Untamed

I’m thirteen years old and bulimic, so I spend half my life curling my bangs and the other half eating excessively and throwing up. Curling and hurling are not an acceptable life, so on Fridays after school my mom drives me downtown to the therapist. She stays in the lobby and I walk in alone, sit down in a brown leather chair, and wait for the therapist to ask, “How are you today, Glennon?”

I smile and say, “I’m fine. How are you today?” She breathes deeply with her whole body. Then we’re quiet.

I notice a picture of a small redheaded girl on my kind, frustrated therapist’s desk. I ask who the girl is. She glances over, touches the frame, and says, “That’s my daughter.” When she turns back to me, her face is sad and soft. She says, “Glennon, you say you’re fine, but you aren’t. Your eating disorder could kill you. You know that. What you don’t know is that since you refuse to feel all of this, since you won’t join us in the land of the living, you’re half dead already.”

I am offended. My insides turn hot and they feel instantly inflated, difficult to contain. I hold my breath and clench everything.

“Well, maybe I’m trying to be fine. Maybe all I do is try to be fine. Maybe I try harder than anybody.”

She says, “Maybe you should stop trying to be fine. Maybe life isn’t fine, and maybe it’ll never be fine. Maybe fine isn’t the right goal. What if you stopped trying so hard to be fine and just…lived?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say.

I know exactly what she’s talking about. She’s talking about the Ache.

I don’t know when I first discovered the Ache, but by the time I am ten years old, it has become my constant interrupter.

When my cat, Co-Co, climbs onto the couch with me, she rubs her face against mine so softly and she purrs so gently that I’m tempted to let myself melt into her. But the Ache interrupts with: Be careful. She won’t live very long. You’ll have to bury her soon.

When my grandmother Alice whispers her evening rosary, I spy on her. She is the master of the universe, there in her rocker, controlling everything on Earth, keeping me safe. Just as I become lulled into peace by the rocking, the Ache points and says: Look at how bruised and papery the skin on her hands is. See how they shake?

When my mom leans over to kiss me good night, I catch the smell of her face lotion. I feel the soft sheets under me and the warm blanket around me, and I breathe in deeply. I rarely make it to the exhale in peace, though. The Ache paralyzes me with You know how this ends. When she goes, you will not survive.

I don’t know if the Ache is trying to protect me or terrorize me. I don’t know if it loves me or hates me, if it’s bad or good. I just know that its role is to constantly remind me of the most essential fact of life, which is: This ends. Don’t get too attached to anything. So when I get too soft, too comforted, too close to love, the Ache reminds me. It always arrives in words (she’ll die) or an image (a phone call, a funeral), and immediately, my body responds. I stiffen, hold my breath, straighten my spine, break eye contact, lean away. After that, I’m in control again. The Ache keeps me prepared, distant, safe. The Ache keeps me fine, which is another word for half dead.

It takes a lot of effort for a live human being to stay half dead. For me, it also takes a lot of food. When I discover bingeing and purging at ten, food addiction becomes a whole life I can lead that has utterly nothing to do with actual life. Bulimia keeps me busy, distant, distracted. I plan my next binge all day, and when I find a private place to start eating, my frenzy becomes a raging waterfall inside and outside me—loud, much too loud, for any interruption at all. There is no remembering, no Ache, nothing but the binge. Then, just as I’m stuffed to the point of more nothingness, the purge. Another waterfall. More noise. Nothing but noise until I am on the floor, laid out, wracked, too tired to feel or think or remember anything at all. Perfect.

Bulimia is private. I need a way to silence the Ache in public, too. That’s what booze is for. Booze overpowers the Ache. Instead of just interrupting love, it blocks it completely. No connection is real, so there is nothing risky for the Ache to bother interrupting. Over the years I learn that the bonus of booze is that it destroys all of my relationships before I can. You can’t lose people who never even found you.

By the time I turn twenty-five, I have been arrested repeatedly. I cough up blood on a regular basis. My family has distanced themselves from me for their own protection. I have no feelings left, and I am nowhere near the land of the living, which is for fools and masochists. I am no fool. I have beaten life at its own game. I have learned how to exist without living at all, and I am completely free—with nothing left to lose. I am also almost dead, but by God, I am safe. Take that, Life.

And then, that May morning, I find myself staring at that positive pregnancy test. I am certainly surprised by the pregnancy, but I’m absolutely stunned by my reaction to it. I feel inside me a deep desire to grow and birth and raise a person.

