32. Leaving the Shadowlands

Leaving the Shadowlands

M ara

First thing Wednesday morning I opened the playlist. He’d added ‘Without You Here’ by The Goo Goo Dolls. I listened. Borrowed words telling me I’m his reason, that I fill his emptiness. I listened to all of the songs again.

I went to breakfast, then had my first private session for the day.

“How’s today treating you, Mara?”

“A bit better.” I met Marissa’s friendly gaze. “I need to talk to my daughter.”

She brightened. “That’s good! Let’s chat about that a bit and then get you connected to her. Olivia? Is that her name?”

I nodded.

“Tell me about her.”

“She’s wonderful. She has special needs. She’s probably so confused. Zale doesn’t always know how to handle things with her. I’m worried about her.”

“What do you want to tell her?”

“Just that I wasn’t feeling well but I’ll be home tomorrow.”

“Are you ready to go home?”

“I need to get back to Olivia. I thought she’d be better off without me, and me in this state, I’m probably correct. But I know what it is to be abandoned by your mother and, as imperfect as I am, it’s far better to have a mother who loves you and is trying than no mother at all.”

The clarity I’d gained overnight, with a bit of rest, a bit of quiet, and a bit of perspective, had been necessary.

“I don’t want her to deal with feeling unloved or unwanted. She is loved, by me, by Zale, by my sister, our close friends. I can’t flake out on her. The bottom line is that I am, good or bad, irreplaceable, in her life at least. The outcome of our relationship is my responsibility and I’m not going to let her down.”

“That’s good, but are you ready to go home?”

“I have to be. I’ll take whatever support I can get. I know I’m going to need to intensify the therapy, I’m good with that. I’ll do whatever it takes. Including staying away from my mother.”

“I think it’s wise to be thinking along those lines, what supports you’ll need, and a stress reduction plan for the next while. Let’s take a look at that and then we’ll get you on the phone with Olivia.”

“Shouldn’t we call right now? What if they’re not available at the end of the session?”

“You want to call now? We can do that. Let’s work out what you’re going to say to her, to calm her, and then we’ll try calling.”

We wrote down my points, as well as some questions I could ask her about Sirius and Harry Potter to keep things as normal as possible. My heart pounded in my chest as she dialed my house.

We decided that she’d call, talk to Zale, tell him I wasn’t ready to talk to him yet and ask for Olivia. I told her she could tell him I was doing better. As soon as the phone began to ring she switched it to speaker.

“Hello?” Hearing his low, mellow voice was a gift. I held my hand to my heart. Marissa saw and smiled.

“Hello, is this Zale Donovan? ”

“Yes, this is Zale.”

“Hello Zale, this is Marissa, Mara’s counselor at the hospital. We met yesterday.”

“Hello, hi, how is my wife?”

I could hear the anxiety in his voice. It hurt me. Tears sprung to my eyes, yet I couldn’t talk to him until I decided what to do about us.

“She’s with me right now. She is improving.”

“Thank God. Will she see me? Talk to me?”

“She’s working on that. I have you on speaker phone so she can hear your voice but she's not ready to talk to you yet. Right now, she just wants you to know that she’s doing better, and she is planning on being home with Olivia tomorrow.”

“With Olivia,” he repeated. “What does that mean?”

“It means she’s going to be discharged tomorrow, and right now her priority is to get home to Olivia. She’s concerned about her. She’d like to talk to her if that’s okay, just her this time. We’d like to bring you in tomorrow morning to join Mara in her counseling session with me. Would that be something you’d be willing to do?”

“Anything. Anything at all.”

God, he sounded terrible. I dropped my face into my hands and bent over my knees. I could feel myself rocking.

“That’s great, Zale. Can you arrange for Olivia to be available to talk to Mara in about fifteen minutes? We just need to give Mara a chance to pull herself together again. Hearing your voice has affected her.”

“She can hear me?”

“Yes, she’s just not able to talk at the moment.”

