October, 2012.

My birth month. My husband and I are bidding our marriage counselor farewell on the steps of the counseling establishment…not necessarily because we are “healed and whole” but more because the non profit organization was out of money and they were closing their doors. Pam the Therapist, who took us most of our 8 years of marriage to find, didn’t have a new job lined up and her life seemed more unsure than even our marriage. But if I’m honest, I felt pretty good. We had dealt with a lot of nitty gritty bits and pieces and the act of keeping a therapy appointment at all can be very therapeutic in itself.

Since I met my husband when I was 14 years old, we both knew there were going to be some differences in nearly every aspect of our lives. You never know how thats going to look 15 years down the road, but you try to bank on this dynamite bond you have going on and forget the rest till it rears it’s head. The bottom line is that I was raised in a broken home with daily substance abuse and domestic violence and the court system making all the families decisions for us. My parents did the best that they knew how to for myself and my four brothers. They had all their own sets of hurt and disfunction that shaped their lives and decisions. I once read that it would be foolish to expect to have received from our parent something that they didn’t actually possess themselves.  They cant possibly give what they do not have.  The best part of my childhood…the silver lining in it all…was simply that comic relief wasn’t an option, it was necessity. I have learned more from laughing at my life than I ever will trying to make sense of it all. Despite their more prominent personality traits, my parents are some of the funniest people Ive ever known. As weird as it sounds, it kept things feeling sane…when they clearly weren’t. And when you couldn’t laugh anymore, you could always cry. We are a strongly emotive family.

My husband however, has a Brethren Pastor for a father and a nurse for a mother. Loving, normal people. 3 brothers. All with gobs of their own inherent human dysfunction, but not nearly as announced or quite as life altering as my own families’. Trust me, if everyone were raised the way Christian Philip Emanuel Krouse was, the world would be a better place. Less hearts all out there on sleeves to be certain. That’s not reality though.

So you’re up to speed on who and when and where. One of the main things I had been working with my therapist on was setting up safe boundaries. A family like mine didn’t have use of a word like “boundaries”. I don’t know if they use that word anywhere but in America. Especially not with family. I don’t picture a hut dwelling family in Uganda confronting each other when someone goes all “boundary buster” on someone else. No room for boundaries when survival is the primary goal. But as an adult lady with four children and a husband, the thought of having more control over who and what I let effect me emotionally sounded nice.

So naturally, I was in the midst of a boundary enforced period with my father as counseling came to an end. I will always be my father’s daughter. I will always crave his approval and his adoration. But I was starting to realize it was at the expense of some of my morals. Over the past several months he had done a few off color things…just things that sent up red flags, mostly involving substance around my children and being a silly girl and imagining I had all the time in the world to decide how and when (or maybe never) to address this…we just weren’t talking. Maybe 2 months went by…he might have called…I didn’t return the call…mostly cause I didn’t want to say the things I needed to say. Everything I had to say seemed so “therapy verbiage” and I couldn’t picture it going well. So I avoided it. He lived 6 hours away at the time so it wasn’t too hard to make that happen.

At the close of October though, my family was in crisis and my father was making the trip down from Connecticut to help undo some things that were done. The young, codependent girl inside of me felt the need to at least offer a positive word or affirming nod while the family went through a hard time. I remember his voice on the message he left me, when he returned my call. With all that was going on, he sounded so happy to hear from me. He always called me his sunshine. Told me I could brighten anyones day. Maybe it was only true for him, but thats all a daughter really needs. When we finally made a connection, nothing went as planned. By the time I spoke to him he had already spoken with my mother, who he has been civil with on and off since their divorce in my teen years. That clearly didn’t go well and I got to hear all about it. Hindsight wished I had remained silent. A statue. But that blubbering, over emotive young girl had turned into a woman and I’ll be damned she was a woman who had received some therapy and if there was one thing that she knew, it was that there was a boundary being busted RIGHT NOW! I tried to calmly say,”Dad, the same way i don’t like to hear mom say terrible things about you, I also don’t like to hear you say awful things about her. She is my mother.” Well, I don’t think he wanted to hear that. Things became heated and I ended up saying everything I have ever needed to say to him. “SO HOW WAS YOUR HABIT OF GOING AWAY TO JAIL EVERY FEW YEARS NOT A MAJOR FACTOR IN THE OUTCOME OF THIS FAMILY! HOW WAS THE ABUSE, VERBAL AND PHYSICAL, NOT A FACTOR! TELL ME AGAIN HOW THE SHIT STORM THAT THIS FAMILY FACES ISNT YOUR FAULT!!” Thats the condensed, edited version. It was two days before my birthday. He told me as far as he was concerned i was no longer his daughter and that I was dead to him. I ended the conversation telling him that I loved him but couldn’t stand to listen to the lies he tells himself any longer. That was all. It was the worst phone conversation of my entire life. To add insult to injury, he died within the week.

