March started off fabulous. Our tax return gave us enough money to pay down a good chunk of credit card debt, put a little in our savings, pay 6 months of car insurance in advance, pay off Luke's tuition and summer camp bills for 08/09 and we still had $1000 that we specifically decided to use to start renovating our 1980's house.
Fast forward to June. One credit card is totally maxed. Another one is close. Our saving's balance is about to be totally depleted and I'm debating selling my husband's semen.
How did this happen? We're used to highs and lows, but man, this is the lowest that we've come. How did we let this happen?
Well, there was $1000 for the pool (that I don't regret since we use it TONS and it keeps us from spending more money out entertaining ourselves), there was new tires for both cars, a new windshield for me, baby furniture, a renovation that had a $1000 budget and ended up close to $5000 (renovating one room led us to renovating 3 rooms and a hallway), we decided that yes we COULD afford to pay Luke's tuition for 09/10 in 4 interest free installments instead of 12 payments like we normally do, Luke needs braces, Ziggy lost a lot of income and the finale was the a/c breaking.
For Ziggy's income questions - he's delivered the newspaper on Friday/Saturday/Sunday nights for the entire time he's been sober (part of his ammends to pay off his debts that turned into a luxury monthly paycheck for us to blow that we didn't want to give up that then turned into a necessity). Well, the paper scaled him back to one day a week due to general cut backs (less people buying the paper) and bam, there goes $400 a month that we were used to having.
Anyway, I'm just throwing myself a little pity party. I know it will be ok. My dad had offered last year to help me if ever Luke needed braces, so I plan to swallow my pride and call daddy. That will help a big bit. Ziggy and I have some other ways to get cash that aren't illegal, although Uncle Sam will penalize us a bit. So it's not like I'm asking you all to send me canned goods...yet.
So that's life right now. It's all I can think about and I just want to get out of this black hole soon. I'm not sure if it's earned bad Karma, or just my turn for a shit pile to be thrown on me, but enough already. Please?
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Sunday, June 21, 2009
The End
Hopefully I can get through the rest of this mess of a story tonight. This part of the story is honestly SO busy and so complicated that I still have no idea how to even verbalize it properly.
So we all evacuated for Katrina. Luke went to Natchitoches, LA with his dad and his dad's family. I went to Lafayette, LA with my dog, and the rest of my family went to Baton Rouge, LA. Ziggy went to Houston, TX with his family. We were friends at this point, but not together yet and my family would have preferred that he drop dead at this point, so much of our friendship was kept quiet so that I wouldn't get regular lectures and eye rollings from family.
We expected it to be a 2 - 3 day evacuation, like normal, which is why I sent Luke with his dad - since it was his dad's weekend time with him anyway. (I say that because people often don't understand how I could "send my kid away" for such a tragedy - we had NO idea that it would be a tragedy, and a weekend with his dad in Natchitoches was actually a normal event for him).
I got regular texts from Ziggy. The phone lines were so jammed and so many towers were knocked down that if you didn't know how to text, you learned fast because it was the only way to communicate. My mother had stayed at home and didn't evacuate.
Once the horrors on the TV began, all of us 20 and 30 something year olds who had never in our life dealt with tragedy all began to grow up and start making real life decisions - if my home is destroyed, what will I do, where will I live, where will I work, how do I pay my bills if I'm not working, do I go home or just sit in this hotel, is my mom alive, how do I get FEMA help, where is the Red Cross station?
Once the damage of the area was assessed and we all knew how bad or good it was, I came home to get to work. At a time like this, your job is absolutely essential, if you still have one, and if my job had asked me to fly to the moon, I probably would have. I got started rebuilding my company and rebuilding my home (I had a little over a foot of water in my house, so everything under 4ft had to be ripped out and rebuilt). All of this Katrina mess is a blog novel in and of itself, so let's skip it and get back to Ziggy.
His job transferred him to a hotel in Dallas, TX where he worked from an office there. He quickly ran out of suboxone. The desired course of suboxone therapy is at least 6 months to 3 years, depending on the level of addiction. He had only been on it a month at most. He couldn't find a doctor in the Dallas area and suddenly his texts stopped and I lost him.
We were a state apart and I had major issues of my own. I had a destroyed home, homeless friends and family members, I was working 60+ hours a week to help keep my company from dying and I was trying desperately to get my house safe and livable for Luke to come home. His father and I shuttled him all over the state in those weeks/months to stay with family while we rebuilt homes for him - he couldn't come home until basic services were up and running and our homes had power and water and were mold free - and that took a painfully long time. My mother's job went under, my dad was totally homeless and it was just - my own personal hell. While Ziggy was important, there was enough severe trauma going on for me that took my mind off of him. He was away from anyone on earth who loved him, and before he found a suboxone certified doctor, he found a dealer.
I was shuttling to Natchitoches every weekend to see Luke (a 5 hour drive each way) and to this day, I have no idea how I made it through that 3 - 4 month period of my life - it was torture on all of us.
Once I finally got Ziggy talking to me again, I knew it. I knew he was "gone" and pulling him back when he was 14 hours away and I had so much to deal with was impossible. By time I got home from work, worked on my own house and got into bed to talk to him, I barely had enough energy to even feel the pain of hearing his slurred words and his nonsense. I began to pull away from him out of necessity - I had my own shit going on and if he wanted to kill himself, well, sorry buddy, but I can't help you right now.
By early October, I had walls again and the townhouse was disinfected enough for Luke to come home. He got back to school shortly after and our lives were full of work/school and coming home to work on the house. We did his homework on a concrete floor and I learned how to cook meals in the microwave since the kitchen was the last room finished. We watched TV on kitchen chairs and our TV was on the concrete floow. Sounds awful, but we were actually better off and more "recovered" than the majority of the houses around us. (Neighbors made fun of me for fixing the mexicans coffee every morning and offering water bottles to them at mid day, but it was my house that was done before theirs and we had the same mexicans working for us!) We finally got a sofa and a TV in November. By Thanksgiving my house would be rebuilt and normal again.
Before that, Ziggy finally hit his official bottom. An addict's bottom usually involves near death experiences or jail time or both. Ziggy's bottom was a night full of hallucinations culminating with getting his parents involved, because I just couldn't take it anymore.
It was shortly before Luke came home, though I don't remember the exact date. I still had 3 - 4 people from work living with me reguarly since my house was better off than theirs and I had lights/water back before them. A phone call came in from Ziggy.
He was in his truck and said that he was on the highway and that the FBI was after him. Don't laugh - yes this part is extraordinary, but in his mind, the FBI WAS after him. He said that he had just picked up an 8 ball of cocaine (google it if you don't know what that is) and when he noticed the FBI was after him, he had swallowed the entire 8 ball and washed it down with the only liquid in his car - a bottle of windex. He was screaming and crying and freaking the fuck out.
The call lasted over an hour. Somehow, I got him to find his hotel and his hotel room and when I hung up, he was begging for me to call his mother and said that he was laying by the door to block the FBI from getting in. To this day, none of us have any clue how Ziggy managed to keep his job except that perhaps his boss contributed some of his bizarre behavior as emotional effects of Katrina. No idea, but amazingly, he did keep his job.
To me, that was his bottom. It has much much more details to it, but for Ziggy's sake, I don't think they all need to be shared with the world. So I gave you the basics and that's that.
Within a week, we had him home and back with his parents, who now knew what was going on. He still used for a while when he got home. Bottom doesn't always equal sobriety to come next. He showed up at my house for my birthday and when he walked in and saw my house - he claims that THIS was his bottom.
I say his bottom was the FBI incident, he says it was my house. Whatever - it doesn't matter as long as it happened.
When he walked in and saw my concrete floors and my bare drywall and my doorless rooms and a "home" that he once knew in the midst of being fixed, he says that it all hit him. He hadn't been there. He had "abandoned" Luke and I for the sake of a drug. He fell to his knees on the concrete and wept like a baby. He just couldn't believe, though he had heard, what I had faced/fought/rebuilt without him. The guilt that he felt for not being the one to walk into that house with me and rip up that carpet with me and and throw away half of my life with me was more than he could bear. His parent's house hadn't been damaged and since my home was his nearest concept of home, he lost it and just freaked out over not being there to help me negotiate with contractors and haggle over tile and fight with Mexicans leaving cigarette butts on the floor. What I had been doing for the past two months hit him all at once like a ton of bricks.
He told me that he would be back very soon and that he swore that he would get better. It took a little while - first of all for him to find a doctor again, and second of all for him to save up to see that doctor. He came over often - he bought me window blinds and came and installed them. He had his doctor's appointment set, so he wasn't clean yet, but he was only doing enough opiates to keep him out of withdrawels and my god, he was making a hell of an effort to try to help me and make up for whatever it was that he was trying to make up for. And I let him. Partially because I needed my house done and partially because I knew that every hour that he spent at my house fixing my floors/walls/tiles was another hour that he wasn't getting high. He was safe at my house and so I wanted him there as much as possible.
On December 11th, 2005, Ziggy took his first suboxone and went to his first Narcotics Anonymous meeting.
I watched him get his 24 hour chip. I watched him get his 1 month chip. I watched him lead his first meeting. I watched him get his 6 month chip. I drove his parents to see him speak at his first meeting. I was there when he met his sponsor and I was there - I was there - for all of it.
I almost gave up and ran away a million times. Running would have been easier. I had met a great guy after the hurricane who adored me and fawned all over me and I could have easily changed my number and let Ziggy be and just - run. But I chose to stay and since I chose to stay, I also had to choose to learn how to deal with all that hurt and still look at him without spitting on him or punching him daily.
It was actually my recovering father, who is over 20 years sober, who gave me this advice...he said, "Sandy, if it's going to work, then you HAVE to forgive him before he begins to make ammends to you, you just have to."
FORGIVE HIM???????? Are you fucking kidding me? Forgive him BEFORE he made ammends? Are you shitting me? I was waiting for the "ammends" step like a fat kid waits for cake! I deserved it. He owed MEEEEE! I deserved a parade and a trophy and a round of applause and a song named after me and my own goddamned statue for christ's sake...right? RIGHT???
Nope. Wrong. This was Ziggy's disease. It was his triumph. Not mine, and as much as that sucks and it took me awhile to grasp, I finally did. Through a 12 step program for the loved ones of addicts, and through my own therapist and through ALOT of reading and crying and hair pulling, I finally "got it".
I forgave him. I let it all go. I NEVER forgot, but I forgave - and forgiving him actually had so little to do with HIM that it's almost funny. By March, I felt safe enough to let him back into my life and Luke's life on a romantic level. We struggled and had a lot of issues. I checked his phone religiously (and I still do when he acts weird sometimes), I dug through his car and I searched for every sign on earth. But Ziggy allowed it. Part of his eventual ammends was to be transparent. I could and can dig through whatever I want and it's ok and tolerated and accepted. I can random drug test him anytime and he can't and he won't get upset. And as the years passed, I relaxed.
