Untamed

by Glennon Doyle

  What should I do if my husband is a cheater but also an amazing dad?

  My seventeen-year-old son, Chase, and his friends are in the family room watching a movie. I’ve been trying to leave them alone, but it’s hard for me. I understand that most teenagers think their moms are uncool, but I am certain I’m the exception.

  I stand at the door and peek inside. The boys are draped all over the couch. The girls have arranged themselves in tiny, tidy roly-poly piles on the floor. My young daughters are perched at the feet of the older girls, quietly worshipping.

  My son looks over at me and half smiles. “Hi, Mom.”

  I need an excuse to be there, so I ask, “Anybody hungry?”

  What comes next seems to unfold in slow motion.

  Every single boy keeps his eyes on the TV and says, “YES!”

  The girls are silent at first. Then each girl diverts her eyes from the television screen and scans the faces of the other girls. Each looks to a friend’s face to discover if she herself is hungry. Some kind of telepathy is happening among them. They are polling. They are researching. They are gathering consensus, permission, or denial.

  Somehow the collective silently appoints a French-braided, freckle-nosed spokesgirl.

  She looks away from the faces of her friends and over at me. She smiles politely and says, “We’re fine, thank you.”

  The boys looked inside themselves. The girls looked outside themselves.

  We forgot how to know when we learned how to please.

  This is why we live hungry.

  My friend Ashley took her first hot yoga class recently. She walked into the room, unrolled her mat, sat down, and waited for something to happen.

  “It was exceptionally hot in there,” she told me.

  When the instructor—young and confident—finally walked into the room, Ashley was already dripping with sweat. The instructor announced, “We’ll start soon. You are going to get very hot, but you can’t leave this room. No matter how you begin to feel, stay strong. Don’t leave. This is the work.”

  The class got started, and a few minutes in, the walls began to close in on Ashley. She felt light-headed and sick. Each breath became harder and harder to come by. Twice her vision became spotty, then briefly went black. She looked at the door and felt desperate to run toward it. She spent ninety minutes terrified, close to hyperventilating, holding back tears. But she did not leave that room.

  The moment the instructor ended the class and opened the door, Ashley jumped off her mat and ran into the hallway. She kept her hand over her mouth until she found the bathroom. She threw the door open and vomited all over the sink, the wall, the floor.

  While she was on her hands and knees wiping up her own puke with paper towels, she thought: What is wrong with me? Why did I stay and suffer? The door wasn’t even locked.

  When I was a little girl, my godmother gave me a snow globe as a birthday gift. It was small and round, like a palm-sized crystal ball. In its center stood a red dragon with sparkly scales, bright green eyes, and fiery wings. When I first took it home, I put it on the nightstand beside my bed. Then I’d lie awake at night, wide-eyed, feeling afraid that the dragon existed so close to me in the dark. So one night I climbed out of bed and moved the snow globe to the highest shelf in my room.

  Every once in a while, only in the light of day, I’d pull my desk chair over, climb up, and pull the snow globe off the shelf. I’d shake it, get still, and watch the snowflakes swirl. As they began to settle, the fiery red dragon in the center of the globe would emerge, and I’d feel a chilly thrill. That dragon was magical and scary, always there, unmoving, just waiting.

  * * *

  My friend Megan is five years sober now after a decade of alcohol and drug abuse. Lately, she’s been trying to figure out what happened to her—how addiction had taken over the life of such a strong woman.

  On Megan’s wedding day, she sat in the back of the chapel knowing she didn’t want to marry the man waiting for her at the end of the aisle. She knew it from her roots.

  She married him anyway, because she was thirty-five years old and getting married was what she was supposed to do. She married him anyway, because there were so many people she would have disappointed if she had called it off. There was only one of her, so she disappointed herself instead. She said “I do” while her insides said “I don’t,” and then she spent the next decade trying not to know what she knew: that she had betrayed herself and that her life would not really begin until she stopped betraying herself. The only way not to know was to get wasted and stay that way, so she started drinking heavily during her honeymoon. The drunker she became, the more distance she felt from the dragon inside her. After a while, the booze and drugs became her problem, which was convenient because she didn’t have to deal with her real problem anymore.

  * * *

  We’re like snow globes: We spend all of our time, energy, words, and money creating a flurry, trying not to know, making sure that the snow doesn’t settle so we never have to face the fiery truth inside us—solid and unmoving.

  The relationship is over. The wine is winning. The pills aren’t for back pain anymore. He’s never coming back. That book won’t write itself. The move is the only way. Quitting this job will save my life. It is abuse. You never grieved him. It’s been six months since we made love. Spending a lifetime hating her is no life at all.

  We keep ourselves shaken up because there are dragons in our center.

  One night, back when my children were babies, I was reading a book of poetry in the bathtub. I came across a poem called “A Secret Life” about deep secrets and how we all have them. I thought: Well, I haven’t had one since I got sober. I don’t keep secrets anymore. That felt good. But then I read:

  It becomes what you’d most protect

  if the government said you can protect

  one thing, all else is ours….

  it’s what

  radiates and what can hurt

  if you get too close to it.

