leftycanwrite

[leftycanwrite]

[i want to go back] by Gregory Orr

[leftycanwrite]

Healing wounds on Blood Mountain

Michael parked his speedy Audi in the wooded parking lot for the Byron Reece trailhead. He told me it would lead us up to the top of Blood Mountain, where we would camp for the night. We were in the Chattahoochee National Forest, a place where many hopefuls begin a trek north, traversing the Appalachian Mountains via the AT. And where he and I would try to find some peace among a whirlwind of recent tumult.

He started pulling gear out of the trunk of his car while I examined the wilderness before us, leaves beginning to turn into an autumnal rainbow in the hours before dusk.

I was happy to be with my big brother, the Eagle scout. Death seemed so far from us now. He would lead the expedition and help me excavate my mind from the recent trauma. So I followed him, no questions, just trust, like always.

He had everything packed and ready: water, food for the night (including S'mores makings), first aid kit, sleeping bags, tent, jet boil, toilet paper and a shovel.

I only had a few essentials that I could not forget: special gauze, antibiotics, antibiotic ointment and an elastic band that I could cut to fit over my head and slide down on my neck to keep the weeping wound that was sliced open, beginning under my chin and moving down and over to just below my left ear, from becoming infected.

It was the first time in weeks I had gotten a whiff of the outdoors. After nearly dying on the operation block during a routine wisdom tooth extraction, I wasn't sure I would see anything except what was in front of my hospital bed again, intubation and catheters kept me sedentary for days.

To me, it seemed like this trip to Blood Mountain was just another hike. Although I believe that for Michael, there was a greater purpose. Nature had healed many of his wounds. Maybe he thought this would help to heal mine.

Growing up, Michael was pretty much my second caretaker. In pictures of my baptism, you can see his gleeful, toothy tween smile bobbing to the left and right of my baby self through a series of photos. My sister Molly on the other hand, looks non plussed. Michael was the self-appointed doting older brother, and since day one, he never missed a beat with me.

When mom put me down, Michael would pick me up. He fought with her when I had to have braces with a cage that would keep me from sucking my thumb; he couldn't bear to see me cry so. One summer, when he came home from Emory, he unloaded the "Crocodile Mile" from his truck. At the time, it was the summer must have, a slip-n-slide where you'd run and slide on your belly through a wet Crocodile mouth. Michael was so excited that he spent his first hour home setting it up so my friends and I could have a wild glissade. He even did a run himself.

Hoisting the heavy-looking pack on his big shoulders, Michael made it look easy. His years as a scout taught him to pack light, pack neat, leave no trace and to bring only what is necessary....like S'mores. He double and triple checked that I had all my medical supplies. Even though I was 19 on this outing, mom said he had to watch out for me. I wasn't out of the woods yet. So he worried and stressed so that I wouldn't have to.

It was my first time to Blood Mountain, and this part of Georgia. Since he lived in Atlanta, he thought I could get out of Charlotte and see something different for a while, so he invited me to stay with him, excitedly planning what we could do during this special brother-sister bonding/healing time. A hike seemed in order, nay tradition.

Michael was a boy scout but I was an honorary boy scout, having come from a long line of scouts, including my father and grandfather. As Troop 41's scoutmaster, my dad had already carved out his own legends. He never missed an opportunity to take his family camping, including taking his toddler daughter on treks through some difficult terrain and wilderness in hopes she might come to enjoy it as much as he did.

Michael let me know what the plan was for the night and how we would be reaching the top of Blood Mountain. Our trek would be decent, with a steady elevation to the summit. But the view from above would be worth it. We would be camping on the summit's smooth granite bald, with the wild Appalachian mountains and their broccoli forests spilling out below us.

As we walked, we wondered why it was called Blood Mountain, coming up with all sorts of theories, but none close to some of the more widely accepted reasons, including the fact that near the mountain a sanguine battle between the Cherokee and Creeks in the aptly named Slaughter Gap.