Last December, he took his last suboxone. He did the full 3-year therapy that is reserved for severe addicts. I'm glad he did. There were times when I resented the suboxone. It's not covered by insurance and cost us about $350 a month! But I'm glad he did it because the point is for the addict to learn how to live and deal with life without needing drugs to cope. I'm so glad that we bore the expense of giving Ziggy the full 3 years of it because studies are now showing that 3 years is the most effective and long lasting course of action.
When he got clean, he re-entered the world with over $23,000 in credit card debt (he paid for his addiction with cash advances from cards after his paycheck was gone). I resented him for the debt that "we" were in. But eventually, we paid it off and the debt we now have is our own and not drug related in any way.
We don't talk about the bad times often. I ask him every few months or so if he's been struggling or thinking about drugs or craving anything. 99% of the time he tells me "no". Recently, he once answered that he had thought about it, but he thought about it just as a memory and not as something he wanted. He has the life that he wanted - it's not perfect, but what he wakes up to now is what he wanted - the house, the yard, the wife, the kids, the normality. And honestly, if you ask him, he will honestly tell you that if he went out and got high ever again now, he would have to shoot himself right after, because everything that he would lose would be worse than death for him.
He regrets the end and how awful it was. While I sometimes think that I am the reason that he got so bad so fast, since I was the reason for the unhealthy attempts at quitting and since I was such an instigator in his life, constantly pushing his buttons and driving him to get high, he sees it very differently. On the night that he proposed to me, he told me that he believed that I saved his life. I told him that I wasn't even there for him at the end of it all since I was so busy with the recovery of my own life, and he always says, "precisely, Sandy". He says that it was when he lost me and I was too busy for him that he finally fought his way to get back to me.
His parents have told me stories of the actual final withdrawal - the one that happened under doctor supervision - the one that I wasn't there for. I witnessed, unknowingly at the time, at least 100 withdrawals, or the beginnings of withdrawals, in my own home, but the final one - that very last one was with his parents. According to them and according to his sister, he spent about 12 hours writhing in sweat and painful agony and screaming out one word. The word was "Sandy".
And that, my friends, is our love story. Conventional? No. Romantic? Not particularly. Insane? Most definitely. We fight and we argue and he's an asshole and we even sleep in separate beds occasionally, so we aren't two star crossed lovers living in bliss. That's almost hilarious. We're just normal people with normal crap going on all the time who happened to have a wild beginning.
So we all evacuated for Katrina. Luke went to Natchitoches, LA with his dad and his dad's family. I went to Lafayette, LA with my dog, and the rest of my family went to Baton Rouge, LA. Ziggy went to Houston, TX with his family. We were friends at this point, but not together yet and my family would have preferred that he drop dead at this point, so much of our friendship was kept quiet so that I wouldn't get regular lectures and eye rollings from family.
We expected it to be a 2 - 3 day evacuation, like normal, which is why I sent Luke with his dad - since it was his dad's weekend time with him anyway. (I say that because people often don't understand how I could "send my kid away" for such a tragedy - we had NO idea that it would be a tragedy, and a weekend with his dad in Natchitoches was actually a normal event for him).
I got regular texts from Ziggy. The phone lines were so jammed and so many towers were knocked down that if you didn't know how to text, you learned fast because it was the only way to communicate. My mother had stayed at home and didn't evacuate.
Once the horrors on the TV began, all of us 20 and 30 something year olds who had never in our life dealt with tragedy all began to grow up and start making real life decisions - if my home is destroyed, what will I do, where will I live, where will I work, how do I pay my bills if I'm not working, do I go home or just sit in this hotel, is my mom alive, how do I get FEMA help, where is the Red Cross station?
Once the damage of the area was assessed and we all knew how bad or good it was, I came home to get to work. At a time like this, your job is absolutely essential, if you still have one, and if my job had asked me to fly to the moon, I probably would have. I got started rebuilding my company and rebuilding my home (I had a little over a foot of water in my house, so everything under 4ft had to be ripped out and rebuilt). All of this Katrina mess is a blog novel in and of itself, so let's skip it and get back to Ziggy.
His job transferred him to a hotel in Dallas, TX where he worked from an office there. He quickly ran out of suboxone. The desired course of suboxone therapy is at least 6 months to 3 years, depending on the level of addiction. He had only been on it a month at most. He couldn't find a doctor in the Dallas area and suddenly his texts stopped and I lost him.
We were a state apart and I had major issues of my own. I had a destroyed home, homeless friends and family members, I was working 60+ hours a week to help keep my company from dying and I was trying desperately to get my house safe and livable for Luke to come home. His father and I shuttled him all over the state in those weeks/months to stay with family while we rebuilt homes for him - he couldn't come home until basic services were up and running and our homes had power and water and were mold free - and that took a painfully long time. My mother's job went under, my dad was totally homeless and it was just - my own personal hell. While Ziggy was important, there was enough severe trauma going on for me that took my mind off of him. He was away from anyone on earth who loved him, and before he found a suboxone certified doctor, he found a dealer.
I was shuttling to Natchitoches every weekend to see Luke (a 5 hour drive each way) and to this day, I have no idea how I made it through that 3 - 4 month period of my life - it was torture on all of us.
Once I finally got Ziggy talking to me again, I knew it. I knew he was "gone" and pulling him back when he was 14 hours away and I had so much to deal with was impossible. By time I got home from work, worked on my own house and got into bed to talk to him, I barely had enough energy to even feel the pain of hearing his slurred words and his nonsense. I began to pull away from him out of necessity - I had my own shit going on and if he wanted to kill himself, well, sorry buddy, but I can't help you right now.
By early October, I had walls again and the townhouse was disinfected enough for Luke to come home. He got back to school shortly after and our lives were full of work/school and coming home to work on the house. We did his homework on a concrete floor and I learned how to cook meals in the microwave since the kitchen was the last room finished. We watched TV on kitchen chairs and our TV was on the concrete floow. Sounds awful, but we were actually better off and more "recovered" than the majority of the houses around us. (Neighbors made fun of me for fixing the mexicans coffee every morning and offering water bottles to them at mid day, but it was my house that was done before theirs and we had the same mexicans working for us!) We finally got a sofa and a TV in November. By Thanksgiving my house would be rebuilt and normal again.
Before that, Ziggy finally hit his official bottom. An addict's bottom usually involves near death experiences or jail time or both. Ziggy's bottom was a night full of hallucinations culminating with getting his parents involved, because I just couldn't take it anymore.
It was shortly before Luke came home, though I don't remember the exact date. I still had 3 - 4 people from work living with me reguarly since my house was better off than theirs and I had lights/water back before them. A phone call came in from Ziggy.
He was in his truck and said that he was on the highway and that the FBI was after him. Don't laugh - yes this part is extraordinary, but in his mind, the FBI WAS after him. He said that he had just picked up an 8 ball of cocaine (google it if you don't know what that is) and when he noticed the FBI was after him, he had swallowed the entire 8 ball and washed it down with the only liquid in his car - a bottle of windex. He was screaming and crying and freaking the fuck out.
The call lasted over an hour. Somehow, I got him to find his hotel and his hotel room and when I hung up, he was begging for me to call his mother and said that he was laying by the door to block the FBI from getting in. To this day, none of us have any clue how Ziggy managed to keep his job except that perhaps his boss contributed some of his bizarre behavior as emotional effects of Katrina. No idea, but amazingly, he did keep his job.
To me, that was his bottom. It has much much more details to it, but for Ziggy's sake, I don't think they all need to be shared with the world. So I gave you the basics and that's that.
Within a week, we had him home and back with his parents, who now knew what was going on. He still used for a while when he got home. Bottom doesn't always equal sobriety to come next. He showed up at my house for my birthday and when he walked in and saw my house - he claims that THIS was his bottom.
I say his bottom was the FBI incident, he says it was my house. Whatever - it doesn't matter as long as it happened.
When he walked in and saw my concrete floors and my bare drywall and my doorless rooms and a "home" that he once knew in the midst of being fixed, he says that it all hit him. He hadn't been there. He had "abandoned" Luke and I for the sake of a drug. He fell to his knees on the concrete and wept like a baby. He just couldn't believe, though he had heard, what I had faced/fought/rebuilt without him. The guilt that he felt for not being the one to walk into that house with me and rip up that carpet with me and and throw away half of my life with me was more than he could bear. His parent's house hadn't been damaged and since my home was his nearest concept of home, he lost it and just freaked out over not being there to help me negotiate with contractors and haggle over tile and fight with Mexicans leaving cigarette butts on the floor. What I had been doing for the past two months hit him all at once like a ton of bricks.
He told me that he would be back very soon and that he swore that he would get better. It took a little while - first of all for him to find a doctor again, and second of all for him to save up to see that doctor. He came over often - he bought me window blinds and came and installed them. He had his doctor's appointment set, so he wasn't clean yet, but he was only doing enough opiates to keep him out of withdrawels and my god, he was making a hell of an effort to try to help me and make up for whatever it was that he was trying to make up for. And I let him. Partially because I needed my house done and partially because I knew that every hour that he spent at my house fixing my floors/walls/tiles was another hour that he wasn't getting high. He was safe at my house and so I wanted him there as much as possible.
On December 11th, 2005, Ziggy took his first suboxone and went to his first Narcotics Anonymous meeting.
I watched him get his 24 hour chip. I watched him get his 1 month chip. I watched him lead his first meeting. I watched him get his 6 month chip. I drove his parents to see him speak at his first meeting. I was there when he met his sponsor and I was there - I was there - for all of it.
I almost gave up and ran away a million times. Running would have been easier. I had met a great guy after the hurricane who adored me and fawned all over me and I could have easily changed my number and let Ziggy be and just - run. But I chose to stay and since I chose to stay, I also had to choose to learn how to deal with all that hurt and still look at him without spitting on him or punching him daily.
It was actually my recovering father, who is over 20 years sober, who gave me this advice...he said, "Sandy, if it's going to work, then you HAVE to forgive him before he begins to make ammends to you, you just have to."
FORGIVE HIM???????? Are you fucking kidding me? Forgive him BEFORE he made ammends? Are you shitting me? I was waiting for the "ammends" step like a fat kid waits for cake! I deserved it. He owed MEEEEE! I deserved a parade and a trophy and a round of applause and a song named after me and my own goddamned statue for christ's sake...right? RIGHT???
Nope. Wrong. This was Ziggy's disease. It was his triumph. Not mine, and as much as that sucks and it took me awhile to grasp, I finally did. Through a 12 step program for the loved ones of addicts, and through my own therapist and through ALOT of reading and crying and hair pulling, I finally "got it".
I forgave him. I let it all go. I NEVER forgot, but I forgave - and forgiving him actually had so little to do with HIM that it's almost funny. By March, I felt safe enough to let him back into my life and Luke's life on a romantic level. We struggled and had a lot of issues. I checked his phone religiously (and I still do when he acts weird sometimes), I dug through his car and I searched for every sign on earth. But Ziggy allowed it. Part of his eventual ammends was to be transparent. I could and can dig through whatever I want and it's ok and tolerated and accepted. I can random drug test him anytime and he can't and he won't get upset. And as the years passed, I relaxed.
