I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway

by Tracy McMillan

  And even though everything else around me appears to be in shambles, I choose to believe that this is a fresh new start for me. The Spacebar is evidence of it. A new me is being born—conceived the first day I saw Paul’s picture and gestating ever since. As everyone knows, birth isn’t very pretty. It involves blood, and guts, and agony. It hurts and it never goes according to plan. But what you get when it’s over is so magnificent, so awe inspiring—a brand-new life!—that it’s all worth it. Beyond worth it.

  It’s just hard to know that when you’re in the thick of it.

  SAM IS IN THERAPY. I found someone for him to talk to after the mother of one of his friends phoned me with some very disturbing news. It was just days after Paul and I split up.

  “I’m calling because I thought you should know what happened with Sam today,” she begins.

  I’ve never gotten this type of call. Sam has never been a problem. He is the cautious type who becomes alarmed if the car is moving before his seat belt is buckled. Sam follows the rules—he does his homework without being told. He brushes his teeth at slumber parties. He is scrupulously honest. He’s a popular member of the boy group who makes a spirited, and sometimes silly, sidekick.

  What he does not make is trouble.

  “What happened?” I’m nervous, because I know this can’t be good.

  The mother, a sweetheart named Michelle, explains how the boys had been involved in some type of minor kerfuffle and it led Sam to an emotional meltdown (to be expected under the circumstances). Michelle apparently called the boys aside to discuss what happened and, in true “progressive parenting” style, ask each one what he felt should be done about it.

  “His answer really concerned me,” Michelle says. “Sam said he thought he ‘should just die.’ I’m sure he didn’t mean it literally, but still. Is everything okay?”

  There are no words for the feelings that bubble up inside when you hear that your child is in that kind of emotional jeopardy, and worse, that the danger is within. “Oh my god” is all I can say. “Oh my god.”

  This makes me cry.

  “My husband moved out this week,” I say, but I can barely get the words out. “And Sam is really close to him, and I know it’s having a terrible effect on him.”

  “Didn’t you just recently get married?” Michelle, married for fifteen years, can’t understand how these facts—that I’m both divorcing and a newlywed—could possibly reconcile themselves.

  “Yes.” That’s all I can say: yes. Yes, I got us into this. And yes, I’m getting us out.

  Sometimes the moment is where the pain is. This is one of those times.

  I hang up the phone and immediately call Saundra, even though it’s a Friday night. She gives me the name of a child therapist, someone in Arcadia, a good twenty-five miles east of here, but I’ll do whatever it takes.

  Later, I ask Sam about the incident. Gently. “Why did you say you should die, honey?”

  “I don’t know,” Sam says. My boy doesn’t talk a lot, unless it’s about Pokemon. “I just did.”

  “Can you tell me any more about it?” I venture to ask.

  “Not really.”

  Later, when I think about it further, I feel intuitively that Sam is picking up on all of the torment and self-hatred in this house—Paul loathes who he has become; I am startlingly thin—and it chills me down to my bones. I have always believed that children transmit the unspoken and/or repressed thoughts and feelings in a household. They are like little broadcasting towers, picking up signals and playing them back in such a way that the parents must see exactly what they can’t or won’t look at.

  Sam is showing me where my “love” affair has taken me, and it’s as bad as any drug addiction. The way I’ve stayed with Paul no matter what he’s done—through the lies and the insanity. If I look at Paul as if he’s a drug, it all makes perfect sense. I had to have it. I just had to have it.

  In fact, I can look back on all of my relationships—the marriages, the men; the ones I got, the ones I didn’t get—and I see how I have pursued my love obsession with the same single-mindedness I once used to pursue drinking and drugs. Maybe more. And now, “suddenly,” on the verge of my third divorce, it’s pretty goddamn obvious that I am demoralized in the same way I would be if I were still drinking. Maybe I’m not in jail, but I’ve got to hire a lawyer, and my kid is in trouble, and the life I built up for myself is in shambles.

  Again.

  Strangely, this gives me hope. Because what I know about hitting bottom is that if you can surrender, I mean really surrender, it can be the beginning of an amazing healing.

