July 4th is Independence Day here in the United States. It is also Israeli Girl's birthday. My husband's relationship with Israeli Girl was his bottom: it was what finally caused him to admit his sexual behavior was out of control, that he was an addict. I began calling her Israeli Girl contemptuously: while not technically a girl, she was only 19 when my 30+ year old husband met her on a business trip abroad and began a several year long relationship with her. I don't feel the same contempt anymore, yet I still cannot quite bring myself to grace her with a name. Somehow, giving her a name gives her some humanness, some power, that I don't yet want her to have.

For years, Israeli Girl was one of the most worrisome splinters in my brain. I remember one year, on July 4th, Mark spent $70 of our money (I was furious when I saw the price) on a single international phone call to her, to say happy birthday. I listened to the entire call, jealously, edgily, because something seemed wrong, suspicious, off. I listened for any hint in his voice of anything beyond friendliness -- some trace of desire, seduction, attraction, deep caring, love -- but I didn't hear them, although I knew the sound of them well. And I settled back into a dissatisfied uneasiness, which persisted, until years later, everything fell apart, and made sense.

After my husband admitted his addiction, admitted that one April day he had finally hit bottom with Israeli Girl, July 4th was tainted. I imagined all of those beautiful fireworks going off to celebrate her birthday. I remembered the phone call, imagined what he must have written to her in those years e-mail messages they exchanged, and I couldn't stand to leave the house. This night four years ago, new in a black place of crushing, disbelieving pain, I cringed at each pop of a distant firework, each whistling rocket, and felt they were searing and exploding inside of me.

The next year, Mark and I were wondering aloud whether or not to go out and try to see fireworks. He was tired, and I was still angry and depressed. We both understood that subtext, although with the kids listening, we simply said to each other, "Should we go?" My son heard us talking and said, with verbal skills newly developed after a year of speech therapy, "I want to watch fireworks!" So, it was decided, and I declared it my Independence Day. I was not going to let a tyrannical past rule my present; I would not let the past cast a shadow that blotted the fireworks from the skies my children saw.

We didn't have a destination that year, we simply drove around until we saw some fireworks and parked the car by the side of the road to watch them. There is a Schoolhouse Rock song my son liked to listen to that contained a line, "Red, white and blue fireworks like diamonds in the sky..." As he gazed up into the sky, my son echoed it back, gasping, "They look like diamonds in the sky!" He was thrilled to see a smiley face in the sky, and to watch the blaze of fireworks that marked the end of the show.

As I was putting him to bed afterwards, I told him that he could go to sleep and dream about trains (which were his obsession at the time). When he said he didn't know what dreams were, I told him they were pictures in your head while you sleep. He looked thoughtful, and said, "We can go to sleep and see fireworks in the sky, and we can see that face and then lots and lots like diamonds in the sky."

See, I worried about Israeli Girl's birthday ruining the fireworks, when in fact, my son's joy, and the magic he saw in the sky, threw a light on that night that no dark memory could blot out. I wouldn't think of missing fireworks after that year.

Last year my daughter was awake and old enough to appreciate the fireworks for the first time. As she walked outside, she saw the moon, which was quite a new and exciting sight to her, since her bedtime was 7 p.m. She asked if the moon could come with us to see the fireworks, and I promised her it would. During our car ride, she looked out the car window, checking to make sure that the moon was following us to the fireworks display. When we arrived, she was thrilled to see the moon, still there, watching. She sat with her mouth open wide through the whole show and was too excited to fall asleep, even so long after her bedtime, on the way home.

She and her brother have been chattering all day about the fireworks, about sitting outside and eating cookies and having the moon there and seeing lots of them explode at the end of the show and waving our flags and singing love songs to our nation, like "America the Beautiful," which gives me goosebumps (truly) every time I hear it. My life may not always be perfect, and my country may not always be perfect, but both of us are free.

Happy Independence Day. Enjoy the fireworks.

In the dream, I was driving on a highway laid out like silver thread between my home and the nearest big city. My husband was seated next to me, smiling, and I could feel the kids safely at home, laughing with their babysitter. It was just before sunset; the day's dying rays were golden on the water and the softly swaying dry grass as we approached the bridge.