Last December, he took his last suboxone. He did the full 3-year therapy that is reserved for severe addicts. I'm glad he did. There were times when I resented the suboxone. It's not covered by insurance and cost us about $350 a month! But I'm glad he did it because the point is for the addict to learn how to live and deal with life without needing drugs to cope. I'm so glad that we bore the expense of giving Ziggy the full 3 years of it because studies are now showing that 3 years is the most effective and long lasting course of action.
When he got clean, he re-entered the world with over $23,000 in credit card debt (he paid for his addiction with cash advances from cards after his paycheck was gone). I resented him for the debt that "we" were in. But eventually, we paid it off and the debt we now have is our own and not drug related in any way.
We don't talk about the bad times often. I ask him every few months or so if he's been struggling or thinking about drugs or craving anything. 99% of the time he tells me "no". Recently, he once answered that he had thought about it, but he thought about it just as a memory and not as something he wanted. He has the life that he wanted - it's not perfect, but what he wakes up to now is what he wanted - the house, the yard, the wife, the kids, the normality. And honestly, if you ask him, he will honestly tell you that if he went out and got high ever again now, he would have to shoot himself right after, because everything that he would lose would be worse than death for him.
He regrets the end and how awful it was. While I sometimes think that I am the reason that he got so bad so fast, since I was the reason for the unhealthy attempts at quitting and since I was such an instigator in his life, constantly pushing his buttons and driving him to get high, he sees it very differently. On the night that he proposed to me, he told me that he believed that I saved his life. I told him that I wasn't even there for him at the end of it all since I was so busy with the recovery of my own life, and he always says, "precisely, Sandy". He says that it was when he lost me and I was too busy for him that he finally fought his way to get back to me.
His parents have told me stories of the actual final withdrawal - the one that happened under doctor supervision - the one that I wasn't there for. I witnessed, unknowingly at the time, at least 100 withdrawals, or the beginnings of withdrawals, in my own home, but the final one - that very last one was with his parents. According to them and according to his sister, he spent about 12 hours writhing in sweat and painful agony and screaming out one word. The word was "Sandy".
And that, my friends, is our love story. Conventional? No. Romantic? Not particularly. Insane? Most definitely. We fight and we argue and he's an asshole and we even sleep in separate beds occasionally, so we aren't two star crossed lovers living in bliss. That's almost hilarious. We're just normal people with normal crap going on all the time who happened to have a wild beginning.
Friday, June 19, 2009
Chapter Three...Maybe
Before I get into Chapter 3, I wanted to answer a few reader questions posed to me today. Also, Luke is home for the weekend from his dad's so I may not have the hour and a half that it normally takes me to post this serious of a topic - so Chapter 3 may go on hold...I'll see what I can crank out before The Clone Wars and Yugio cards get too boring for him.
How did you get found out? Well, we began getting too sure of ourselves and too sloppy. My townhouse was on a fairly major road in my town. Ziggy began using his own car to come over or spend the night and a salesman who was supposed to be our friend began telling people at work how often Ziggy's car was at my house. As the rumors began, he began job hunting. He was still in control of his addiction - it wasn't out of hand yet, and he easily found another job making more money elsewhere.
Before he found another job, our boss asked him flat out about our relationship and he did come clean. We were able to spend about 2 months "out of the closet" at work and the consensus was a general happy one for us with a whole lot of "it's about times". Ziggy was offered a management position in another department that had just opened up, but he declined it and thought it better for us to make a fresh start.
It was hard for us to be apart at first. We were genuinely a team at work, both of us needing the other to bring out the best (so we thought at first), and we both struggled. However, his leaving finally opened doors for me. I was finally noticed for my own brains, and instead of being in his shadow, I finally was able to shine.
Where was Luke when things got bad? Well, Luke was there. He was protected from the horrors - I'm not some triflin ho that you see on reality TV. When Ziggy's moods became extreme at the end, Luke was shielded properly. Luke was told that Ziggy was sick or that Ziggy had gone on a fishing trip - or other white lies to keep life normal for him. He wasn't exposed to the horrors and to this day he does know that Ziggy had an addiction, but he has no horrible memories and he genuinely loves Ziggy. When the hell ended, Luke had just turned 4, so he's already lost a great majority of his memory of this time.
So there's the answers. Back to the story.
Chapter 3:
The break up was harder on me than any break up I'd ever had. Later Ziggy would say that it was because we were soulmates being ripped apart - I'm not sure about the whole soulmate notion, but it makes for a good thing for him to say to get laid nowadays.
Not knowing yet what was wrong, I struggled with guilt that it was a physical or mental illness that I should stick it out for. My mother had abandoned my father when he came clean and gained his health. She couldn't handle how hard it was to go through the hell, so I guess maybe subconsciously, somehow I knew deep down and I didn't want to do what she had done? I don't know, but that was one therapist's theories.
I tried my best to move on. He called ALOT - to cry - to yell - to be crazy. My friends begged me to change my cell phone number, but I couldn't. Was I too weak, or too strong? That's up to you to decide. At this point, it was probably weakness. Later, it would become strength.
I began hearing bizarre stories through the grapevine - people seeing Ziggy acting crazy and sweating like a nutcase at a wedding - people seeing him walking down Bourbon Street alone and confused - people seeing him wearing the same clothes to work 2 days in a row. The stories were outrageous...and yet they were true.
The behind the scenes story was that Ziggy knew that his addiction to opiates was killing him, so in his sick and twisted mind, he tried to switch to cocaine. He truly believed that he could never be addicted to cocaine like he was to opiates and that the cocaine would help him get through the withdrawals so that he could kick it all and get better. Crazy right? Sure. Hell yeah, but to him it was his only answer.
So the sweating, the weight loss, the general craziness was a body addicted to opiates adjusting to massive amounts of cocaine. For those lacking knowledge of drugs, the two substances act on your body totally differently and he was swapping a numbing/sleepy type drug for a speed/adrenaline type drug.
He was literally killing himself. The same loud mouth salesman may actually be responsible for partially saving his life, because it was him who finally blew another secret and helped me "get to" Ziggy.
Now before I go on, please please don't in any way think that I am actually so vain as to believe that I saved Ziggy's life. Not the case. A handful of people saved his life, including God and himself. I however, only get the credit for being the first one to reach out the hand and go a little further to put the boots on and walk through the shit to get him. It's not much compared to what he had to face and what others did for him.
So it was this salesman who came to me and told me the story of Ziggy acting nuts at a bachelor party and he asked me, "Sandy, do you think it's drugs again?" And I was like...AGAIN??? WTF? You gossipping piece of shit, what do you mean? This salesman knew Ziggy in highschool and knew Ziggy to be a bit of a pot head and hang with the "druggie" crowd. Total news to me. I was in shock and in about 5 minutes it all came together in my head.
I thought about my move very carefully. Very nervously, I sent Ziggy a text message that simply said, "I know". That was it...just that I knew. Later that night my phone rang and through tears he said that he would tell me, but not tonight. He would stop by the next night when I didn't have Luke. He didn't call the next night and I thought again and sent the text, "I'm telling your parents". Within seconds the phone rang.
For over an hour he came clean...well, he didn't get clean, but he came clean. He told me everything - what he did, how he did it, how he got it, how much he spent on it, how bad off it was, where he hid it - everything.
He didn't ask for help. He didn't say he was quitting. He just said that he was sorry and that he could do nothing more this night than tell me. Being the selfish human I am, I attempted to yell at him for what he did to MEEEEEEEEEE MEEEEEE WAH WAH WAH and I was boldly stopped. He very calmly said, "Sandy, I've been clean for 12 hours now and I have no idea how long that can last. I know what I've done and I'm begging you to please just not make me face that right now, please."
And so I didn't.
The options for opiate addicts are small. You can detox in your sleep at a clinic (they literally put you to sleep for up to a week and you wake up detoxed) and while that sounds ideal, that would mean coming clean to his parents and possibly losing his job. You can go to rehab, which has a very low success rate for opiate addicts. You can quit cold turkey, which we know doesn't work, or the worst, you can go on methadone. Methadone is what heroin addicts take to get clean and methadone is now known to be just as addictive as any other opiate. Ziggy had dozens of "friends" addicted to methadone and he refused it.
At this point, he couldn't even achieve "high" anymore. He was so deep into it that all he was doing was enough to maintain a level in his body that avoided withdrawals. He was spending almost $1000 a week, if not more and he couldn't even physically get high anymore - withdrawal was just that painful and that scary.
Enter George W. Bush. Now a hell of a lot of people hate that man. Ziggy and I however, love him, because he gets a small portion of the credit for saving Ziggy's life. There was a drug being used in Europe for years called suboxone. It is specifically for opiate addicts and about 90% less potentially addictive than methadone. It was George W. Bush who got the drug to America and in the blink of an eye, millions of opiate addicts actually had hope and possibility of a life without being addicted to methadone.
The drug is hard to find and you have to be specially trained to distribute it at this point in time - it's very new in America. In 2005 you may have only been able to find one doctor in a major city who was certified to distribute it. I won't bore you with details of the drug, however, if you have an opiate addict that needs help, research this drug, please, and find a doctor in your area that distributes it.
We got Ziggy an appointment and he began taking the pills. I agreed to be his friend and walk with him through this as much as I could handle. I can't explain how hard it is to take the hand of the monster who destroyed your life and your heart and your dreams and help them get up and walk again without being able to even begin to express to them the hurt and the pain and the trauma that they caused and were still causing. There's a saying in 12 step programs that goes along the lines of "I stayed sober today and for today, that's the best I can do". And while that sounds like a cop out - at this point, it was true. I couldn't mumble a peep about MY pain and MY hurt and MY MY MY - if I was going to do this, I had to keep that all in and save it for later. This was no shit life or death for Ziggy at this point and so I shut my mouth the best I could (I'm wasn't perfect with it though).
The first time I saw him again after the night from hell where Chapter 2 ended, we met at a Subway near our jobs and I can't even describe how close to death he had come. He had gone from a healthy 36/38 waist to a 29 waist. His skin was pale and clammy, his movements were slow and strained. It was heart breaking just to look at him. But I put on my happy face, hugged him and bought him a friggin footlong and forced him to eat the whole thing. As we walked out, he looked at me, almost crying and said, "My God, I can't believe what I've done to you - I will make this up to you, I swear it."
This is where Chapter 3 must end before Luke kills me for the computer. However, I will leave you with this...this is not hell yet. Hell was about to begin. That lunch at Subway was in the beginning of August 2005. On August 26th, the entire southeastern portion of Louisiana began to evacuate for a bitch in the Gulf named Katrina. Katrina pushed Ziggy into a hell that we hadn't yet known. It threw him a state away from his doctor and into a world where even now, almost 4 years later, he will begin to shake and fight back tears at the very thought of. On August 29th, 2005, Katrina would change all of us and a hell began for us both that was bad enough to deserve its own fucking sound track.
And I promise that we'll get through the hell and begin to see some light...next Chapter.