  MOST DAYS I FEEL LIKE I’m in this Quentin Tarantino movie, the one where a badass martial-arts chick played by Uma Thurman is thrown into a wooden coffin and buried alive by the bad guys. Even though it’s a movie (and you know that if she doesn’t get out of the coffin it’s going to be a really short movie), when you’re watching it you totally think, Wow, she’s a goner. Because her only hope of escape is to apply all of the kung fu lessons she’s ever learned in her life. And even then, her prospects look really dim.

  This is basically what I have to do now. Going through the death of my third marriage is just like being buried alive, and the coffin is my mind.

  My brain, I am discovering, is my true enemy. There’s an obsessive thought factory up there, churning out an endless loop of negativity twenty-four hours a day and then some. He left you for a twenty-one-year-old. You’re forty-one! You’re old. You’re ugly. He lied to you. He cheated on you. He left you. For a twenty-one-year-old. No one will ever love you. You get the idea. About the only thing it doesn’t say is You’re fat, and that’s only because I’m pretty much starving.

  The factory also produces so-called nice thoughts, fantasies, which are beautiful pictures of the way it used to be with Paul, or the way it could be if only he would come back, or the way it would have been if he’d never met that girl or maybe just gotten a job. These thoughts are just as torturous as the negative ones, if not more so, because some part of me wishes they could be true even though I already know they definitely aren’t. And never will be.

  Every painful feeling I’m having in this breakup—almost every tear I’ve shed—starts with one of these obsessive thoughts.

  Which is where the kung fu comes in.

  In the movie, Uma’s kung fu master is a guy with gorgeous long white hair and a Fu Manchu beard named Pai Mei. Pai Mei sets up a piece of wood and tells Uma to break it in two with her bare hands. Of course she can’t. She turns her knuckles bloody trying.

  That’s when Pai Mei tells Uma the secret to developing devastating kung fu: if she wants to break through the wood with her bare hands, she needs to stop being afraid of the wood.

  “You need to make the wood afraid of you,” Pai Mei says.

  This is what I’m doing now. Instead of trying to get rid of the obsessive thoughts, I am using them. I am countering every single one of those agonizing fantasies and self-hating thoughts that enter my mind with four words I say to myself, sometimes silently, sometimes out loud:

  I love you, Tracy.

  Every. Single. Time. Which when your newlywed husband has been caught dating a girl of twenty-one can be a helluva lot of times per day. I love you, Tracy. I love you, Tracy. I love you, Tracy. Sometimes the emphasis is on the “I,” and sometimes it’s on the “love,” and other times it’s on the “you.” Those are three different meanings, and I need to hear all of them.

  After doing this for a while (like a month), what I’m finding is that if you tell yourself you love you four hundred thousand times a day, you start to look and feel and act like a person who is loving herself. What does that look like? Kinda happy. Kinda peaceful. Like someone drawing good people and things into her life. What doesn’t it look like? It definitely does not look bitter, angry, victim-y, or depressed.

  Not that there aren’t still bad days or bad moments. There are. But at least there aren’t bad weeks and bad months. Hell
, I know women who’ve had bad years, even bad decades. Some of them have given up on men altogether and now have cats instead.

  I guess the point of my mantra is a lot like the point of a saying in the recovery world: “You keep what you give away.” In terms of busting through solid wood with your bare knuckles, it means if you think about love, you feel love. If you think about bitterness, you feel bitter. It’s not that I don’t experience bitterness; I do sometimes. But I’m not practicing bitterness—saying over and over, He sucks, I’m a victim, he sucks, fuck him, he sucks.

  Even if he does suck.

  It’s astounding to realize that despite everything, I actually feel better than ever. I know now that the awful pain of my past breakups—especially those where “he” left me—had less to do with the loss of those men and more to do with the washed-out bridge between me and me. The fact that I would just leave myself standing there, alone and vulnerable, listening to all the garbage that was being said about me, by me, is stunning.