My husband looked at me, and for a split second, I lost focus. I stopped looking at the road, and the car simply drifted serenely off the bridge and started plunging down, down before I knew we were in danger. We fell like Alice down the rabbit hole, falling for so long we seemed to hang suspended in the golden air. I felt like one often does feel in an accident: as if I were seeing everything in slow motion and if only my body would move as fast as my mind, I could do something to prevent the inevitable moment looming ahead.  But the water waited unyielding below us. And I knew we were going to die at the end of that long fall. I had killed both of us in that momentary flicker of attention. My children were going to grow up without parents.  I just hoped they would be asleep when the babysitter called and called the cell phones that would ring on without answer, wondering why we were so late.

I turned to Mark to say I was sorry for killing him; sorry that he was paying the price for my inattention. And he lookedsaidthought, "We all make mistakes, sometimes very bad ones." But he didn't blame me. He held out his hand and we sat, holding hands and falling, waiting for the impact that never came, as I woke with a start. I sat up, shivering, as the images flashed on my waking mind in the cold gray dawn, and I assigned the dream the moral: "I am feeling guilty for not paying enough attention, not being present enough, for my kids."

Irrational as I know it is, I have been terrified of driving that highway ever since. The dream was so vivid, that when I enter the stretch of road leading to the bridge I can see my dream self plunging off the side. If I hit an uneven stretch of pavement and the car jolts or swerves slightly, I feel my heart racing, my body taut with anxiety. I fear that at any minute, I might lose focus, lose control and lose everything. It only takes an instant to make a mistake from which there is no recovery.

I was driving that highway today, with my kids unusually occupied with drawing in the back seat, when I started to feel numb with panic thinking about the bridge. My kids' lives depended on me. Other drivers lives depended on me. And am I really to be trusted? My hand could slip on the steering wheel. Or jerk. Or freeze. What if I have a seizure? What if I fall asleep? What if I get a brain aneurysm? What if I suddenly become diabetic right here in the car and my blood sugar becomes unstable and I pass out? What if I panic so much I black out?

Of course, the only real problem was the panic, which was stubbornly refused to respond to either rational thought, meditation techniques or faith. I eyed the traffic, wondering where it might be safe to pull off and breathe, grumbling to myself, "I so need to talk to my doctor about anxiety meds. This is ridiculous. I can't function. What is really going on here? This isn't just about a stupid dream."

And my mind, as if relieved to have finally been pressed with a direct question, brought up an image of my destination: a park that formed a green oasis in the barren concrete, steel and glass of the city. We were meeting friends there, visiting from out of town. But eight years ago, on the day he hit bottom, my husband went on a different kind of visit there: a picnic to that park with one of his... What's the word for it? Lovers seems too intimate, mistresses too urbane, and acting out partners, too sterile. In any case, they met. The picnic was the appetizer, the foreplay, the prelude, the rising anticipation. Rolling the food on their tongues, then wiping their lips, packing the remains and walking, toward her house, her bed. I can see the way his hand slipped down the small of her back as she pulled him close under a tree for a kiss. Right there in the park. For anyone to see.

We were going to drive past the street to her old house on the way to the park. We were driving on the highway Mark had traveled, secretly, back and forth, from her house to our own. Was this panic -- over this highway, over loss, over lack of control, over mistakes from which there is no recovery -- not about the dream but a twisted response to past trauma? Was the dream, perhaps, not really about quite what I thought it was either? Those thoughts washed through me like water, like crystal clear liquid truth, taking the panic and the looming shadow of future annihilation away with them, leaving me staring at an old scar, still sometimes tender to the touch.

I woke up this morning, muscles clenched like a fist and throat tight with anxiety, wanting to grab my son and never let him go. I crept to where he was sleeping and ran my fingers through his curls, reassuring myself he was there and safe. He'd actually been better than usual in this morning's version of my recurring nightmare; at least in this dream, I'd found him in the end.

I've had some variation on this nightmare — in which I lose one or both of my children — countless times. In a nightmare theme a few weeks ago, I'd happily, if absent-mindedly, voiced my assent to my 6-year-old daughter's trip to the mall with a friend of hers on Christmas day. Dream-hours later, when she wasn't home yet, I realized I didn't know the friend's name, address or phone number and there were no stores open on Christmas. She was gone, taken, and it was my fault.

Last night, my husband was the bad guy for a change instead of the usual villain: me. In my dream, he'd planned to go out to run some errands alone, but Austen begged to come, so the two of them went off together, but only Mark returned home, having forgotten he'd brought Austen with him. We rushed back to find him, with my dream mind running through the very real-life possibilities that Austen would not be able to communicate his needs and get help. We found Austen and he burst into tears mingled with a steady stream of anxious, repetitive shouts and questions with no answers, very much like what I'd expect of the real Austen under stress. Then the chime of my alarm woke me, still tight and panicky, and truly wanting to punch my husband, who was sleeping innocently beside me, totally unaware of what he'd been doing in my dream.