I was a bit weak, so we had to stop more often than we had planned for. We estimated hiking the 5 miles would take about 2 hours, but it took more like 3. We arrived at the summit just as the sun was setting and the cold sinking in.

We set up the tent together. Michael had bought me a compact North Face two-person tent the previous year for Christmas, as I was attending Appalachian State University. He figured it would come in handy. But he also wanted to test out if his notion of a good tent was right, so he asked me to bring it to test out.

Once we got the sleeping bags and mats rolled out, he started on dinner and I worked to carefully disengage the bandages that were stuck on my newly forming neck scar.

At just 19 years old and about to enter my sophomore year at Appalachian State University, my mom decided it was the moment for me to get my wisdom teeth pulled. It did not turn out well.

I was put to sleep but then woke up in the middle of one of my teeth's extraction. I was shaking and moving around, unable to comprehend where I was or what was going on. I remember the oral surgeon yelling "shut up, shut up" and then I succombed to blackness again.

When I woke up, it seemed like a bad dream. Then, four days later, I was admitted to the hospital with a massive abcess, my mother finally surrendering that my blackouts, nausea and fever were caused by something much greater than dry sockets.

My neck was cut open, drained, packing put in and antibiotics administered. My teeth were swabbed with a sponge on a stick and I peed through a catheter. I had a tube down my throat so could not talk, all my needs written on pieces of random paper, things like "don't let the nurse with the crazy eye take my blood sample, she can't find an artery to save her life."

When Michael and Molly arrived, they gave my parents a reprieve from the helter skelter of four days of their youngest child in the Intensive Care Unit. And for me, their youthful presence and jokes between us were a breath of fresh air.

But Michael remained long into the night, as I fell into a dreamland and a tube took over breathing for me, injecting air into my lungs when it deemed my breathing too shallow or not fast enough. Sometimes this foreign jolt into my system would wake me up. After one such awakening, I found that my hand was wrapped in something warm. Michael had fallen asleep in a chair, his head resting next to my right leg, his left hand interlocked with my right. I cried quietly, so grateful for my brother.

in the pink hues of setting sunlight, he asked to see my new scar. I couldn't yet stand to look at it, afraid still that any sudden movement would make my head fall off. He always had an affinity for gross things. He missed his calling as a doctor, we used to joke. But he said it looked good, there was a bit of old puss still clinging to one of the flaps of open neck skin, but overall clean. I put the ointment and gauze back on with the elastic to hold everything in place and we enjoyed our ramen in silence...everything already said, or being said in that moment.

We went to bed, as you do when you're camping, just after we finished eating. Michael hung any food stuff in a nearby tree, just in case bears were around. We got in our sleeping bags, wished each other a good night and dozed off.

I was never good at camp sleeping. Too many new sounds, smells and on this particular night, sights. I woke up to a light so so bright that I roused my sleeping, farting brother. The moon was full and the sky was so clear that it seemed nearly like the sun was rising. We stepped out of the tent to gaze at the moon's silver light, shining upon us. We were its only witnesses, or liked to think we were.

We were beautiful in that moment. Peaceful, my brother and I.

[leftycanwrite]

VA, not Virginia

When I met François in 2009, he was, what I would consider, an experienced mountaineer. He climbed craggy outcroppings, he hopped like a mountain goat along small paths in the high mountains, he camped out under the stars, his sleeping bag and tent reeking of overuse. He was also the person that introduced me to mountaineering documentaries, a genre that I had only really uncovered once, when Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air hit the mainstream.

We took a deep dive into all genre's of extreme sport documentaries but something about the mountain-themed films, and the sudden deaths of their stars always hit on something deep within me. How could these people, experts, at the top of their game, so well-versed in their passions, just not come back from a climb to the top of Everest, or an expedition to master the north face of the Eiger?

Their stories, left to their own minds, sometimes never truly being uncovered but being pieced together as best as they could be by those left behind: family and friends.

