“If everything works out with John, Benjamin won’t know a time when he wasn’t around.”
As my therapist’s words sink in the last three years of my life flash through my mind; from the beginning when I packed everything up and moved into my mother’s, to the quiet nights at her house in the woods wondering and wishing myself away and back to some semblance of independence and then to the moment when Benjamin and I stepped into our own sweet, little apartment – ready to begin our new life.
What followed is all here, on this blog in my eBook, or safe in my mind.
I sit on her couch, staring off into a painting on the wall as I try to grasp this idea of him not remembering anything before John Bear. The memories wash over me – the adventures big and small – like the time we were yelled at by a hair salon owner or the countless grocery store trips that typically ended in knock down drag out tantrums. Then there were the big adventures like trips to find Joshua Trees
or deep forests and mountain coves in Vancouver.
And smaller adventures like hours of puddle jumping for no reason
or sweating it out on a hot summer day in August to hear our future president, a man also raised by a single mom, speak to us from about twenty feet away.
or chasing bunnies with Sydney.
Now, looking back, it is these moments – the moments when I forced myself out of the house with him, braving the book store, the library, the festivals, the camping trips and the road trips all by myself, trying to fill the time – that are the best memories I have of the two of us.
Memories of the moments when we both forgot where we were or when we just took our time
because we didn’t have anywhere else to be.
“So they’ll all be gone? He won’t remember a thing?” I ask my therapist or, as I fondly call her, Wonder Woman. She’s helping me to straighten out my trust issues and to figure out why, in the past, I had a pattern of choosing bad boys dysfunctional men. [click to continue…]
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