How did you get found out? Well, we began getting too sure of ourselves and too sloppy. My townhouse was on a fairly major road in my town. Ziggy began using his own car to come over or spend the night and a salesman who was supposed to be our friend began telling people at work how often Ziggy's car was at my house. As the rumors began, he began job hunting. He was still in control of his addiction - it wasn't out of hand yet, and he easily found another job making more money elsewhere.
Before he found another job, our boss asked him flat out about our relationship and he did come clean. We were able to spend about 2 months "out of the closet" at work and the consensus was a general happy one for us with a whole lot of "it's about times". Ziggy was offered a management position in another department that had just opened up, but he declined it and thought it better for us to make a fresh start.
It was hard for us to be apart at first. We were genuinely a team at work, both of us needing the other to bring out the best (so we thought at first), and we both struggled. However, his leaving finally opened doors for me. I was finally noticed for my own brains, and instead of being in his shadow, I finally was able to shine.
Where was Luke when things got bad? Well, Luke was there. He was protected from the horrors - I'm not some triflin ho that you see on reality TV. When Ziggy's moods became extreme at the end, Luke was shielded properly. Luke was told that Ziggy was sick or that Ziggy had gone on a fishing trip - or other white lies to keep life normal for him. He wasn't exposed to the horrors and to this day he does know that Ziggy had an addiction, but he has no horrible memories and he genuinely loves Ziggy. When the hell ended, Luke had just turned 4, so he's already lost a great majority of his memory of this time.
So there's the answers. Back to the story.
Chapter 3:
The break up was harder on me than any break up I'd ever had. Later Ziggy would say that it was because we were soulmates being ripped apart - I'm not sure about the whole soulmate notion, but it makes for a good thing for him to say to get laid nowadays.
Not knowing yet what was wrong, I struggled with guilt that it was a physical or mental illness that I should stick it out for. My mother had abandoned my father when he came clean and gained his health. She couldn't handle how hard it was to go through the hell, so I guess maybe subconsciously, somehow I knew deep down and I didn't want to do what she had done? I don't know, but that was one therapist's theories.
I tried my best to move on. He called ALOT - to cry - to yell - to be crazy. My friends begged me to change my cell phone number, but I couldn't. Was I too weak, or too strong? That's up to you to decide. At this point, it was probably weakness. Later, it would become strength.
I began hearing bizarre stories through the grapevine - people seeing Ziggy acting crazy and sweating like a nutcase at a wedding - people seeing him walking down Bourbon Street alone and confused - people seeing him wearing the same clothes to work 2 days in a row. The stories were outrageous...and yet they were true.
The behind the scenes story was that Ziggy knew that his addiction to opiates was killing him, so in his sick and twisted mind, he tried to switch to cocaine. He truly believed that he could never be addicted to cocaine like he was to opiates and that the cocaine would help him get through the withdrawals so that he could kick it all and get better. Crazy right? Sure. Hell yeah, but to him it was his only answer.
So the sweating, the weight loss, the general craziness was a body addicted to opiates adjusting to massive amounts of cocaine. For those lacking knowledge of drugs, the two substances act on your body totally differently and he was swapping a numbing/sleepy type drug for a speed/adrenaline type drug.
He was literally killing himself. The same loud mouth salesman may actually be responsible for partially saving his life, because it was him who finally blew another secret and helped me "get to" Ziggy.
Now before I go on, please please don't in any way think that I am actually so vain as to believe that I saved Ziggy's life. Not the case. A handful of people saved his life, including God and himself. I however, only get the credit for being the first one to reach out the hand and go a little further to put the boots on and walk through the shit to get him. It's not much compared to what he had to face and what others did for him.
So it was this salesman who came to me and told me the story of Ziggy acting nuts at a bachelor party and he asked me, "Sandy, do you think it's drugs again?" And I was like...AGAIN??? WTF? You gossipping piece of shit, what do you mean? This salesman knew Ziggy in highschool and knew Ziggy to be a bit of a pot head and hang with the "druggie" crowd. Total news to me. I was in shock and in about 5 minutes it all came together in my head.
I thought about my move very carefully. Very nervously, I sent Ziggy a text message that simply said, "I know". That was it...just that I knew. Later that night my phone rang and through tears he said that he would tell me, but not tonight. He would stop by the next night when I didn't have Luke. He didn't call the next night and I thought again and sent the text, "I'm telling your parents". Within seconds the phone rang.
For over an hour he came clean...well, he didn't get clean, but he came clean. He told me everything - what he did, how he did it, how he got it, how much he spent on it, how bad off it was, where he hid it - everything.
He didn't ask for help. He didn't say he was quitting. He just said that he was sorry and that he could do nothing more this night than tell me. Being the selfish human I am, I attempted to yell at him for what he did to MEEEEEEEEEE MEEEEEE WAH WAH WAH and I was boldly stopped. He very calmly said, "Sandy, I've been clean for 12 hours now and I have no idea how long that can last. I know what I've done and I'm begging you to please just not make me face that right now, please."
And so I didn't.
The options for opiate addicts are small. You can detox in your sleep at a clinic (they literally put you to sleep for up to a week and you wake up detoxed) and while that sounds ideal, that would mean coming clean to his parents and possibly losing his job. You can go to rehab, which has a very low success rate for opiate addicts. You can quit cold turkey, which we know doesn't work, or the worst, you can go on methadone. Methadone is what heroin addicts take to get clean and methadone is now known to be just as addictive as any other opiate. Ziggy had dozens of "friends" addicted to methadone and he refused it.
At this point, he couldn't even achieve "high" anymore. He was so deep into it that all he was doing was enough to maintain a level in his body that avoided withdrawals. He was spending almost $1000 a week, if not more and he couldn't even physically get high anymore - withdrawal was just that painful and that scary.
Enter George W. Bush. Now a hell of a lot of people hate that man. Ziggy and I however, love him, because he gets a small portion of the credit for saving Ziggy's life. There was a drug being used in Europe for years called suboxone. It is specifically for opiate addicts and about 90% less potentially addictive than methadone. It was George W. Bush who got the drug to America and in the blink of an eye, millions of opiate addicts actually had hope and possibility of a life without being addicted to methadone.
The drug is hard to find and you have to be specially trained to distribute it at this point in time - it's very new in America. In 2005 you may have only been able to find one doctor in a major city who was certified to distribute it. I won't bore you with details of the drug, however, if you have an opiate addict that needs help, research this drug, please, and find a doctor in your area that distributes it.
We got Ziggy an appointment and he began taking the pills. I agreed to be his friend and walk with him through this as much as I could handle. I can't explain how hard it is to take the hand of the monster who destroyed your life and your heart and your dreams and help them get up and walk again without being able to even begin to express to them the hurt and the pain and the trauma that they caused and were still causing. There's a saying in 12 step programs that goes along the lines of "I stayed sober today and for today, that's the best I can do". And while that sounds like a cop out - at this point, it was true. I couldn't mumble a peep about MY pain and MY hurt and MY MY MY - if I was going to do this, I had to keep that all in and save it for later. This was no shit life or death for Ziggy at this point and so I shut my mouth the best I could (I'm wasn't perfect with it though).
The first time I saw him again after the night from hell where Chapter 2 ended, we met at a Subway near our jobs and I can't even describe how close to death he had come. He had gone from a healthy 36/38 waist to a 29 waist. His skin was pale and clammy, his movements were slow and strained. It was heart breaking just to look at him. But I put on my happy face, hugged him and bought him a friggin footlong and forced him to eat the whole thing. As we walked out, he looked at me, almost crying and said, "My God, I can't believe what I've done to you - I will make this up to you, I swear it."
This is where Chapter 3 must end before Luke kills me for the computer. However, I will leave you with this...this is not hell yet. Hell was about to begin. That lunch at Subway was in the beginning of August 2005. On August 26th, the entire southeastern portion of Louisiana began to evacuate for a bitch in the Gulf named Katrina. Katrina pushed Ziggy into a hell that we hadn't yet known. It threw him a state away from his doctor and into a world where even now, almost 4 years later, he will begin to shake and fight back tears at the very thought of. On August 29th, 2005, Katrina would change all of us and a hell began for us both that was bad enough to deserve its own fucking sound track.
And I promise that we'll get through the hell and begin to see some light...next Chapter.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Chapter Two
This is where I have to choose words wisely, and cautiously decide what to divulge and what to refrain from spilling. There is a delicate balance between seeing Ziggy as a monster and therefore seeing me as a pathetic co-dependant wuss, and seeing Ziggy as someone with a help-less disease and me as someone strong enough to trust/love/forgive. I don't want either of us to come off as self righteous heroic super humans or wastes of the human space either.
And so, here we return:
When Ziggy called that Saturday morning, I was excited, but I honestly had NO idea whether or not this was a date, or just a friend from work trying to cheer me up with a night out. I was still in my one bedroom apartment at this time. I slept on a futon in the living room and the bedroom belonged to Luke. Even though he was only about to turn 2, I wanted him to have everything normal that he could possibly have, so the room was his except for my dresser. I was saving up and had my eyes on a townhouse down the street that I would buy just 6 months later with the gift of a down payment from my dad.
So I was embarrassed for Ziggy to pick me up - I stupidly placed him on a pedestal from day one and that is where I wind up being partially to blame for part of his need to hide his dark side. When someone has you up on a pedestal, the last thing you want to do is disappoint them by having to step down in front of them. A year later, I would learn that I had no reason for the embarrassment, but having no idea what neighborhood he came from or how he lived yet, I thought that he would find my dwelling to be shocking and pathetic - as if I was looking for a superman to save Luke and I, when the reality was that I was doing better than he was and just didn't know it yet.
I went to Target and bought a brand new outfit that I can still remember to this day. We ate at Roadhouse Grill and then saw Bruce Almighty afterwards. We struggled through conversation at dinner. We'd known each other and worked together for so long and amazingly were both shy and awkward. In the middle of the movie, it happened. His hand grazed my knee and just as I thought it was accidental, his hand found mine. Oh. My. God. HE LIKED ME! In the car he explained that while he knew it wasn't the best timing, that he saw the window open and he knew he needed to jump in fast since I didn't tend to stay single very long. That still goes down as one of the nicest things he's ever said to me. He actually saw me as this unattainable person with a line of suitors a mile long.
After that we had several other small dates. Nothing progressed really, and I soon learned that Ziggy was very green in the relationship department. Though he had lost his virginity in high school on the floor of a Subway bathroom (no friggin lie, he was a sandwich artist and lost his virginity to an older co-worker at work), he had actually never been in a relationship. Being painfully aware of his physical features, he was often called Alf or Dr. Evil by friends, due to a small resemblance, or what they thought was a resemblance to both characters. In fact, his own real nickname given to him by friends in high school, Ziggy, came from the size of the cartoon character's nose. Personally, I found his prominent nose and cleft chin to be painfully sexy and he reminded me of my life long crush, John Travolta.
A few months later, the young work crew was pulled into a meeting and literally yelled at for our cavorting and friendships and we were warned that we all needed to grow up and realize that this was work and not 90210 - there was a whole lotta messin going on other than Ziggy and I. That night Ziggy did not call. I was crushed. My thought was that the meeting was about the triflin ho's and had nothing to do with the budding relationship that we had hidden so well. We only went out in his parents' car, and we would go 50 miles out if we chose to be in public - it wasn't us that had been caught.