When François asked me to live with him in his home in the French Alps, I jumped at the chance. We bought a tiny house, which was at one time the village apple press for the town of Vovray-en-Bornes. It had been renovated to welcome two people, comfortably.

Odile was our first visitor, she was the matron of Vovray, it's most likeable and recognizeable character. She looked like a character Pixar might create of a grandmother, with big, curious eyes that glowed at you from behind her prescription lenses and then smacked you with her purse. But she did not do this second part, but her demeanor was so sweet I felt a great urge to hug her, tightly. She let us know that if we ever needed anything, we could just walk on up to the great white house up the hill, where she lived. It was her great-grandmother's home and one of the oldest farm houses in Vovray.

As Odile spoke, I noticed a small silver chain around her neck, with two names inscribed on it small plaquettes of silver, strewn together: Valery and Antoine. I assumed that these were her children and she had had the necklace made on the occasion of their birth. I didn't think much more of it.

Francois and I grew into our house and neighborhood, making good friends with our neighbors sharing our quaint rural road. Because I wasn't yet able to work, but curious about everyone's lives, I would often wander the street until I bumped into someone, or someone bumped into me. Some days I would wander to Odile's house and say hello, either dropping something off or asking for advice.

On one occasion, she invited me in to sit with her, offering me grape juice and some cookies. As she prepared our "tea" I noticed nooks and crannies of her stone walls filled with photos of her, her husband, Jean-Claude and lots of boys. I asked her who they were.

She moved over to a photo and picked it up, two men smiling toothily at the camera, looking nearly like twins. "This is Valery and this is Antoine," she pointed with a shaky finger. I noticed then that her hands trembled all the time.

"Have you been to the cemetery in Vovray and seen that there's a windsock flying over a tomb?" I admitted that yes, I had seen it and always thought it was a little quirky but perhaps meaningful in someway. "Valery and Antoine are there, buried beneath it," she finished.

She told me bits and pieces of their story, of their youths as wild teens, trying everything from freeriding, which is skiing with a parachute down some of the Alps most unforgiving terrain, to throwing themselves out of airplanes, skydiving even as part of an elite French team of skydivers, the Soul Flyers. I saw RedBull emblazoned on their parachutes in pictures, on skis in her garage, she had saved all of them, relics and shrines to her deceased children.

I could see tears in her eyes and so not wanting to pry or to make her recall more than she could handle, I hugged her, told her thank you and that I would come again another time.

And I began my search for their stories and how on earth they did not make it to 30.

[leftycanwrite]

Hell...no.

Jesus scares the shit out of me. He has for some time. The trauma of his presence began as a little girl being dragged to Catholic church in the southeast. I might as well have been Buddhist. Catholics in the south were already a rarity, our idolatry viewed as extreme and terrifying. And I have to agree with my Protestant neighbors. Every Sunday, Jesus would peer down at my little face, with his wan skin and bloody stigmata. His droopy eyes were either sad or dead, I could never tell which. And if I wasn't gawking at his bleeding wounds on the cross straight ahead of me, I could witness his death march illustrated on the walls around me, something that would later be drilled into my head, the repetition of each step and my committment to their memory a true sign of a good, reputable and healthy Catholic.

The religion thrives on its congregation either living in fear, sadness or regret, with the possibility to repent and ask for forgiveness, because you know, we were all born with the original sin. Bad as ever us Catholics.... And then they'd finish each Sunday by serving us all hot 'n now Krispy Kreme donuts, it was a truly perplexing dichotomy. A sort of "nice sandwich" if you will.

All of my friends were protestant, mostly either Presbyterian or Methodist. They had cool gyms where you could roller skate. They had camps where you ate candy and sang songs with actual bands, not a haunting organ blurting out rare and terrifying chords just as frankensence lulled you to sleep. But as fun as the other religions sounded, I was bound to Catholicism by three pieces of paper: baptism, first communion and confirmation. These were the marks of a person truly dedicated to living a holy life.