I realized, as time passed and I calmed down, that on top of the fear that I will lose my children, the sheer panic that they could be hurt or lost or worse — a fear any parent understands — there extends through all of these nightmares a different kind of fear. In each dream, at some point, I always think, "Oh, no. I'm not going to be able to find this child by myself. I have to ask someone — the store clerk, a police officer, a neighbor — for help. But if I tell them I lost my child, they are not going to want to help me. They are going to blame and judge me. They are going to tell me I didn't work hard enough and do well enough. They are going to tell me that it's my fault. And even if we find my child, they are going to think that my husband and I are such bad parents that they take our children away forever anyway." It's not just the realization that my child is missing that causes the nightmares to be so traumatic, it's the realization that my child is missing, that I might be blamed and that the problem is so big, I can't fix it by myself.

And I recognize that isolation and loneliness, that self—blame and guilt. I recognize those fears: The fear of asking for help. The fear that mistakes or weaknesses or imperfections will cause me to lose everything I love. The fear that I'm not working hard enough. The fear of judgment and of blame, and not just in and of themselves, but as agents of loss. I recognize in all of these the deep roots of addiction and codependency still present in my mind, gripping me when I sleep.

My subconscious has been spinning up lovely blog posts for me lately. Having held the mirror up to my own self-doubt, it decided to move on to my magical power to heal others.

In the dream, I was out at a restaurant with a group of women and a good friend who has been going through a hard time lately. In the restaurant with us was a fascinating and radiant woman sitting with her back toward me. I very much wanted to to meet her, but couldn't pay attention to her yet. My friend was sitting in a corner sobbing and I had to soothe her. The chorus of women surrounding me urged me on, "Look how badly she's hurting. You have to do something! Do something to make her feel better. Do something!" So I approached my friend who sobbed to me, "I just want to feel normal again. I don't want to feel so sad anymore." I gave her a kiss and through the magic of my caring friendship, she perked right up, forgot her recent losses and said with a smile, "Thanks! I feel so much better now!" I woke up with this feeling that I ought to have been pleased for solving the problem, but was instead ashamed for having ignored the radiant stranger.

Even before I knew we had addiction in our lives, I knew that my husband was hurt and vulnerable; that's part of what I found attractive about him. Because I knew that I was going to place the healing kiss on his fevered brow. It was going to be my divine fabulousness that was going to fill his empty ache and ensure that he'd never be unhappy or insecure. If he didn't believe he was lovable, I was going to love him harder. If he was afraid I would leave, I would prove to him how tenaciously I'd stay. If he felt lost, I was going to show him the way. I was going to keep him so enthralled with me he'd never need to look at anywhere else for a high. That would fix what ailed him, right?

Only for all I gave and as hard as I tried, I didn't possess that longed for dream power to heal him. I had the illusion for a time that I did, but when the reality of his addiction came crashing in, I saw that my single kiss wasn't ever going to fix addiction any more than it could have healed a gunshot wound. And in the process of trying to love him well enough to cure him, I was shamefully ignoring someone radiant and divine that I ought to have been seeking out instead.

Sometimes my subconscious likes to be really mysterious in its messages to me (so, why, exactly, did a frog hop on the big pink bubble gum bubble I was blowing?). Sometimes it likes to tell jokes. Sometimes it (like many a subconscious) likes to play on my fears (hm, what would those be?). And sometimes it likes to tell really obviously metaphorical stories that I can turn into blog posts about living with addiction.

My sister came to visit me in my dream. I don't have a sister, but you know dreams, so in this one, I did. I hadn't seen her for a long time and when she arrived, I was horrified. Her body was grotesquely bloated and her flushed, blotchy cheeks were distended, like the cheeks of a chipmunk hoarding nuts. I worried that the huge lumps were tumors and that her bloated body was filled with cancer. But she seemed not to notice that her appearance had changed so dramatically at all, and she sat down and chatted cheerfully with me.