“Okay, that’s okay.” I heard him take a deep breath. “Fifteen minutes is fine. I’ll hand Olivia the phone as soon as you tell me Mara’s ready to take the call. She won’t have to talk to me. And, Mara, don’t answer, it’s okay, but please, God, gorgeous, know that I love you and Olivia is doing okay. I may have promised her a goldfish.” He huffed out a dry laugh. “But we’ll work that out when you get home. I love you and I miss you and I can’t fucking wait to see you tomorrow.” His voice broke on the last word, and he hung up the phone.

I sat back, leaning my head on the back of the couch, my throat working to balance the demands of breathing and swallowing while beating back the tears.

Marissa moved closer to me. “What would Radical Acceptance sound like right now Mara?”

I shook my head in response.

“Try,” she pushed. “I’ll get you started. I’m here in the hospital because…”

“...of millions of events and decisions that led up to this moment.” I breathed. “It couldn’t be any other way. ”

“That’s great, sweetheart. What else now?”

“I can make different decisions, so it doesn’t happen again.”

“That’s right. You’ve got this.”

“Can we call my daughter now?”

Marissa smiled her beautiful smile. “You bet.”

She dialed the phone, I heard Zale answer, and Marissa asked for Olivia.

“Mommy?”

I took a steadying breath. “Hi, my little bird.”

“You don’t sound right.”

“Hmm. I wasn’t feeling well, at all, but I’m getting better. I’ll be home tomorrow.”

“Hmm.” Olivia found it difficult to talk on the phone.

“What did you do yesterday?”

“Daddy took the day off work. We got Little Caesar’s. I ate all the breadsticks. Two packages. And Daddy bought cinnamon sticks too.”

“You got spoiled?”

“Yes. Daddy does not know how to say no.” I smiled at her lack of filter. Her voice sounded small when she continued. “When are you coming home? ”

“Tomorrow, little bird. Mommy’s sorry it happened so suddenly. You were upset?”

“I was scared,” she admitted. “I didn’t know where you were, and I stayed so late at Uncle Dean’s. Their dogs were loud, twice.”

“Dogs are loud sometimes, aren't they!”

“Dogs are loud. Cats are only loud sometimes. Goldfish, goldfish are not loud.”

I laughed, and I heard Zale laugh in the background. “We’ll talk about the goldfish.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow and the next day, but we won’t make a decision about the goldfish for a few weeks, okay?”

“Okay. Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow. I love you, little bird.”

“Goodbye, Mommy. I love you, too.”

She ended the call. I looked at Marissa and smiled, then laughed outright at the joy I felt in speaking with my daughter.

After lunch I went back to my room and opened my playlist. He’d added a new song, ‘I’ll Follow You’ by Shinedown. Promises to follow me down to the eye of the storm to keep me warm, keep me close, to get me through the deep. He’d always reeled me back in when I strayed too far from reality, but I’d never strayed so far before.

I didn’t love the idea of dragging him down into my storm, but I was selfish enough to saddle him with me anyway, for Olivia’s sake if nothing else. I justified that my love for him, which was deep and wide and endless, could counteract the craziness of being with me, but I didn’t believe it.

He deserved someone stable, someone who would be emotionally safe for him, not crazy like me. Also, I didn’t believe that he would do and keep all the promises he gave me in the lyrics. The prospect of returning to a relationship where I had to constantly hide, where my pain just didn’t register for him, where I had to keep going on alone, was not particularly appealing.

My session in the afternoon centered around my feelings about going home and my feelings for Zale. I loved him, but it was more complicated than that. I never wanted to leave him, ever, but I didn’t want to be dependent on him to feel better. We talked at great length about how sex could just be sex, and therapy could teach me the tools I needed to feel better. I didn’t think it would be as effective, and it sure as hell wouldn’t be as much fun, but it put the power, some of it, back in my hands, and it would take the pressure off of him.

