Three Is My Number

What is it about the number three?

I think three is my number.

I am one of three sisters. I have three children.

I come from a lineage of two not being enough, four being too many, three being just right.

Like a fairytale. 

Hah.

Three years.

Year one I was a pendulum. I swung between numbness and emotional breakdowns. I ate very little. I put on a lot of makeup. I felt free and I felt trapped. Guilty and relieved. It was adrenaline and momentum that kept me going - a need to survive, a fear of not surviving.

Three kids. A job. A house. A truck. A car. A pile of bills.

A dead body. 

All mine to deal with or fuck up. Forever. FOREVER.

How do you not get overwhelmed by forever?

I distanced myself from things that were hard and neared myself to the things that were easy. I distanced myself from my children, from family, from friends. I neared myself to sex and shoes.

It was just about surviving, making it to the end of each day and putting a check mark on the calendar. Counting down 365 days one at a time, like a one-tenth mile marker in a marathon. I turned myself into a numb machine, just to make it, because I knew if I made it I could continue to make it.

I made it.

Year two I had a choice.

I knew I had made it past one year, and that meant I could make it past every next year. If I chose to.

What was I going to do?

I did not want to live in a house with a ghost in the basement, with patched holes like scars reminding me of the times he had punched in the walls, with all the neighbors who had seen me screaming on the front lawn, with my knees to my chest, screaming that he was dead and that he had been mad at me for wanting to leave him, he had been mad at me for wanting to be safe, to be not so alone, to not worry about the alcohol and the sleeping pills every night so oh my god was it my fault had I killed my husband had I had I had I. They had all seen me clinging to the grass, as if I was worried I was going to fall off the earth. They knew me in that moment, and that moment became who I was.

I did not want to go around life wearing the same t-shirt that said "I'm a tragedy" every day. I didn't want to explain why I was late all the time to people who thought I would have all my shit together one year later. I did not have all my shit together. I was a tragedy. I knew I was a tragedy. I just didn't want to wear the t-shirt.

In the second year I had a choice, and I took a chance on change, because that seemed like quite possibly the only way out of always being the tragedy I had become.

I chose to look for a new job, and a new house, and a new community, and a new school for my children. And when I got offered a dream job, when someone looked at me and didn't see me as a tragedy, they saw me as potential, it felt like a miracle. I followed that miracle like a firefly on a summer night in the yard, and it led me to this home, and to this neighborhood, and to my friends, and to my children's school. 

The second year was change, because I chose to change.

Year three was this past year. This year a pandemic shut everything down. It forced me and my children into one space together, all day, every day, and it made me get closer to everything that was hard. I became their caretaker, their teacher, their playmate, their cook, their nurse, their therapist. 

Being an only parent is HARD. I am everything for my children. I am their everything. They rely on me for clothing and shelter and safety and comfort and guidance and chocolate milk and snacks and their forever. 

My mother ran away from our family when I was a teenager, because she said we were too much. We were a burden, keeping her from living her life. When I asked her, through tears, to explain, she closed her bedroom door in my face.

I have been in therapy. I understand why this has been hard for me to embrace.

For two years I worried that this life would not be joy. That it could not be joy. But being an only parent is joy. Being a mother is joy. I realized not only could I be all of the things my children need me to be, but I can love being all of these things, when I let myself be all of these things without fear.

I understand why this was hard for me to embrace. Why I was scared of wanting to run away.

It has been three years. 

Year one I was a pendulum. Year two I made a choice. Year three I got quarantined with the hard things, and I could not run away from them so I faced them, and then I embraced them.

I think three is my number.