So, lately I've been reading some Pema Chodron, and some of her friends and co-authors, and for the first time in my life -- all due to their knack for translating these things in the Western terms, and describing the inner furniture of my mind -- I began to understand what I'm supposed to do when I sit down and meditate. And why I should.

Now, I don't mean understand on any deep and abiding level. I mean in any basic way -- at all. I've always thought I "should" meditate, and sometimes I'd try it. I'd sit down, maybe on a pillow, maybe light a candle, and try to concentrate. I'd sit, and "focus" for a while, and my mind would run rampant, and then finally, the timer would go off, and I'd feel a little smug because I did it. And also a little stupid, because I knew I had no clue what I was doing.

Then, I read Chodron, and some of one of her colleages in a book called "How to Turn Your Mind into an Ally," or something close to that. And it explained in the clearest of terms that my mind was an untrained horse, which I had no control over. I could relate to that, because once I actually had an untrained horse, and it did take the bit in its teeth and run like hell in the worst possible places, and I never did get the upper hand. The horse won the battles and the war.

So this book taught me that my mind was the same, and that my mission was to tame the horse. And the way to start doing that was to sit, and stay. It explained how the mind flickers then sets on things like a fly, from this to that and this to that. To the point that it's not really accurate to say that we've spent time thinking about anything in particular. The mind rambles. So the goal is to train the fly to sit on the breath, and stay there. And if you can accomplish that, you may begin to meditate.

Most people also suggest you begin a meditation journal. I guess maybe the reason why is that meditation is really hard, and really humbling, and discouraging. I mean, I've given it a serious effort for five days here, and I don't think I've learned much. I don't control my mind. And if I'm at all tired, which I usually am, I slide off into this sloppy dream state where my mind plays movies for no particular reason, and I get caught in the movies, and forget about my breath. If I try to meditate for 10 minutes, I'll spend the last five slipping around in that sloppy dream state, unable to come back or get a grip.

Frustrating. But maybe if I keep going, it'll get better.

The bright coin of the moon
surprises the black water
as we ride by, lightless,
unprepared for whatever longing
kept us on the road even after
the ducks skidded into the marshes,
complaining,
and the beaver splashed off the bank
like a show girl, then patiently pulled the threads
of water to the other side.

Chris is on spring vacation, which means I write a lot less.

Things have been really topsy-turvy, both on the work and home fronts. Tough, really. On the work front, I made $100 mistake today and upset a partner (a partner, however, who I sent thousands of dollars of business to). I've spent thousands of dollars on ad buys, I'm spending about a thousand more on a decent shopping cart and all the toys that go with it, and my whole goal is to make a ridiculous amount of money over the summer so that I can have my house worked on -- an actual office built, actually. I'd like to have pretty things in my house by summer's end, and that means making bank. Installing a complicated shopping cart, installing an SSL certificate, getting a merchant account and a payment gateway -- frustrating. But probably the right direction.

On the home front -- I can't really even begin to describe things, except in a long therapy session maybe. Things have been very tough here too. Tough with Chris, as I change and my perceptions change. (Plus, those weeks he stays home and I work are always tough. Hoo boy, summer vacation.) I find myself attempting to tear down some walls, and in the process, I'm afraid of finding that Chris really isn't there on the other side. And sometimes he seems not to be, but my mind is a hall of mirrors when it comes to things like that.

I've been reading my 14 year old diary. It's pretentious. It's also familiar, and extremely predictive. I seem to have formed some so-called "core beliefs" during the brief but intense time I was writing this diary. It was a damn weird year of my life. I had a freaky dream that predicted my remaining high school and college years to a tee. I could see where I was going, and it scared me.

One of the things I realized, and said, was that it wouldn't have hurt me at all if my mother, father and brother were to just cease to exist. I could care less if they died, I wrote. And I think this was very true. Living in my family was something you survived as best you could. I didn't survive very well at all. At the same time I realized and wrote that the sudden death of my entire family in a car crash would hardly affect me, I decided that also meant I was a monster. A psychopath. And ever since, I have felt like a horrible monster.