I had lost trust in his desire to be there for me, that was a huge obstacle. No one grows up daydreaming about being a burden. I wanted to be wanted, but I mostly felt replaceable. A cleaning lady, a good crock pot, an occasional booty call, bile rose in my throat at that thought, and a good nanny for Olivia would be better for him. I wasn’t deluded enough to think I brought nothing to the table, I just didn’t think I brought enough, and some of what I brought made his life hell, and I wanted that to stop.

“What about Willa and Bex?”

And Rhys, I thought.

“Oh, God! They saw me completely fall apart. Especially Rhys, Bex’s husband. I totally lost it.” I focused inward and got lost in the memory. “I let them all down, especially Willa. I’m the only mother figure she has, and I totally lost my mind right in front of her.” I continued, “I wouldn’t let Zale near me. Rhys held me, brought me back…” I looked up at Marissa, whispered, “Even when I had calmed down, Zale didn’t come to me.”

“Is this something we should add to the list of things to work through with Zale during our joint session tomorrow?”

“What? What list? What joint session?”

“We spoke about this earlier today. Tomorrow, a few hours before you go home, Zale is coming into counseling with you, so we can set you up for success when you go home.”

My mouth slowly dropped open as she spoke, my eyebrows drawn together in horror. “Oh, no, I don’t want to do that at all.”

“What is it about the idea that bothers you? ”

I wrapped my arms around my shoulders. “I’m going to feel so exposed.”

“Yes,” Marissa gently replied. “That’s how you get the support you need, find the people who are able to give it to you, by exposing your need, your vulnerabilities.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Tell me.”

“I’m not worth the trouble to him. Honestly. I’m not.”

She sat back in her chair, tapping her pen against her lips. “When Olivia is an adult, if she finds herself in a loving relationship, would she be worthy of support?”

“Of course.”

“Then why not you?”

Why indeed.

“The thing is,” I replied slowly, “I don’t want to feel like I’m not enough anymore, and I don’t want to feel like I’m going it alone anymore. Just like I wouldn’t want that for Olivia, I don’t want it for me either.”

After dinner, again, another new song, ‘I Won’t Give Up’ by Jason Mraz, words that promised forever even when skies get rough .

I listened to all the songs and then opened Instagram. There were dozens of pictures, all new. I guessed most were taken by Olivia as Sirius was prominently featured. Zale took lots of pictures of Olivia going about her day, including a picture of Olivia sleeping, and several of Olivia looking lost. He photographed his poor attempt at making macaroni and cheese, it looked crunchy, and the resulting pizza order, my empty place in our bed from his viewpoint with the caption ‘I miss you’, my writing desk, my plants, the seeds for the garden that I’d ordered that had come in that day, the yard of earth that had been delivered and dropped on the driveway that I’d forgotten I’d ordered, Willa, Rhys, and Bex at our house with Olivia, a picture someone took of him and Olivia, him looking so lost.

I touched his handsome face through the screen. Sent ‘I miss you, too’ in the reply.

I needed to get home.

Zale

Marissa, the hospital therapist, had already met with Mara a few times, it was his turn now. As far as hospitals went it wasn’t bad, but the sterile environment, and the fact that his Mara was in here somewhere, all her passion and fire in lockdown, made his skin crawl.

Things had gotten so bad so fast. The diagnosis, the situation with Holly at the bar, Bea, his neglect, a perfect storm. He sat on the chair, waiting, his foot jiggling. He checked the time. He should be going in any moment. This appointment was one step toward getting her home.

A door opened and an attractive forty-something woman smiled at him. “Zale?”

He jumped up. “Yes, I’m Zale.” He powered forward. “Are you Marissa?”

“Yes, come on back.” She smiled again and waved him through the door.

This room was much more to his taste. Large comfortable furniture, wide windows, those little pillows in bright colors, art on the walls, good stuff like Willa might produce, and tons of plants.

“Does Mara have her sessions in here?”

“Yes, she does. Is that a good thing?”