And I believe, for many of us Catholics, this is where our bad reputation comes in. Because we are bound to such strictness in practice, once reality hits and the doors of our sacred one-hour prison are opened, we unleash ourselves into the world fully unprepared for anything. And if our parents forced the religion upon us, they were just as unaware. Mine were....

At age 15, I entered another sacred institution: high school. That was its own spiritual training ground. I was baptized as a Freshman into a new world, full of raging hormones, sex and drugs, wholly naive to cherry popping, blow jobs and dating in general. I found out soon enough what it all was.

Mr Siemen, ironically the name of one of my Sunday school teachers, liked to tell us, "the Bible is full of sex, drugs and rock and roll", as if to make it cool. I guess the Bible was describing adolescents in high school.

At 16 I had my first kiss with Ben, who kissed me with a mouth full of chewing gum and badly brushed braces. It should have been romantic, it was at the beach, during a warm and beautiful sunset. I was with friends at spring break and they told me he liked me. I knew him from school but not more than that. He was cute enough but he didn't tempt me otherwise. I was still young in the brain. I chased boys away, literally running to scare them off if they mentioned liking me. He was the first one I stood still for. So I sat next to him, anticipating the orbit fresh mint flavor, while trying to ignore the burger bits caught in the metal brackets, and let his tongue search the inside of my mouth for a minute. And then we opened and closed our mouths and then I tried my tongue in his mouth and on it went for a few minutes. Then I had had enough. Sometimes his mouth was open too much and I felt like a fish was trying to eat my face. After it was over, I wondered if Jesus had ever kissed someone. And then I wondered if I was bad for it. My Protestant friends did not protest to it, so I esteemed it was a good, natural thing. I would not need to confess it to Father O'Rourke.

Ben and I did not last long. Spring Break ended, as all good things do and summer was upon us. My mom felt it would be good for me to take on a job, so I got hired with my best friend, Brigid, ironically the name of my patron Confirmation saint, at Carabba's Italian Grill. I was a hostess and I made $10 an hour, a pittance for some, but for a 16-year old with no bills to pay, it was pure gold.

I made friends with some of the line cooks, and one of them, Mayfield, took a particular liking to me. He called me "Shorty", which I didn't quite understand until I understood that it wasn't so much about my height as his intense feelings about me. He was 21. Mayfield had been around the block a time or two but he was smooth, really smooth. His flirting began by cooking me all types of pasta, then remembering my favorite dishes and saving me extra for after work to take home. He would walk me to my car and watch out for me if someone was not acting right...there was more than one male customer that "accidentally" felt my butt as I seated him and his family at a booth or table. One night as he walked me to my car, he kissed me. And I felt something I had never felt before, not with Ben's fish lips. I felt a sensation throughout my whole body, one that yearned for another kiss, a proximity with him that I didn't know existed. We never went on dates. Our relationship was bound only by the fact that we worked together. He would grab me as I went to get more silverware from the back store room and would push me into a closet and kiss me and squeeze me tight like he wanted to eliminate all the air from my lungs and drag my limp body around with him, hugging and kissing it as much as he wanted. And then there was the night where it all went wrong. He walked me to his car on this night. And we were talking and we were kissing and he told me to come over to his side of the car, which required some maneuvering. He tried to get me to straddle him, my rear making the car horn beep as I tried to comprehend what he wanted from me. As I write I still don't know how I didn't see it coming, this is the unpreparedness I spoke of earlier. I was wearing a dress, a shorter dress as it was a hot, sticky Carolina summer. He lifted up the skirt and placed his fingers between my legs and began rubbing them in a place and in a way that I did not know existed. And then I was dripping something. He kept saying I was wet, but I didn't know what he was talking about. But I knew it felt good. Until it didn't. All of a sudden, there was a sharp pain between my legs. It made me scream. He tried to calm me down, told me to "sit down on it" and forced me down with his arms. I was scrambling to get off. I could not. He kept forcing me, holding my arms down and out of the way so he could continue. I finally broke free, screaming and hitting him. I threw myself back into the passenger seat only to see his hard brown member standing erect and him smiling at me like an idiot. And then I knew what had happened. My mom told me that when someone you love dies, you don't cry, you howl, like a wolf at the moon. I didn't cry now. I howled. I felt the little girl inside me die. And I would never be the same from that moment forward.

