Four years ago I was strong. I was working in a school that I absolutely adored, with a phenomenal team of people, designing and implementing programs that I believed in whole-heartedly. Even when I was putting out fires, which was often, I felt like I was making a very real difference in people's lives. I had decided the summer before that, if my body wasn't going to allow me to have children, I was going to find joy in other ways. I was seizing the chance to work a bit on me, to be the best version of myself. Two days a week, I woke up at the not-even-crack of dawn to work out with a group fun and inspirational women. I learned I could push my body and keep up with people I considered "fit." In the evenings, weary and bleary from a ten hour day at school, I would truck off to rehearsal for My Fair Lady, which allowed me to sing, dance, and play, to transform on stage. I was excited, joyful, bold.
I met my wife four years ago this week, while she was visiting my school as part of our ten year re-accreditation visit. We had no fireworks moment then, just a shake of hands and smiles at the welcome reception. For the next four days she toured the school, learned about its programs, interviewed people, and apparently, watched me- not in a creepy stalker kind of way, but the way someone watches the second in command of the school they are assessing. And apparently, she liked what she saw. "You were such a powerhouse of a personality," she has said to me. "You radiated confidence. And you were beautiful."
Four years and one week ago, I found out I was pregnant, and I was absolutely elated. Maybe it was the working on me bit that allowed my body to take on the task of creating a new person. Everything about me felt capable, powerful, and in control. I believe then I truly was the woman she saw, a woman in charge of her own life and making another. My year continued on an upward trajectory: good things at school, a best actress nomination for the state theater awards, a healthy pregnancy supported by a husband and friends who told me I had never looked more beautiful, that I handled pregnancy and work like a trooper. I was exhausted but ecstatic. The next time I saw my now wife, I was six months pregnant. I sat to her left as we interviewed her for a position at our school. She had fallen in love with it, a school I had helped to create, during her visit, and we were anxious to bring her energy aboard. "You were such a cute pregnant lady," she tells me. "You and your basketball belly. I knew you were someone I wanted to get to know."
We saw each other once again that spring, when she visited to see how we created the schedule, but not again until after my son was born. By that time, in the end of July three years ago, I had taken on the pallor of a new mom: dark circles masked by big smiles. My body was depleted from breastfeeding and lack of sleep, but I had this new little life that was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me. However, behind the scenes, his father had started to disappear. He spent countless hours away from home, rarely touching me or talking to me. He told me at to do so was "off-putting." I had no idea how to be a new parent (no one does), and I certainly didn't know how to do it alone. That powerhouse of a woman? She started to fray around the edges. My migraines came back with a vengeance when my son was six months old. I tried very hard to keep myself pulled together at school, but as my physical self began to wither away to nothing, it became outwardly clear something was amiss.
When a dear friend questioned me about having an eating disorder, I had no choice but to tell my administrative team that no, I wasn't starving myself, but instead, my world was collapsing, and my body was responding in kind. My husband was having an affair, which had been going on for months, with a woman-child twelve years younger than me. I had tens of thousands of dollars of debt from helping him start his business, a six month old infant that I would now be raising essentially alone, and a sense of self that had been shaken to the core. All of that confidence, that physical glow and inner light? Gone. My colleague then friend cried in her office for me and wondered what she could do to help.
A month later, my friend and trusted mentor announced that he was retiring from the superintendency, and he asked me to apply for his job. He knew what life had dealt me recently, but he still thought I was up to the task. It was wonderful to feel like someone believed in me, still saw me as strong and worthy, but the prospect of taking on that responsibility was daunting. I polished up my suit of armor, bought some new big girl clothes to fit my fragile frame, and tried to muster that glow my friend had seen in me. I was honored to be named one of two finalists, but I wasn't sad to see the job to go to someone else. But then my second trusted friend and mentor, the principal of my beloved school, also announced that he was going to be leaving. It felt like I was getting jilted for a second time in less than six months.
While finalizing my divorce and celebrating my son's first birthday, I was also named interim principal of my little school. This should have been cause for celebration, but it wasn't a job I was expecting, or even one I really wanted. I loved what I was doing before. I missed the people who had helped me do it. Instead, I was thrust into the role of new principal on top of new mom, with little to no guidance for either and a new superintendent who found fault with just about everything I did. Somehow, in less than a year, I had gone from the top of every aspect of my game to second-guessing my every move, every decision, every aspect of myself.
There is nothing like being lied to and abandoned, told you are essentially revolting, balancing on a financial abyss, and being constantly berated, all while trying to figure out how the hell to operate a school and this thing called a child, while your staff stand back and watch you go down in flames, to make you feel completely and utterly inept. I was a shell of that person my friend had first met, although she repeatedly told me she believed in me, that that woman of before was in there. I cried all of the time. I was angry at the world. My migraines were so severe that I was sick nearly fifty percent of every month. I vacillated between trying to protect myself and protect my staff, and I did neither well. I existed in a perpetual fog of guilt at not being able to be the mother my son nor the leader my school deserved. I gave up on thinking I could change the situation at work and began to look elsewhere for jobs, for a place where I could start fresh, where no one would know that woman who had stood so strong, so capable, and so proud. A place where they would know only me in this present incarnation, and would hire her anyway. A place where maybe I could shuffle my way back to competent and confident. My friend had become my partner, and she supported me in this effort at recreation, at finding myself again.
And then I was diagnosed with cancer.
My body, seemingly healthy and back from the brink of emaciation, was in revolt. A bunch of cells flipped a switch and somehow decided that if the stress of the last couple of years hadn't killed me, they were going to try. You think job stress is tough? Parenting? Let's try the prospect of dying. But before that, let's see how much trauma and physical pain your body can withstand. How many times can a needle pierce your skin? How many hours can you spend in a tube? How much radiation and burning before your skin splits and oozes? How many inches of hair can we cut off, or flesh can we cut open and out? How significantly can we rearrange and disfigure your body before you snap?
People see the adversity I have faced and they tell me that I am strong. And yet sometimes I feel like the frame supporting this troubled body and anxious mind is made of glass. I am told that woman of four years ago really did exist. I have a vague sense of her voice and poise, the command of her limbs, the shadow of her mind and will, all the shimmer of a distant memory. My partner saw her then and tells me stories about her, and believes in her essence today, enough that she signed on to be my wife. I know I will never again be the person I was four years ago. But I would like my present self to have a chance to know her strength, her confidence, her inner and outer beauty, to allow the now me to be shaped by her. How desperately I want the me of today and the four years ago me to take all of the days in between and smooth them out and balance them, pain resolved to humility, rejection to resilience, guilt to acknowledgement, chaos to calm. I want my wife to have a chance to be married to the brilliance she first met and for my son to be raised by a mother who can embrace the weight and wonder of the world without being crushed by it. I believe there is a capable, beautiful, powerful woman out there searching for this wounded soul to claim and inhabit. And only by accepting that I have work to do can I hope to find her. Maybe then I will get to see her with my own eyes and not simply through someone else's. And perhaps, if I am lucky, she will be even better than before.
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