The next day was Valentine's Day and I didn't hear from him. A few months later he called and told me that he had pulled away from me specifically because he knew that I needed my job way more than he did, and that he was afraid of jeopardizing it, because after the meeting, he was pulled in one on one with our bosses and told something that would keep us apart for a long time...he was being promoted and would become my official boss in less than a month.
I was devastated over a good thing ending so suddenly. I was devastated about him getting promoted and not me. But time passed and we got back into our work groove. I began dating again and we went our separate ways outside of work.
I would hear from him on the phone every now and then. He normally called late at night when he was sad. Amazingly, we would have some of the deepest conversations on those nights discussing everything from religion to death to love and childhoods. These were the nights when I learned how desperately he wanted to have a relationship, and more specifically, one with me, but he loved his job and he knew I loved mine and it was almost as if we were just stuck. We hung up at 6:00am just to shower and head in to work on many a morning, our cell phones scalding hot and slimy from sweat from six to eight hours of continuous use.
About a year later, we decided to throw caution to the wind. We began dating again - very cautiously. We only went out in his parents' car. We went as far as Slidell and Baton Rouge for dates. We decided to allow the relationship to finally just happen and if we found ourselves serious at any point, then we would discuss options for work. At work, we were absolutely amazing. Being my boss, he wound up being harder on me than anyone and we pulled the wool over every one's eyes. We still got comments about how great we would be together, but no one actually suspected us together. Later on, we would get sloppier about it and a loud mouth salesman would bust our cover, but for now, everything was going great.
He was so funny and so sweet and so innocent. Though he had been laid before, he had never been loved and never had the opportunity to love in return so everything was new to him. It was precious. He appreciated the tiniest of things - simple kissing, hanging out and being close. He secretly let me always keep one of his toe nails painted pink for months, just so that he could be reminded that he actually had a girl in his life. We had secret codes at work. Secret "work" words that meant "I Love You". We took weekend trips to anywhere we could go where we could be outside and a normal couple without worrying about being caught.
A few months into the relationship, I noticed strange behavior. I won't string you along or foreshadow, I'll just lay it on the line. Ziggy had experimented with every drug on earth. You name it, and he's tried it with the exception of heroin and crack, that is. Of course I had no idea. I've never in my life (honest to God) even tried pot, so I just figured he was like me and if he had ever experimented, I never imagined it was more than pot. I wasn't a goody goody, I was just raised with an addict father and an addict sister and the stuff just scared the shit out of me, so I didn't touch it. Towards the end of college, a friend handed him a Vicoden and that's when his love affair with opiates began.
Sure he was moody, but you did hear me mention my family, right? Moodiness = normality for me. Nothing seemed askew.
By the time we were dating seriously and "in love", he was crushing and snorting oxycontins about 2 - 3 times a week. Now enters his side of the story for a moment here, as it was once told to me by his own sponsor on a night when I almost threw in the towel and gave up on him. When we began dating, he wanted desperately to have that relationship and to be clean and just start a new life. Have you ever been fat and tried to diet unhealthily? Have you ever tried to quit smoking cold turkey? What happens? For the majority of us, we attempt to quit with no help/support/assistance and a day or a week later we are failures stuffing twinkies down our throats or smoking pack after pack like a chimney. Now take that experience and multiply by the strength of an opiate. Every attempt to quit was doing nothing more than increasing his addiction and he became absolutely powerless against it.
And so that was his life. His growing addiction was hidden from family, work and even his best friends. He was embarrassed and ashamed and desperate to be sober. He would quit cold turkey, hit the withdrawals (opiate withdrawals are as difficult, if not worse than heroin withdrawals) and then the next day he was using twice as much as before. The cycle continued for over a year and this is now where we are in the story.
He's sick all the time. He's constantly either sweating, or puking or having leg cramps. I'm constantly begging him to see a doctor, thinking that he must be dying from some kind of stomach cancer. He's spending so much time with friends instead of me that I'm convinced that either I'm fat and ugly or he is gay. (I would later learn that all that hanging out with buddies was really just him going to dealer's houses - his friends even had no clue what he was really doing...in fact they all hated me for taking him away from them, or so they thought).
He's almost 100% impotent at this point (opiates are notorious for this fun side effect), which increases my worries of either his homosexuality or my fat/ugliness ten fold. He's constantly broke. I made about $30,000 by this time and he was at $40,000. I was raising a kid and owned a townhouse. He lived with his mother and was always broke. I began thinking that he was gambling or a million other things that I just couldn't bust him on. I'm waking up at night to find him balled up in corners crying his eyes out and begging God for help...I'm scared shitless. This perfectly great guy is turning into a maniac right in front of my eyes. I'm afraid of him and yet I feel so bad for whatever "illness" this is that he's battling, that I can't just walk away from him.
I. Never. Considered. Drugs. Ever.
Ziggy was too immaculate, too clean, too polished and shiny to be a drug addict. I began checking his phone, digging through his over night bag when he slept over, rifling through his car while he slept looking for any clue on earth that would tell me why this wonderful friend and lover was turning into this monster. But he was a master at hiding it all...and skilled in turning it all around and blaming it all on me - a skill that most addicts are capable of.
And then it happened - the end. In a final attempt to get him to just TELL ME WHAT WAS WRONG WITH MEEEEEEE, I forbade him to leave the house. With one fell swoop, he took me by the head and threw me across the room and stormed out of the house.
The next day, I got a prescription for Prozac, I began seeing a therapist and I very slowly began life without him, determined that whether he was gay, a compulsive gambler, addicted to prostitutes or whatever it was, that it had to be HIM and couldn't be ME and that I would get myself out of this situation and find my health and my sanity again.
And this my friends is where Ziggy's hell truly begins.
To be continued.....
And so, here we return:
When Ziggy called that Saturday morning, I was excited, but I honestly had NO idea whether or not this was a date, or just a friend from work trying to cheer me up with a night out. I was still in my one bedroom apartment at this time. I slept on a futon in the living room and the bedroom belonged to Luke. Even though he was only about to turn 2, I wanted him to have everything normal that he could possibly have, so the room was his except for my dresser. I was saving up and had my eyes on a townhouse down the street that I would buy just 6 months later with the gift of a down payment from my dad.
So I was embarrassed for Ziggy to pick me up - I stupidly placed him on a pedestal from day one and that is where I wind up being partially to blame for part of his need to hide his dark side. When someone has you up on a pedestal, the last thing you want to do is disappoint them by having to step down in front of them. A year later, I would learn that I had no reason for the embarrassment, but having no idea what neighborhood he came from or how he lived yet, I thought that he would find my dwelling to be shocking and pathetic - as if I was looking for a superman to save Luke and I, when the reality was that I was doing better than he was and just didn't know it yet.
I went to Target and bought a brand new outfit that I can still remember to this day. We ate at Roadhouse Grill and then saw Bruce Almighty afterwards. We struggled through conversation at dinner. We'd known each other and worked together for so long and amazingly were both shy and awkward. In the middle of the movie, it happened. His hand grazed my knee and just as I thought it was accidental, his hand found mine. Oh. My. God. HE LIKED ME! In the car he explained that while he knew it wasn't the best timing, that he saw the window open and he knew he needed to jump in fast since I didn't tend to stay single very long. That still goes down as one of the nicest things he's ever said to me. He actually saw me as this unattainable person with a line of suitors a mile long.
After that we had several other small dates. Nothing progressed really, and I soon learned that Ziggy was very green in the relationship department. Though he had lost his virginity in high school on the floor of a Subway bathroom (no friggin lie, he was a sandwich artist and lost his virginity to an older co-worker at work), he had actually never been in a relationship. Being painfully aware of his physical features, he was often called Alf or Dr. Evil by friends, due to a small resemblance, or what they thought was a resemblance to both characters. In fact, his own real nickname given to him by friends in high school, Ziggy, came from the size of the cartoon character's nose. Personally, I found his prominent nose and cleft chin to be painfully sexy and he reminded me of my life long crush, John Travolta.
A few months later, the young work crew was pulled into a meeting and literally yelled at for our cavorting and friendships and we were warned that we all needed to grow up and realize that this was work and not 90210 - there was a whole lotta messin going on other than Ziggy and I. That night Ziggy did not call. I was crushed. My thought was that the meeting was about the triflin ho's and had nothing to do with the budding relationship that we had hidden so well. We only went out in his parents' car, and we would go 50 miles out if we chose to be in public - it wasn't us that had been caught.
The next day was Valentine's Day and I didn't hear from him. A few months later he called and told me that he had pulled away from me specifically because he knew that I needed my job way more than he did, and that he was afraid of jeopardizing it, because after the meeting, he was pulled in one on one with our bosses and told something that would keep us apart for a long time...he was being promoted and would become my official boss in less than a month.
I was devastated over a good thing ending so suddenly. I was devastated about him getting promoted and not me. But time passed and we got back into our work groove. I began dating again and we went our separate ways outside of work.
I would hear from him on the phone every now and then. He normally called late at night when he was sad. Amazingly, we would have some of the deepest conversations on those nights discussing everything from religion to death to love and childhoods. These were the nights when I learned how desperately he wanted to have a relationship, and more specifically, one with me, but he loved his job and he knew I loved mine and it was almost as if we were just stuck. We hung up at 6:00am just to shower and head in to work on many a morning, our cell phones scalding hot and slimy from sweat from six to eight hours of continuous use.
About a year later, we decided to throw caution to the wind. We began dating again - very cautiously. We only went out in his parents' car. We went as far as Slidell and Baton Rouge for dates. We decided to allow the relationship to finally just happen and if we found ourselves serious at any point, then we would discuss options for work. At work, we were absolutely amazing. Being my boss, he wound up being harder on me than anyone and we pulled the wool over every one's eyes. We still got comments about how great we would be together, but no one actually suspected us together. Later on, we would get sloppier about it and a loud mouth salesman would bust our cover, but for now, everything was going great.
He was so funny and so sweet and so innocent. Though he had been laid before, he had never been loved and never had the opportunity to love in return so everything was new to him. It was precious. He appreciated the tiniest of things - simple kissing, hanging out and being close. He secretly let me always keep one of his toe nails painted pink for months, just so that he could be reminded that he actually had a girl in his life. We had secret codes at work. Secret "work" words that meant "I Love You". We took weekend trips to anywhere we could go where we could be outside and a normal couple without worrying about being caught.
A few months into the relationship, I noticed strange behavior. I won't string you along or foreshadow, I'll just lay it on the line. Ziggy had experimented with every drug on earth. You name it, and he's tried it with the exception of heroin and crack, that is. Of course I had no idea. I've never in my life (honest to God) even tried pot, so I just figured he was like me and if he had ever experimented, I never imagined it was more than pot. I wasn't a goody goody, I was just raised with an addict father and an addict sister and the stuff just scared the shit out of me, so I didn't touch it. Towards the end of college, a friend handed him a Vicoden and that's when his love affair with opiates began.