I went home that night in hysterics but I had to collect myself before I got home because whatever had just happened to me, I could not tell my parents. Sex before marriage was absolutely forbidden and I was sure to burn in hell. But I thought that if I didn't tell my parents that surely I would be ok, that announcing it to the world was the only way that God would know.

But at Mass the next day, I was reminded that God is omniscient. And not telling is as good as lying. So without telling my parents, I went and told the next best people: my adolescent friends. Rather than concern for my state of mind, they wanted all the details on what sex was like. Rape was not a term any of us were familiar with. But blame was.

I spent the rest of the summer ignorning Mayfield and dreamed of going back to school again, to be surrounded by people and distraction. I spent a lot of time blaming myself for what happened. My friends didn't offer much support. They thought my situation was as curiously fascinating as it was funny. I felt like a walking nothing. I was vacant and I hated myself. I wished to know what love was, thinking that if someone could just love me, that the sensation of feeling dirty would go away.

I tried to make light of the situation until things got worse. My friends told other people about my "sexcapades". Then my phone number was written on the backs of door stalls in the boys' bathroom in one of our campus buildings. "Katy Oral gives good head" it apparently read, my last name constantly being misread as the former term. i started getting phone calls after school on my home phone, back in the days before everyone had a cell phone, from random guys, some I had never even spoken to. "Hey Katy, this is Petar. So I heard you like to get down. What are you doing this weekend? I'll come pick you up. You know I drive a Caddy. We can go somewhere and you can....you know....suck my d--" I hung up the phone before he could finish. I was disgusted. Is this really what people thought sex was about? Is this love or sex? Is this what sex is about?

I longed to go back to Ben and his fish kiss, I swore to God that if He could just rewind time that I would be more kind, that I would not care what Ben had stuck in his braces, that I would accept the gross with the good and innocence. I didn't know until much later that Ben's was the first and last kiss that I would ever taste that was truly from and of a whole me.

From my newfound nothingness, I became a Jezebel. It was easy.

Any male attention given to me at that point was a trigger. It was a trigger for my anger and a trigger for my desire to be loved. The first victim was David, who was Brigid's ex-boyfriend.

Having sex with David was in breech of the first of girl friends' 10 commandments: thou shalt not date or sleep with your friends boyfriend (current or ex).

I did it and I did not care. Granted, Brigid scared the shit out of me, but with Mayfield, I had already made my bed, now I was going to lay in it. I was using David not to get back at Brigid for being a bitch, which she was, but to get back at myself and the rage I felt for what I thought was shameful, disgusting behavior.

But this backfired as well.

On the night of my 17th birthday, my four closest friends had organized a surprise birthday party for me out in the country, near the border with South Carolina, about 30 minutes from my home in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Something told me that Brigid already knew about David but she played it off like everything was hunky dory. We were all just so happy together, things were great. She asked me a number of questions, tried to make everyone in the car laugh, but there was a lingering discomfort all around. A tension slowly filled the air.

We drove to an insect farm, where Brigid's dad worked, counting and studying bugs. There was a picnic table, balloons, a cake and a golf cart. Brigid told my friends Beth, Julia and Katie to stay behind and she was going to take me on a little spin in the cart. I reluctantly agreed but I knew what was coming. She didn't even have to say anything.