These thoughts are foreign and baffling. I stand up and stare at my puffy, dirty face in the mirror and think: Hold up. Wait, what? You, there in the mirror. You don’t even LIKE life. You don’t even find it worth trying yourself. Why, then, are you suddenly desperate to bestow life upon another being as though it’s some kind of gift?

The only answer I have is: Because I love it already. I want life for this being because I love this being. Why don’t I want life for myself, then? I want to be a being that I love, too.

The Ache sweeps in with a ferocity. Danger! Danger! Don’t be ridiculous! It becomes difficult to breathe. Yet there in that bathroom—dirty, sick, broken, aching, gasping—I still want to become a mother. That is how I learn that there is something deeper and truer and more powerful inside me than the Ache. Because the deeper thing wins. The deeper thing is my desire to become a mother. This is what I want more than I want to stay safe: I want to be this being’s mother.

I decide, right there on the floor, to get sober and reenter the land of the living. I suspect that the courage I muster up to make this decision is due, in large part, to the fact that I’m still wasted from the night before. I stand up and wobble out of the bathroom and into life.

Life is exactly as I remembered it: just the fucking worst.

While I attempt to both become a human and grow a human at the exact same ridiculous time, I am also teaching third grade. By noon each day, I am dizzy with several sicknesses at once: morning sickness, withdrawal sickness, and the sickness of living without a daily escape plan. Each day at noon, I walk my class the long way to lunch so I can peek into my friend Josie’s classroom and see the sign hung above her window, which says in big black block letters: WE CAN DO HARD THINGS.

“We can do hard things” becomes my hourly life mantra. It is my affirmation that living life on life’s own absurd terms is hard. It isn’t hard because I’m weak or flawed or because I made a wrong turn somewhere, it is hard because life is just hard for humans and I am a human who is finally doing life right. “We can do hard things” insists that I can, and should, stay in the hard because there is some kind of reward for staying. I don’t know what the reward is yet, but it feels true that there would be one, and I want to find out what it is. I am especially comforted by the We part. I don’t know who the We is; I just need to believe that there is a We somewhere, either helping me through my hard things or doing their own hard things while I do mine.

This is how I survive early sobriety, which turns out to be one long Return of the Ache. I say to myself every few minutes: This is hard. We can do hard things. And then I do them.

Fast-forward ten years. I have three children, a husband, a house, and a big career as a writer. I am not just a sober, upstanding citizen, I am kind of fancy, honestly. I am, by all accounts, humaning successfully. At a book signing during that time, a reporter approaches my father, points toward the long line of people waiting to meet me, and says, “You must be so proud of your daughter.” My father looks at the reporter and says, “Honestly, we’re just happy she’s not in jail.” We are all so happy I’m not in jail.

One morning, I am in my closet, getting dressed, when my phone rings. I answer. It’s my sister. She is speaking slowly and deliberately because she is between contractions. She says, “It’s time, Sissy. The baby’s coming. Can you fly to Virginia now?”

I say, “Yes, I can. I will come! I will be there soon!” Then I hang up and stare at a large stack of jeans on my shelf. I am unsure of what to do next. During the past decade I have learned how to do many hard things, but I still don’t know how to do easy things, like book a flight. My sister usually does easy things for me. I think and think and decide that it is perhaps a less-than-ideal time to call her back and ask if she’s aware of any good airline deals. I think some more and begin to wonder if anyone else’s sister might be available to help me. Then the phone rings again. This time it’s my mom. Her voice is slow and deliberate, too. She says, “Honey. You need to come to Ohio right away. It’s time to say good-bye to Grandma.”

I say nothing.

She says, “Honey? Are you there? Are you okay?”

How are you today, Glennon?

I’m am still in my closet, staring at my jeans. That’s what I remember thinking first: I have a lot of jeans.

Then the Ache becomes real and knocks on my door. My grandma Alice is dying. I am being called to fly toward the dying.

How are you today, Glennon?

I do not say, “I’m fine, Mom.”

I say, “I’m not okay, but I am coming. I love you.”

I hang up, walk to my computer, and google “how to buy plane tickets.” I accidentally buy three tickets, but I am still proud of myself. I walk back into my closet and begin to pack. I am both packing and watching myself pack, and my watching self is saying: Wow. Look at you. You are doing it. You look like a grown-up. Don’t stop, don’t think, just keep moving. We can do hard things.