What followed this event, aside from instant shock and trauma, was months of feeling like a hollow version of my former self. A shell, in place of what had been a breathing, thriving life force…going thru the daily motions of a life that i recognized but somehow felt removed from now. Grief. Some have known it well, I had never known it before this point and I never imagined it could carry this amount of weight. The circumstances seemed like the worst imaginable. I have had so many wonderful, heartfelt moments with my father. Why did his life have to end this way? Why so suddenly and with such a harsh last interaction? My first reaction was disbelief. In the days that followed our last conversation, I felt hopeful. I imagined that we would move past this and have a better understanding of one another and what we each needed and wanted from the relationship. Looking back I realize that sounds like the most perfect therapy session the world of psychology has ever known and it most likely wasn’t a realistic outcome. Maybe he would have lived for years more and we would have remained stubborn and mute to one another. Theres no telling. But I never would have guessed he was suffering from a blood infection that was slowly shutting parts of his body down and that even in months leading up to his death maybe he wasn’t in his right mind as this thing took over and altered every bit of his life.

Fast forward to December…nearly a month after his passing. “It’s the most wonderful time of the year!” Yea, that song…and every other Christmas song playing thru the Farmers Market could just shut the hell up for all I cared. Thankfully I did still have my vintage clothing boutique I operated 3 days a week to keep my mind from turning on itself. My children had become more of a burden than the usual source of joy they had previously been. I was so inside my head and it wasn’t anything they could begin to understand. I tried to hide when I felt the need to cry softly…or not softly. Chris became more of a roommate than a husband. Chris had had trouble respecting my father for most of their relationship…never openly disrespecting him, but as my protector I understood that Chris couldn’t respect the jeopardy that my fathers choices had always seemed to put his entire family in. Chris is a truly responsible, honorable gentleman. My gift from God. My dad was probably more like Chris’ opposite. They had a lot of beautiful moments together, throwing back a few beers, seeing eye to eye about world issues…but they also had there differences that most often remained an unspoken understanding. For whatever reason, Chris was not the person I felt like mourning with. Even his embrace became void of feeling to me. We spent the next several weeks sharing the household duties while we all suffered through the worst cold and flu season our family…or maybe any family in the history of families had ever seen. My hours at market became a much needed break. The high point of each passing week. I enjoyed my interactions with other adults. While I do struggle with some mild social anxiety (mostly when I’m around large groups of people) I can be quite a conversationalist in the one on one department. I enjoy talking to people. People’s stories have always fascinated me…and that Farmer’s Market was full of stories. I am also a strong verbal communicator (strong isn’t necessarily good) and at times, to avoid the awkwardness of the conversational silence, I’ve been known to nervously fill the air with the sound of my own voice. I’m getting better at that…being ok with those silences. But at this time in the history of Autumn…I was a bit of a mess. I probably didn’t belong anywhere near the public, much less trying to run a business. So naturally I end up finding a listening ear in a mutual friend of Chris and I who frequented market…and wait for it…he was MALE! Thus begins the most scandalous two weeks of my life. I sat at a public bar maybe 5 times with this male…all 5 times with my husbands knowledge…I drank wine and cried too much and then he would make sure I made it home safely. Looking back I realize I probably coulda just used a girlfriend who’s husband was as awesome as mine and let her out of the house once in a while to hang out. This fella became the distraction I was looking for. Morals weren’t an issue for me at this point. When people drop dead, good and bad quit making sense. There was part of me that loved that people will judge what they don’t understand. I have been with one man my whole life. I have only known him…and my four brothers with any level of closeness. I know a professional would have called my situation a brief emotional affair…that most likely could have ended in an actual affair. Ouch. Not what I was going for and while I wish for your sake that I had a spicier story to tell…i don’t. A concerned family member who we’ll just call “The Hero” became aware of the situation because I didn’t feel any level of guilt and spoke openly about it and this person used it as an opportunity to point out the error of my way and far from gently point me back in the direction of righteousness. But it felt more like I was a kid in a sand box with a bunch of sand in my eyes and someone was offering me a moist towelette…that was covered in sand. Basically I realized this person has always had a few things to say to me and they chose to use the time after the traumatic death of my father and the rocky emotional storm there afterward to say all those things. Really quite refreshing. Like a fart in an elevator. It wasn’t fair to my husband that instead of turning to him to cry with I felt like going elsewhere. But I cant say I had a copy of the rule book on hand…and if I did, I probably wasn’t going to read it. So there it is. Thats as bad as this story gets. Naturally I ruined any friendship my husband or I had with the male friend…things became so awkwardly blown out of proportion that there was no salvaging it. Those were the consequences of my actions. I regret this fully. Chris seemed to take none of this personally and was as forgiving and understanding as you could ever imagine. He knew I was dealing with things beyond what he or I understood. Though his forgiveness and acceptance was evident, i remained distant. Something about my internal makeup keeps self rejection constantly appealing. Kind of like if he wasn’t willing to punish me, I’d just punish myself. The next week at market wasn’t easy. Just pushing past it all.