  I stopped reading and thought: Oh, wait.

  There’s one thing.

  One thing I haven’t even told my sister.

  My secret that radiates is that I find women infinitely more compelling and attractive than men. My secret is my suspicion that I was made to make love to a woman and cuddle with a woman and rely on a woman and live and die with a woman.

  Then I thought: So odd. That cannot be real. You’ve got a husband and three children. Your life is more than good enough.

  As I climbed out of the tub and shook my hair dry, I told myself: Maybe in a different life.

  Isn’t that interesting?

  As if I had more than one.

  I sit in a cold plastic seat near the airport gate, stare at my suitcase, sip airport coffee. It’s bitter and weak. I look at the plane through the gate window. How many of those will I board in the coming year? A hundred? I’m bitter and weak, too.

  If I board, this plane will take me to Chicago O’Hare, where I’ll search for a driver holding a sign with my (husband’s) last name on it. I’ll raise my hand and watch the driver’s face register surprise that I am a small woman in sweatpants instead of a large man in a suit. The driver will deliver me to the Palmer Hotel—where a national book conference is being held. There I’ll stand on a stage in a grand ballroom and speak to a few hundred librarians about my soon-to-be-released memoir, Love Warrior.

  Love Warrior—the story of the dramatic destruction and painstaking reconstruction of my family—is expected to be one of the biggest books of the year. I will be promoting it on stages and in the media for, well, forever.

  I am trying to find my feelings about this. Fear? Excitement? Shame? I can’t isolate anything specific. I stare at the plane, wondering how to explain my life’s most intimate, complicated experience to a sea of strangers withi
n my seven allotted minutes. I have written a book, and now I must become a commercial for the book I have written. What is the point of being a writer if I have to say words about the words I’ve already written? Do painters have to draw about their paintings?

  I’d been at this airport gate starting line before. Three years before, I’d released my first book and traveled the country telling the story of how I’d finally found happily-ever-after by trading my lifelong food and booze addictions for a son, a husband, and writing. I’d stood on stages all over the country and repeated the book’s message to hopeful women: Carry on. Life is hard, but you are a warrior. One day it will all come together for you, too.

  Right after that first book’s ink dried, I sat in a therapist’s office and listened to my husband say that he’d been sleeping around since our wedding.

  I held my breath as he said, “There have been other women,” and when I inhaled again, the air was made of smelling salts. He kept apologizing while looking down at his hands, and the impotent stammering made me laugh out loud. My laughter made both men—my husband and his therapist—visibly uncomfortable. Their discomfort made me feel powerful. I looked at the door and willed adrenaline to carry me out of that building, across the parking lot, and into my minivan.

  I sat in the driver’s seat for a while and realized that the revelation of my husband’s betrayal did not leave me feeling the despair of a wife with a broken heart. I was feeling the rage of a writer with a broken plot. Hell hath no fury like a memoirist whose husband just fucked up her story.

  I was furious with him and disgusted with myself. I’d let down my guard and trusted that the other characters in my story would act as they should and that my plot would unfold as I’d mapped it. I’d rendered my own future and my children vulnerable by ceding creative control to another character. What an idiot. Never again. I would take back full control, starting now. This was my story and my family, and I would decide how it ended. I’d take this shit I’d been handed, and I’d spin it into gold.

  I took control back with words, sentences, chapters, and scripts. I started with the story’s resolution in mind—a healed, whole family—and worked backward from there. There would be rage, pain, therapy, self-discovery, forgiveness, reluctant trust, then eventually: fresh intimacy and redemption. I do not know if I lived the next few years and then wrote about what happened or if I wrote the next few years and then made it all happen. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that at the end of that blur of time I had myself a dark love story—a drama of betrayal and forgiveness, pain and redemption, brokenness and healing. In book form and family form. Checkmate, Life.

  In Ann Patchett’s Truth & Beauty, a reader approaches Lucy at her book-signing table and asks of her memoir, “How do you remember all of that?”

  “I don’t remember it,” she says. “I write it.”

  When Love Warrior was complete, I handed the manuscript to Craig and said, “Here. Here is what it all meant. I made it all mean something. We won the war. Our family made it. We are a love story after all. You are welcome.”

  Now the war has ended, and I want to go home. But home is still a foxhole with me and Craig left staring at each other, wondering: What now? What did we win?

  I call my sister and ask if I can cancel the book launch event in Chicago. I want her to tell me that this will be fine, no big deal. She says, “We can cancel, but it will be a big deal. You committed to this.”

  So I do this thing I do. From the outside I imagine it looks like a straightening, a stiffening. From the inside it feels like turning my liquid self to a solid. Water to ice. Glennon has left the building. I’ve got this. I board the plane to go tell a story I’m not sure I believe.