He sat back on the couch, ankles loosely crossed but tucked close, knees open, his relaxed position in obvious conflict with the tension on his face.

“I don’t like thinking of her in that sterile environment. This is much better. She loves plants. She has a greenhouse at home, and a sunroom, filled with plants.”

He was babbling. He usually didn’t talk this much in an entire day. He wrapped one hand around the back of his neck, looking down for a moment before dropping his hand and looking at the therapist .

She smiled and he smiled back, then burst. “If I smiled at you with Mara here, there would be tension. I’m on edge all the time, monitoring her for reactions, afraid she’ll see me smile at someone.”

Marissa nodded. “It’s not easy having a partner with borderline personality disorder.”

He leaned forward, spreading his hands out in supplication. “It’s nothing new. I’ve known how she is since pretty early in our relationship and I’ve tolerated it. I didn’t understand it, but I accepted that that’s how she is. I don’t understand why a formal diagnosis makes a difference.”

“May I try to explain what I believe happened?”

“Please.” He sat back again. Maybe if he understood what happened he’d be able to reverse it, or at least avoid it in the future.

“I’m going to speak frankly, it’s the only way forward even though it may be uncomfortable for you, please keep in mind that for me, working with BPD patients all the time, all of this is commonplace for me.”

He nodded. His natural reticence did not allow for frank discussions about private issues. His skin felt stretched tight, and the exit door beckoned, but he wanted his wife back, so he pushed himself to sit back on the couch and opened his mind to what Marissa had to say.

She explained the role of sex in Mara’s illness, as a decompressor, a way to cut through the noise, a reprieve from the painfully intense emotions intrinsic to BPD. Having sex with him gave the added benefit that most people get from sex, connection, grounding, intimacy with someone you love. Some people use drugs, shopping, gambling, shoplifting, food, whatever they use, it has to be intense enough to distract from, and ease, the pain. The hair pulling and scratching made sense now in an odd sort of way and he nodded when Marissa immediately followed with an explanation of the self-harm component, and the issue of distress intolerance.

She waited for his response.

“She often overreacted to trivial things in the past, like if a woman approached me, even a co-worker like last week. That made me furious if I’m honest. There was a bad situation a long time ago where she reacted badly, and I think I was reminded about that, and perhaps I overreacted as well. Looking back, I can see she was trying to smile and be polite, she was just so flat. I was embarrassed in front of a colleague.”

“She was flat?” She asked and he nodded in response. “Then I suspect she was dissociating from the stress or trying to lock it down.”

Rhys’ words came back to him. Harder this time and he began to acknowledge that he’d missed something crucial in all the years he’d been with his wife.

“Why, after so many years of coping, did things go so badly off the rails? ”

“Before her diagnosis, she had hoped that if you two were able to fix the flaws in your relationship, that she would feel better. She saw the problem simply in terms of her having a jealous streak that she needed to contain and being insecure. The solution, for her, was more sex, which stabilized her emotions. It was a simple fix. Really it’s just a band aid, but it worked for her well enough. Getting the diagnosis, she lost that hope, because the problem was bigger than she expected. She said that it lives in her, and it’s bigger than she is. She feels sorry for you being stuck with her, and there’s another aspect as well, but I’ll circle back around to that in a minute.” She continued. “So, the diagnosis triggered feelings of hopelessness and unworthiness, and then the situation with her mother came to a head. Being raised by a narcissistic parent is a unique form of abuse that robs a child of their esteem and identity, all their focus is set on calming the parent if they’re the token good child and escaping the parent if they’re the token bad child. Either way, children of narcissistic parents don’t develop healthy self-esteem. Environmental factors, combined with a genetic predisposition, caused Mara’s BPD. Part of the equation in her life that added up to developing Borderline Personality issues is her mother’s narcissism. Breaking away from a narcissist is tough. When that narcissist is a spouse or parent, and you are not mentally healthy, it’s earth shattering.”