Sure he was moody, but you did hear me mention my family, right? Moodiness = normality for me. Nothing seemed askew.
By the time we were dating seriously and "in love", he was crushing and snorting oxycontins about 2 - 3 times a week. Now enters his side of the story for a moment here, as it was once told to me by his own sponsor on a night when I almost threw in the towel and gave up on him. When we began dating, he wanted desperately to have that relationship and to be clean and just start a new life. Have you ever been fat and tried to diet unhealthily? Have you ever tried to quit smoking cold turkey? What happens? For the majority of us, we attempt to quit with no help/support/assistance and a day or a week later we are failures stuffing twinkies down our throats or smoking pack after pack like a chimney. Now take that experience and multiply by the strength of an opiate. Every attempt to quit was doing nothing more than increasing his addiction and he became absolutely powerless against it.
And so that was his life. His growing addiction was hidden from family, work and even his best friends. He was embarrassed and ashamed and desperate to be sober. He would quit cold turkey, hit the withdrawals (opiate withdrawals are as difficult, if not worse than heroin withdrawals) and then the next day he was using twice as much as before. The cycle continued for over a year and this is now where we are in the story.
He's sick all the time. He's constantly either sweating, or puking or having leg cramps. I'm constantly begging him to see a doctor, thinking that he must be dying from some kind of stomach cancer. He's spending so much time with friends instead of me that I'm convinced that either I'm fat and ugly or he is gay. (I would later learn that all that hanging out with buddies was really just him going to dealer's houses - his friends even had no clue what he was really doing...in fact they all hated me for taking him away from them, or so they thought).
He's almost 100% impotent at this point (opiates are notorious for this fun side effect), which increases my worries of either his homosexuality or my fat/ugliness ten fold. He's constantly broke. I made about $30,000 by this time and he was at $40,000. I was raising a kid and owned a townhouse. He lived with his mother and was always broke. I began thinking that he was gambling or a million other things that I just couldn't bust him on. I'm waking up at night to find him balled up in corners crying his eyes out and begging God for help...I'm scared shitless. This perfectly great guy is turning into a maniac right in front of my eyes. I'm afraid of him and yet I feel so bad for whatever "illness" this is that he's battling, that I can't just walk away from him.
I. Never. Considered. Drugs. Ever.
Ziggy was too immaculate, too clean, too polished and shiny to be a drug addict. I began checking his phone, digging through his over night bag when he slept over, rifling through his car while he slept looking for any clue on earth that would tell me why this wonderful friend and lover was turning into this monster. But he was a master at hiding it all...and skilled in turning it all around and blaming it all on me - a skill that most addicts are capable of.
And then it happened - the end. In a final attempt to get him to just TELL ME WHAT WAS WRONG WITH MEEEEEEE, I forbade him to leave the house. With one fell swoop, he took me by the head and threw me across the room and stormed out of the house.
The next day, I got a prescription for Prozac, I began seeing a therapist and I very slowly began life without him, determined that whether he was gay, a compulsive gambler, addicted to prostitutes or whatever it was, that it had to be HIM and couldn't be ME and that I would get myself out of this situation and find my health and my sanity again.
And this my friends is where Ziggy's hell truly begins.
To be continued.....
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
As promised...
As promised, I wanted to do a little something to honor Ziggy's 3 and 1/2 year sobriety anniversary. With our 2 year wedding anniversary only a week away, I guess it's also fitting to maybe type out the story of us, per say.
I'm thinking this won't all fit in one post so I was thinking the hook up may be first, then the decent into hell and then finally the rising above the ashes. We'll see how it goes though.
The Beginning:
In August of 2000, I was 8 months pregnant, married to a man who was really only ever just my friend, making $8.50 an hour, living in a 1 bdrm apt and scared shitless about what was happening to me. But damn it to hell, I was determined to make it all work somehow.
I had been at my current job for a full year and I was about to turn 23. I began as a "utility clerk" which was what my boss, Mrs. Anal, titled me. In that first year, I had clawed my way into being noticed by the Accounting Department. They would give me odd jobs to do and I would amaze them with my shy manner of correcting the errors of those who were paid much better than I was in a way that made me needed rather than a threat. In time, I had my own daily set of Accounting tasks on top of being Mrs. Anal's filing, coffee making, plant watering bitch.
In walks Ziggy. He was hired as a favor to a big boss and he was unwelcomed in the Accounting Department. A department filled with non-degree carrying, hard working mothers didn't take kindly to this degree toting prissy boy. I would later come to respect his own fight for respect in that crowd, but at the time, he was nothing more than a threat to me and to all of us. I was to give HIM all of my Accounting duties to handle while on maternity leave and I laid awake at night sure that all of my hard work to get somewhere in this company was being stolen by him.
Needless to say, I loathed him. He asked a million questions and was a perfectionist to the nth degree. He was absolutely nothing more than a nuisance and I literally prayed for his demise, because I knew that he would hamper my rise to the top - I just knew it. If you had told me that I would one day carry this boy's child, I would have laughed my ass off for a week.
By time I returned from maternity leave, he was beginning to gain mild respect for his brains and his uncanny ability to take a task and completely dismantle it and then return it reassembled in a much more streamlined manner. While the women still feared him, they began to accept him for his sense of humor and they even began to mother him as their own little boy of the group. Nauseating!
It wasn't long before we became a team - him constantly the thinker and me constantly the one who brought his ideas into fruition and made them work in the day to day work that he had no concept of.
We spent a year as almost a brother/sister team. His penis and his degree helped him rise faster - this was still a good ole boys company (it still is in many ways, but it's come a far way in 10 years). He was able to stay late and be noticed as the only person in Accounting left in the building after dark. I had an infant to rush home to. He could go to lunch with the big boys because he made $30,000 a year and lived with mommy. I was on a budget and in constant fear of not being able to pay the bills and I packed bologna sandwiches.
I'll grant him that he was brilliant and did take that department from 1970 to at least 1990 in a matter of his first year, but I don't admit that to his face. To his face, I remind him that if I had a penis, a degree and was not a new mother going through a divorce, that I would have risen beyond him easily.
Years later, our boss and mutual mentor told us that she believed us to be the perfect brains/brawn team and that it was a shame that I was always labeled as the brawn when I had my own brains to show off. God, I loved that woman. Hats off to you, Ms. Carolyn.
The Accounting Department had morphed in the year that had passed. I had been officially stolen from Mrs. Anal and placed full time in Accounting (HALLELUJAH!) and the department went from an average age of about 45 to an average age of 21 in that year. I was 24/25 at the time, and Ziggy was 7 months younger than me. We were the two oldest in the group and we found ourselves with young chics beneath us to actually teach and groom. They all looked up to us and commented regularly on "what a great team" we were and how we "would make the perfect couple" - all comments that we shrugged off. I had begun a new relationship with a Born Again Christian Cuban since my divorce and I was in lurve. He was flirting with ironically, the Cuban chic in Customer Service.
As young people often do in these situations, we found ourselves at a local bar almost every Friday night. Friday night was mamma's night off from Luke, so I was free to be young and go out and drive home dangerously tipsy and dance and be nuts.
It was on one of these nights where Ziggy actually graced us with his prescence. He was obnoxiously cautious about his job and he always acted too good for us, as if he already had WAY too many friends to be bothered with the likes of us. It was on this night that I saw Ziggy let loose a little, I heard him laugh a real laugh for the first time and I noticed that his eyes were blue. Having squinty eyes and never seeing him out of the office, I had never noticed how blue his eyes were. He isn't sure of the exact date, but I know that this was the night he first noticed me as more than his teammate from work. Long after the bar closed, we remained in the parking lot, just talking, for hours.
From that night on, there would be moments when I absolutely hated him, wished him dead and hoped that he drove off a cliff - but I never, not once, ever stopped loving him.
A few months later, I broke up with the Cuban for reasons that had nothing to do with Ziggy. Our moment was not forgotten, but booze wears off and you get back to normal life on Mondays. I cried in his office the morning after the break up, which was strange behavior for me. He had no idea what to say and I could tell that he was really uncomfortable with it. However, very early the next morning (a Saturday), my phone rang and for the first time, it was Ziggy's voice that I heard. He nervously pretended to be calling to ask something absurd about work and then finally in a stuttering and stammering way, he asked me to go to dinner and a movie that night. It was the summer of 2002.
To be continued...
I'm thinking this won't all fit in one post so I was thinking the hook up may be first, then the decent into hell and then finally the rising above the ashes. We'll see how it goes though.
The Beginning:
In August of 2000, I was 8 months pregnant, married to a man who was really only ever just my friend, making $8.50 an hour, living in a 1 bdrm apt and scared shitless about what was happening to me. But damn it to hell, I was determined to make it all work somehow.
I had been at my current job for a full year and I was about to turn 23. I began as a "utility clerk" which was what my boss, Mrs. Anal, titled me. In that first year, I had clawed my way into being noticed by the Accounting Department. They would give me odd jobs to do and I would amaze them with my shy manner of correcting the errors of those who were paid much better than I was in a way that made me needed rather than a threat. In time, I had my own daily set of Accounting tasks on top of being Mrs. Anal's filing, coffee making, plant watering bitch.
In walks Ziggy. He was hired as a favor to a big boss and he was unwelcomed in the Accounting Department. A department filled with non-degree carrying, hard working mothers didn't take kindly to this degree toting prissy boy. I would later come to respect his own fight for respect in that crowd, but at the time, he was nothing more than a threat to me and to all of us. I was to give HIM all of my Accounting duties to handle while on maternity leave and I laid awake at night sure that all of my hard work to get somewhere in this company was being stolen by him.
Needless to say, I loathed him. He asked a million questions and was a perfectionist to the nth degree. He was absolutely nothing more than a nuisance and I literally prayed for his demise, because I knew that he would hamper my rise to the top - I just knew it. If you had told me that I would one day carry this boy's child, I would have laughed my ass off for a week.
By time I returned from maternity leave, he was beginning to gain mild respect for his brains and his uncanny ability to take a task and completely dismantle it and then return it reassembled in a much more streamlined manner. While the women still feared him, they began to accept him for his sense of humor and they even began to mother him as their own little boy of the group. Nauseating!
It wasn't long before we became a team - him constantly the thinker and me constantly the one who brought his ideas into fruition and made them work in the day to day work that he had no concept of.
We spent a year as almost a brother/sister team. His penis and his degree helped him rise faster - this was still a good ole boys company (it still is in many ways, but it's come a far way in 10 years). He was able to stay late and be noticed as the only person in Accounting left in the building after dark. I had an infant to rush home to. He could go to lunch with the big boys because he made $30,000 a year and lived with mommy. I was on a budget and in constant fear of not being able to pay the bills and I packed bologna sandwiches.
I'll grant him that he was brilliant and did take that department from 1970 to at least 1990 in a matter of his first year, but I don't admit that to his face. To his face, I remind him that if I had a penis, a degree and was not a new mother going through a divorce, that I would have risen beyond him easily.