  But things are changing. Before all this Paul business, if you didn’t love me, I didn’t love me. I’d do anything to keep your love—I had to!—because if you deemed me unworthy of love, I wouldn’t (couldn’t) love myself. Like in junior high, if you didn’t like my new sweater, I didn’t like it either.

  In the simplest of terms possible, this breakup—the “worst” thing that has ever happened to me in all my years of relationships—has taught me how to like my sweater no matter what. All I have to do is commit to the sweater. To myself. No matter what my soon-to-be-ex-husband did. Or what my thoughts are saying to me.

  The implications of this are far-reaching. It means I can make a mistake, a giant mistake, and still say, I love you, Tracy. And I can save myself when the bad guys threaten to bury me alive.

  That is some devastating kung fu.

  MOVING DAY FINALLY ARRIVES two months later. Paul has been living in a hotel all this time while Sam and I stabilized emotionally and I lined up a place of our own. This might be the hardest day of my life.

  Sam is safely ensconced at Dan’s house, clear of any shrapnel. Thank god for Dan. He has been so good to me in all this. I swear, ten years later, Dan is teaching me what marriage really means—he knows I am way more than my flaws, and he is standing by me, pulling with me, to minimize the damage to our son from what I’ve done. And I love him for this.

  My friend Tracy—Tracy Renee—comes to sit with me while I wait for the movers, and when she has to go, another friend comes to take her place. They are witnesses, but none of them can save me from the moment when I sit alone in this huge loft, sobbing.

  I cry for the mess I’ve made. I cry for the plans I laid. I cry for the girl who thought this is what felt so right. It’s been twenty-one months since I first wondered if I was going to like living downtown.

  Well, now I know.

  THE NEXT DAY, I TAKE SAM to the loft one last time. As much as I would love to just slam the door on the whole wretched affair, I know that allowing him to say good-bye to his room and to get some closure will be what’s healthiest in the long run.

  There’s an idea in child development that you don’t need—nor do you want—a perfect mother. What you want is a “good enough” mother. Someone who will make mistakes and frustrate you so that you learn how to adapt, how to cope, how to deal with life, while still in the safety of home. Sam is totally hooked up in this respect, huh?

  There’s another idea that goes along with the idea of a “good enough” mother: that you’re going to make mistakes as a parent, so it’s not so much about whether you do damage, it’s about how you go about repairing it. Acknowledging what has happened is the first thing. Then you have to allow for grieving.

  That’s why I brought him here. I want to help him make the passage from the boy who had a stepdad he loved named Paul…to a boy who no longer does.

  We stop at the bodega on the way into the building and buy one of those candles with a picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe on it. I don’t even know what Our Lady of Guadalupe represents, but whatever it is, she’ll do. We walk into the loft, down the long hallway, and I can’t help but remember the first time I ever made this trek. I had so much hope. I really thought my dreams were about to come true. They were—just not how I thought.

  Sam is quiet, but he doesn’t seem morose. There are a couple of things he wants to make sure he gets while he’s here.

  “Don’t forget my candy kit, Mom,” he reminds me. He’s talking about the kit we got at one of those educational stores that uses candy making to teach kids the basics of chemistry. “It’s on top of the refrigerator.”

  He can’t reach up there, so I grab it and put it on the dining room table. The table is covered with a piece of glass, under which we have slid a lot of Polaroid pictures we took over the months we were here. I pull some of them out and tuck them into my purse. We might want to look at them someday, a long, long time from now.

  Sam, meanwhile, has gone into his room. There’s nothing in there but the giant pin screen, the one he never did touch in months of sleeping right next to it. “Everything’s gone,” he says.

  “It’s not gone. It’s in the new place.” I want to cry, but I’m reluctant to make my feelings bigger than his. I remember June Ericson and how she handled the day she told me I was leaving. This is his moment to say good-bye, and I don’t want to get in the way of that. “Come on, pumpkin. Let’s do the candle.”

  We go back into the dining room, and I pull out the candle. I get some matches. I lay them next to the candle. I’m trying to be just a little bit ceremonious—this is a ritual, like a funeral. We’re letting go of us: me, Sam, and Paul.

