A few months ago, Mark and I took the kids to a "sensory friendly" movie showing.  Autistic individuals, and others with sensory processing difficulties, can find a typical movie going experience overwhelming.  Movies are loud.  Theaters are dark and often crowded.  The screen is huge and the images on it are flickering and fast paced.  There are previews and commercials before the show that switch rapidly from one theme to another, while we wait impatiently for what we actually came to see.  Then when the movie does start, its story and situations are designed to evoke strong emotional responses: to scare or thrill or amaze us.  And did I mention they're LOUD?

Most of us go to the movies to be a little overwhelmed.  But for some people, all of that can be too much.  So, at sensory friendly showings, there are no previews.  The lights are dim, but the theater is not dark.  And the sound is turned down.  And not only that, it's ok to sing or talk or to get up and walk around, dance or jump if it all gets to be too much anyway.

At the showing we went to, some kids got up and paced the aisles.  Some rocked in their seats.  Some grunted or chirped.  My son commented on the movie at full voice.  (Whispering is only for secrets.)  And we all had a fun day out doing something different while nobody stared.  Nobody glared.  Nobody shifted uncomfortably in their seats and made little "hem" noises in their throats.  The air didn't buzz with electric hostility.  And nobody had to worry that, at any moment, it might.

I don't know about the other parents in that theater, but I felt like I'd been able to put down a hundred pound weight.  The kids and young adults in that theater could all be themselves, and we all understood.  No one said anything or did anything, but there was a palpable sense of acceptance in the air.  It hung there, invisible but enveloping, like the drowsy smell of honeysuckle on a warm afternoon.  What a relief.  Which made me realize just how guarded I am and how much weight, how much fear and tension and worry, I carry every day.

This past weekend, I went to a convention for my 12 Step group.  Hundreds of sex addicts and their partners or family members gathered in hotel conference rooms and ballrooms.  There were meetings and workshops and outings.  There were speakers who shared their experience, strength and hope.  At each banquet iced tea was served instead of alcohol.  No one gossiped about the latest infidelity scandal in the media.  People openly shared their pain and their weaknesses and their gratitude.  And all weekend long, I had nothing to do but connect with my Higher Power in a group of people who was supporting me in doing just that.  All weekend long, I felt I had nothing to worry about and nothing to fear.

Again that love and acceptance enveloped me.  Again that hundred pound weight dropped off my shoulders. Again the relief washed over me.  And again I realized just how guarded I am and how much weight, how much fear and tension and worry, I carry every day.

On the last day of the convention, I wept with gratitude for the gift of having been there.  (If you were one of the lovely ladies sitting around a hotel banquet table with me on Monday morning at breakfast, yes, that was me crying and smiling at you all crazy.) We were asked on that last day if we had picked up any burdens that we wanted to leave behind, and I couldn't think of any.  All I could think was that I needed to try not to reshoulder the burdens I'd set down when I entered.

For the past year and a half, I have been a regular contributor at the recovery website The Second Road. I learned today that The Second Road will cease operations this month. The content will remain available but unfortunately the site will not be regularly maintained. I am grateful to The Second Road for introducing me to many wonderful people and allowing me to share my journey more widely than through my blog alone, and tonight I drink a nice sober toast (of sparkling apple cider) to all the folks over there.

While I'm saddened, I'm also excited to spend some time right here, tinkering around behind the scenes, maybe answering some of those (ahem) year-old messages piled up in my inbox and of course, writing.

I had a dream last night that I was in a temple and one wall was a curio cabinet filled with tiny statues. I was in a group of people and as we filed past the cabinet, we were each supposed to choose a figure to serve as our spiritual guide and protector. I choose a figure seated in meditation, carved from purple stone. It sat above a small white label with black type that read: "Ananda." When I left the temple, I found I had forgotten to take the figure with me, and I felt lost, until I remembered that in choosing it, it was with me always. And what do you know? Today turned out to be (like every day) a day of losing and finding, of forgetting and remembering. This old room of mine is still here, open like a flower, and I'm ready for whatever the universe has in store for me next.

"I don't want to get up and I don't want to go to school!" my daughter Janie yelled when she heard me chime "Time to get up!" this morning.  ("Well, maybe tonight you will go to sleep on time so you won't be tired tomorrow," I found myself muttering, then added mentally, "And I won't either.")