And I chatted cheerfully back. After all, I couldn't tell her she looked awful. If she didn't see herself as looking terrible, I ought not to either. I should see her the way she wanted me to, through the eyes of love. Telling her she looked bad might hurt her feelings. Or scare her. Or insult her. She might get angry and leave. I had to take care of her and keep what I saw from her. And really, was it even true? Maybe I was wrong. Maybe she was perfectly fine. She certainly seemed fine. Maybe I was crazy and projecting my own hypochondria on her. Maybe I misremembered how she used to look. So I kept smiling and chatting and wondering when she would leave so that I could look at old pictures of her and confirm that she really had changed and I could google things like "bloating and distended cheeks" to see if cancer came up.

That interaction with my dream sister was like my interactions with so many of the active addicts I've been close to during my life. I'll sense something wrong, but they'll seem perfectly fine, which leaves me wondering if I'm crazy. I don't feel safe telling them what I see my truth and my reality, not theirs, for fear of hurting or angering them. I don't feel confident saying that my truth and my reality are valid. I woke up thinking, "Ok, I get it subconscious!" And that was something in itself. If I'd had that dream years ago, I would have missed the metaphor entirely. Or maybe just wondered if I was crazy to see it.

When I have nightmares, my subconscious doesn't like to get imaginative. There are no weird surrealist scenes. There are no horror movie serial killers. There are no dank and mouldering castles. It likes to stick with what it knows: my children in danger or my husband having an affair. And it depicts both of these themes with vivid, lifelike realism. So much so that I'll wake up the next morning wanting to hug my kids or punch my husband or both.

A few nights ago I dreamt that Mark and I were trying to have a conversation, and (like so many of our conversations in real life) we were continually interrupted. We moved from room to room as he uneasily looked for a space in which he could evade my questions in privacy. In bits and pieces, trying to keep my calm in front of the people who passed in and out of the rooms, I learned that he had a child outside our marriage. The mothers name was Lorena and the child, Diego.

Upon waking, my mind wavered temporarily in a transitional state where the dream, and the knowledge that it had been a dream, were both simultaneously real. I calculated when the dream child would have conceived, and was upset to find that it would have been after he began recovery, around the time I ended my own pregnancy. I fretted over what it meant that the mother and child had names. Before Mark's disclosure of sex addiction, I so often had nightmares of his infidelity that I always fear my mind discovering a hidden truth in sleep.

I lay in bed tense and angry, until the dream slowly started to slip away and I realized I was getting upset at my husband for details my mind created. But then again, that probably happens more often than I'm willing to acknowledge.

I wish my subconscious would stick to making jokes.

How is this my house?
Who furnished these ancient rooms?
How did they get here?

Sometimes I find rooms
already housing others,
unknown, in my home.

Night comes, breathing soft.
Each time, a new house, new rooms,
yet it's always mine.

What dark place is this,
the undiscovered country,
the map my mind makes?

Why hidden spaces?
Why places I know, but don't?
Why my rooms, but not?

My mind is trying
so hard to tell me something
I'm not listening.

Image credit: Photo posted on UADDit (along with other pictures of amazing Lego art!)

I grew up believing that there was a formula for building a career. Jobs were like packaged construction sets: you picked the single set you liked best, followed the instructions, laying down one piece of education or experience at a time, until you had assembled that dump truck or starship or hospital or national monument.

I had a few problems. First, I could never decide which one career to settle on to pick. I'd consider and discard one after another, even starting to put together several of the kits, then petulantly scrapping each one and starting on the next when I found it wasn't quite what I wanted. None of those boxes really fit me, yet I couldn't see beyond them.

And then there was that perfectionist in me bringing up the thorny matter of success. Once I did build a set, the work wasn't done. I couldn't, for example, just write anything: I'd have to write for publication, because that had the prestige. And I couldn't just be published: I'd have to be published in the New Yorker or write a bestseller. And I couldn't just be published in a big name way: I'd have to win a Nobel or Pulitzer Prize. There was no being satisfied. There was always another big prize off in the distance.

Earlier this year, stood in my bedroom and told my husband, with tears in my eyes, that I had come to feel this strange new sense of faith and a new satisfaction. I had a growing feeling that, through the blog, I was building my own creation. The ad money I was getting wasn't much, but it was trickling in: a penny here, a dollar there. The reader base wasn't huge, but it was growing. And I had this beautiful sense that I was, for the first time in my life, doing something that I really loved and touching other people's lives. I began to see that maybe it was possible that a career writing the kinds of things I wanted didn't have to rely on finding an agent or submitting query letters or begging publisher after publisher fighting off the despair at growing piles of rejection letters to finally get that break. Maybe I didn't need to be published in any conventional sense. Maybe this was all I needed, and it would work, if I worked at it and trusted in it.