Years later, our boss and mutual mentor told us that she believed us to be the perfect brains/brawn team and that it was a shame that I was always labeled as the brawn when I had my own brains to show off. God, I loved that woman. Hats off to you, Ms. Carolyn.
The Accounting Department had morphed in the year that had passed. I had been officially stolen from Mrs. Anal and placed full time in Accounting (HALLELUJAH!) and the department went from an average age of about 45 to an average age of 21 in that year. I was 24/25 at the time, and Ziggy was 7 months younger than me. We were the two oldest in the group and we found ourselves with young chics beneath us to actually teach and groom. They all looked up to us and commented regularly on "what a great team" we were and how we "would make the perfect couple" - all comments that we shrugged off. I had begun a new relationship with a Born Again Christian Cuban since my divorce and I was in lurve. He was flirting with ironically, the Cuban chic in Customer Service.
As young people often do in these situations, we found ourselves at a local bar almost every Friday night. Friday night was mamma's night off from Luke, so I was free to be young and go out and drive home dangerously tipsy and dance and be nuts.
It was on one of these nights where Ziggy actually graced us with his prescence. He was obnoxiously cautious about his job and he always acted too good for us, as if he already had WAY too many friends to be bothered with the likes of us. It was on this night that I saw Ziggy let loose a little, I heard him laugh a real laugh for the first time and I noticed that his eyes were blue. Having squinty eyes and never seeing him out of the office, I had never noticed how blue his eyes were. He isn't sure of the exact date, but I know that this was the night he first noticed me as more than his teammate from work. Long after the bar closed, we remained in the parking lot, just talking, for hours.
From that night on, there would be moments when I absolutely hated him, wished him dead and hoped that he drove off a cliff - but I never, not once, ever stopped loving him.
A few months later, I broke up with the Cuban for reasons that had nothing to do with Ziggy. Our moment was not forgotten, but booze wears off and you get back to normal life on Mondays. I cried in his office the morning after the break up, which was strange behavior for me. He had no idea what to say and I could tell that he was really uncomfortable with it. However, very early the next morning (a Saturday), my phone rang and for the first time, it was Ziggy's voice that I heard. He nervously pretended to be calling to ask something absurd about work and then finally in a stuttering and stammering way, he asked me to go to dinner and a movie that night. It was the summer of 2002.
To be continued...
Monday, June 15, 2009
Vagina
Well, it's official folks, we have a vagina. Well, "we" meaning me and the fetus. You may or may not have a vagina, so I don't want to assume anything.
She finally raised her ass above the placenta for us today and showed us her girlie bits. We were happy and shocked and just so god damned relieved to know what it is. Since ultrasounds are so good these days, you would be shocked if you went to a baby store and actually tried to purchase one full gender neutral outfit - it's nearly impossible.
Her name is Shelby and that is her real name. I share it with you since I love you. I don't know why I worry over this anonymity online thing since Shelby and Luke are real names - Ziggy is not - that's a nickname, but oh well.
I had planned to post tonight about my husband's 3 and 1/2 year sobriety anniversary. And I still will try to do that tomorrow night, because there was a lot of healing things I needed to get out - more for me than for you, but you know - it is MY blog after all.
The vagina thing blew all other news and stories out the water. So how are we doing with the news? Well, we're almost in awe.
My parents had 3 girls between them. Between us 3 girls, there are 5 grandSONS. No one has had a girl in this family in 31 years. So this girl is anxiously anticipated. Sister # 1 (the one closest in age to me with the twins) expressed sincere excitement and happiness for me and for us and for the family in general. While she may long for a girl, we both know that at 35 and with twins, her baby making days are probably over and she's ok with that and just happy at the chance to have a baby girl around either way.
Sister # 2 (the eldest who lives in Miami with 2 sons) didn't seem too jazzed. If anything, I almost detected a bit of jealousy in her - as if her have two boys is any more my fault than me about to have a girl. She's the girliest of us all and would probably be the best at raising a girl, whereas I will most definitely be the worst!
Mom and dad were both thrilled. Dad seemed a bit nervous and has decided not to meet her until her Christening (he lives states away), but dad is dad and I'm fine with that. Mom is crossing her t's and dotting her i's and probably sending out shower invites as we speak, god bless her.
Auntie M was by far THE MOST excited of us all. She has no kids and so she dotes on our kids as much as she doted on us and I swear she's been saying daily novenas for one last chance to buy dresses and tap shoes.
Ziggy's sister, the godmother, seemed honestly excited. All I got from his mother was an emailed "yahoo". Just like that. Not even in caps or with an exclamation point. Fuck her - that's a whole other blog to talk about her nonsense lately. Long story short though - apparently middle child syndrome carries on to the middle child grandbabies even though they are the first grandbabies.
And then there is Ziggy. He spent the walk to the car and the drive back to work kind of in a daze. I was worried that he was upset, so I kept talking about how much daughters love their daddies and blah blah blah. He wasn't upset at all. It turns out that despite my growing belly, despite the furniture, despite the ultrasounds, none of it had become real until that moment when he learned that he had a daughter. He was just in shock of it all.
After work Ziggy and I went to Babies R Us to scan pink and purple items that were left off the registry thus far - towels, burp cloths, blankets, bibs, etc. We picked out a couple of sleepers and onesies - the basic staples that you need regardless of how many you're blessed with at a shower. Then we made our way to the little sundresses section. We picked out 2 sundresses that we both loved and then we came home and just sat in awe for a little while at what we'd done.
It's as if I have no other child and the wonder of it all is on us like scared 20 year olds. I'm seasoned. I know all this junk and yet, I'm scared shitless. Being a basic tomboy most of my life, femininity was something I always had to work VERY hard on - it never came natural and it still doesn't. I can't style my own hair let alone a toddler's. It's so scary, and while my god, I am so blessed to be able to raise one of each gender, this gender in particular has me petrified.
So that's the news. Sorry this post isn't funny or poetic - just informational is all. I'll be back sooner than later - promise.
She finally raised her ass above the placenta for us today and showed us her girlie bits. We were happy and shocked and just so god damned relieved to know what it is. Since ultrasounds are so good these days, you would be shocked if you went to a baby store and actually tried to purchase one full gender neutral outfit - it's nearly impossible.
Her name is Shelby and that is her real name. I share it with you since I love you. I don't know why I worry over this anonymity online thing since Shelby and Luke are real names - Ziggy is not - that's a nickname, but oh well.
I had planned to post tonight about my husband's 3 and 1/2 year sobriety anniversary. And I still will try to do that tomorrow night, because there was a lot of healing things I needed to get out - more for me than for you, but you know - it is MY blog after all.
The vagina thing blew all other news and stories out the water. So how are we doing with the news? Well, we're almost in awe.
My parents had 3 girls between them. Between us 3 girls, there are 5 grandSONS. No one has had a girl in this family in 31 years. So this girl is anxiously anticipated. Sister # 1 (the one closest in age to me with the twins) expressed sincere excitement and happiness for me and for us and for the family in general. While she may long for a girl, we both know that at 35 and with twins, her baby making days are probably over and she's ok with that and just happy at the chance to have a baby girl around either way.
Sister # 2 (the eldest who lives in Miami with 2 sons) didn't seem too jazzed. If anything, I almost detected a bit of jealousy in her - as if her have two boys is any more my fault than me about to have a girl. She's the girliest of us all and would probably be the best at raising a girl, whereas I will most definitely be the worst!
Mom and dad were both thrilled. Dad seemed a bit nervous and has decided not to meet her until her Christening (he lives states away), but dad is dad and I'm fine with that. Mom is crossing her t's and dotting her i's and probably sending out shower invites as we speak, god bless her.
Auntie M was by far THE MOST excited of us all. She has no kids and so she dotes on our kids as much as she doted on us and I swear she's been saying daily novenas for one last chance to buy dresses and tap shoes.
Ziggy's sister, the godmother, seemed honestly excited. All I got from his mother was an emailed "yahoo". Just like that. Not even in caps or with an exclamation point. Fuck her - that's a whole other blog to talk about her nonsense lately. Long story short though - apparently middle child syndrome carries on to the middle child grandbabies even though they are the first grandbabies.
And then there is Ziggy. He spent the walk to the car and the drive back to work kind of in a daze. I was worried that he was upset, so I kept talking about how much daughters love their daddies and blah blah blah. He wasn't upset at all. It turns out that despite my growing belly, despite the furniture, despite the ultrasounds, none of it had become real until that moment when he learned that he had a daughter. He was just in shock of it all.
After work Ziggy and I went to Babies R Us to scan pink and purple items that were left off the registry thus far - towels, burp cloths, blankets, bibs, etc. We picked out a couple of sleepers and onesies - the basic staples that you need regardless of how many you're blessed with at a shower. Then we made our way to the little sundresses section. We picked out 2 sundresses that we both loved and then we came home and just sat in awe for a little while at what we'd done.
It's as if I have no other child and the wonder of it all is on us like scared 20 year olds. I'm seasoned. I know all this junk and yet, I'm scared shitless. Being a basic tomboy most of my life, femininity was something I always had to work VERY hard on - it never came natural and it still doesn't. I can't style my own hair let alone a toddler's. It's so scary, and while my god, I am so blessed to be able to raise one of each gender, this gender in particular has me petrified.
So that's the news. Sorry this post isn't funny or poetic - just informational is all. I'll be back sooner than later - promise.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Ball Hairs and General Updates
It's official, Luke has nut hair. As horrifying as that sounds, experiencing it is even worse.
We've noticed him "fiddling" ALOT more with his man parts. And when I say ALOT, I mean that if he doesn't have pants on and is in his boxers, then his hand is on his weiner. We've begun discussing appropriate behaviors and how some intimate fondling should be reserved to our bedrooms. We've also installed a TV in his room so that some of his rest time/fondling time can be done in private.
Last month he announced that when his "bird gets bigger, there's a big blue vein in it." Then he announced to me in the car a couple weeks ago that he has nut hairs. Just a random, oh by the way, type of notification on both occasions. I was half proud that I've obviously done well thus far at raising him to feel comfortable telling me ANYTHING, and half mortified that he chose me to share this with. He asked me to look at it for him, and although I admit that I was SOOOO curious, I left this one to his father. (And shut up, because you'd be curious too!)
Via text message on Sunday night, I got the confirmation from ex that our son's once silky smooth sac, is indeed, now covered in peach fuzz that is of a thicker nature than leg hair. He says it's blonde and slight, but definitely there and a noticeable difference than the sac of 6 months ago.
So I frantically consulted Dr. Google. (Side note, if the FBI ever confiscates my computer, I will probably be incarcerated now due to my vulgar Dr. Google searches.) See, my little boy is only about to turn 9. This is not supposed to happen yet, right? RIGHT??
Nope. It's totally normal. According to Dr. Google, the average age for boys to begin having wet dreams is now as early as 10, with 9 being considered normal also and 11 being the median. Girls are beginning to menstruate (I said, menstruate...haha) as early as 10 also with some spotting beginning at 9. GAH!!! Are you fucking kidding me? A chat with a pediatric nurse I know of confirmed it all for me also.