It was a battle to get Janie's clothes on and a battle to get her out the door.  At the time we ought to be leaving the house, she was clothed, but still hadn't eaten breakfast.  ("I don't want to eat, because I don't want to go to school!")  I weighed the odds and decided just to give up on trying to make the bus and drive her today.  So I plopped her in the back of the car with a piece of toast and we headed off to school, where she managed to run in just in time (and in a considerably better mood after having grudgingly eaten the toast in the car).

On my drive home, a little bird darted out from the side of the road and began to take flight just as I drove past.  There was no time for it or for me to react and it hit my front bumper with a sickening thud.  I stopped and watched, wondering "What should I do?" as it thrashed for just a moment and then lay still before I had time to answer my own question.

On any other day, that bird could have flown low over the street and my car would not have been there to hit it.  If I had decided to try to have Janie catch the bus today (which she might have, though it would have been close), my car would not have been there to hit it.  If Mark had gotten Janie to bed earlier while I was out last night or if I had not gone out and put her to bed myself, maybe she would not have been so cranky this morning and I wouldn't have been on the road.  Or maybe the car behind me would have startled the bird and hit it instead if I hadn't been there.  My little decisions — my small, seemingly random, actions — affect so many other things, but I don't always know how and why.

Last night, while Mark was trying to wrangle Janie in to bed, I was attending a talk by a Zen Buddhist who said, "Things are.  There is a reason that they are.  But we do not know the reason, only that they are and that there is a reason."  There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow.  I want to know what it is, but it's enough to know that it is.

On Thanksgiving morning, I needed to run out to the grocery store for a few last minute items, and if the parking lot of my local store was any indication, I was far from the only one.  As I weaved my way slowly through the traffic at the front of the store looking for an available space, I noticed a man standing in front of the store holding a hand-lettered cardboard sign bearing the words, "Please help."  I thought about the family I had at home, the friends we would be getting together with later that day and the feast of delicious food awaiting us all, and I decided I'd pick up dinner for the man from the deli counter in the store.

The store was running a Thanksgiving special, so I was able to get a plate of turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, stuffing, spinach and macaroni and cheese.  I added a piece of pumpkin cake (because, really, what's Thanksgiving without dessert?), grabbed napkins and utensils and walked outside to hand the bag of food to the man with the sign.

"Thank you so much," he said, "But I imagine it's turkey?  I don't have all my teeth, so I can't eat turkey."

"Well, yes, there's turkey," I said, "But I also got mashed potatoes and a few other things you should be able to eat. Please take it anyway."

"Thank you.  God bless you," he said.

"God bless you," I said.  (Wow.  I said that?  And meant it?  Crazy recovery.)

As I walked back to my car, I thought about how I didn't get the perfect meal for him, but how I got something that was good enough.  He may not have been able to chew the turkey, but the plate had other nourishing foods he could eat.  God was providing for him through me.  Then I thought about the times I have not gotten exactly what it is that I want, yet God provided for me too.  And I drove home feeling shaky and flushed with gratitude.

Spiritual inspiration can come from the oddest bits of serendipity.  I was at a talk a few months ago by a Zen Buddhist who talked about making each moment sacred, about how we could light incense before doing the dishes and make the washing of each dish a meditation and a part of our practice.  That's a nice goal.  I like that image.  Instead, every day I engage in the totally unspiritual practice of washing dishes while playing yesterday's episode of the Colbert Report on my laptop: sometimes watching, sometimes listening, sometimes popping over to my e-mail.  And it turns out, that led me, well, maybe to the same place anyway.

A few months ago, Colbert's guest was AJ Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible.  The premise of the book sounded like a take on the humorous e-mail that circulates periodically mocking Biblical literalists for calling homosexuality an abomination while ignoring passages that condone things like slavery and animal sacrifice.  It sounded interesting, but because my hands were wet and covered with dish soap, I didn't jump right over to Amazon to buy it.  And then, I'll admit, I forgot about it.  Until a few weeks later, when my husband and I were out on a date night and decided to use our last few minutes of babysitter coverage to browse in a bookstore, where I noticed the book and decided to buy it after page one made me laugh out loud.

I loved it. It was much more than a take on a joke e-mail. It was spiritual and funny, reverent and irreverent.  It reminded me in many ways of my own spiritual journey.  (And what's not to love there?)  It even (unknowingly) contained some commentary on what recovering sex addicts face in our culture (but more on that tomorrow).  The bit that inspired me was the author's relationship to the Sabbath.  At first, leaving work aside for a day and resting is an anxiety producing chore for Jacobs, who can't make it through the first evening without checking his e-mail.  But it gradually becomes his favorite day, the one around which the rest of the week revolves.

