I’ll admit it — I was in a dark place.
Married twenty-seven years, my husband and I had retreated to the darkest recesses of our caves, ignoring each other, sitting separately, often going to bed hours after the other, and barely kissing good-bye or saying “I love you” during the day.
I’d had the crap knocked out of me that year, by employees who’d gathered together and decided to bring false claims against me, all the while trying to steal clients and business away.
Is it my fault for trusting too much or becoming too relaxed? Yeah, I’ll admit that. But I’m also a romantic. I tend to dream and see the flowers along the path, while ignoring the slugs.
I can’t pinpoint the day when I began to see a brass ring shining again, but I presume it was one night while I sat up writing sometime between three and four in the morning. It had become a habit for me, staying up late, not having to go to bed and touch my husband or hear him snore, or feel the separateness of being together.
Does that make sense?
Even as we lay next to each other, we were both very lonely. We’d gone to therapy, we’d tried the dance of talking it through, but we always retreated after a few weak attempts at working it our.
The oddest part of it all, is that it wasn’t over money, or sex, or children. There wasn’t anything wrong in those areas. What it was, was that we’d become only friends, and I began to resent it. And I REALLY started to resent it when I started my books, The Broken Bottles Series, so named after my father’s alcoholism.
I waned to tell more than that. Sure, I went through what thousands and thousands of others have, a child of trauma, mental and physical abuse from the alcoholic or addicted parent, but what was it from all of those shadows that made me afraid to walk up to my husband and ask for intimacy and love?
Why were the words so hard? I only had to say, “Honey, I want more. I want your lips on mine, and your arms around my body.”
You’d think after that many years it would be easy.
But it wasn’t.
I began to examine why not. As I peeled back my layers, I began to understand what being a child of alcoholism does: it shuts you down, closes your heart, and makes you afraid — it made me very afraid. I knew I’d be abandoned because I wasn’t even the first choice of my father. He chose his bottle over me. How could I ever hope anyone would love me?
And also, why do so many couples end up as friends as they transition into their fifties (or even younger)?
What is it that fades away? Why can’t we each ask for what we want and find our voice with each other?
And that, my friends, is the crux of Shadow Heart, Fire Heart, and the novels to come in the Broken Bottles Series. I have three missions:
1. I want to show what the effects are from growing up in a family battling addiction. It’s not only the fears of mental or physical abuse, it’s the every day choices we make — the way we dress, comb our hair, socialize, participate — they’re all because of how we grew up.
2. I want to take the dirty our of sex. It’s healthy, it opens the heart, and keeps us talking, communication, and asking for what we want.
3. I want to encourage people, wherever they are in their lives to openly ask for what they really want from each other.
We can’t read minds, and we can’t guess. Say it!
DISCUSSION: What is the first step (baby steps) you could do to ask for what you want? Do you even know how? Don’t feel bad, I didn’t!
MAR
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