I entered the doom-buggy and off we barrelled to the other side of a small lake, where I could see my remaining friends from afar. She stopped the cart and got out, switching from giddy to irate. "Did you really think I wouldn't find out," she screamed. "You fucking bitch. What the fuck is wrong with you. With David of all people." She screamed. I was silent. I let her rant. Anyway she was right. What could I say. Then she wanted to punch me. This would be a recurring theme from lots of people. "Come on get out of the cart, I'm gonna punch you." In my head it was not so ridiculous but I didn't know how to fight and neither did she. She just acted tough but I knew she wouldn't go through with it. I talked her down from the fight but she held onto the rage with staggering persistence.

My birthday present was the quick removal of all of my friends. The handed me a present, a contract, "I ....... promise to no longer be friends with Katy Orell. I will not talk to her, look at her or listen to her. She does not exist," and they all signed it. She delightfully handed it to me and wished me a happy birthday. The 30-minute drive home was excruciating. Julia and Katie mouthed I'm sorry to me in the back seat. Beth was driving and egged Brigid on on her rampage.

Then for the following months, Brigid taunted me. She wrote eight-page notes, numbered each page in her outrageously neat handwriting for someone having a psychotic breakdown. She flashed her C-cups to coach Strahan and he let her sashay herself over to the bleachers where I was writing notes to hand me her evil script during gym class one day. In it, she wrote that I was a bitch, a slut, a whore. Who would ever want to date someone like me? Brigid befriended my Sunday school friend, Sarah, who had at this point turned into some sort of thug, and dragged her into the quad where I was eating a sandwich. Sarah looked pissed and opened her mouth to threaten to punch me. "Katy I'm gonna punch you in the face!" "Why, Sarah? We literally went to fucking Sunday school together for the past 10 years!" "Because you messed with Brigid's man. You deserve it." She did not punch me either. For all of the people that wanted to fight me, none of them actually went through with it, incredibly.

I stopped going outside for lunch, opting instead to eat in my crafts classroom with my oblivious teacher. She didn't mind but she didn't ask questions either. I had no one and nothing. I was truly at the bottom of the barrel.

Some days I would go home and draw a hot bath. I would take one of mom's kitchen knives with me and set it on the cool porcelain, waiting for the tub to fill. I would decide which would be less painful: drowning or slitting. I didn't try either. It both terrified and relieved me. I wasn't meant for suicide. I eventually made new friends that made me feel worth it again and as happens with juicy news, eventually everyone moves onto something else. My story was no longer on the front pages. I was given a new schedule, moved out of Brigid's classes and her bullying stopped, mainly from a parental intervention. Not before Beth's mom called my house to talk to my mom about what I had "been doing" but at that point I had had enough of southern women's self-righteousness and told her to fuck off. She never called back.

In college, I was reborn and made new friends and a new life, but the emptiness from the rape followed me and I continued down a path of self-abuse and self-destruction, allowing men to use me as an object and in turn learning to do the same to them. Until I finally met a good one who turned my life around.

His name? Noah.

[leftycanwrite]

Death or rebirth

I've been meaning to write something about how it feels to turn 40. In French they call it "la crise de la quarantaine", the 40s crisis. Some people say it's when you reach maturity nirvana and don't give a shit what other people say anymore. For others it's a time when all the things you haven't done yet and meant to do feel too large a mountain to climb now.

Then when you feel all of those things at once, life feels insurmountable.

So what does 40 feel like?

40 feels like 30, like 20, like 10, but with more hindsight and more worry. It feels like the wind in your sails and getting the wind knocked out of your sails simultaneously. It feels old yet young, tired yet strong, disheveled but put together. 40 is a hot mess of beauty and adulting. And much of it self-inflicted.

And in between all the living moments you want to find yourself. Where did that girl go, who was she anyway, before kids, before a husband, before financial needs tied me down.

I dream of myself before. She was not perfect, oh no, she was far from it. She lied, cheated, stole a bit. She didn't kill anyone but she hurt a lot of people. On the surface, she was sweet, naive, but she learned quickly, my former self. about what the world was truly like. She conformed but she also broke rules, hearts, friendships, burned bridges and ruined many, many men.