  It will be okay. I’ll just tell it like a story instead of a life. As if I am past the end instead of stuck in the middle. I’ll tell the truth, but I’ll tell it with a slant: I’ll blame myself just enough; present him in the most sympathetic light; attach my bulimia to my frigidity and my frigidity to his infidelity. I’ll tell how the cheating led to my self-reflection, how self-reflection led to forgiveness and pain led to redemption. I’ll tell it so that people will decide: Of course. It was leading to this ending all along. I see. It all had to happen exactly that way. That is what I will decide, too.

  The moral arc of our life bends toward meaning—especially if we bend it that way with all our damn might.

  I arrive in Chicago and meet my book publicist at the Palmer House hotel, where the event is being held. This weekend is the literary Super Bowl, and she’s buzzing. We are on our way to a dinner where ten authors will get to know one another before we head into the ballroom and pitch our upcoming books from the stage. This dinner, which I have just learned about a few hours before, has heightened my introvert terror alert level from yellow to red.

  The room where the authors are to have dinner is small, with two long conference tables pushed together to form a square. Instead of sitting, people are milling. Milling with people I do not know is my idea of hell on Earth. I do not mill. I walk over to the drink table and pour an ice water. A famous writer walks over and introduces herself. She asks, “Are you Glennon? I’ve been wanting to talk to you. You’re the Christian one, right?”

  Yes, I’m the one.

  “My new book is about a woman who has a religious experience and becomes a Christian. Do you believe it? A Christian! It feels so real to her! I don’t know how my readers will react: Will people be able to take her seriously? What do you think? Do you feel like people take you seriously?”

  I say the most serious thing I can think of and then excuse myself.

  I look at the table. No assigned seats, damnit. George Saunders sits quietly at the end of the table. He seems gentle and kind and I’d like to sit next to him, but he is a man and I don’t know how to talk to men. At the end of the table is a young woman with calm energy. I sit down next to her. She is a twentysomething releasing her first children’s book. I ask her question after question while considering how wonderful it would be if the organizers would just place our books on the table, so we could get to know each other by reading silently. We butter our rolls. Salads are served. As I’m reaching for dressing, the children’s book lady looks over at the door. I look over, too.

  Suddenly, a woman is standing where nothingness used to be. She takes up the entire doorway, the entire room, the entire universe. She has short hair, platinum on top, shaved on the sides. She is wearing a long trench coat, a red scarf, a warm half smile, cool steel confidence. She stands still there for a moment, taking inventory of the room. I stare at her and take inventory of my entire life.

  My whole being says:

  There She Is.

  Then, I lose control of my body. I stand up and open my arms wide.

  She looks over, cocks her head to the side, raises her eyebrows, smiles at me.

  Fuck Fuck Fuck Why am I standing? Why are my arms open? Oh my God, What Am I Doing?

  I sit back down.

  She walks around the table and shakes hands with everyone. When she gets to me, I stand up again, turn around, face her. “I’m Abby,” she says.

  I ask if I can hug her, because what if this is my only chance? She smiles and opens her arms. Then—the smell that will become home to me—skin like powder and fabric softener blended with the wool of her coat and her cologne and something that smelled like air, like outdoors, like crisp sky, like a baby and a woman and a man and the whole world.

  The only seat left is at the far end of the table, so she walks away from me and sits down. She’ll later tell me that she didn’t eat or speak because all of her energy was spent trying not to stare. Mine, too.

  Dinner ends, and there is more milling. Oh my God, more milling and now with a revolution in the room. I excuse myself to go to the bathroom and kill two milling minutes. When I walk out, she is standing in the hallway, watching the ba
throom door, waiting. She motions to me to come over. I look behind me to make sure it’s me she’s talking to. She laughs. She laughs.

  Then it’s time to walk to the ballroom. We separate ourselves from the pack somehow. There are people three feet in front of us and behind us, but here we are, walking alone, together. I want so badly to be interesting. But she is so cool, and I don’t know how to be cool. I’ve not been cool a day in my life. I am warm—burning up—sweating through my shirt already.

  She starts talking, thank God. She tells me about the book she’s about to release. She says, “But things are hard right now. You’ve probably heard.”

  “Heard what? I have not heard. What would I have heard, and where would I have heard it?”

  She says, “The news, maybe? ESPN?”

  “Um, no, I have not heard the news on ESPN,” I say.

  She speaks, slowly at first, then all at once.

  “I’m a soccer player. Was a soccer player. I just retired, and I’m not sure what I am now. I got a DUI last month. It was all over the news. I watched my mug shot scroll across the ticker for days. I can’t believe I did it. I’ve been really lost and depressed the last couple of years, and I just…I screwed up. I’ve always been about honor, and I ruined my whole legacy. I let everybody down. I hurt the whole team, maybe. And now they want me to write my book as some kind of hero athlete puff piece, but I keep thinking: What if I’m just honest? What if I write the truth about my life?”

  I am sad for her, but I am thrilled for me. In our four minutes together she has asked me about the three subjects I know best: drinking, writing, and shame. This is my jam. I’ve got this. Hot damn.