene. His girls were important to him, but Mara, Mara was everything.

Delicately pretty, like a China doll. Perfect lips, big, brown eyes, winged eyebrows like an old-time movie star, and dimples when she laughed, and she laughed a lot. She was funny, found the funny in life, and did not hesitate to share that. She appreciated little things, never asked for much, was easily pleased, and aimed to please those around her. She was fiercely loyal and fiercely protective of those she loved.

Mothering came naturally to her, which was astonishing considering her example, and she mothered not just Olivia, but all her family and friends. The way she leaned in with her best friend Bex after Jack passed was evidence of this, along with the advocating she did constantly for Olivia, and the way she stood in for her mother with Willa. Thankfully, Willa and Bex gave that back to her, and they lavished it on Olivia.

Mara was generous with her time, always willing to help, openly affectionate with him, with their daughter, with her sister, and her best friend. She cared passionately, felt deeply, and easily expressed her feelings. You never doubted where you stood with Mara, even when it was uncomfortable, which seemed to only happen with him.

He loved her curvy body, loved to dig his hands into her hips, press his hips between her soft thighs, her skin like silk, the way she responded under his hands and his mouth, her taste, her sex drive he could not hope to keep up with. She kept that hidden most of the time, lucky for him, he did not like the idea of other men knowing that about his wife.

All this and yet, she was easily the most insecure woman he had ever met in his life.

In their earlier years, that insecurity led to tantrums and ultimatums that were shocking in their intensity and acceleration, like a female version of Jekyll and Hyde. He grew accustomed to it, as much as a person could. He trained his eyes not to glance at other women, one look was like a knife to her heart, the resulting tears and recriminations a pain in the ass he didn’t want to deal with, so he made sure not to look.

She worried incessantly that he would cheat on her. He wouldn’t cheat on anybody; it was not in his nature. Explaining this brought her no relief, only a new worry that he might someday want to be with someone else, and the thought of him wanting anyone other than her killed her.

When it was just them, in their family bubble, she was relaxed and even-tempered, funny, and giving, and life flowed along smoothly. Most of the time. Introduce others to the mix and she could get wary, and it was a wariness he needed to stay on top of or deal with the consequences, consequences which could typically take a couple of days and a long, hard fuck to sort out and get her back on track .

He didn’t know she was so insecure when they started out or he wouldn’t have gone in. Her constant need for reassurance was draining, her moods mercurial, and they could change by the hour. At times, she could get downright despondent, snap at the merest provocation, and become positively enraged by jealousy, though he could not think of a time when he’d ever given her reason to doubt him.

It was worse after they fell in love. In their beginning, she was just sweet and sexy and funny. As she became more attached to him, she got scared. He could see it. He could not see what to do about it.

He never figured that out.

He did not know she was so insecure, and by the time he clued in, it was too late. He was already taken by her sweetness.

Thank God because he could not fathom his life with her.