When people disagree with something I did, I assumed it was because I was monstrous. When people seemed okay with me, I assumed it was because they weren't very observant. When the various people in my life failed to take on the role of fixing my fatherlessness or motherlessness, I assumed it was because they also thought it was a monster. Occasionally, especially in my late high school years (maybe my counselor told? The one I was always asking for suggestions about how to move out of my house?) someone would be my surrogate parent. The Newspaper teacher, for example, who somehow figured out I was completely alone and took me mountain climbing, and to journalism conferences.

Basically, if you took the premise that I believed I was a horrible monster getting through life by trying to hide it, you could pretty much predict how my life and relationships would go, and the things I did to prove I wasn't a monster, and also to prove I was.

What Chris worries about: money. Ex-wives.

What I worry about: well, it varies from week to week.

This week it's food issues. I have a long history of them. We had moved halfway through my junior year, my never-strong family began falling apart in earnest, my father left for another state, and I was trapped deep in the heart of miles of suburbia for the first time in my life. Before this, I'd been surrounded by wilderness -- literally -- and I covered miles on an average day, but now I felt there was nowhere to go, at least after a few halfhearted attempts to jog down the sidewalks of the ugly strange neighborhoods I lived in now.

I began to put on a little weight, but I couldn't do that, so soon I became a real bulimic. My problem with actually binging in sticking my finger down my throat eased a bit after I left home for college, though it took about a year to start tapering off. After that my weight was pretty stable, except it began to climb during my truly awful first marriage of 10 years, and I forced it off again. Then, when I divorced, I went through detox and also some fasting and probably lost about 20 pounds.

The whole time I would have told you I had food under control now -- I binged and purged once year at most -- but that wasn't true. What was true was that I was managing my bulimia with anorexia. I thought about food far more than the average person. I thought about food when I was stressed. I thought about food when I wanted to become numb. I thought about food when I was in danger of being vulnerable within a relationship. But I didn't weigh a ton because I was also extremely good self-denial, something my father taught me. I felt bad about enjoying food. I felt bad about eating breakfast. I felt bad about being seen buying something that tasted good at the store.

More recently, I decided that if I were going to somehow stop letting food dominate all my thoughts, I needed to let the anorexia part unravel. Which meant I might start gaining weight again. Which is, in fact, happening. And for someone like me, that's really scary.

I have a therapy session tomorrow, and I dread it and look forward to it at the same time. My business mojo has been almost dead in the water since my mother-in-law died. But I see a little more about how I structure my day with activity after activity after activity, so I'm never stuck just being. And as for food -- well, food has always been my great comforter. So much of my life has felt like being lost in gravity-less, lightless deep space. And for me, each and every meal has been a marker that said, here is a little outpost of comfort. Here is a full belly to tell you, if you should die in the next few minutes, that there was something warm in your life.

Not only does food give me this little proof against the total meaningless of my life if I should die, it's like a vaccination that ensures me against disappointing relations with the people in my life. They may give me nothing, I think, but food will get me by. The problem, of course, is that I no longer live with the kind of people who will give me nothing. And ironically enough, in that way that always turns up in therapy, my using food as a crutch to make my life bearable in fact keeps away the real people who are standing there wanting to be part of it. In other words, it keeps me hungry, and now it's making me fat on top of it, which I hate.

So I'm spending these days sinking. Sinking isn't bad -- sometimes it's how I feel when I let go of something that needs letting go. But it feels bad. It feels dark and formless and directionless, like those early years in a loveless family, and I literally feel like I'm in a slow freefall all day long. As for work, I could barely care less. And this morning I had a long and incredibly detailed dream about being dead. It was spring. There was a learning curve involved. There were some dead children who needed some cheering up. I had to learn how to walk over the mud and not sink, because it was no longer necessary to sink, being dead. I was awkward at it. I was seen by a kind woman tending a memorial garden for people like me. Other people sensed me; one angry man wanted to exorcise me; most people didn't see me at all.