I thought about my own tendency toward constant work: how hard I push myself, how difficult it is for me to make time for rest and how overwhelmed with guilt and fear I become whenever I am not being "productive."  I thought about how freeing it had been when my computer was in for repairs recently, and I couldn't do some of my work.  And I thought the idea of a Sabbath, a day of rest devoted to spirituality, might be good for me.

I don't formally belong to any organized religion, so I can choose any day for my Sabbath and honor it in any way that works for me.  So I've been thinking about what it would look like to spend one day a week dedicated to my spiritual life and wondering how I can make it happen.  I don't have it all figured out yet, and I don't need to, but what I do know is that I've decided I'd like to make it part of my spiritual journey to find out.  And I suspect that will mean that, at least one day a week, I will turn off the Colbert Report and light some incense when I do the dishes.

I'm pretty certain that everyone who passed my daughter Janie's elementary school at dismissal time a few weeks ago now knows me by sight. Yep, I'm that woman whose daughter threw a tantrum so gigantic and so spectacular that it took us over a quarter of an hour just to move to the front of the school and strangers felt moved to ask if she needed medical attention. I'm the woman who stood there for more than a half an hour next to a six-year-old girl who was sprawled on the sidewalk, as people passed by with nervous glances asking if everything was ok.

Yes, everything is ok. First grade is just hard, and tiring, and this has caused our mother/daughter relationship to devolve into a hostage situation. The hostage being me. Her demands are: 1) a juice box right now, 2) that I carry her backpack, 3) that I carry her, 4) ice cream upon arrival home. Otherwise she is not moving, nuh-uh, no way; she's going to sit here and cry until it gets dark and then sleep on the sidewalk. (This is her actual plan.) My position is that I do not negotiate with terrorists, I do not have a juice box anyway, I have neither the desire nor the ability to carry a six-year-old anymore, and I'm not rewarding a hissy fit with ice cream. As you can imagine, this produced a standoff.

Now I know that some of you are thinking, "Well, make her move! You're the mom! You're the boss! Demand it!" And believe me, that's what I was telling myself. I'm the mom! I'm the boss! She ought to do what I say! She ought to be enticed with the (non-ice cream) snack that awaits her at home, and she ought to be mortally fearful of the consequences of her behavior. Yet she didn't care at all. Have you ever seen a donkey just refuse to move? You can yell at it and beat it and push it and drag it and still it stands there stubbornly. I had a little donkey and had neither a stick big enough nor a carrot tasty enough to induce movement.

So there we stood, until we were each able to bend just enough to reach a mutually agreeable settlement: I would not carry her but would let her lean on me, and I would carry her backpack, but in return she would have to downgrade for a week to her preschool backpack which was smaller, lighter and much less cool looking. So, an hour later than usual, we staggered through the front door looking precisely as if we'd just fought a war: me, sweaty and disheveled and Janie with debris clinging to her hair and her grimy face streaked with tears.

As expected, a snack and a rest on the sofa greatly improved the matters, but the ceasefire ended at bedtime, when Janie refused to get into bed.

"Time for bed."

"No."

"Janie, get in bed now."

"Or else what?"

Or else what? Who did she think she was talking to? Or else this!

Now, we must pause for a moment to allow you to imagine "this." I find that whenever I divulge my specific parenting methods, it distracts from the story I am trying to tell. People get caught up in the details. So at this point, don't think about what I did, imagine what a good parent (whatever your definition of that is) would do. Imagine what you would have done. If you would have spanked her, spank her in your mind. If you would have told her "no story tonight," then no story. If you would have made a sticker chart for nice talk, go make a sticker chart. If you would have lifted her firmly into bed and left the room, go do it.

I did what you would do. I did what I thought was going to have the effect I wanted.  I called on the examples of parents I knew and admired and did what I thought a "good" parent (whose children do what they are supposed to do) would do. Furthermore, I did it calmly and firmly. I even used what Janie calls my "stun voice" (which I think is a variation on "stern voice").

But here's what you have to imagine now (and this is the hard part): imagine it didn't work. You spanked, she cried louder and refused harder. You told her no story, and she screamed, "I don't care! I'm not going to bed!" You offered ice cream or stickers, and she told you she wanted that plus fifty thousand dollars right now. You put her in bed and and she jumped back out and tried to run out of the room. Whatever you did, the situation escalated, she got more adamant and more upset and still was not in bed.  And if you tried again, she escalated the situation still further.

