Time Travel (re-posting)

This is the first of a series of transposed posts from a previous blog, which I lost and found again, re-posted here for continuity's sake - apologies to those who may have already read these. Will continue with new posts after these three old ones!

 "Time Travel" written December 1, 2012

 It's been a time of many transformations for me over the past year or so. Some of these have been progressive changes and others have been a kind of backtracking.

Pop psychology likes to make big issues out of what I think they call co-dependent relationships. Relationships that usually involve one or both partners having addictions. When my husband passed away on the last day of July 2011, I was set free from this kind of relationship. His addiction was drugs, the hardest of all drugs. I didn't share that particular addiction with him but living with it every day for more years than I'd like to admit made me take up some addictions of my own in order to cope (if you can call it that...maybe a more appropriate word would be "survive") with these circumstances.

My addictions seemed harmless compared to his, although they were probably just as damaging in different ways. They did not involve the physical debilitation that comes from drug abuse. On the contrary, I became addicted to exactly the opposite path. I became a fanatic about health and diet, as well as adopting other habits to escape my everyday world. Not really healthy, although it appeared so on the surface. For me it was dietary practices (I went from a loosely practicing vegetarian to a hard core vegan), plus what might be called an addiction to fantasy in the form of online roleplay writing and to a lesser extent online games. Perhaps strangely enough, the roleplaying was not of a sexual nature, as so many people get caught up in, but it was historical. It was time travel, mostly back to the first few centuries of Ireland, intricately researched and imagined in all possible depth and detail. These habits and practices took me out of the space and time that I hated so badly and put me into a world where I was in control. He used to call it, with a touch of sarcasm, my "happy space." I lived on one floor of the house, he lived on another. I refused to let him drive me out of the home I loved, the house I dreamed of before we bought it, the place I felt I was meant to be, regardless of - to use more cliches of addiction - the big purple elephant in the room that no one mentions.

So, it could be said that I "enabled" (in the psychospeak language of these situations) his drug addiction by my silence and non-presence. However, I wasn't entirely silent and invisible. I tried so many times to get him to seek help in so many different ways. I tried everything I knew to heal him. You can't heal someone who doesn't want to be healed. Finally, I guess I just gave up. There didn't seem to be anything I could do to stop this.

When he passed on, I fell into a manic whirlpool of mixed emotions. I was sad and I mourned. I was happy to be free. I was angry that he left my granddaughter and me practically nothing, having cleaned out the bank accounts during the last few months of his life. I was thankful that I could now cleanse my house of all the sick, hoarded clutter and make it into the home I always thought it could be. I spent months cleaning and throwing things away. Months of constant, compulsive cleansing. There was an unbelievable amount of garbage. One of the big things I wanted to do was have a new furnace and central a.c. installed. It would be expensive but I was terrified of our old, ancient furnace and refused to spend another winter worrying if the house was going to blow up.

Well, to make a long story short, it basically did. There was one last night in that house, the coziest, warmest night I ever had there, October 27, 2011, with the new furnace working beautifully and heating the whole place like the old furnace never could. The next day as the contractor was finishing up, using a welding torch in the basement, a spark went up the wall and set the house on fire. It was a total loss.

My granddaughter and I lived at the Red Roof Inn, courtesy of the Red Cross, for 3 days. We were lucky enough to find an apartment right next door to our old house and moved right in. It was there that we started putting our lives back together. Eventually I bought this house where we are now, after months of visualizing and dreaming and hoping.

This is where the "time travel" comes in. My new home is in the neighborhood where I was born and raised. My sister lives almost within shouting distance, two streets away. We moved from this neighborhood with our parents in 1962. Before then, we'd been living with my dad's parents. My mother wanted her own house.  It was traumatic for me. My grandmother was always there. She was more like my mother than my real mother. Suddenly I had to change mother-figures and switch from my grandmother to my mom who had very little in the way of maternal skills. I had to make all new friends and go to a different school. I hated the new house. My reaction was to rebel in as many ways as I could find, from seventh grade onward. Within a few years, I was going by a different name, shedding the name my parents gave me for a nickname which stuck. I was developing a whole new personality to go with it. Not unusual for adolescents, but in my case it was likely a little more extreme.

Skip the next fifty years or so.

Now I'm back where I left off in 1962. My sister and I are friends again. We started hating each other after we moved and as adults we went separate ways and didn't speak to each other for years. I've gone back to using my old name, sort of by default at first, because that's what I was called when I lived here as a child. I'm comfortable with it now. I'm in touch with my cousin again, who was one of my best friends for my entire childhood, and its like only a few days have gone by since we were in fifth grade. We marvel at how much the same we still are.

 It's very mind-boggling the way all this has worked out. It feels so good. I'm more relaxed than I've been for decades, after all that has transpired since the end of July 2011. I'm home again.

 Through all the transmutations of all those years, I've returned to the original "me" again. Don't get me wrong. I know its 2012, not 1962, but I am picking up whatever I let go, lost, half-forgot or otherwise buried, and making it work again while somehow weaving into it all the fine things I learned or took up along the way. Too much blogging. Yet I have so much more to say, on so many levels. Stay tuned.