Enter Donald, the elderly veteran who comes into market everyday and minus the film of dirt over his entire person and the spittle that is constantly collected at the corners of his mouth, he’s actually quite charming. He is never without cap with a feather, a tie with tie clip and a dapper vest. A complete look. He approaches my stand once per market day, fully hunched over and recites his daily speech. “Good morning Autumn. You’re looking very nice today. I wish I had my paint and easel, I would paint you. We need to take you to Enola, to modeling school. Yes, we do.”(cause I hear all the big time models are straight outta Enola?) I always banter with him, tell him I’m too old to get mixed up in that racket and he says “Never too old!” and we chuckle and he moves on. It really is the same thing…every time i see him. He has only broken character three times. Once he approached me and looked at the veins on my arm and said “You have thick blood. You need to drink more red wine.” I had no problem adhering to his advice. The second time was right after my father passed. He simply approached me and said “Autumn, when I heard that your father passed I was very sorry.” I thanked him. The third and final time that he broke free of his rehearsed and somewhat autistic performance was the week after this whole mess. I was feeling low. I didn’t want to be around humans. I certainly didn’t want to participate in the rehearsed comradery that was expected of me. Donald approaches. I force a smile. “Hi Donald.” Without any of the normal chatter he simply looks at me and states, “Your husband loves you with a great passion. Yes he does. He loves you very deeply.” It must have seemed as though I was looking straight through him when the tears began to course my cheeks. He was telling me the truth. How had I gotten so out of touch with the man that loved me enough to bear thru the torrent that was a lifetime of pain and hurt and fear and confusion and compulsive behavior and aggressive self depreciation and over emotive, over communicating all wrapped up into one female. In that moment I realized that my husband is the only man who has ever truly seen me. He has seen things that even I don’t know are there. At some of my lowest points I have envisioned Chris married to some nice church raised girl who just loves to knit and scrapbook and never raises her voice and in this vision all of his dreams have come true because she doesn’t speak up or hinder him. Then I remember that he didn’t fall in love with that kind of girl because that isn’t the kind of girl he wants. He wants ME. Wether I’m a mess or not, he loves me. And I realized that a man’s passion isn’t going to look erotic or impulsive. My husband loving me passionately and deeply looks a lot more like him doing a job he doesn’t necessarily love to provide for his family. It looks like him reading books to our children on the couch when I’m too tired to keep my eyes open any longer. His passion looks like a foot rub. It looks like his silhouette in the kitchen window while he does the dishes after supper. His passion looks like holding my hand while we drive a van full of children to go get ice cream. His passion looks like folding laundry together while we watch a show after the kids are in bed. How has it taken me 10 years to realize, to accept, that I am his passion.

The months that followed weren’t among our finest, but we learned lots.  Death forces a teaching of appreciation.  It prompts an unstoppable recognition of what can be lost…and when.  Which is right now.  It, that, her, him…could be gone.  Forever.  I think my father passing and my brief emotional affair got me thinking.  If what everyone said was true and i had let that thing run its course, I would have lost Chris.  It woudln’t have been a question of him or his forgiveness.  It would have been my own bitter spirit that rears its head and turns on me and anyone around.  My inability to forgive myself would have been our end.  My father once told me that the true tradgedy in a premature death is the cutting short of the entire process of learning from mistakes and getting to try again and experiencing getting it right.  Growing old offers a grace to us. The grace of perspective and the grace of time and even the grace of being able to make things right.  Dad, I know we would have made it right.