That was where I was.  We were getting nowhere, and I was in despair.  Here I am doing what everyone I admire says a good parent is supposed to do and my child is acting like a complete nightmare, thus proving that I am a bad parent.  I don't get it.  Why am I so bad at this?  What the hell am I supposed to do?  What have I done already to make things this bad?  I can't even ask anyone for help, because then I'd have to admit to how much I've clearly somehow screwed up already.

That's when the answer came.  Beyond the point where Janie was kicking and screaming on the floor, a book on her bookshelf caught my eye. Actually, a single word in the title caught my eye: God.  Cheesy, huh?  The old me would want to punch me for something like this, but I thought "No, wait.  That's it!  God's will, not my will!" I knew what my will was: I wanted to be a good parent by bossing Janie into bed. (She's tired! She needs to be in bed!) But what was God's will?

So I took a deep breath and said, "Janie, this isn't working.  I'm going to try something different.  Right now I'm worried because we're fighting over bedtime.  Bedtime isn't something I'm trying to make you do to be mean.  We all need enough sleep so our bodies can be healthy, and it's my job as your mama to protect you and help take care of you and help you learn to take care of yourself.  I don't want to fight about this, but I don't know what else to do right now.  I'm stuck.  So, do you know what I believe?  I believe there is a God part inside each one of us and if we are quiet and still we can hear that part of us tell us the right thing to do.  So I'm going to be quiet and still now and see if that God part can help me figure out what I need to do now.  And maybe you can be quiet and still and think — not about what you want me to do — but what you should do for you right now."

Janie stopped crying.  She turned away from me and scooched across the floor to where her beloved stuffed animal Gigi lay, and she sat there for a bit, hugging her knees.  Then she turned to me and said, "Mama, I think I can go to bed if I show you something."  So I joined her, and she showed me a bead she'd found on the floor: "It's pretty, isn't it?"

"Yes," I said.

"Can I make something with it in the morning?"

"Yes."

"Ok.  I'm ready for bed now."

"Sweetie, can I give you a hug?  I think we've both had a rough day."

"Yes."

So, I gave Janie a hug that felt like melting, like walls dissolving, like peace.  Then she climbed into bed.  I smoothed her hair, and she smoothed mine, and she was asleep in minutes, holding my hand.

Sometimes people ask me (and frankly, sometimes I ask myself) how I went from being very vocal in my rejection of God to someone who now talks about God all the damn time. The short and simple answer is: 12 Step recovery (which is probably one of the reasons people like me -- or at least like the me I used to be -- find 12 Step scary). The long answer is, well, the accumulation of every tiny moment in a lifetime, which makes it both too long to tell and nothing to tell at all. But in all of the tiny moments that even the answer "12 Step" holds, there are the signposts along the way: the times when everything shifted and changed, in nearly as dramatic (but not as painful) a way as they did when I found out about my husband's addiction. Sometimes I put those together for myself into some story of change.

When I was young and asked why I had to go to church when I didn't believe, my mother said, "I didn't used to like going either, but when things in my life got hard, I found the rituals comforting. I want you to have some foundation in religion, something you can go back to when you need it." So, standing in the bedroom of our old home, the place we lived when I found out about my Mark's sex addiction, I told Mark that I felt like God was trying to break me, like taming a wild horse. God was going to heap woes on me like some mirror Job, until I was so broken down from famines and locust plagues that I would have no choice but to go tamely back to the church, just as my mother had said I would. But I was not going to be broken by God.

Was it months later or a year? At some point, still weighed down with hurt, having been stung yet again by something Mark had said or done, I wept alone in our room and tried to meditate, when the faltering thought came to me that maybe this was it, maybe I should pray. And a voice inside me told me I didn't believe in God, and I felt comforted by the higher power I couldn't and wouldn't call God.

The years passed, and although I didn't quite lose my bitterness or resentment, I lost my fear that I might somehow end up back in the arms of the church that hurt me. I began to see that having spirituality in my life didn't mean I had to have religion in my life if that didn't help me. I began the search for something to call that spiritual connection, and with my fear of the church gone, my fear of the word God began to leave me too. Intellectually, I began to explore the idea that maybe it was a word I could use as a shorthand for something in my life that was beyond words.

By the time I started working the 12 Steps, I felt I had already come to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity and had lost my resistance to the word God. I don't know that I expected much to change, and yet, Step 7 (in which we humbly ask God to remove our shortcomings) shattered me all over again. Prayer wasn't something that fit well with my conception of what my God is and what my God is not and healthy humility wasn't something that had been a part of my experience. And yet, kneeling down in my bedroom facing a wall, hung up on all of these ideas and unable to ask God for help, in a sudden flash like a ray of sunshine breaking through cloud, I was inspired to ask God for help asking for help. In that moment, as I cried and begged for help, I felt something melt away, something new form and my connection with what I called God strengthen beyond anything I ever felt or expected.