The very next morning a woke up and found that Mary Ann had sent me a message with the subject line "Gratitude" along with a gift to tell me she was thankful for what I shared on this blog. God moment.

Now, months later, on the same day I got an e-mail from Google letting me know that they had banned me from AdSense for life, I was offered an opportunity to participate in a new writing project.* One door closed and another door opened. God moment.

Then last week I was reading ProBlogger and saw a post on how to write an ebook. "Hm," I thought, "I don't want to deal with publishing, but an ebook I could do. I get people e-mailing me all the time who are lost in the wake of discovering a partner's sex addiction, asking what to do and where to turn, just like I did. I should write a book for those partners in the first throes of coming to terms with sex addiction!"** I excitedly shared this idea with my husband, who thought it sounded fantastic. A day later, Chatti Patti posted about a dream she had in which I was selling my own books, which were insubstantial and paper thin, not like real printed books. God moment.

Now you all may read the tea leaves of my life differently, but what I see is the big flashing arrow of the universe pointing me in one direction. And I hear a voice inside me saying, "Keep doing this, honey. And what's more, do it even more. Make your own box. Build your own construction set. You are exactly where you're supposed to be right now and you're going exactly where you're supposed to be going."

I fell into a light sleep, listening to the kids alternately giggling and bickering as they got ready to leave, then slipped into a deep sleep and into a dream. In the dream, I had just received a letter from a music teacher at my son's school (which proves it's a dream. Music teachers? No Child Left Behind didn't mandate those. Next I'll dream about Siberian Tigers.)

The dream letter described my son's imaginary (but realistic) behavior in the dream music class: he had started screaming at the sound of recorders being played by elementary students during rehearsal, then he yelled at the teacher and tried to push past other kids to get out of the room when the teacher tried to hand him a chocolate chip cookie for a snack. The letter went on, in an arrogant tone (you'll just have to believe me), as the teacher ranted, indignant at my son's disruptive and rude behavior. He signed the letter, "Sincerely, Allan Holle, Music Teacher."

I read the letter and thought, "Of course my son would react that way! He's extremely sensitive to sounds. Screechy elementary recorder playing gives me a headache, for goodness sake. And he's scared to death of non-preferred foods!" I ranted to my husband about how this was going to come up in the IEP meeting, and instead of working with us to help my son and the music teacher understand each other, they were going to blame my bad parenting and punish my son.

Then I woke up, and thought, "Wow, I sure am stressed about that upcoming IEP!" Then I thought, "Why Allan Holle? Where did that name come from and why do I remember that detail now that I'm awake?"

Allan Holle. Allan Holle. A. Holle. a-hole.

Ha! My subconscious is the best! It was calling the folks at my son's school a-holes in a joke designed by me, for me. Thanks for the laugh, Subconscious!

With those elements in my head -- pregnancy, a familiar face now unrecognizable, a much wanted baby, a loving and devoted husband, car accidents, speed, death -- my mind devised a dream for me. In the dream, Missy is pregnant and dies with another high school friend in a car accident, speeding to get to a destination on time. Her husband finds the car wreck, but the bodies are so mangled and disfigured that he doesn't know her. He lost the wife that was the center of his life, the baby they were longing for, but he didn't know it yet, looking at blood and twisted metal.

I woke up in a panic. It was a sign. I shouldn't take the plane. Forget that it was a dream about someone who was not me dying in a car accident and not a plane crash, there was a blond in the car and they were going fast. It just meant I was going to die at some uncontrollable speed, rushing to get somewhere. It meant I would end up in a heap of twisted steaming metal, my body would be ripped apart and unrecognizable. (Can you tell that my rational mind does not work well after a nightmare at the time of day my brother refers to as "the butt crack of dawn?") I tried to breathe, to get back to sleep, but I couldn't. So, I got up knowing I had hit my own personal anxiety bottom.

I've been doing this addicty thing lately. I have been knowingly holding on to the anxiety about this trip, because the rush of excitement I am having about it is a high I don't want to let go of. I have been afraid of letting go of the anxiety, because I don't want to let go of the excitement. I haven't been doing yoga. I haven't been sitting in meditation. I haven't been doing these things even though I know that they will help, because I know they will help. But screw it, I'm done. The trip will be here soon enough, and it will be fabulous. If the excitement goes with the anxiety, so be it, but the anxiety must go. I'm going to yoga tonight. I am sitting in meditation. I will be present for this adventure, not high on adrenaline. I will sleep tonight, and it will be dreamless.