I discovered one way to have a PR 7 blog that's capable of supporting an entire family today. Look like a supermodel, write like an angel, take photos of your photogenic mutt everyday, have a wild and crazy history in LA, and be so naturally amusing that your posts about your baby daughter's bassinet sheets take on an epic quality.

Back to real life. In my DIY fervor, I slapped a bunch of primer over these downstairs shelves my stepdaughters have been using as a giant dollhouse. Unfortunately, I failed to notice that the primer was oil-based, something that made itself pretty clear when I tried to wring the roller clean with a little soap and running water and ended up gloving in my hands in insoluble oil paint. Sadly for me, we had no "mineral spirits" in the house, although I was able to rub off a bit of the paint with vaseline. Not the smell, though. Lucky for Chris. Hope my wedding ring somehow makes it.

The fun part about marriage is that eventually, all the things that made dating such a wonderful escape -- the new sex, the feeling that someone has finally gotten you and can never misunderstand, the feeling that someone in the world is literally waiting by the phone for you to call -- totally disappears after marriage, and what's left is what you had before ... you.

You have all the same fears, the same selfishness, the same secrets you might not admit even to yourself, the same prejudices, the same tendency to reduce other people to black and white, the same abilities to misconstrue even your spouse's choices as ones intended to be hostile toward you. You're left with yourself, but your spouse is a better mirror than anyone else.

Friends and acquaintances can be fooled, but even the most high-in-the-sky husband or wife eventually comes down to earth, and knows who you are. And you betray them, because you're human -- not necessarily with infidelity, or even any malice, but because of your weakness or self-absorption. And when you do, you have to earn forgiveness, but all the time your spouse knows who you are and the places you could go on a bad day. 

Having this type of mirror held up to yourself is tough. And I think it's no wonder that now the divorce doesn't necessarily lead to a lifetime of social stigma, that people trade out these relentless, all-seeing mirrors before too many years go by for someone new and fresh who doesn't necessarily see who they are, right away. I can see how that would be a big break, a feeling of infinite possibility (and I've only been married for a year). 

Still, I'm grateful for what marriage has to offer me in terms of seeing who I really am. I'm forced to either grow as a person, or hurt my husband repeatedly by telling him he's something much smaller and colder than he really is, out of my own fear or ignorance. It's a tough choice.

It's always a trip when my brain starts reprogramming itself, because the dreams get crazy... and exhausting. Not bad, just tiring, so that by 5 a.m. or so it's easier to wake up and just wait until I get tired enough to really conk out. Last night the dreams were about being in a small clear pod with a few other women, tumbling out the back of a pickup truck at high elevation, and plummeting far, far down to the ground while I screamed, "God protect us! God protect us!" right before the others informed me that we'd already hit the ground.

And then, the one about being in the same pod, rolling down a conveyor belt in a dark tunnel toward a sign that said, "RADIATION." And I dug my way out of the pod with my fingernails and press the alarm button to make the conveyor belt stop, again and again... which it did...

That sort of thing.

This all started when my mother-in-law died, on February 21, I think. It started off a long chain of processes which forced me to compare how people in my family died. They died bitter and alone, and scared, and without fanfare or any loving ceremonies -- unlike my mother-in-law.

Before that I had literally been praying for my compulsion to work on my business to be lifted somewhat, because I felt imprisoned. I felt like a horrible taskmaster. Not only did I work all day long, I worked all night long and on weekends, too. This was all accompanied by the horrible feeling that if I stopped even for a minute, my competitors would overtake me.

Then my mother-in-law died, and we were there for over a week (it was a full Catholic funeral), and when I came back everything was topsy-turvy.

Right now, I'm taking a break from work. I haven't seriously worked for going on two weeks now. My excuse, when I bother to have one, is that I'm doing taxes, which is true, and laborious. But that's not really it. I'm just making space for my brain to rewire itself, which is hard to do what I'm constantly scurrying after the next project like some robotic gerbil with no end to the hamster wheel in sight.