So, when I reached Step 12, I had to admit that I had had a spiritual awakening, just as that Step promised. And I went off to carry the message, and started talking about God all the damn time too.

I've got plans for tomorrow that are going to keep me away from the computer, and I knew I wanted to squeeze in one last blog post today. So first thing in the morning I began the day right: by panicking because I wasn't sure what I was going to write about. I didn't have an idea! Ack! What if I sat down and couldn't think of anything? Well, you can see (tongue firmly planted in cheek here) how very catastrophic that would be. There I was with the threat of writer's block looming in front of me ominously (and let me tell you, it really knows how to loom: casting a long shadow with its big claws and pointy teeth), when I remembered something I once heard from the very wise Karen Maezen Miller: that the answer will always be there when we need it; we just have to learn to trust that. I see it as a variation on my favorite recovery slogan (and the one I most often need to remember): Let go and let God.

So, given that I had no idea what to write about and I was supposed to trust this (grr, stupid!) process, I decided not sit down at my usual writing time and I went out and ran errands instead. And as I ran errands, I got this weird throbbing headache. Now, I'm an old hand at headaches. I'm prone to both migraines and sinus headaches, so I'm no stranger to pain in my head. But that pain is old and familiar. This pain was new and different. I'd be walking along, feeling ok and then throb throb! Pain just above my left ear for a few seconds. Then nothing for a few minutes. Then throb throb again.

Given the great mental state in which I started the day, my mind went immediately to the next reasonable thought: I'm going to die. I mean, this could be the first sign of an aneurysm or a stroke. After all, I once had a coworker, a mother to young children, who was perfectly fine one moment, complained of a headache a few minutes later, then walked into a meeting and collapsed, dead of a brain aneurysm. It's the kind of thing that is both horribly tragic and completely terrifying. So I walked around thinking, "Could these throbs be the early warning sign of the same thing in me? Could I do something different right now and change things... control the outcome?"

But I caught myself right there: wanting to control the things I can't. I was feeling nervous and anxious about a whole host of things and had fallen down lately on taking care of myself. So for the second time today I was, in a major way, not letting go and trusting things to work out, but instead trying to figure out a way to approach my discomfort that was going to guarantee the outcome I wanted. So I realized that I had a headache. It wasn't particularly bad or painful, just unfamiliar. It wasn't worth consulting a doctor, because right at that moment, I had to admit, it didn't seem at all serious. The next right thing to do was to wait. If it got more alarming, I'd see a doctor. And maybe, as for my coworker, that moment would be too late. But I can't control that.

As I realized this, I began to relax, and as I relaxed, the little throbs subsided and I realized I had something to write about today too. Well, what do you know? The answer really is there when I need it, if I can just let go of my control freaking and trust that.

I was struggling today with several issues that have been swimming around in my head lately: my relationship with anger and rage, the place of vulnerability in my recovery, the harsh and insidious voice of my inner critic, my past emotionally and verbally abusive relationships and the ways they led to where I am today. I started to try to work it out through journaling but couldn't wrap my head around it. After all, there are some really fascinating clouds outside my window today, and it's pretty important to me to beat the computer at this particular game of solitaire that's been plaguing me. Also, I'm hungry. Are those Girl Scout cookies still in the pantry?

Then my computer beeped at me. Oo! It's my friend Ellie wanting to chat.

Well, you know, since the writing isn't getting me anywhere, why not? Ellie is an Al-Anoner, and a few weeks ago we'd been talking on the phone about some things we are each working through in recovery, but (because we are both moms on the go) one of us had to run. She chatted me looking for contact information for a mutual friend, but of course, we drifted back to the earlier conversation, and when she had to leave the computer to pick her daughter up at school, she suggested I call her cell so we could keep talking.

I know picking up the phone and calling friends in recovery is some well known wisdom, but it's still not something I do regularly. I have a lot of reasons for that, and many of them are good and valid. But there are times, like today, when it's the best possible thing to do. I got to talk to someone who loves me and gets me, someone who is able to laugh off the inner critic I can't. I got to hear about Ellie's struggles around similar issues, which informed my own. And I got to get out of my own head for a while. It was like a spiritual breath of fresh air, and while I still don't have my head around all the issues that have been on my mind, I feel refreshed and rejuvenated enough to let them go for today.