Surprisingly, now that the Ache has transformed from idea to reality, I feel relatively steady. Dealing with the dropped shoe is less paralyzing, apparently, than waiting for that shoe to drop.

I call my sister and tell her I have to go to Ohio first. She already knows. My mom picks me up at the Cleveland airport and drives me to the retirement home. We are quiet and soft with each other. No one says she’s fine. We arrive and walk through the loud lobby, then through the antiseptic-smelling hallway and into my grandmother’s warm, dark, Catholic room. I pass her motorized wheelchair and notice the gray duct tape covering the “high-speed” button, which she lost her right to use when her hallway velocity began scaring the other residents. I sit down in the chair next to my grandmother’s bed. I touch the Mary statue on her bedside table, then the deep blue glass rosary beads draped over Mary’s hands. I peek behind the table and see a small calendar hung there, the theme of which is hot priests. Each month’s priest wears a full vestment and a smoldering smile. This calendar is a fund-raiser for something or other. Charity has always been important to my grandmother. My mother stands several feet behind me, giving my grandmother and me time and space.

I have never in my life felt the Ache more deeply than I do in that moment, as my mother stands behind me, watching me touch each of her mother’s things, knowing exactly which memory I am recalling with each lingering touch. Knowing that her daughter is preparing to say good-bye to her mother and that her mother is preparing to say good-bye to her daughter.

My grandmother reaches over, rests her hand on mine, and looks at me deeply.

This is when the Ache becomes too powerful to resist. I am out of practice. I don’t stiffen. I don’t hold my breath. I don’t break eye contact. I unclench and let it take me.

First it takes me to the thought that one day, not long from now, these roles will shift. I will be in my mother’s place, watching my daughter say good-bye to my mother. Then, not too long from then, it will be my daughter, watching her daughter say good-bye to me. I think these thoughts. I see these visions. I feel them, too. They are hard and deep.

The Ache continues to take me with it, and now I am somewhere else. I am in the Ache. I am in the One Big Ache of lovepainbeautytendernesslonginggoodbye and I am here with my grandmother and my mother, and suddenly I understand that I am here with everyone else, too. Somehow I am here with everyone who has ever lived and ever loved and ever lost. I have entered the place I thought was death, and it has turned out to be life itself. I entered this Ache alone, but inside it I have found everyone. In surrendering to the Ache of loneliness I have discovered un-loneliness. Right here, inside the Ache, with everyone who has ever welcomed a child or held the hand of a dying grandmother or said good-bye to a great love. I am here, with all of them. Here is the “We” that I recognized in Josie’s sign. Inside the Ache is the “We.” We can do hard things, like be alive and love deep and lose it all, because we do these hard things alongside everyone who has ever walked the Earth with her eyes, arms, and heart wide open.

The Ache is not a flaw. The Ache is our meeting place. It’s the clubhouse of the brave. All the lovers are there. It is where you go alone to meet the world. The Ache is love.

The Ache was never warning me: This ends, so leave. She was saying: This ends, so stay.

I stayed. I held my grandmother Alice Flaherty’s paper hands. I touched the wedding rings she still wore twenty-six years after my grandfather’s death. “I love you, honey,” she said. “I love you too, Grandma,” I said. “Take care of that baby for me,” she said.

That was it. I did not say anything remarkable at all. It turns out that a lot of good-bye is done in the touching of things: rosaries, hands, memories, love. I kissed my grandmother, felt her warm, soft forehead with my lips. Then I stood up and walked out of the room. My mother followed me. She shut the door behind us, and we stood in the hallway and held each other and shook. We had taken a great journey together, to the place where brave people go, and it had changed us.

My mom drove me back to the airport. I boarded another plane to Virginia. My dad picked me up, and we drove to the birthing center. I walked into my sister’s room, and she looked over at me from her bed. Then she looked down at the bundle in her arms and up at me again. She said, “Sister, meet your niece, Alice Flaherty.”

I took baby Alice into my arms, and we sat down in the rocking chair next to my sister’s bed. First I touched Alice Flaherty’s hands. Purple and papery. Next I noticed her gray-blue eyes, which stared right into mine. They looked like the eyes of the master of the universe. They said to me: Hello. Here I am. Life goes on.

Since I got sober, I have never been fine again, not for a single moment. I have been exhausted and terrified and angry. I have been overwhelmed and underwhelmed and debilitatingly depressed and anxious. I have been amazed and awed and delighted and overjoyed to bursting. I have been reminded, constantly, by the Ache: This will pass; stay close.

I have been alive.