  Because Paul is dead.

  I fold my hands in prayer. “Fold your hands, muffin.” He does. I’m supposed to start the prayer now and suddenly I’m at a loss for words. What are we praying for, exactly? I’ve never been that good at the extemporaneous. It’s exactly why I never became a reporter. All those live shots! Then I remember. We’re praying to acknowledge the fact that if this is happening, somehow, it is for the highest good. Because god is good. All the time.

  “Dear god, we bless the time we had in this house. We bless Paul and we forgive Paul. We let him go with love and light. And so it is. Amen.”

  I strike a match and hand it to Sam, who lights the candle. I wipe a tear from my eye. “No one knows exactly why things in life unfold the way they do. But I know”—I say it a little more fiercely than I mean to—“I know that everything that happens is in our highest good. It’s up to us to make it so.” I put a hand on his back. “Do you understand, honey?”

  “Yeah.” I look into Sam’s soulful, downturned eyes and I can see that he really does understand. Somehow. “All right,” I say softly. “I think it’s time to go.”

  “Mom?” His face is a little brighter. He’s got something he wants to say before we leave. “Can I do one last thing?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can I touch the pin screen?”

  This I did not expect. What an amazing request! Now that we’re leaving, Sam wants to do the one thing he never got to do—touch the pin screen—because we told him not to do it. Sam, a high-integrity person, held up his side of the bargain. Which is more than I can say for Paul.

  “Yes, you can,” I say. “You totally can.”

  We go into his room, and I watch as Sam takes his plump little fingers and painstakingly pushes in a few pins in the lower left-hand corner of the screen. It doesn’t disturb the design on the pin screen, but it does say, I was here. And perhaps it adds, Motherfuckers.

  He looks up at me and smiles. I smile back.

  Now we can go.

  OF COURSE, I MEET SOMEONE. I don’t mean to. But I go out to a Halloween party and we strike up a conversation, and the next thing I know, the party is over. He isn’t really my type. Too tall, very blond, with big muscles. The kind of guy who likes Vegas, or used to. But he’s smart and he makes me laugh. And he’s got a childhood like mine. Hi
s name, improbably, is Sam.

  A couple of weeks later I run into him with mutual friends and we end up going for a cup of coffee. I level with him immediately. “Listen,” I say. “I’ve been married three times. In fact, I’m married right now. As we speak.”

  You’d think this would send him packing immediately. But he doesn’t seem all that deterred. Instead, when we get to the end of the coffee he says to me, “Can I get your phone number?”

  And what occurs to me, without my wanting it to, is: Oh shit. He’s gonna want to marry me.

  When Big Sam calls and asks me out, I say yes.

  Then, an hour later, I call back and say no. I feel awful about it, but who am I kidding? I’m in no position to date this guy. For one thing, Paul only left three months ago. For another, as Paul and I approach our one-year wedding anniversary, he’s been wanting to reconcile sleep with me. For old times’ sake. And I’ve been wanting to let him.

  So I do. And after a week or two, I don’t.

  I just couldn’t resist the opportunity to feel what it’s like to have Paul want me and to not really want him back. I know exactly how lame this is. After everything that’s happened? After how much pain Paul has caused me and my son?

  What was I thinking?

  The truth is, I’m not thinking. I’m just being human. But my ten-day relapse has shown me something very important that I could not have seen any other way: Paul is not this all-powerful love of my life. He’s just a guy whose demons lined up treacherously close to mine and my dad’s. And now that I’m no longer locked in a desperate battle to win Daddy’s love—by getting Paul to stop lying to me and cheating on me—even the sex is only so-so.

  Free at last.

  Free at last.

  THE TV-WRITING AGENT finally gets in touch with me—eight months later, on Paul’s birthday, no less—to say he just read The Spacebar, he loves it, and he would like to represent me. I’m ecstatic, not only because getting an agent is the (first) Holy Grail of a Hollywood writing career, but also because it looks like all the anguish I lived through with Paul—and poured into that script—might end up yielding something good after all.