Why do I dream of her?

She had the world ahead of her. To be reborn, which she tried to do many times, she had to kill her present self. Kill off parts of that present self that didn't help her to get where she wanted to be.

The first thing she killed was that stupid innocence. This was what got her into the most trouble. It wasn't her fault, being so trusting, but innocence left her weak, exposed to having to conform to someone else because she didn't know things for herself.

The rape did that. Once innocence was gone, however, there was a void.

Drugs, alcohol and men filled that void for a while but they were not long-term solutions. She knew this. It would require a really big change, an escape to another place....

I always liked France. I studied French, went on many exchanges all over the country, studied French cuisine, was a true francophile. I knew that if I were to overcome the unfeeling, self-abusing beast I was becoming that I would have to run far from the things that triggered her. A new language, a place where I knew no one, had nothing. This would be the way to do it.

But with this move came other things. It's like the old north wind, pushing Anouk and her mother around in "Chocolat". Sometimes you just cannot be tamed.

The old north wind has again brought that itch, right up to age 40. It tickles my mind, ruffles my feathers, makes me yearn to pick up and go again.

The one thing that trails along behind me, when I kill off part of myself and move forward, to try to be reborn, is that I can never get rid of all the memories. They remain like a stain on my life, that only my brain can go over and over again. I cannot share them with my husband, what would he do with all those stories? Am I ashamed of them or have I just lived my life?

I wonder do I really need to kill off parts of me to live? What am I running from? What am I not facing?

[leftycanwrite]

Day 1: When he didn't fold my shit

Starting is the hard part. The next hardest part is keeping it going. There is always an excuse to stop so my excuse is that I have to keep going otherwise my lifelong dream will stop. And then there will have been no point to it at all. So I will recount a funny thing that happened to me today because it bothers the shit out of me and is one of those things that you realize when you get older that makes you feel life just isn't ever going to be what you thought it would. My husband, François (he's French) is not good at putting things away. It's genetic. His father is that way, and our first son is also organizationally challenged. But on occasion, François gets the impetus to rearrange, put away, throw out and fold. Today's session involved laundry, which, let's just be honest, no one likes it. It's a never-ending task and once you get to the bottom of it, you've already got a new pile.

Anyway, I had been nagging at François for at least a week to fold and put away the laundry on the bench in our bedroom. Mission accepted, however, for him, he wanted to add a little extra challenge: fold and put away laundry that was his as well as not his. When he was finished he asked me to come into our room to check out the final result. He was proud, you could see it in the puffed chest and goofy happy puppy face. It was slick, it was lovely, his clothes were folded and put away, our children's clothes had also miraculously found their own rooms and shelves. But then when I looked into the laundry basket, I realized that there were still clothes in there, in the bottom, unfolded and unorganized. When I looked closer, I discovered that all the clothes that remained (albeit clean because did that part myself) were mine. Then I just looked up, with a second of bewilderment and I just had to laugh. I laughed a mad/crazy laugh because, literally, WHAT THE FUCK? For 10 years, a decade -- enough time to watch 2 1/2 presidents come and go and the war in Afghanistan to come to a close and a new era of pants with high-waists to come back in style -- I have washed, folded and put away his mother fucking clothes. And ten years later, he decides he want to participate in household chores. However, when he does, it's like my stuff, and in essence, I, don't matter. He had an option to just skip right over them and with no thought whatsoever that I might appreciate a little help, does he even think of touching my clothes. Nope, nah uh, not today sister. And now as I write the incident down, it makes me really, really sad. When my mom used to tell us how unappreciated she felt, that she did all these small tasks for us everyday but we never recognized any of it, I now know what she meant. I now have the full scope of what she was saying. It's the idea that we hope that we are seen and that the little things we do for those we love are seen. But when they see through us like we are not even there, or sort out all the other clothes and leave ours behind, that's a heartbreak.

And then it might leave you to wonder, were you even important at all?

#marriage #lifelessons #laundry