“So, her diagnosis shook her, took away hope, made her feel worthless and a burden, and realizing her mother is who she is and the effect she’s had on her, caused her to combust? ”

“Yes, I’d say so. Coupled with the distance she felt from you, due to the lessening of sexual activity between the two of you, her despair over the growing anger she’d been dealing with largely because of that, and your dismissal of the seriousness of her diagnosis, and your unwillingness, in her eyes, to be involved with her recovery.”

He closed his eyes against the exposure. “That’s a lot.”

“It boils down to this. You are her favorite person. You get all the love in her heart, you also bear the brunt of all her fear of abandonment, that fear that is just as much a part of BPD as the rampant emotions. When you took away sex, or cut it back, you took away her life raft. It was what she was using to keep her head above water.”

“That’s a lot of responsibility.”

“Yes...and she needs to take responsibility, as she has tried to do over the years, but she will probably always have BPD issues, even after therapy, which leads us back to where I said I’d circle back to.”

He felt like he’d already been hit with a sledgehammer, but he nodded for her to continue.

“She is not talking to you, not because she’s angry, but because first, she feels you should be free of her and she’s been contemplating how she can leave you without hurting Olivia, and second, and this is where you need to make a decision, she doesn’t feel you can handle what she calls her dark side. She feels your impatience with her, and your resentment, which is understandable by the way, but is intolerably painful for her. She’s amazingly in tune with other people’s feelings. She may struggle to understand your perspective on a situation, but she is incredibly emotionally empathetic. Some BPD patients have a superior ability to sense emotions in others just as they feel more intensely. I believe she is one of those people. Does that ring true for you?” He nodded. “Because she can feel your hesitation, your resentment, your impatience. She’s not going to be able to thrive under that shadow.”

“How do we move forward? Without her leaving, without me continuing to walk on eggshells, to get her to a healthy place. I love my wife. She’s the best person I know. I’m not going anywhere.”

Marissa smiled widely. “Funny, she said the same thing about you.”

Several minutes later, the session ended, and he left, knowing that Mara would soon be having her session with Marissa, and just as she’d allowed Marissa to speak openly to him about her, he also gave permission and agreed to ongoing therapy alone, as well as with Mara, to learn better how to cope, create appropriate boundaries for himself, and help her to cope. That one session was excruciating, having his brain peeled like a grape, but if that’s what it would take, he would do it whole-heartedly.

Later on that day, he heard her laugh through the phone, and that sound lit him up inside like a Christmas tree. She was a pain in his ass at times, but the joy, love, and passion she brought to his life far outweighed the angst. Honest to God, all he ever wanted to do was love her, he worked all day just so he could lie beside her every night.

She did not want to talk to him, but he spoke to her through the speakerphone for a moment. Knowing she could hear him, his one-sided communication, he was desperate to reach her, knowing in that moment, that whatever mistakes she made due to her diagnosis, he forgave her. It was an easy decision in the end. One that he should have made long ago.

It wasn’t even that he hadn’t forgiven her, he had, but he’d never forgotten, and the events, without context, had led him to behave toward her in ways that were triggering for her, shaded as they were with his resentment at what he perceived to be control and manipulation.

He needed some reprogramming to change those learned responses, to get closer to her when she started spiraling instead of taking himself away, to see her requests for sex as something he, and only he, could give her, a perk in this whole fucking mess that they could enjoy, not a tool to control.

Communicating that change to her was going to be a bitch but failure had never been an option for him. When he finally fell into bed, he flipped open Instagram to add photos and saw that she’d replied .

I miss you, too.

He hadn’t cried since his parents passed, and before then he’d been a child, but he cried more in the past three days than all those memories combined. He read those four words and his eyes welled again, from relief this time.

His day had been a rollercoaster and he had the uncomfortable thought that Mara lived like this all the time.

The last thing he did before going to sleep was to add Nickelback’s ‘Far Away’ to their playlist.