While I'm comforted to know that my son is not some abnormally maturing freak, I'm still appalled that we are here in this place ALREADY. So this is what prompted us into trying to encourage him to seek out a little privacy. We are asking him to start closing the door when he uses the bathroom and I'm not sitting and chatting with him during his baths anymore (he takes showers now anyway, sniff sniff - and he even asked for man shampoo this week, and I almost cried while buying him a bottle of Erick's brand instead of his normal Johnson's kids' foam wash).
While I miss our openness and feeling of joy while prancing around naked all over the house, I know that it's healthier and better for him to not be stroking his pecker in the living room next to me while we watch Spongebob, even if he still doesn't know the meaning of it all yet - it's not cute boy fiddling anymore - it could lead to a goal VERY soon, if you know what I mean and his mother should NOT be next to him if/when he figures out the goal.
So other than my son's nuts, lots is happening. The baby's room is DONE! Ziggy finished all of the furniture tonight and it's all set up and we catch ourselves just walking in there to stare at it all. Ziggy never had a baby, and I lived in a one bedroom apartment when I had Luke, so the actual nursery is new for the both of us.
We made a big decision to save $300 on a ridiculous crib bedding set that the baby never uses anyway and we're using Luke's that I meticulously packed away, so it looks like new anyway. I chose his theme before I knew his gender, so while we both feel that the theme is maybe a bit masculine for a possible girl, for the sake of not wasting $300 and also making Luke feel special over his stuff being used for the baby, we've opted for the hand me down since everything else thus far is brand new. Many of my new mom friends don't "get" this concept. My seasoned mom friends normally shout an "amen, sistah" at me when asked about the bedding choice.
I bought a bottle of Dreft to wash Luke's set tonight so I could put them on and take pics, even though I know after sitting for 12 - 15 weeks, they'll need another washing prior to the baby actually using them. Let me tell you, when I opened the bottle of Dreft and took that first sniff, it was like...oh my god...it was like I was transported 8 years back and Luke as an infant was in the next room. The scent of that stuff is powerful. I don't recommend sniffing it unless you are really prepared for the emotions that come with it...seriously. A year ago, I may have slit my wrists from the scent and the fertility issues and the longings and all that jazz.
So that's the happenings of the moment. Lots else going on with in law drama and work drama and renovations drama - but I'll get to that later.
We've noticed him "fiddling" ALOT more with his man parts. And when I say ALOT, I mean that if he doesn't have pants on and is in his boxers, then his hand is on his weiner. We've begun discussing appropriate behaviors and how some intimate fondling should be reserved to our bedrooms. We've also installed a TV in his room so that some of his rest time/fondling time can be done in private.
Last month he announced that when his "bird gets bigger, there's a big blue vein in it." Then he announced to me in the car a couple weeks ago that he has nut hairs. Just a random, oh by the way, type of notification on both occasions. I was half proud that I've obviously done well thus far at raising him to feel comfortable telling me ANYTHING, and half mortified that he chose me to share this with. He asked me to look at it for him, and although I admit that I was SOOOO curious, I left this one to his father. (And shut up, because you'd be curious too!)
Via text message on Sunday night, I got the confirmation from ex that our son's once silky smooth sac, is indeed, now covered in peach fuzz that is of a thicker nature than leg hair. He says it's blonde and slight, but definitely there and a noticeable difference than the sac of 6 months ago.
So I frantically consulted Dr. Google. (Side note, if the FBI ever confiscates my computer, I will probably be incarcerated now due to my vulgar Dr. Google searches.) See, my little boy is only about to turn 9. This is not supposed to happen yet, right? RIGHT??
Nope. It's totally normal. According to Dr. Google, the average age for boys to begin having wet dreams is now as early as 10, with 9 being considered normal also and 11 being the median. Girls are beginning to menstruate (I said, menstruate...haha) as early as 10 also with some spotting beginning at 9. GAH!!! Are you fucking kidding me? A chat with a pediatric nurse I know of confirmed it all for me also.
While I'm comforted to know that my son is not some abnormally maturing freak, I'm still appalled that we are here in this place ALREADY. So this is what prompted us into trying to encourage him to seek out a little privacy. We are asking him to start closing the door when he uses the bathroom and I'm not sitting and chatting with him during his baths anymore (he takes showers now anyway, sniff sniff - and he even asked for man shampoo this week, and I almost cried while buying him a bottle of Erick's brand instead of his normal Johnson's kids' foam wash).
While I miss our openness and feeling of joy while prancing around naked all over the house, I know that it's healthier and better for him to not be stroking his pecker in the living room next to me while we watch Spongebob, even if he still doesn't know the meaning of it all yet - it's not cute boy fiddling anymore - it could lead to a goal VERY soon, if you know what I mean and his mother should NOT be next to him if/when he figures out the goal.
So other than my son's nuts, lots is happening. The baby's room is DONE! Ziggy finished all of the furniture tonight and it's all set up and we catch ourselves just walking in there to stare at it all. Ziggy never had a baby, and I lived in a one bedroom apartment when I had Luke, so the actual nursery is new for the both of us.
We made a big decision to save $300 on a ridiculous crib bedding set that the baby never uses anyway and we're using Luke's that I meticulously packed away, so it looks like new anyway. I chose his theme before I knew his gender, so while we both feel that the theme is maybe a bit masculine for a possible girl, for the sake of not wasting $300 and also making Luke feel special over his stuff being used for the baby, we've opted for the hand me down since everything else thus far is brand new. Many of my new mom friends don't "get" this concept. My seasoned mom friends normally shout an "amen, sistah" at me when asked about the bedding choice.
I bought a bottle of Dreft to wash Luke's set tonight so I could put them on and take pics, even though I know after sitting for 12 - 15 weeks, they'll need another washing prior to the baby actually using them. Let me tell you, when I opened the bottle of Dreft and took that first sniff, it was like...oh my god...it was like I was transported 8 years back and Luke as an infant was in the next room. The scent of that stuff is powerful. I don't recommend sniffing it unless you are really prepared for the emotions that come with it...seriously. A year ago, I may have slit my wrists from the scent and the fertility issues and the longings and all that jazz.
So that's the happenings of the moment. Lots else going on with in law drama and work drama and renovations drama - but I'll get to that later.
Monday, June 1, 2009
23 weeks? Are you shitting me?
It hit me today, hard - I'M 23 weeks! HOLY SHIT! That's like 3 weeks away from viability...not that I want/plan to have a 26 week old baby, but still - if it did happen to fall out for some reason, in only 3 weeks, it would probably survive. That's freaking amazing.
I also noticed that I'm more than half way finished in the boxes above - that's weird and freaky too, expecially since it felt like FOREVER just to get out of the first box.
So what's been happening? Well, the 1/2 house renovations are almost done. Our house is a great shell of a house, but it SCREAMS 1980. We could only afford to start renovating half of the house right now, so we chose the guest room (future baby room), Luke's room, the living room and the hallway...well that's really about a 1/3 of the house, but by time this baby is in high school, we should be done!
So I demanded that Luke's room be the first done so that he wouldn't be displaced long, so his room is finally done. The baby's room is about 90% done. Ziggy just needs to caulk/spackle/paint the baseboards. Then the living room and hallway are last. It's been really hard having furniture all over and nothing in it's place - especially for someone like me, but I'm dealing.
All of the baby's furniture is in and is just awaiting being unboxed and put together. Things are moving along...SLOWLY, but surely.
Ziggy is doing much better, thank God. My theory of the early onset of his normal June depression seems to be true and we've entered June almost in the clear, so May just sucked the way that June normally does. He's returned to his normal bubbly, joking, dancing around the house obnoxious self and we are so happy to have him back. I've been trying my best to applaud his return as the experts say I should and let go of the anger of his departure - that is also coming along...SLOWLY, but surely.
Alterior placenta be damned, this baby has become a kicker. I'm not sure if the placenta is migrating, as the doctor hoped it would, or if he/she is just strong enough to now be felt through it, but good gawd I'm feeling some kicking.
Sometimes I sit and just gaze at Luke - his fingers, his toes, his nose and I think, I MADE THAT - I made every cell in his body and here I am, blessed enough to get to do it one more time. And when I say, "one more time", that is exactly what I mean. This is it for us. I have no desire to have a litter. I want as many as I can afford and be comfortable and love adequately while hanging on to my career and I know in my soul that this is it for us and I'm ok with that. We've decided against getting "fixed" until we are 35...just in case we win the lottery or have a major change of heart, but in our minds, we know we are done.
So that's a generic update of life in general. So much else is going on...growing twin nephews that are HILARIOUS, Luke being with his dad for the weeks during the summer, stress and anxiety over our growing debt and worries over Ziggy's physical health lately (we are suspecting possible diabetes), my crazy mother being crazy again and me being scared about being out of work for 8 weeks - but we'll catch up on all that jazz later, I promise.
I also noticed that I'm more than half way finished in the boxes above - that's weird and freaky too, expecially since it felt like FOREVER just to get out of the first box.
So what's been happening? Well, the 1/2 house renovations are almost done. Our house is a great shell of a house, but it SCREAMS 1980. We could only afford to start renovating half of the house right now, so we chose the guest room (future baby room), Luke's room, the living room and the hallway...well that's really about a 1/3 of the house, but by time this baby is in high school, we should be done!
So I demanded that Luke's room be the first done so that he wouldn't be displaced long, so his room is finally done. The baby's room is about 90% done. Ziggy just needs to caulk/spackle/paint the baseboards. Then the living room and hallway are last. It's been really hard having furniture all over and nothing in it's place - especially for someone like me, but I'm dealing.
All of the baby's furniture is in and is just awaiting being unboxed and put together. Things are moving along...SLOWLY, but surely.
Ziggy is doing much better, thank God. My theory of the early onset of his normal June depression seems to be true and we've entered June almost in the clear, so May just sucked the way that June normally does. He's returned to his normal bubbly, joking, dancing around the house obnoxious self and we are so happy to have him back. I've been trying my best to applaud his return as the experts say I should and let go of the anger of his departure - that is also coming along...SLOWLY, but surely.
Alterior placenta be damned, this baby has become a kicker. I'm not sure if the placenta is migrating, as the doctor hoped it would, or if he/she is just strong enough to now be felt through it, but good gawd I'm feeling some kicking.
Sometimes I sit and just gaze at Luke - his fingers, his toes, his nose and I think, I MADE THAT - I made every cell in his body and here I am, blessed enough to get to do it one more time. And when I say, "one more time", that is exactly what I mean. This is it for us. I have no desire to have a litter. I want as many as I can afford and be comfortable and love adequately while hanging on to my career and I know in my soul that this is it for us and I'm ok with that. We've decided against getting "fixed" until we are 35...just in case we win the lottery or have a major change of heart, but in our minds, we know we are done.
So that's a generic update of life in general. So much else is going on...growing twin nephews that are HILARIOUS, Luke being with his dad for the weeks during the summer, stress and anxiety over our growing debt and worries over Ziggy's physical health lately (we are suspecting possible diabetes), my crazy mother being crazy again and me being scared about being out of work for 8 weeks - but we'll catch up on all that jazz later, I promise.
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