50 Ways to Leave the LaLa
[written a few days ago – today’s Fat Tuesday]
I’ll share a secret with you that might not have been obvious at the time. In the summer of 2011, I considered taking my life. I would look outside at the bayou and dream about putting actual stones in my pockets and entering the bayou (and taking pills to ensure I didn’t come out). That’s how hopeless my life seemed to me then, that’s how trapped I felt. I thought about this walking through City Park this morning and thought about Nick and Craig, two colleagues from different times and places, who had actually killed themselves. Craig off the Golden Gate Bridge and Nick who shot himself. If only I could have told them, hang on.
Who knows if I would have followed through on this despair. I have a child and so inevitably I have become my mother. My mother always said she stayed with my father because of me (us). So here’s a burden my son doesn’t ever need, he is the reason why getting in the truck and heading to Mexico (my father’s threat all of my life), or going into the bayou and saying bye bye is not an option. That’s right – Tin needs me. But more importantly, I need him.
In the spring of 2012, when my hair started falling out, I almost freaked out because I didn’t know what the hell was going on, but somehow on a deeper level it seemed par for the course. It was that ounce of pride I had left in me that had now been removed. Once totally bald, and not accepting my state, I started noticing people who had cancer, or who had died or had loved ones who had died, just a lot of people who had worse situations than my own. Not to minimize loss of energy or complete hair loss, because really …. so I began to embrace what had happened as an opportunity. A chance to have a blank slate and start again. Differently.
I wanted to shed the part of me that was getting used to telling the sob story. My life became a convenient cautionary tale to dole out to unwitting bystanders. But I wanted to embrace a new narrative that told of triumph over adversity and renewal rather than refusal to change. And so I started looking at my life from many different angles. My relationship with Tatjana had guided me through some rough patches in my life – two failed adoptions, mother dying, Arlene dying, but I found in the end that as much as we loved each other, the love itself could not overcome the fundamental differences in our notions of relationship and these differences grew more glaring in 2012. This turmoil simultaneously caused me to re-mourn my relationship with Steve as, farther away from that relationship, I could recall the very best of him, which was that Steve had been my rock. This is not a conclusion that I forged in hindsight, it is what I said when I was in the relationship.
Someone told me once that it takes half as long as you were in the relationship to grieve it. So it makes sense that eight years later I was coming full circle of my grief of 16 years of marriage.
I remember years ago at the height of my Wall Street career sitting at a round table with a dozen men late one night, traders and salesmen, and drinking way too much expensive wine, and each of these men was so loud that together they formed a thundering cacophony, so I slipped into the bathroom and text Steve and said, “I miss the quietness of you.” And I did, again and again. I have missed the silent strength the men I have chosen in my life typically bring to the equation that was missing from my equation.
My world was falling apart and I needed a rock. Someone to count on.
When I had finished the LaLa and moved in, I sent a thank you note to Steve to thank him for the gift of his design, this gift of love, I had called it. Whoa! Was I delusional or was he laughing so hard his sides hurt? This gift of love turned out to be a demon child that made my head spin round and round and throw up green vomit – it was rock and roll from day one. From the brother who went postal and hid in his house refusing to sign the Agreement to Sell to the appraisal that came in $100K over the selling price before I dumped $500K into it that my mother insisted came from a jealous red headed divorcee appraiser who thought I had a better deal, to the cuts in pay that started with a 30% then a 20% cut to finally losing my job, to the roller coaster of hair loss, learning more about the differences in my partnership, admitting that if I didn’t do anything my life would end some how, some way, to listing the LaLa and receiving two offers before the house was even on the market eight years later – two offers – one cash and the other over asking price before finally settling on a third offer, an architect who bought it for his mother.
The LaLa. The LaLa was given its name by a child, a boy of seven years old, who had first named this house, “Rachel’s writing house” then changed his mind and called it simply, “The LaLa.” The name stuck and became etched in the foundation of the house, and I recreated the acronym to mean many different things through the years, mainly settling on Live And Love And [repeat].
And that I did, and do, and [repeat].