Instead, I sit at my computer, or on the couch with a book, or outside with an edging spade in my hand, and I ask myself over and over, "What do I want to do? What do I want to do?"

There's a pleasure with asking that's there no matter how often I do it. And this too makes it hard to go to bed. It's easier to sleep without that nagging sense of possibility and opportunity hanging around the hours.

Filling out the "interest" section of the profile seems kind of revealing. It's like being a pre-teen again, taking those little quizzes in magazines, and feeling like you learned something. Oh, so I am the kind of person that likes John Lennon, wants to have a certain kind of wedding (cheap), is childless but wishes she weren't, comes from a dysfunctional family, benefits from a lot of good therapy. I am the kind of person who thinks marriage is hard. Not surprising.

I go to very expensive therapy, usually about every two weeks. I say "very expensive" with pride because I found the first therapist who was ever able to help me (and here I am, almost 37 years old) and I still can hardly believe that I'm better than I was.

My first marriage was very damaging; 10 long years of one Dark Night of the Soul after another. I chose a man who would dump me on the roadside without a thought (and did), and took on armies full of problems that were his, and tried to solve them, at great cost. In other words, the classic codependent. In all fairness I didn't love him, although after awhile I convinced myself otherwise. We married for legal reasons, a nasty custody case, and for that reason I consider my current husband my first.

My current husband, Chris, is everything I'm not. I'm an oldest child, and he's the baby of the family. Although it's been said before, I just came across an article pointing out that these kinds of marriages have a lot to offer, but can also drive you crazy. I am a nagging, critical perfectionist. He is terrible with money, cars and yard work, and barely knows how to change a lightbulb. He's also insanely funny, creative, loyal, loving and a terrific father to his three daughters.

He's made so many poor financial decisions that I pay all our living expenses, save some of the food, and his car and gas. Having a child together is out of the question. I grew up without money and refuse to put a child through that. If we had a child I'd be worse off than a single parent, because there'd be no one else to give of their time or money, however inconsistently. That sucks, but life doesn't always serve up exactly what you want.

I grew up in a cold family, and inherited a lot of compulsions about doing, instead of being. Sometimes I measure my marriage by a "doing" yardstick, and judge it a failure. I have strong feelings about financial contributions when it comes to marriage. I remember writing a bitter essay in high school about people who were parasites in their marriage, because they didn't contribute financially. I was determined not to be one, and I certainly never planned to marry one.

My ex was pretty good at bringing home the bacon when he worked, which was most of the time. I worked hard too but may a lot less money. By my 'doing' POV, I was the parasite, but the marriage was good. By the being POV, my ex was incapable of caring for me in any way, and my efforts to bring in money were equally valid, not to mention I was attempting to parent his three kids singlehandedly.

Sometimes I look at my current marriage and just blanche. We can't have a kid, but I have to deal with three stepkids (who, by the way, are total sweethearts). Chris doesn't even pay for the utilities. What's worse, he soaks me here and there, borrowing money and never paying it back. He can't pay it back because he's too busy bouncing checks. Little repairs around the house? I do them, or I pay for them. Yardwork? Occasionally there's a nice surprise in store, and he's pretty good about sharing the mowing, but the lion's share falls to me for sure.

So from one POV this marriage is a miserable failure. His last ex-wife thought so too. She left Chris for a very wealthy man when their child was about a year old. They now live in a looming mcMansion where she raises one daughter who lives like a princess. This little girl's college was completely paid for at age five by a doting grandfather. She'll enjoy everything life has to offer, and of course, Chris pays child support on top of it. I'm jealous of what this woman has. I would kill to have the beautiful daughter in the giant house who eagerly looks forward to having it all, and knows nothing about getting by or cutting corners.

Chris and I buy our clothes at the thrift store. Right now, my business makes pretty good money, but with me paying all our expenses and shelling out for self-employment tax on top, there isn't much left over. It's stressful. 

And yet I know that if I got the cancer today and my hair fell out and I became a walking bag of skin and bones, Chris would walk with me all the way. Because he really, truly loves me, and he's the first person to do so.